https://greenpolicy360.net/api.php?action=feedcontributions&feedformat=atom&user=Siterunner 2026-10-10T19:30:32Z User contributions MediaWiki 1.39.11 https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=File:Suzanne_Simard,_Trees_and_Much_More.png&diff=138397 2026-10-10T19:15:58Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> [[File:Above Our Living Earth.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :::[[File:Tree of Life on Hand.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Agriculture]]<br /> [[Category:Animals]]<br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:Biogeosciences]]<br /> [[Category:Biosphere]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth System Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Law]]<br /> [[Category:Ecological Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-ethics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-Spirituality]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:Endangered Species]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Full-cost Accounting]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Laws]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Protection]]<br /> [[Category:Evolutionary Biology]]<br /> [[Category:Extinction]]<br /> [[Category:Fisheries]]<br /> [[Category:Forests]]<br /> [[Category:Green Graphics]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Green Values]]<br /> [[Category:Land Ethic]]<br /> [[Category:Microbiology]]<br /> [[Category:Microorganism]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Capital]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resources]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resource Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Nature]]<br /> [[Category:Oceans]]<br /> [[Category:Ocean Science]]<br /> [[Category:Ocean Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Open Access]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Rights of Nature]]<br /> [[Category:Seventh Generation Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability Policies]]<br /> [[Category:Wetlands]]<br /> [[Category:Wildlife]]<br /> [[Category:Zoology]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Tree_of_Life&diff=138396 2026-10-10T19:13:54Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[It's All Related]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Nature Us and Veins of a Green Leaf.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/It%27s_All_Related&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Let's begin with a life of a leaf... Freddie The Leaf by Leo Buscaglia<br /> <br /> * https://www.buscaglia.com/the-fall-of-freddie-the-leaf-a-story-of-life-for-all-ages/<br /> <br /> * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/841110.The_Fall_of_Freddie_the_Leaf<br /> <br /> <br /> Then on to a story of a tree, a 'Mother Tree' ....<br /> <br /> <br /> In the 1990s, Canadian ecologist Suzanne Simard made a groundbreaking discovery that challenged everything we thought we knew about how forests work. While studying managed forests in British Columbia, she noticed something puzzling: when birch trees were removed to promote the growth of valuable Douglas firs, the firs did not flourish as expected, they actually struggled and grew more slowly.<br /> <br /> Determined to understand why, Simard traced the movement of nutrients using radioactive carbon isotopes. What she found was astonishing. Trees were actively sharing resources through vast underground fungal networks known as mycorrhizae. These delicate, thread-like fungi connect the roots of different trees across the forest floor, forming a complex web that allows the exchange of carbon, water, nutrients, and even chemical signals, sometimes between entirely different species.<br /> <br /> She discovered that older, larger trees often serve as central &quot;hubs&quot; or &quot;mother trees,&quot; supporting younger saplings by redistributing vital resources and helping the entire ecosystem remain resilient. When these key trees are removed, the underground network weakens, and the health of the remaining forest declines.<br /> <br /> Simard’s research overturned the traditional Darwinian view of forests as battlegrounds of ruthless competition. Instead, she revealed a far more sophisticated reality: forests operate as highly cooperative systems where trees communicate, support one another, and even warn neighboring trees about threats like drought, disease, or insect attacks.<br /> <br /> What appears to the human eye as a silent, still forest is, in truth, a vibrant, interconnected living network, built not on isolation and rivalry, but on deep connection and mutual aid.<br /> <br /> * https://x.com/rainmaker1973/status/2108923002679144662?s=58&amp;t=14LnFHA-cgLSdk-DhRp7cw<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/14/my-ideas-are-a-little-revolutionary-ecologist-suzanne-simard-on-intelligent-forests-the-climate-and-her-critics<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''When the Forest Breathes'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/667786/when-the-forest-breathes-by-suzanne-simard/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Finding the Mother Tree'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://mothertreeproject.org/<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finding_the_Mother_Tree<br /> <br /> <br /> Suzanne Simard, University of British Columbia<br /> <br /> * https://forestry.ubc.ca/faculty-profile/suzanne-simard/<br /> <br /> * https://suzannesimard.com/research/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Suzanne Simard, Trees and Much More.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[It's All Related]]<br /> <br /> Exploring Connections, previously unseen and unknown....<br /> <br /> An Earth Scientist comes along with a new vision....<br /> <br /> Revealing living relationships, connected and communicating.... <br /> <br /> <br /> At GreenPolicy360, our work over decades brings new ways of seeing... <br /> <br /> We have often said in speaking of our Living Earth and systems of life, &quot;it is all connected, it is all related&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> Our work with the Bioneers network provides an example of our bioneering' -- <br /> <br /> '''[[Bioneers]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> Here the Bioneers write of Suzanne Simard's new science of Living Earth at work -- <br /> <br /> * https://bioneers.org/when-the-forest-breathes-suzanne-simard-on-regeneration-and-relationship-ze0z2603/<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://emergencemagazine.org/conversation/the-scaffolding-of-life/<br /> <br /> * https://growwild.kew.org/blog/suzanne-simard-wood-wide-web-mother-trees-and-power-collective-action<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Mushroom life in the forest.png]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Mushroom_life_in_the_forest.png&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> There's more to forests than meets the eye and ear ...<br /> <br /> : Go underground, to the roots and web of life connections<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ························································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Remembering E.O. Wilson and Thomas Lovejoy.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Remembering E.O. Wilson and Thomas Lovejoy'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''We celebrate today the lives of two great ecologists: E.O. Wilson, who passed away on December 26 at the age of 92, and Tom Lovejoy, who passed away onDecember 25 at the age of 80. Each made extraordinary contributions to the field of bio-diversity and to the greater public dialog about humans and nature...''<br /> <br /> * https://www.garrisoninstitute.org/blog/remembering-e-o-wilson-and-thomas-lovejoy/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Tom and Ed, Pioneering Conservation Biology'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Thomas Lovejoy and Edward O. Wilson<br /> <br /> ''The two scientists first met in the mid-nineteen-seventies. At that point, Wilson was in his mid-forties, and teaching biology at Harvard. Lovejoy, a dozen years younger, was working for the World Wildlife Fund. Over lunch, they got to talking about where the W.W.F. should focus its efforts. They agreed that it should be in the tropics, because the tropics are where most species actually live. There wasn’t a good term for what they were trying to preserve, so they tossed one around—“biological diversity”—and put it into circulation. “People just started using it,” Lovejoy recalled, in an interview in 2015. (Later, the phrase would be shortened to “biodiversity.”)''<br /> <br /> * https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/honoring-the-legacy-of-e-o-wilson-and-tom-lovejoy<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ························································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''World Animal Foundation'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://worldanimalfoundation.org/advocate/how-many-animals-are-in-the-world/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Quantifying the Amazing Diversity of Life'''<br /> <br /> '''2023''' <br /> <br /> ~ From the Total of 8.7 Million Species, 2.16 Million Are Animal<br /> ~ 97% of All Animals Are Invertebrates<br /> ~ More Than 62,000 Vertebrate Species Have Been Identified<br /> ~ The Estimated Species of Insects Is 10 Quintillion<br /> ~ The Described Species of Birds and Reptiles Is 11,188 and 11,733, Respectively<br /> ~ About 6,596 Described Species of Mammals Exist in the World<br /> ~ The Current Amphibians Database Shows There Are 8,698 Existing Species of Amphibians<br /> ~ The Estimated Number of Fish in the World Is 3.5 Trillion<br /> ~ 86% and 91% of All the Land and Sea Species Respectively Have Not Been Discovered<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Earth BioGenome Project'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Working to sequence 1.5+ million genomes<br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07279-z<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The Earth BioGenome Project aims to sequence the genomes of the roughly 1.5 million+ known animal, plant, protozoan and fungal species — collectively known as eukaryotes — worldwide over the next decade. The initiative is estimated to cost US$4.7 billion, although only a small proportion of that money has been committed so far.''<br /> <br /> ''The project comprises more than a dozen existing sequencing projects that are focused on, for instance, specific branches of the tree of life — such as birds, insects and plants — or on the biodiversity in a particular country, such as the UK effort, officially called the Darwin Tree of Life Project.''<br /> <br /> ''“We don’t need one genome project to rule them all,” says Lewin. Rather, the effort’s raison d’etre, he says, is to ensure that ongoing biodiversity sequencing efforts are standardized.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ''“Variation is the fount of all genetic knowledge... The more variation you have the better — so why not sequence everything?”''<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Tree of Life video.png | link=https://youtu.be/AjvLQJ6PIiU]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://youtu.be/AjvLQJ6PIiU<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew-6WuTo1Is <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :::::[[File:You are here on the cladogenetic tree m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ······················································································ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;GreenPolicy360 'Science Idea of the Day'&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Carl Zimmer<br /> <br /> * https://carlzimmer.com/what-is-a-species-398/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;What is a species?&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Long before the dawn of science, humans were naming species. To be able to hunt animals and gather plants, people had to know what they were talking about. Taxonomy, the modern science of naming species, emerged in the 1600s and came into its own in the next century, thanks largely to the work of Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus. Linnaeus invented a system to sort living things into groups, inside which were smaller groups. Every member of a particular group shared certain key traits. Humans belonged to the mammal class, and within that class the primate order, and within that order the genus Homo, and within that genus the species Homo sapiens. Linnaeus declared that each species had existed since creation. “There are as many species as the Infinite Being produced diverse forms in the beginning,” he wrote.''<br /> <br /> ''Linnaeus’s new order made the work of taxonomists much easier, but trying to draw the lines between species often proved frustrating. Two species of mice might interbreed where their ranges overlapped, raising the question of what name to give to the hybrids. Within a species there was confusion as well. The willow ptarmigans in Ireland, for example, have a slightly different plumage than the willow ptarmigans in Finland, which differ in turn from the ones in Norway. Naturalists could not agree about whether they belonged to different ptarmigan species or were just varieties–subsets, in other words–of a single species.''<br /> <br /> ''Charles Darwin, for one, was amused by these struggles. “It is really laughable to see what different ideas are prominent in various naturalists’ minds, when they speak of ‘species,’” he wrote in 1856. “It all comes, I believe, from trying to define the indefinable.” Species, Darwin argued, were not fixed since creation. They had evolved. Each group of organisms that we call a species starts out as a variety of an older species. Over time natural selection transforms them as they adapt to their environment. Meanwhile other varieties become extinct. An old variety ends up markedly different from all other organism–what we see as a species in its own right.'' <br /> <br /> ''“I look at the term ‘species’ as one arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience, to a set of individuals closely resembling each other,” Darwin declared...''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Like the taxonomists before him, Darwin could study species only with the naked eye, observing the color of a bird’s feathers or counting the plates on a barnacle. It would not be until the early 20th century that scientists could start to examine the genetic differences among species. Their research led to a new way of thinking. What made a species a species were the barriers to reproducing with other species. Genes could flow among its members as they mated, but these individuals usually remained within the species, thanks to reproductive barriers. Species might spawn at different times of the year, they might find courtship songs of other species unattractive, or their DNA might simply be incompatible.''<br /> <br /> ''The best understood way for these barriers to evolve is through isolation. Some members of an existing specie–a population–have to become unable to mate with the rest of their species. A glacier could thrust across their range, for example. The isolated population evolves new genes, and some of those new genes may make interbreeding difficult or impossible. Over hundreds of thousands of years so many barriers evolve that the isolated population becomes a distinct species.''<br /> <br /> ''This understanding of how species evolve led to a new concept of what it meant to be a species. Ernst Mayr, a German ornithologist, boldly declared that species were not convenient labels but real entities, like mountains or people. In 1942 he defined a species as a gene pool, calling it a set of populations that can reproduce with one another and that are unable to mate successfully with other populations.''<br /> <br /> ''The biological species concept, as it is now called, became the textbook standard...''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Related organisms share traits because they share the same ancestry. Humans, giraffes and bats all descend from ancient mammals, and as a result they all have hair and milk. Within mammals, humans share a closer common ancestry with other primates. From the common primate ancestor, primates inherited other traits, such as forward-facing eyes. You can zoom in on smaller and smaller sets of organisms this way. Eventually, though, the zooming in comes to a stop. There are organisms that form groups that can no longer be split. These, according to the phylogenetic species concept, are species. In a sense, this concept takes Linnaeus’s original system and updates it in light of evolution. The phylogenetic species concept has been embraced by researchers who need to identify species rather than just contemplate them. Recognizing a species is a matter of finding a group of organisms that shares certain clear-cut traits. Scientists do not have to depend on slippery qualities like reproductive isolation.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Tiny Species / Microorganisms'''<br /> <br /> ''Most of the work that has been done on the species concept in recent years has been directed at animals and plants. That bias is the result of history: animals and plants were the only things that Linnaeus and other early taxonomists could study. But today scientists know that the vast majority of genetic diversity lies in the invisible world of microbes. And microbes have long posed the biggest puzzle of all when it comes to the nature of species.''<br /> <br /> ''When microbiologists began naming species in the 1800s, they could not inspect feathers or flowers like zoologists and botanists can. Microorganisms–especially bacteria and archaea–generally look a lot like one another. Some are rod-shaped, for example, and some are tiny spheres. To distinguish two rod-shaped bacteria from each other, microbiologists would run experiments on their metabolism. One kind of microbe might be able to feed on, say, lactose, whereas the other could not. From clues of this sort, microbiologists described such species as Escherichia coli or Vibrio cholerae. Underlying their work, however, was no clear concept of what it meant for microbes to belong to a species. And when Mayr came up with his biological species concept, it seemed to exclude many microbes. After all, bacteria are not made up of males and females that have to reproduce sexually like animals. They can just split in two.''<br /> <br /> ''The confusion got worse when scientists began to analyze the DNA of microbes. They tried to figure out how different the DNA of two microbial species was, selecting small fragments for comparison. To their surprise, the differences could be huge. Two species of bacteria placed in the same genus based on their metabolism might be more different than humans are from all other primates. And the bacteria within a species could make their living in radically different ways. Some strains of E. coli live harmlessly in our gut, for example, whereas others can cause fatal diseases. “The genetic variation within a species is so enormous that the term species does not really have the same meaning for bacteria and archaea” as it does for multicellular plants or animals, says Jonathan Eisen of the University of California, Davis.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Tiny Little Ones... Inner Life of a Cell.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Microbes are not some minor exception to the rule that can be ignored. As investigators have surveyed the microbial world, they have discovered that the diversity of all animals is puny in comparison. “It’s always struck me as rather odd that if Mayr is right, then 90 percent of the tree of life doesn’t come in species,” says John Wilkins, a philosopher of science at the University of Queensland in Australia. “That’s got to give you some pause for thought.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> Excerpts from Scientific American 2008<br /> <br /> =='''''Open source 'Tree of Life' including all species known to humans to date'''''==<br /> <br /> <br /> ''U.S. National Science Foundation'' / ''As of September 2015''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''First draft of ‘Tree of Life’ data diagrams include 2.3 million species'''''<br /> <br /> ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States''<br /> <br /> * http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-09/uom-ol091815.php<br /> <br /> * http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/09/16/1423041112<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Authors of the 2015 PNAS Study''<br /> <br /> ''Scientists have used gene sequences and morphological data to construct tens of thousands of evolutionary trees ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life_(biology) phylogenetic schematics]) that describe the evolutionary history of animals, plants, and microbes. '''This study is the first, to our knowledge, to apply an efficient and automated process for assembling published trees into a complete tree of life. This tree and the underlying data are available to browse and download from the Internet, facilitating subsequent analyses that require evolutionary trees. The tree can be easily updated with newly published data.''' Our analysis of coverage not only reveals gaps in sampling and naming biodiversity but also further demonstrates that most published phylogenies are not available in digital formats that can be summarized into a tree of life.''<br /> <br /> <br /> * http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/09/16/1423041112.full.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The realization that all organisms on Earth are related by common descent was one of the most profound insights in scientific history. The goal of reconstructing the tree of life is one of the most daunting challenges in biology. The scope of the problem is immense... most species have yet to be described. Despite decades of effort and thousands of phylogenetic studies on diverse clades, we lack a comprehensive tree of life, or even a summary of our current knowledge. One reason for this shortcoming is lack of data. GenBank contains DNA sequences for 411,000 species, only 22% of estimated named species. Although some gene regions have been widely sequenced across some lineages, they are insufficient for resolving relationships across the entire tree. Most recognized species have never been included in a phylogenetic analysis because no appropriate molecular or morphological data have been collected...''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''&quot;The Tiny Little Ones&quot;''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Microbiomes_at_Risk ''Microbiomes at Risk'']<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/12/science/scientists-unveil-new-tree-of-life.html &lt;big&gt;'''NYT: Scientists Unveil New ‘Tree of Life’ '''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> :* http://www.nature.com/articles/nmicrobiol201648<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tree of Life nmicrobiol201648-f1 via Nature.jpg | link=http://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/Tree_of_Life_nmicrobiol201648-f1_via_Nature.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Visit Life Explorer'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.evogeneao.com/explore/tree-of-life-explorer '''''Tree of Life Interactive Explorer''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tree of Life Explorer - Evogeneao.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.eol.org/ &lt;big&gt;'''Encyclopedia of Life'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> :* http://blog.eol.org/ -- https://twitter.com/eol<br /> <br /> :* https://www.flickr.com/groups/encyclopedia_of_life<br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> [http://ens-newswire.com/2015/09/21/tree-of-life-with-2-3-million-species-open-for-changes/ ''September 20, 2015 (ENS - Environment News Service)''] <br /> :''The relationships among living things, as they diverged from one another from the beginning of life on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago, are shown for the first time in a comprehensive Tree of Life... It is now available free online for anyone to use or edit, something like a Wikipedia for evolutionary trees.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> The current version of the Tree with underlying data and source code is available to browse and download at: https://tree.opentreeoflife.org<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Treemachine'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''View at GitHub'' / '''''OpenTreeofLife''''' -- ''https://github.com/OpenTreeOfLife/treemachine''<br /> <br /> ''The '''open source framework''' facilitates community comment and contribution, enabling the tree to be continuously updated when new phylogenetic and taxonomic data become digitally available...''<br /> <br /> ''Principal investigator Karen Cranston of Duke University said, “This is the first real attempt to connect the dots and put it all together. Think of it as Version 1.0”...'' <br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Open_Access ''Next steps in multiplying the research'']<br /> <br /> :* ''http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Open_Access''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''#OpenAccess''''' - ''https://twitter.com/hashtag/openaccess?src=hash''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Dimensions of Biodiversity Program / NSF'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Despite centuries of discovery, most of our planet's biodiversity remains unknown. The scale of the unknown diversity on Earth is especially troubling given the rapid and permanent loss of biodiversity across the globe. The goal of the Dimensions of Biodiversity campaign is to transform, by 2020, how we describe and understand the scope and role of life on Earth.''<br /> <br /> * http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2014/nsf14057/nsf14057.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> '''The innovative and interdisciplinary teams of the Dimensions of Biodiversity program “may accomplish in 10 years what, with a piecemeal approach, would have taken 50 years—a half century we can no longer afford to wait.”'''<br /> <br /> - Dr. Joann P. Roskoski, NSF Deputy Assistant Director for Biological Sciences<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ''NSF BIODIVERSITY STREAMS OF ACTIVITY - 2020 GOALS''<br /> <br /> ''*Research -- An integrated understanding of the key but unknown dimensions of biodiversity on earth<br /> <br /> ''*Cyberinfrastructure -- Informatics and infrastructure that support accessible, interoperable information capability for dimensions of biodiversity<br /> <br /> ''*Collections -- Digitization of collections and enhanced physical infrastructure to link to cyberinfrastructure and leverage the enormous investments of the past<br /> <br /> ''*Workforce -- A diverse, interdisciplinary, globally-engaged, scientific workforce capable of transforming and communicating our understanding of biodiversity on Earth<br /> <br /> ''*Synthesis -- Scientific analyses and syntheses that generate and disseminate useful information for scientists, educators and decision makers<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''As of 2014, projects funded by the Dimensions of Biodiversity Program are required to format and deposit phylogenetic character matrices and trees within the Open Tree of Life Project...'''<br /> <br /> Program Title:<br /> <br /> Dimensions of Biodiversity<br /> <br /> Synopsis of Program:<br /> <br /> ''Despite centuries of discovery, most of our planet's biodiversity remains unknown. The scale of the unknown diversity on Earth is especially troubling given the rapid and permanent loss of biodiversity across the globe. With this loss, humanity is losing links in the web of life that provide ecosystem services, forfeiting an understanding of the history and future of the living world, and losing opportunities for future beneficial discoveries in the domains of food, fiber, fuel, pharmaceuticals, and bio-inspired innovation.<br /> <br /> ''The goal of the Dimensions of Biodiversity campaign is to transform, by 2020, how we describe and understand the scope and role of life on Earth. The campaign promotes novel, integrated approaches to identify and understand the evolutionary and ecological significance of biodiversity amidst the changing environment of the present day and in the geologic past.<br /> <br /> ''This campaign seeks to characterize biodiversity on Earth by using integrative, innovative approaches to fill the most substantial gaps in our understanding of the diversity of life on Earth. It takes a broad view of biodiversity, and currently focuses on the integration of genetic, taxonomic/phylogenetic, and functional dimensions of biodiversity. Successful proposals should integrate these three dimensions to understand interactions and feedbacks among them. While this focus complements several core NSF programs, it differs by requiring that multiple dimensions of biodiversity be addressed simultaneously, in innovative or novel ways, to understand their synergistic roles in critical ecological and evolutionary processes.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioinformatics ''Bioinformatics'']<br /> <br /> [[File:TreeOfLifeArt s.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Treeoflife.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Aldo quote.gif]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Natural Resources and Intrinsic, Integral Ecology'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''SJS / GP360 Siterunner''': Essentially, the value of biodiversity extends far beyond the US National Science Foundation enumerated research goals of &quot;beneficial discoveries&quot; for &quot;food, fiber, fuel, pharmaceuticals and bio-inspired innovation&quot;. We speak of [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Natural_Capital &quot;Natural Capital&quot;], of the [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Natural_Resources natural resources] of Earth even as biodiversity on Earth has value inherently, an '''intrinsic value''' in and of itself, in ways seen and utilized as resources in human activity -- and in ways unseen and vital beyond human economic activity. An [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Integral_Ecology &quot;integral ecology&quot;] speaks to larger issues of interconnectedness, resilience and survivability over time. The biosphere and environmental security are integrally connected and life on Earth must be protected for future generations. <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life ''Tree of Life / Wikipedia citations'']<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://tolweb.org/tree/ '''The Tree of Life Project - Related History'']<br /> <br /> [http://www.tolweb.org/tree/home.pages/media.html ''Tree of Life Media: Images, Movies, Sounds'']<br /> <br /> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=H6IrUUDboZo ''Tree of Life / Video'']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Plant Family Tree - US Botanic Garden 800x600.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Tree_of_Life_video.png<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :: [[File:Tree of Life opensourcetreeoflife m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Nature Us.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> :::[[File:Tree of Life on Hand.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Agriculture]]<br /> [[Category:Animals]]<br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:Biogeosciences]]<br /> [[Category:Biosphere]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth System Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Law]]<br /> [[Category:Ecological Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-ethics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-Spirituality]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:Endangered Species]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Full-cost Accounting]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Laws]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Protection]]<br /> [[Category:Evolutionary Biology]]<br /> [[Category:Extinction]]<br /> [[Category:Fisheries]]<br /> [[Category:Forests]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Green Values]]<br /> [[Category:Land Ethic]]<br /> [[Category:Microbiology]]<br /> [[Category:Microorganism]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Capital]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resources]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resource Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Nature]]<br /> [[Category:Oceans]]<br /> [[Category:Ocean Science]]<br /> [[Category:Ocean Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Open Access]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Rights of Nature]]<br /> [[Category:Seventh Generation Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability Policies]]<br /> [[Category:Wetlands]]<br /> [[Category:Wildlife]]<br /> [[Category:Zoology]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Tree_of_Life&diff=138395 2026-10-10T19:11:35Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[It's All Related]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Nature Us and Veins of a Green Leaf.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/It%27s_All_Related&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Let's begin with a life of a leaf... Freddie The Leaf by Leo Buscaglia<br /> <br /> * https://www.buscaglia.com/the-fall-of-freddie-the-leaf-a-story-of-life-for-all-ages/<br /> <br /> * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/841110.The_Fall_of_Freddie_the_Leaf<br /> <br /> <br /> Then on to a story of a tree, a 'Mother Tree' ....<br /> <br /> <br /> In the 1990s, Canadian ecologist Suzanne Simard made a groundbreaking discovery that challenged everything we thought we knew about how forests work. While studying managed forests in British Columbia, she noticed something puzzling: when birch trees were removed to promote the growth of valuable Douglas firs, the firs did not flourish as expected, they actually struggled and grew more slowly.<br /> <br /> Determined to understand why, Simard traced the movement of nutrients using radioactive carbon isotopes. What she found was astonishing. Trees were actively sharing resources through vast underground fungal networks known as mycorrhizae. These delicate, thread-like fungi connect the roots of different trees across the forest floor, forming a complex web that allows the exchange of carbon, water, nutrients, and even chemical signals, sometimes between entirely different species.<br /> <br /> She discovered that older, larger trees often serve as central &quot;hubs&quot; or &quot;mother trees,&quot; supporting younger saplings by redistributing vital resources and helping the entire ecosystem remain resilient. When these key trees are removed, the underground network weakens, and the health of the remaining forest declines.<br /> <br /> Simard’s research overturned the traditional Darwinian view of forests as battlegrounds of ruthless competition. Instead, she revealed a far more sophisticated reality: forests operate as highly cooperative systems where trees communicate, support one another, and even warn neighboring trees about threats like drought, disease, or insect attacks.<br /> <br /> What appears to the human eye as a silent, still forest is, in truth, a vibrant, interconnected living network, built not on isolation and rivalry, but on deep connection and mutual aid.<br /> <br /> * https://x.com/rainmaker1973/status/2108923002679144662?s=58&amp;t=14LnFHA-cgLSdk-DhRp7cw<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/14/my-ideas-are-a-little-revolutionary-ecologist-suzanne-simard-on-intelligent-forests-the-climate-and-her-critics<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''When the Forest Breathes'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/667786/when-the-forest-breathes-by-suzanne-simard/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Finding the Mother Tree'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://mothertreeproject.org/<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finding_the_Mother_Tree<br /> <br /> <br /> Suzanne Simard, University of British Columbia<br /> <br /> * https://forestry.ubc.ca/faculty-profile/suzanne-simard/<br /> <br /> * https://suzannesimard.com/research/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Suzanne Simard, Trees and Much More.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[It's All Related]]<br /> <br /> Exploring Connections, previously unseen and unknown....<br /> <br /> an Earth Scientist comes along with a new vision....<br /> <br /> relationships, communicating, adapting, systems<br /> <br /> <br /> At GreenPolicy360, our work over decades brings new ways of seeing... we have often said in speaking of our Living Earth and systems of life, &quot;it is all connected, it is all related&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> Our work with the Bioneers network provides an example of our bioneering' -- <br /> <br /> '''[[Bioneers]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> Here is the Bioneers writing of Suzanne Simard's new science of Living Earth at work -- <br /> <br /> * https://bioneers.org/when-the-forest-breathes-suzanne-simard-on-regeneration-and-relationship-ze0z2603/<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://emergencemagazine.org/conversation/the-scaffolding-of-life/<br /> <br /> * https://growwild.kew.org/blog/suzanne-simard-wood-wide-web-mother-trees-and-power-collective-action<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Mushroom life in the forest.png]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Mushroom_life_in_the_forest.png&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> There's more to forests than meets the eye and ear ...<br /> <br /> : Go underground, to the roots and web of life connections<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ························································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Remembering E.O. Wilson and Thomas Lovejoy.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Remembering E.O. Wilson and Thomas Lovejoy'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''We celebrate today the lives of two great ecologists: E.O. Wilson, who passed away on December 26 at the age of 92, and Tom Lovejoy, who passed away onDecember 25 at the age of 80. Each made extraordinary contributions to the field of bio-diversity and to the greater public dialog about humans and nature...''<br /> <br /> * https://www.garrisoninstitute.org/blog/remembering-e-o-wilson-and-thomas-lovejoy/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Tom and Ed, Pioneering Conservation Biology'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Thomas Lovejoy and Edward O. Wilson<br /> <br /> ''The two scientists first met in the mid-nineteen-seventies. At that point, Wilson was in his mid-forties, and teaching biology at Harvard. Lovejoy, a dozen years younger, was working for the World Wildlife Fund. Over lunch, they got to talking about where the W.W.F. should focus its efforts. They agreed that it should be in the tropics, because the tropics are where most species actually live. There wasn’t a good term for what they were trying to preserve, so they tossed one around—“biological diversity”—and put it into circulation. “People just started using it,” Lovejoy recalled, in an interview in 2015. (Later, the phrase would be shortened to “biodiversity.”)''<br /> <br /> * https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/honoring-the-legacy-of-e-o-wilson-and-tom-lovejoy<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ························································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''World Animal Foundation'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://worldanimalfoundation.org/advocate/how-many-animals-are-in-the-world/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Quantifying the Amazing Diversity of Life'''<br /> <br /> '''2023''' <br /> <br /> ~ From the Total of 8.7 Million Species, 2.16 Million Are Animal<br /> ~ 97% of All Animals Are Invertebrates<br /> ~ More Than 62,000 Vertebrate Species Have Been Identified<br /> ~ The Estimated Species of Insects Is 10 Quintillion<br /> ~ The Described Species of Birds and Reptiles Is 11,188 and 11,733, Respectively<br /> ~ About 6,596 Described Species of Mammals Exist in the World<br /> ~ The Current Amphibians Database Shows There Are 8,698 Existing Species of Amphibians<br /> ~ The Estimated Number of Fish in the World Is 3.5 Trillion<br /> ~ 86% and 91% of All the Land and Sea Species Respectively Have Not Been Discovered<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Earth BioGenome Project'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Working to sequence 1.5+ million genomes<br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07279-z<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The Earth BioGenome Project aims to sequence the genomes of the roughly 1.5 million+ known animal, plant, protozoan and fungal species — collectively known as eukaryotes — worldwide over the next decade. The initiative is estimated to cost US$4.7 billion, although only a small proportion of that money has been committed so far.''<br /> <br /> ''The project comprises more than a dozen existing sequencing projects that are focused on, for instance, specific branches of the tree of life — such as birds, insects and plants — or on the biodiversity in a particular country, such as the UK effort, officially called the Darwin Tree of Life Project.''<br /> <br /> ''“We don’t need one genome project to rule them all,” says Lewin. Rather, the effort’s raison d’etre, he says, is to ensure that ongoing biodiversity sequencing efforts are standardized.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ''“Variation is the fount of all genetic knowledge... The more variation you have the better — so why not sequence everything?”''<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Tree of Life video.png | link=https://youtu.be/AjvLQJ6PIiU]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://youtu.be/AjvLQJ6PIiU<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew-6WuTo1Is <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :::::[[File:You are here on the cladogenetic tree m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ······················································································ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;GreenPolicy360 'Science Idea of the Day'&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Carl Zimmer<br /> <br /> * https://carlzimmer.com/what-is-a-species-398/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;What is a species?&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Long before the dawn of science, humans were naming species. To be able to hunt animals and gather plants, people had to know what they were talking about. Taxonomy, the modern science of naming species, emerged in the 1600s and came into its own in the next century, thanks largely to the work of Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus. Linnaeus invented a system to sort living things into groups, inside which were smaller groups. Every member of a particular group shared certain key traits. Humans belonged to the mammal class, and within that class the primate order, and within that order the genus Homo, and within that genus the species Homo sapiens. Linnaeus declared that each species had existed since creation. “There are as many species as the Infinite Being produced diverse forms in the beginning,” he wrote.''<br /> <br /> ''Linnaeus’s new order made the work of taxonomists much easier, but trying to draw the lines between species often proved frustrating. Two species of mice might interbreed where their ranges overlapped, raising the question of what name to give to the hybrids. Within a species there was confusion as well. The willow ptarmigans in Ireland, for example, have a slightly different plumage than the willow ptarmigans in Finland, which differ in turn from the ones in Norway. Naturalists could not agree about whether they belonged to different ptarmigan species or were just varieties–subsets, in other words–of a single species.''<br /> <br /> ''Charles Darwin, for one, was amused by these struggles. “It is really laughable to see what different ideas are prominent in various naturalists’ minds, when they speak of ‘species,’” he wrote in 1856. “It all comes, I believe, from trying to define the indefinable.” Species, Darwin argued, were not fixed since creation. They had evolved. Each group of organisms that we call a species starts out as a variety of an older species. Over time natural selection transforms them as they adapt to their environment. Meanwhile other varieties become extinct. An old variety ends up markedly different from all other organism–what we see as a species in its own right.'' <br /> <br /> ''“I look at the term ‘species’ as one arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience, to a set of individuals closely resembling each other,” Darwin declared...''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Like the taxonomists before him, Darwin could study species only with the naked eye, observing the color of a bird’s feathers or counting the plates on a barnacle. It would not be until the early 20th century that scientists could start to examine the genetic differences among species. Their research led to a new way of thinking. What made a species a species were the barriers to reproducing with other species. Genes could flow among its members as they mated, but these individuals usually remained within the species, thanks to reproductive barriers. Species might spawn at different times of the year, they might find courtship songs of other species unattractive, or their DNA might simply be incompatible.''<br /> <br /> ''The best understood way for these barriers to evolve is through isolation. Some members of an existing specie–a population–have to become unable to mate with the rest of their species. A glacier could thrust across their range, for example. The isolated population evolves new genes, and some of those new genes may make interbreeding difficult or impossible. Over hundreds of thousands of years so many barriers evolve that the isolated population becomes a distinct species.''<br /> <br /> ''This understanding of how species evolve led to a new concept of what it meant to be a species. Ernst Mayr, a German ornithologist, boldly declared that species were not convenient labels but real entities, like mountains or people. In 1942 he defined a species as a gene pool, calling it a set of populations that can reproduce with one another and that are unable to mate successfully with other populations.''<br /> <br /> ''The biological species concept, as it is now called, became the textbook standard...''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Related organisms share traits because they share the same ancestry. Humans, giraffes and bats all descend from ancient mammals, and as a result they all have hair and milk. Within mammals, humans share a closer common ancestry with other primates. From the common primate ancestor, primates inherited other traits, such as forward-facing eyes. You can zoom in on smaller and smaller sets of organisms this way. Eventually, though, the zooming in comes to a stop. There are organisms that form groups that can no longer be split. These, according to the phylogenetic species concept, are species. In a sense, this concept takes Linnaeus’s original system and updates it in light of evolution. The phylogenetic species concept has been embraced by researchers who need to identify species rather than just contemplate them. Recognizing a species is a matter of finding a group of organisms that shares certain clear-cut traits. Scientists do not have to depend on slippery qualities like reproductive isolation.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Tiny Species / Microorganisms'''<br /> <br /> ''Most of the work that has been done on the species concept in recent years has been directed at animals and plants. That bias is the result of history: animals and plants were the only things that Linnaeus and other early taxonomists could study. But today scientists know that the vast majority of genetic diversity lies in the invisible world of microbes. And microbes have long posed the biggest puzzle of all when it comes to the nature of species.''<br /> <br /> ''When microbiologists began naming species in the 1800s, they could not inspect feathers or flowers like zoologists and botanists can. Microorganisms–especially bacteria and archaea–generally look a lot like one another. Some are rod-shaped, for example, and some are tiny spheres. To distinguish two rod-shaped bacteria from each other, microbiologists would run experiments on their metabolism. One kind of microbe might be able to feed on, say, lactose, whereas the other could not. From clues of this sort, microbiologists described such species as Escherichia coli or Vibrio cholerae. Underlying their work, however, was no clear concept of what it meant for microbes to belong to a species. And when Mayr came up with his biological species concept, it seemed to exclude many microbes. After all, bacteria are not made up of males and females that have to reproduce sexually like animals. They can just split in two.''<br /> <br /> ''The confusion got worse when scientists began to analyze the DNA of microbes. They tried to figure out how different the DNA of two microbial species was, selecting small fragments for comparison. To their surprise, the differences could be huge. Two species of bacteria placed in the same genus based on their metabolism might be more different than humans are from all other primates. And the bacteria within a species could make their living in radically different ways. Some strains of E. coli live harmlessly in our gut, for example, whereas others can cause fatal diseases. “The genetic variation within a species is so enormous that the term species does not really have the same meaning for bacteria and archaea” as it does for multicellular plants or animals, says Jonathan Eisen of the University of California, Davis.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Tiny Little Ones... Inner Life of a Cell.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Microbes are not some minor exception to the rule that can be ignored. As investigators have surveyed the microbial world, they have discovered that the diversity of all animals is puny in comparison. “It’s always struck me as rather odd that if Mayr is right, then 90 percent of the tree of life doesn’t come in species,” says John Wilkins, a philosopher of science at the University of Queensland in Australia. “That’s got to give you some pause for thought.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> Excerpts from Scientific American 2008<br /> <br /> =='''''Open source 'Tree of Life' including all species known to humans to date'''''==<br /> <br /> <br /> ''U.S. National Science Foundation'' / ''As of September 2015''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''First draft of ‘Tree of Life’ data diagrams include 2.3 million species'''''<br /> <br /> ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States''<br /> <br /> * http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-09/uom-ol091815.php<br /> <br /> * http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/09/16/1423041112<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Authors of the 2015 PNAS Study''<br /> <br /> ''Scientists have used gene sequences and morphological data to construct tens of thousands of evolutionary trees ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life_(biology) phylogenetic schematics]) that describe the evolutionary history of animals, plants, and microbes. '''This study is the first, to our knowledge, to apply an efficient and automated process for assembling published trees into a complete tree of life. This tree and the underlying data are available to browse and download from the Internet, facilitating subsequent analyses that require evolutionary trees. The tree can be easily updated with newly published data.''' Our analysis of coverage not only reveals gaps in sampling and naming biodiversity but also further demonstrates that most published phylogenies are not available in digital formats that can be summarized into a tree of life.''<br /> <br /> <br /> * http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/09/16/1423041112.full.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The realization that all organisms on Earth are related by common descent was one of the most profound insights in scientific history. The goal of reconstructing the tree of life is one of the most daunting challenges in biology. The scope of the problem is immense... most species have yet to be described. Despite decades of effort and thousands of phylogenetic studies on diverse clades, we lack a comprehensive tree of life, or even a summary of our current knowledge. One reason for this shortcoming is lack of data. GenBank contains DNA sequences for 411,000 species, only 22% of estimated named species. Although some gene regions have been widely sequenced across some lineages, they are insufficient for resolving relationships across the entire tree. Most recognized species have never been included in a phylogenetic analysis because no appropriate molecular or morphological data have been collected...''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''&quot;The Tiny Little Ones&quot;''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Microbiomes_at_Risk ''Microbiomes at Risk'']<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/12/science/scientists-unveil-new-tree-of-life.html &lt;big&gt;'''NYT: Scientists Unveil New ‘Tree of Life’ '''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> :* http://www.nature.com/articles/nmicrobiol201648<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tree of Life nmicrobiol201648-f1 via Nature.jpg | link=http://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/Tree_of_Life_nmicrobiol201648-f1_via_Nature.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Visit Life Explorer'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.evogeneao.com/explore/tree-of-life-explorer '''''Tree of Life Interactive Explorer''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tree of Life Explorer - Evogeneao.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.eol.org/ &lt;big&gt;'''Encyclopedia of Life'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> :* http://blog.eol.org/ -- https://twitter.com/eol<br /> <br /> :* https://www.flickr.com/groups/encyclopedia_of_life<br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> [http://ens-newswire.com/2015/09/21/tree-of-life-with-2-3-million-species-open-for-changes/ ''September 20, 2015 (ENS - Environment News Service)''] <br /> :''The relationships among living things, as they diverged from one another from the beginning of life on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago, are shown for the first time in a comprehensive Tree of Life... It is now available free online for anyone to use or edit, something like a Wikipedia for evolutionary trees.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> The current version of the Tree with underlying data and source code is available to browse and download at: https://tree.opentreeoflife.org<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Treemachine'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''View at GitHub'' / '''''OpenTreeofLife''''' -- ''https://github.com/OpenTreeOfLife/treemachine''<br /> <br /> ''The '''open source framework''' facilitates community comment and contribution, enabling the tree to be continuously updated when new phylogenetic and taxonomic data become digitally available...''<br /> <br /> ''Principal investigator Karen Cranston of Duke University said, “This is the first real attempt to connect the dots and put it all together. Think of it as Version 1.0”...'' <br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Open_Access ''Next steps in multiplying the research'']<br /> <br /> :* ''http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Open_Access''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''#OpenAccess''''' - ''https://twitter.com/hashtag/openaccess?src=hash''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Dimensions of Biodiversity Program / NSF'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Despite centuries of discovery, most of our planet's biodiversity remains unknown. The scale of the unknown diversity on Earth is especially troubling given the rapid and permanent loss of biodiversity across the globe. The goal of the Dimensions of Biodiversity campaign is to transform, by 2020, how we describe and understand the scope and role of life on Earth.''<br /> <br /> * http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2014/nsf14057/nsf14057.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> '''The innovative and interdisciplinary teams of the Dimensions of Biodiversity program “may accomplish in 10 years what, with a piecemeal approach, would have taken 50 years—a half century we can no longer afford to wait.”'''<br /> <br /> - Dr. Joann P. Roskoski, NSF Deputy Assistant Director for Biological Sciences<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ''NSF BIODIVERSITY STREAMS OF ACTIVITY - 2020 GOALS''<br /> <br /> ''*Research -- An integrated understanding of the key but unknown dimensions of biodiversity on earth<br /> <br /> ''*Cyberinfrastructure -- Informatics and infrastructure that support accessible, interoperable information capability for dimensions of biodiversity<br /> <br /> ''*Collections -- Digitization of collections and enhanced physical infrastructure to link to cyberinfrastructure and leverage the enormous investments of the past<br /> <br /> ''*Workforce -- A diverse, interdisciplinary, globally-engaged, scientific workforce capable of transforming and communicating our understanding of biodiversity on Earth<br /> <br /> ''*Synthesis -- Scientific analyses and syntheses that generate and disseminate useful information for scientists, educators and decision makers<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''As of 2014, projects funded by the Dimensions of Biodiversity Program are required to format and deposit phylogenetic character matrices and trees within the Open Tree of Life Project...'''<br /> <br /> Program Title:<br /> <br /> Dimensions of Biodiversity<br /> <br /> Synopsis of Program:<br /> <br /> ''Despite centuries of discovery, most of our planet's biodiversity remains unknown. The scale of the unknown diversity on Earth is especially troubling given the rapid and permanent loss of biodiversity across the globe. With this loss, humanity is losing links in the web of life that provide ecosystem services, forfeiting an understanding of the history and future of the living world, and losing opportunities for future beneficial discoveries in the domains of food, fiber, fuel, pharmaceuticals, and bio-inspired innovation.<br /> <br /> ''The goal of the Dimensions of Biodiversity campaign is to transform, by 2020, how we describe and understand the scope and role of life on Earth. The campaign promotes novel, integrated approaches to identify and understand the evolutionary and ecological significance of biodiversity amidst the changing environment of the present day and in the geologic past.<br /> <br /> ''This campaign seeks to characterize biodiversity on Earth by using integrative, innovative approaches to fill the most substantial gaps in our understanding of the diversity of life on Earth. It takes a broad view of biodiversity, and currently focuses on the integration of genetic, taxonomic/phylogenetic, and functional dimensions of biodiversity. Successful proposals should integrate these three dimensions to understand interactions and feedbacks among them. While this focus complements several core NSF programs, it differs by requiring that multiple dimensions of biodiversity be addressed simultaneously, in innovative or novel ways, to understand their synergistic roles in critical ecological and evolutionary processes.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioinformatics ''Bioinformatics'']<br /> <br /> [[File:TreeOfLifeArt s.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Treeoflife.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Aldo quote.gif]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Natural Resources and Intrinsic, Integral Ecology'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''SJS / GP360 Siterunner''': Essentially, the value of biodiversity extends far beyond the US National Science Foundation enumerated research goals of &quot;beneficial discoveries&quot; for &quot;food, fiber, fuel, pharmaceuticals and bio-inspired innovation&quot;. We speak of [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Natural_Capital &quot;Natural Capital&quot;], of the [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Natural_Resources natural resources] of Earth even as biodiversity on Earth has value inherently, an '''intrinsic value''' in and of itself, in ways seen and utilized as resources in human activity -- and in ways unseen and vital beyond human economic activity. An [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Integral_Ecology &quot;integral ecology&quot;] speaks to larger issues of interconnectedness, resilience and survivability over time. The biosphere and environmental security are integrally connected and life on Earth must be protected for future generations. <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life ''Tree of Life / Wikipedia citations'']<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://tolweb.org/tree/ '''The Tree of Life Project - Related History'']<br /> <br /> [http://www.tolweb.org/tree/home.pages/media.html ''Tree of Life Media: Images, Movies, Sounds'']<br /> <br /> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=H6IrUUDboZo ''Tree of Life / Video'']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Plant Family Tree - US Botanic Garden 800x600.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Tree_of_Life_video.png<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :: [[File:Tree of Life opensourcetreeoflife m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Nature Us.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> :::[[File:Tree of Life on Hand.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Agriculture]]<br /> [[Category:Animals]]<br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:Biogeosciences]]<br /> [[Category:Biosphere]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth System Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Law]]<br /> [[Category:Ecological Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-ethics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-Spirituality]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:Endangered Species]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Full-cost Accounting]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Laws]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Protection]]<br /> [[Category:Evolutionary Biology]]<br /> [[Category:Extinction]]<br /> [[Category:Fisheries]]<br /> [[Category:Forests]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Green Values]]<br /> [[Category:Land Ethic]]<br /> [[Category:Microbiology]]<br /> [[Category:Microorganism]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Capital]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resources]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resource Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Nature]]<br /> [[Category:Oceans]]<br /> [[Category:Ocean Science]]<br /> [[Category:Ocean Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Open Access]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Rights of Nature]]<br /> [[Category:Seventh Generation Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability Policies]]<br /> [[Category:Wetlands]]<br /> [[Category:Wildlife]]<br /> [[Category:Zoology]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=File:Suzanne_Simard,_Trees_and_Much_More.png&diff=138394 2026-10-10T19:10:03Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div></div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Tree_of_Life&diff=138393 2026-10-10T19:02:06Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[It's All Related]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Nature Us and Veins of a Green Leaf.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/It%27s_All_Related&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Let's begin with a life of a leaf... Freddie The Leaf by Leo Buscaglia<br /> <br /> * https://www.buscaglia.com/the-fall-of-freddie-the-leaf-a-story-of-life-for-all-ages/<br /> <br /> * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/841110.The_Fall_of_Freddie_the_Leaf<br /> <br /> <br /> Then on to a story of a tree, a 'Mother Tree' ....<br /> <br /> <br /> In the 1990s, Canadian ecologist Suzanne Simard made a groundbreaking discovery that challenged everything we thought we knew about how forests work. While studying managed forests in British Columbia, she noticed something puzzling: when birch trees were removed to promote the growth of valuable Douglas firs, the firs did not flourish as expected, they actually struggled and grew more slowly.<br /> <br /> Determined to understand why, Simard traced the movement of nutrients using radioactive carbon isotopes. What she found was astonishing. Trees were actively sharing resources through vast underground fungal networks known as mycorrhizae. These delicate, thread-like fungi connect the roots of different trees across the forest floor, forming a complex web that allows the exchange of carbon, water, nutrients, and even chemical signals, sometimes between entirely different species.<br /> <br /> She discovered that older, larger trees often serve as central &quot;hubs&quot; or &quot;mother trees,&quot; supporting younger saplings by redistributing vital resources and helping the entire ecosystem remain resilient. When these key trees are removed, the underground network weakens, and the health of the remaining forest declines.<br /> <br /> Simard’s research overturned the traditional Darwinian view of forests as battlegrounds of ruthless competition. Instead, she revealed a far more sophisticated reality: forests operate as highly cooperative systems where trees communicate, support one another, and even warn neighboring trees about threats like drought, disease, or insect attacks.<br /> <br /> What appears to the human eye as a silent, still forest is, in truth, a vibrant, interconnected living network, built not on isolation and rivalry, but on deep connection and mutual aid.<br /> <br /> * https://x.com/rainmaker1973/status/2108923002679144662?s=58&amp;t=14LnFHA-cgLSdk-DhRp7cw<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/14/my-ideas-are-a-little-revolutionary-ecologist-suzanne-simard-on-intelligent-forests-the-climate-and-her-critics<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''When the Forest Breathes'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/667786/when-the-forest-breathes-by-suzanne-simard/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Finding the Mother Tree'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://mothertreeproject.org/<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finding_the_Mother_Tree<br /> <br /> <br /> Suzanne Simard, University of British Columbia<br /> <br /> * https://forestry.ubc.ca/faculty-profile/suzanne-simard/<br /> <br /> * https://suzannesimard.com/research/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[It's All Related]]<br /> <br /> Exploring Connections, previously unseen and unknown....<br /> <br /> an Earth Scientist comes along with a new vision....<br /> <br /> relationships, communicating, adapting, systems<br /> <br /> <br /> At GreenPolicy360, our work over decades brings new ways of seeing... we have often said in speaking of our Living Earth and systems of life, &quot;it is all connected, it is all related&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> Our work with the Bioneers network provides an example of our bioneering' -- <br /> <br /> '''[[Bioneers]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> Here is the Bioneers writing of Suzanne Simard's new science of Living Earth at work -- <br /> <br /> * https://bioneers.org/when-the-forest-breathes-suzanne-simard-on-regeneration-and-relationship-ze0z2603/<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://emergencemagazine.org/conversation/the-scaffolding-of-life/<br /> <br /> * https://growwild.kew.org/blog/suzanne-simard-wood-wide-web-mother-trees-and-power-collective-action<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Mushroom life in the forest.png]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Mushroom_life_in_the_forest.png&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> There's more to forests than meets the eye and ear ...<br /> <br /> : Go underground, to the roots and web of life connections<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ························································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Remembering E.O. Wilson and Thomas Lovejoy.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Remembering E.O. Wilson and Thomas Lovejoy'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''We celebrate today the lives of two great ecologists: E.O. Wilson, who passed away on December 26 at the age of 92, and Tom Lovejoy, who passed away onDecember 25 at the age of 80. Each made extraordinary contributions to the field of bio-diversity and to the greater public dialog about humans and nature...''<br /> <br /> * https://www.garrisoninstitute.org/blog/remembering-e-o-wilson-and-thomas-lovejoy/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Tom and Ed, Pioneering Conservation Biology'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Thomas Lovejoy and Edward O. Wilson<br /> <br /> ''The two scientists first met in the mid-nineteen-seventies. At that point, Wilson was in his mid-forties, and teaching biology at Harvard. Lovejoy, a dozen years younger, was working for the World Wildlife Fund. Over lunch, they got to talking about where the W.W.F. should focus its efforts. They agreed that it should be in the tropics, because the tropics are where most species actually live. There wasn’t a good term for what they were trying to preserve, so they tossed one around—“biological diversity”—and put it into circulation. “People just started using it,” Lovejoy recalled, in an interview in 2015. (Later, the phrase would be shortened to “biodiversity.”)''<br /> <br /> * https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/honoring-the-legacy-of-e-o-wilson-and-tom-lovejoy<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ························································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''World Animal Foundation'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://worldanimalfoundation.org/advocate/how-many-animals-are-in-the-world/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Quantifying the Amazing Diversity of Life'''<br /> <br /> '''2023''' <br /> <br /> ~ From the Total of 8.7 Million Species, 2.16 Million Are Animal<br /> ~ 97% of All Animals Are Invertebrates<br /> ~ More Than 62,000 Vertebrate Species Have Been Identified<br /> ~ The Estimated Species of Insects Is 10 Quintillion<br /> ~ The Described Species of Birds and Reptiles Is 11,188 and 11,733, Respectively<br /> ~ About 6,596 Described Species of Mammals Exist in the World<br /> ~ The Current Amphibians Database Shows There Are 8,698 Existing Species of Amphibians<br /> ~ The Estimated Number of Fish in the World Is 3.5 Trillion<br /> ~ 86% and 91% of All the Land and Sea Species Respectively Have Not Been Discovered<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Earth BioGenome Project'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Working to sequence 1.5+ million genomes<br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07279-z<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The Earth BioGenome Project aims to sequence the genomes of the roughly 1.5 million+ known animal, plant, protozoan and fungal species — collectively known as eukaryotes — worldwide over the next decade. The initiative is estimated to cost US$4.7 billion, although only a small proportion of that money has been committed so far.''<br /> <br /> ''The project comprises more than a dozen existing sequencing projects that are focused on, for instance, specific branches of the tree of life — such as birds, insects and plants — or on the biodiversity in a particular country, such as the UK effort, officially called the Darwin Tree of Life Project.''<br /> <br /> ''“We don’t need one genome project to rule them all,” says Lewin. Rather, the effort’s raison d’etre, he says, is to ensure that ongoing biodiversity sequencing efforts are standardized.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ''“Variation is the fount of all genetic knowledge... The more variation you have the better — so why not sequence everything?”''<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Tree of Life video.png | link=https://youtu.be/AjvLQJ6PIiU]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://youtu.be/AjvLQJ6PIiU<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew-6WuTo1Is <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :::::[[File:You are here on the cladogenetic tree m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ······················································································ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;GreenPolicy360 'Science Idea of the Day'&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Carl Zimmer<br /> <br /> * https://carlzimmer.com/what-is-a-species-398/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;What is a species?&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Long before the dawn of science, humans were naming species. To be able to hunt animals and gather plants, people had to know what they were talking about. Taxonomy, the modern science of naming species, emerged in the 1600s and came into its own in the next century, thanks largely to the work of Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus. Linnaeus invented a system to sort living things into groups, inside which were smaller groups. Every member of a particular group shared certain key traits. Humans belonged to the mammal class, and within that class the primate order, and within that order the genus Homo, and within that genus the species Homo sapiens. Linnaeus declared that each species had existed since creation. “There are as many species as the Infinite Being produced diverse forms in the beginning,” he wrote.''<br /> <br /> ''Linnaeus’s new order made the work of taxonomists much easier, but trying to draw the lines between species often proved frustrating. Two species of mice might interbreed where their ranges overlapped, raising the question of what name to give to the hybrids. Within a species there was confusion as well. The willow ptarmigans in Ireland, for example, have a slightly different plumage than the willow ptarmigans in Finland, which differ in turn from the ones in Norway. Naturalists could not agree about whether they belonged to different ptarmigan species or were just varieties–subsets, in other words–of a single species.''<br /> <br /> ''Charles Darwin, for one, was amused by these struggles. “It is really laughable to see what different ideas are prominent in various naturalists’ minds, when they speak of ‘species,’” he wrote in 1856. “It all comes, I believe, from trying to define the indefinable.” Species, Darwin argued, were not fixed since creation. They had evolved. Each group of organisms that we call a species starts out as a variety of an older species. Over time natural selection transforms them as they adapt to their environment. Meanwhile other varieties become extinct. An old variety ends up markedly different from all other organism–what we see as a species in its own right.'' <br /> <br /> ''“I look at the term ‘species’ as one arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience, to a set of individuals closely resembling each other,” Darwin declared...''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Like the taxonomists before him, Darwin could study species only with the naked eye, observing the color of a bird’s feathers or counting the plates on a barnacle. It would not be until the early 20th century that scientists could start to examine the genetic differences among species. Their research led to a new way of thinking. What made a species a species were the barriers to reproducing with other species. Genes could flow among its members as they mated, but these individuals usually remained within the species, thanks to reproductive barriers. Species might spawn at different times of the year, they might find courtship songs of other species unattractive, or their DNA might simply be incompatible.''<br /> <br /> ''The best understood way for these barriers to evolve is through isolation. Some members of an existing specie–a population–have to become unable to mate with the rest of their species. A glacier could thrust across their range, for example. The isolated population evolves new genes, and some of those new genes may make interbreeding difficult or impossible. Over hundreds of thousands of years so many barriers evolve that the isolated population becomes a distinct species.''<br /> <br /> ''This understanding of how species evolve led to a new concept of what it meant to be a species. Ernst Mayr, a German ornithologist, boldly declared that species were not convenient labels but real entities, like mountains or people. In 1942 he defined a species as a gene pool, calling it a set of populations that can reproduce with one another and that are unable to mate successfully with other populations.''<br /> <br /> ''The biological species concept, as it is now called, became the textbook standard...''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Related organisms share traits because they share the same ancestry. Humans, giraffes and bats all descend from ancient mammals, and as a result they all have hair and milk. Within mammals, humans share a closer common ancestry with other primates. From the common primate ancestor, primates inherited other traits, such as forward-facing eyes. You can zoom in on smaller and smaller sets of organisms this way. Eventually, though, the zooming in comes to a stop. There are organisms that form groups that can no longer be split. These, according to the phylogenetic species concept, are species. In a sense, this concept takes Linnaeus’s original system and updates it in light of evolution. The phylogenetic species concept has been embraced by researchers who need to identify species rather than just contemplate them. Recognizing a species is a matter of finding a group of organisms that shares certain clear-cut traits. Scientists do not have to depend on slippery qualities like reproductive isolation.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Tiny Species / Microorganisms'''<br /> <br /> ''Most of the work that has been done on the species concept in recent years has been directed at animals and plants. That bias is the result of history: animals and plants were the only things that Linnaeus and other early taxonomists could study. But today scientists know that the vast majority of genetic diversity lies in the invisible world of microbes. And microbes have long posed the biggest puzzle of all when it comes to the nature of species.''<br /> <br /> ''When microbiologists began naming species in the 1800s, they could not inspect feathers or flowers like zoologists and botanists can. Microorganisms–especially bacteria and archaea–generally look a lot like one another. Some are rod-shaped, for example, and some are tiny spheres. To distinguish two rod-shaped bacteria from each other, microbiologists would run experiments on their metabolism. One kind of microbe might be able to feed on, say, lactose, whereas the other could not. From clues of this sort, microbiologists described such species as Escherichia coli or Vibrio cholerae. Underlying their work, however, was no clear concept of what it meant for microbes to belong to a species. And when Mayr came up with his biological species concept, it seemed to exclude many microbes. After all, bacteria are not made up of males and females that have to reproduce sexually like animals. They can just split in two.''<br /> <br /> ''The confusion got worse when scientists began to analyze the DNA of microbes. They tried to figure out how different the DNA of two microbial species was, selecting small fragments for comparison. To their surprise, the differences could be huge. Two species of bacteria placed in the same genus based on their metabolism might be more different than humans are from all other primates. And the bacteria within a species could make their living in radically different ways. Some strains of E. coli live harmlessly in our gut, for example, whereas others can cause fatal diseases. “The genetic variation within a species is so enormous that the term species does not really have the same meaning for bacteria and archaea” as it does for multicellular plants or animals, says Jonathan Eisen of the University of California, Davis.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Tiny Little Ones... Inner Life of a Cell.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Microbes are not some minor exception to the rule that can be ignored. As investigators have surveyed the microbial world, they have discovered that the diversity of all animals is puny in comparison. “It’s always struck me as rather odd that if Mayr is right, then 90 percent of the tree of life doesn’t come in species,” says John Wilkins, a philosopher of science at the University of Queensland in Australia. “That’s got to give you some pause for thought.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> Excerpts from Scientific American 2008<br /> <br /> =='''''Open source 'Tree of Life' including all species known to humans to date'''''==<br /> <br /> <br /> ''U.S. National Science Foundation'' / ''As of September 2015''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''First draft of ‘Tree of Life’ data diagrams include 2.3 million species'''''<br /> <br /> ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States''<br /> <br /> * http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-09/uom-ol091815.php<br /> <br /> * http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/09/16/1423041112<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Authors of the 2015 PNAS Study''<br /> <br /> ''Scientists have used gene sequences and morphological data to construct tens of thousands of evolutionary trees ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life_(biology) phylogenetic schematics]) that describe the evolutionary history of animals, plants, and microbes. '''This study is the first, to our knowledge, to apply an efficient and automated process for assembling published trees into a complete tree of life. This tree and the underlying data are available to browse and download from the Internet, facilitating subsequent analyses that require evolutionary trees. The tree can be easily updated with newly published data.''' Our analysis of coverage not only reveals gaps in sampling and naming biodiversity but also further demonstrates that most published phylogenies are not available in digital formats that can be summarized into a tree of life.''<br /> <br /> <br /> * http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/09/16/1423041112.full.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The realization that all organisms on Earth are related by common descent was one of the most profound insights in scientific history. The goal of reconstructing the tree of life is one of the most daunting challenges in biology. The scope of the problem is immense... most species have yet to be described. Despite decades of effort and thousands of phylogenetic studies on diverse clades, we lack a comprehensive tree of life, or even a summary of our current knowledge. One reason for this shortcoming is lack of data. GenBank contains DNA sequences for 411,000 species, only 22% of estimated named species. Although some gene regions have been widely sequenced across some lineages, they are insufficient for resolving relationships across the entire tree. Most recognized species have never been included in a phylogenetic analysis because no appropriate molecular or morphological data have been collected...''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''&quot;The Tiny Little Ones&quot;''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Microbiomes_at_Risk ''Microbiomes at Risk'']<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/12/science/scientists-unveil-new-tree-of-life.html &lt;big&gt;'''NYT: Scientists Unveil New ‘Tree of Life’ '''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> :* http://www.nature.com/articles/nmicrobiol201648<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tree of Life nmicrobiol201648-f1 via Nature.jpg | link=http://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/Tree_of_Life_nmicrobiol201648-f1_via_Nature.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Visit Life Explorer'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.evogeneao.com/explore/tree-of-life-explorer '''''Tree of Life Interactive Explorer''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tree of Life Explorer - Evogeneao.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.eol.org/ &lt;big&gt;'''Encyclopedia of Life'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> :* http://blog.eol.org/ -- https://twitter.com/eol<br /> <br /> :* https://www.flickr.com/groups/encyclopedia_of_life<br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> [http://ens-newswire.com/2015/09/21/tree-of-life-with-2-3-million-species-open-for-changes/ ''September 20, 2015 (ENS - Environment News Service)''] <br /> :''The relationships among living things, as they diverged from one another from the beginning of life on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago, are shown for the first time in a comprehensive Tree of Life... It is now available free online for anyone to use or edit, something like a Wikipedia for evolutionary trees.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> The current version of the Tree with underlying data and source code is available to browse and download at: https://tree.opentreeoflife.org<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Treemachine'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''View at GitHub'' / '''''OpenTreeofLife''''' -- ''https://github.com/OpenTreeOfLife/treemachine''<br /> <br /> ''The '''open source framework''' facilitates community comment and contribution, enabling the tree to be continuously updated when new phylogenetic and taxonomic data become digitally available...''<br /> <br /> ''Principal investigator Karen Cranston of Duke University said, “This is the first real attempt to connect the dots and put it all together. Think of it as Version 1.0”...'' <br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Open_Access ''Next steps in multiplying the research'']<br /> <br /> :* ''http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Open_Access''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''#OpenAccess''''' - ''https://twitter.com/hashtag/openaccess?src=hash''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Dimensions of Biodiversity Program / NSF'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Despite centuries of discovery, most of our planet's biodiversity remains unknown. The scale of the unknown diversity on Earth is especially troubling given the rapid and permanent loss of biodiversity across the globe. The goal of the Dimensions of Biodiversity campaign is to transform, by 2020, how we describe and understand the scope and role of life on Earth.''<br /> <br /> * http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2014/nsf14057/nsf14057.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> '''The innovative and interdisciplinary teams of the Dimensions of Biodiversity program “may accomplish in 10 years what, with a piecemeal approach, would have taken 50 years—a half century we can no longer afford to wait.”'''<br /> <br /> - Dr. Joann P. Roskoski, NSF Deputy Assistant Director for Biological Sciences<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ''NSF BIODIVERSITY STREAMS OF ACTIVITY - 2020 GOALS''<br /> <br /> ''*Research -- An integrated understanding of the key but unknown dimensions of biodiversity on earth<br /> <br /> ''*Cyberinfrastructure -- Informatics and infrastructure that support accessible, interoperable information capability for dimensions of biodiversity<br /> <br /> ''*Collections -- Digitization of collections and enhanced physical infrastructure to link to cyberinfrastructure and leverage the enormous investments of the past<br /> <br /> ''*Workforce -- A diverse, interdisciplinary, globally-engaged, scientific workforce capable of transforming and communicating our understanding of biodiversity on Earth<br /> <br /> ''*Synthesis -- Scientific analyses and syntheses that generate and disseminate useful information for scientists, educators and decision makers<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''As of 2014, projects funded by the Dimensions of Biodiversity Program are required to format and deposit phylogenetic character matrices and trees within the Open Tree of Life Project...'''<br /> <br /> Program Title:<br /> <br /> Dimensions of Biodiversity<br /> <br /> Synopsis of Program:<br /> <br /> ''Despite centuries of discovery, most of our planet's biodiversity remains unknown. The scale of the unknown diversity on Earth is especially troubling given the rapid and permanent loss of biodiversity across the globe. With this loss, humanity is losing links in the web of life that provide ecosystem services, forfeiting an understanding of the history and future of the living world, and losing opportunities for future beneficial discoveries in the domains of food, fiber, fuel, pharmaceuticals, and bio-inspired innovation.<br /> <br /> ''The goal of the Dimensions of Biodiversity campaign is to transform, by 2020, how we describe and understand the scope and role of life on Earth. The campaign promotes novel, integrated approaches to identify and understand the evolutionary and ecological significance of biodiversity amidst the changing environment of the present day and in the geologic past.<br /> <br /> ''This campaign seeks to characterize biodiversity on Earth by using integrative, innovative approaches to fill the most substantial gaps in our understanding of the diversity of life on Earth. It takes a broad view of biodiversity, and currently focuses on the integration of genetic, taxonomic/phylogenetic, and functional dimensions of biodiversity. Successful proposals should integrate these three dimensions to understand interactions and feedbacks among them. While this focus complements several core NSF programs, it differs by requiring that multiple dimensions of biodiversity be addressed simultaneously, in innovative or novel ways, to understand their synergistic roles in critical ecological and evolutionary processes.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioinformatics ''Bioinformatics'']<br /> <br /> [[File:TreeOfLifeArt s.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Treeoflife.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Aldo quote.gif]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Natural Resources and Intrinsic, Integral Ecology'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''SJS / GP360 Siterunner''': Essentially, the value of biodiversity extends far beyond the US National Science Foundation enumerated research goals of &quot;beneficial discoveries&quot; for &quot;food, fiber, fuel, pharmaceuticals and bio-inspired innovation&quot;. We speak of [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Natural_Capital &quot;Natural Capital&quot;], of the [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Natural_Resources natural resources] of Earth even as biodiversity on Earth has value inherently, an '''intrinsic value''' in and of itself, in ways seen and utilized as resources in human activity -- and in ways unseen and vital beyond human economic activity. An [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Integral_Ecology &quot;integral ecology&quot;] speaks to larger issues of interconnectedness, resilience and survivability over time. The biosphere and environmental security are integrally connected and life on Earth must be protected for future generations. <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life ''Tree of Life / Wikipedia citations'']<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://tolweb.org/tree/ '''The Tree of Life Project - Related History'']<br /> <br /> [http://www.tolweb.org/tree/home.pages/media.html ''Tree of Life Media: Images, Movies, Sounds'']<br /> <br /> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=H6IrUUDboZo ''Tree of Life / Video'']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Plant Family Tree - US Botanic Garden 800x600.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Tree_of_Life_video.png<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :: [[File:Tree of Life opensourcetreeoflife m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Nature Us.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> :::[[File:Tree of Life on Hand.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Agriculture]]<br /> [[Category:Animals]]<br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:Biogeosciences]]<br /> [[Category:Biosphere]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth System Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Law]]<br /> [[Category:Ecological Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-ethics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-Spirituality]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:Endangered Species]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Full-cost Accounting]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Laws]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Protection]]<br /> [[Category:Evolutionary Biology]]<br /> [[Category:Extinction]]<br /> [[Category:Fisheries]]<br /> [[Category:Forests]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Green Values]]<br /> [[Category:Land Ethic]]<br /> [[Category:Microbiology]]<br /> [[Category:Microorganism]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Capital]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resources]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resource Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Nature]]<br /> [[Category:Oceans]]<br /> [[Category:Ocean Science]]<br /> [[Category:Ocean Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Open Access]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Rights of Nature]]<br /> [[Category:Seventh Generation Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability Policies]]<br /> [[Category:Wetlands]]<br /> [[Category:Wildlife]]<br /> [[Category:Zoology]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=File:Forest_Moss_and_unseen_%27tiny_little_ones%27.PNG&diff=138392 2026-10-10T18:32:40Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> A walk in the forest, oh the trees and much, much more ...<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Tree_of_Life<br /> <br /> <br /> On the way... look closely, look at the connections, the relationships<br /> <br /> Underfoot, above and below, inside and all around are the &quot;tiny little ones&quot;<br /> <br /> Networks, communicating, the sharing, the ecosytems, science of earth systems<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tardi1.jpg]]<br /> <br /> Tardigrades ! <br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-05796-x<br /> <br /> * http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150313-the-toughest-animals-on-earth<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Tardigrades Are Tiny &amp; Tough'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Waterbear-2014.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> [[File:Life Goes On.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> What is Life?<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&quot;The deeply relational nature of reality&quot; ...&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/What_Is_Life%3F<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> [[File:Mushroom life in the forest.png]]<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Mushroom_life_in_the_forest.png<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Forest Microbiome &amp; Ecosystem Ecology&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Soils are alive. <br /> <br /> Colin Averill: Incredibly diverse forest microbial communities have profound impacts on our world that we are just beginning to grasp. My team studies the forest microbiome. How does incredible microbial diversity affect which trees are in a forest, forest carbon sequestration and climate change forecasts? I focus on the ecology of mycorrhizal fungi - fungi that form a symbiosis with the roots of most plants on Earth – however I am broadly interested in links between microbes and ecosystems.<br /> <br /> By reintroducing native, growth-promoting fungal communities to forest soils, we are further empowering one of the biggest carbon-storing mechanisms on the planet: forests. Trees depend on symbiotic partners belowground (their microbiome) to access growth limiting soil resources , and yet traditional forestry practices have degraded this support system. We are driven by a desire to protect and restore the endless diversity of life that exists in our soils, and to see forests flourish in response. <br /> <br /> Our Science is one part of our story. The work is brought to life by our incredible team of visionary scientists, forestry practitioners, business development leaders, and organization builders united by our shared Mission.<br /> <br /> * https://www.funga.earth/our-story<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[Category:Agriculture]]<br /> [[Category:Alternative Agriculture]]<br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth System Science]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Forest]]<br /> [[Category:Forests]]<br /> [[Category:Green Graphics]]<br /> [[Category:Microbiology]]<br /> [[Category:Microorganism]]<br /> [[Category:Nature]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Soil]]<br /> [[Category:Wildlife]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=File:Forest_Moss_and_unseen_%27tiny_little_ones%27.PNG&diff=138391 2026-10-10T18:31:10Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> A walk in the forest, oh the trees and much, much more ...<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Tree_of_Life<br /> <br /> <br /> On the way... look closely, look at the connections, the relationships<br /> <br /> Underfoot, above and below, inside and all around are the &quot;tiny little ones&quot;<br /> <br /> Networks, communicating, the sharing, the ecosytems, science of earth systems<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tardi1.jpg]]<br /> <br /> Tardigrades ! <br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-05796-x<br /> <br /> * http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150313-the-toughest-animals-on-earth<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Tardigrades Are Tiny &amp; Tough'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Waterbear-2014.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> [[File:Life Goes On.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> What is Life?<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&quot;The deeply relational nature of reality&quot; ...&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/What_Is_Life%3F<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> [[File:Mushroom life in the forest.png]]<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Mushroom_life_in_the_forest.png<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Forest Microbiome &amp; Ecosystem Ecology&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Soils are alive. <br /> <br /> Colin Averill: Incredibly diverse forest microbial communities have profound impacts on our world that we are just beginning to grasp. My team studies the forest microbiome. How does incredible microbial diversity affect which trees are in a forest, forest carbon sequestration and climate change forecasts? I focus on the ecology of mycorrhizal fungi - fungi that form a symbiosis with the roots of most plants on Earth – however I am broadly interested in links between microbes and ecosystems.<br /> <br /> By reintroducing native, growth-promoting fungal communities to forest soils, we are further empowering one of the biggest carbon-storing mechanisms on the planet: forests. Trees depend on symbiotic partners belowground (their microbiome) to access growth limiting soil resources , and yet traditional forestry practices have degraded this support system. We are driven by a desire to protect and restore the endless diversity of life that exists in our soils, and to see forests flourish in response. <br /> <br /> Our Science is one part of our story. The work is brought to life by our incredible team of visionary scientists, forestry practitioners, business development leaders, and organization builders united by our shared Mission.<br /> <br /> * https://www.funga.earth/our-story<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth System Science]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Forest]]<br /> [[Category:Forests]]<br /> [[Category:Green Graphics]]<br /> [[Category:Microbiology]]<br /> [[Category:Microorganism]]<br /> [[Category:Nature]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Soil]]<br /> [[Category:Wildlife]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=File:Forest_Moss_and_unseen_%27tiny_little_ones%27.PNG&diff=138390 2026-10-10T18:27:04Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> A walk in the forest, oh the trees and much, much more ...<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Tree_of_Life<br /> <br /> <br /> On the way... look closely, look at the connections, the relationships<br /> <br /> Underfoot, above and below, inside and all around are the &quot;tiny little ones&quot;<br /> <br /> Networks, communicating, the sharing, the ecosytems, science of earth systems<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tardi1.jpg]]<br /> <br /> Tardigrades ! <br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-05796-x<br /> <br /> * http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150313-the-toughest-animals-on-earth<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Tardigrades Are Tiny &amp; Tough'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Waterbear-2014.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> [[File:Life Goes On.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> What is Life?<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&quot;The deeply relational nature of reality&quot; ...&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/What_Is_Life%3F<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> [[File:Mushroom life in the forest.png]]<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Mushroom_life_in_the_forest.png<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Forest Microbiome &amp; Ecosystem Ecology'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Soils are alive. Incredibly diverse forest microbial communities have profound impacts on our world that we are just beginning to grasp. My team studies the forest microbiome. How does incredible microbial diversity affect which trees are in a forest, forest carbon sequestration and climate change forecasts? I focus on the ecology of mycorrhizal fungi - fungi that form a symbiosis with the roots of most plants on Earth – however I am broadly interested in links between microbes and ecosystems.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.colinaverill.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Relational Reality by Charlene Spretnak.png]]<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Relational_Reality_by_Charlene_Spretnak.png<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth System Science]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Forest]]<br /> [[Category:Forests]]<br /> [[Category:Green Graphics]]<br /> [[Category:Microbiology]]<br /> [[Category:Microorganism]]<br /> [[Category:Nature]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Soil]]<br /> [[Category:Wildlife]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=File:Forest_Moss_and_unseen_%27tiny_little_ones%27.PNG&diff=138389 2026-10-10T18:26:15Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> A walk in the forest, oh the trees and much, much more ...<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Tree_of_Life<br /> <br /> <br /> On the way... look closely, look at the connections, the relationships<br /> <br /> Underfoot, above and below, inside and all around are the &quot;tiny little ones&quot;<br /> <br /> Networks, communicating, the sharing, the ecosytems, science of earth systems<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tardi1.jpg]]<br /> <br /> Tardigrades ! <br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-05796-x<br /> <br /> * http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150313-the-toughest-animals-on-earth<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Tardigrades Are Tiny &amp; Tough'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Waterbear-2014.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> What is Life?<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&quot;The deeply relational nature of reality&quot; ...&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/What_Is_Life%3F<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> [[File:Mushroom life in the forest.png]]<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Mushroom_life_in_the_forest.png<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Forest Microbiome &amp; Ecosystem Ecology'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Soils are alive. Incredibly diverse forest microbial communities have profound impacts on our world that we are just beginning to grasp. My team studies the forest microbiome. How does incredible microbial diversity affect which trees are in a forest, forest carbon sequestration and climate change forecasts? I focus on the ecology of mycorrhizal fungi - fungi that form a symbiosis with the roots of most plants on Earth – however I am broadly interested in links between microbes and ecosystems.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.colinaverill.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Relational Reality by Charlene Spretnak.png]]<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Relational_Reality_by_Charlene_Spretnak.png<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth System Science]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Forest]]<br /> [[Category:Forests]]<br /> [[Category:Green Graphics]]<br /> [[Category:Microbiology]]<br /> [[Category:Microorganism]]<br /> [[Category:Nature]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Soil]]<br /> [[Category:Wildlife]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=File:Forest_Moss_and_unseen_%27tiny_little_ones%27.PNG&diff=138388 2026-10-10T18:23:42Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> A walk in the forest, oh the trees and much, much more ...<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Tree_of_Life<br /> <br /> <br /> On the way... look closely, look at the connections, the relationships<br /> <br /> Underfoot, above and below, inside and all around are the &quot;tiny little ones&quot;<br /> <br /> Networks, communicating, the sharing, the ecosytems, science of earth systems<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tardi1.jpg]]<br /> <br /> Tardigrades ! <br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-05796-x<br /> <br /> * http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150313-the-toughest-animals-on-earth<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Tardigrades Are Tiny &amp; Tough'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Waterbear-2014.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&quot;The deeply relational nature of reality&quot; ...&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Mushroom life in the forest.png]]<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Mushroom_life_in_the_forest.png<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Forest Microbiome &amp; Ecosystem Ecology'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Soils are alive. Incredibly diverse forest microbial communities have profound impacts on our world that we are just beginning to grasp. My team studies the forest microbiome. How does incredible microbial diversity affect which trees are in a forest, forest carbon sequestration and climate change forecasts? I focus on the ecology of mycorrhizal fungi - fungi that form a symbiosis with the roots of most plants on Earth – however I am broadly interested in links between microbes and ecosystems.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.colinaverill.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Relational Reality by Charlene Spretnak.png]]<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Relational_Reality_by_Charlene_Spretnak.png<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth System Science]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Forest]]<br /> [[Category:Forests]]<br /> [[Category:Green Graphics]]<br /> [[Category:Microbiology]]<br /> [[Category:Microorganism]]<br /> [[Category:Nature]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Soil]]<br /> [[Category:Wildlife]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=File:Forest_Moss_and_unseen_%27tiny_little_ones%27.PNG&diff=138387 2026-10-10T18:23:18Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> A walk in the forest, oh the trees and much, much more ...<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Tree_of_Life<br /> <br /> <br /> On the way... look closely, look at the connections, the relationships<br /> <br /> Underfoot, above and below, inside and all around are the &quot;tiny little ones&quot;<br /> <br /> Networks, the communicating, the sharing, the ecosytems, science of earth systems<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tardi1.jpg]]<br /> <br /> Tardigrades ! <br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-05796-x<br /> <br /> * http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150313-the-toughest-animals-on-earth<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Tardigrades Are Tiny &amp; Tough'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Waterbear-2014.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&quot;The deeply relational nature of reality&quot; ...&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Mushroom life in the forest.png]]<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Mushroom_life_in_the_forest.png<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Forest Microbiome &amp; Ecosystem Ecology'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Soils are alive. Incredibly diverse forest microbial communities have profound impacts on our world that we are just beginning to grasp. My team studies the forest microbiome. How does incredible microbial diversity affect which trees are in a forest, forest carbon sequestration and climate change forecasts? I focus on the ecology of mycorrhizal fungi - fungi that form a symbiosis with the roots of most plants on Earth – however I am broadly interested in links between microbes and ecosystems.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.colinaverill.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Relational Reality by Charlene Spretnak.png]]<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Relational_Reality_by_Charlene_Spretnak.png<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth System Science]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Forest]]<br /> [[Category:Forests]]<br /> [[Category:Green Graphics]]<br /> [[Category:Microbiology]]<br /> [[Category:Microorganism]]<br /> [[Category:Nature]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Soil]]<br /> [[Category:Wildlife]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=File:Forest_Moss_and_unseen_%27tiny_little_ones%27.PNG&diff=138386 2026-10-10T18:22:00Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> A walk in the forest, oh the trees and much, much more ...<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Tree_of_Life<br /> <br /> <br /> On the way... look closely, look at the connections, the relationships<br /> <br /> Underfoot, above and below, inside and all around are the &quot;tiny little ones&quot;<br /> <br /> The channels and networks, the communicating, the sharing, the ecosytems, earth systems<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tardi1.jpg]]<br /> <br /> Tardigrades ! <br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-05796-x<br /> <br /> * http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150313-the-toughest-animals-on-earth<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Tardigrades Are Tiny &amp; Tough'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Waterbear-2014.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&quot;The deeply relational nature of reality&quot; ...&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Mushroom life in the forest.png]]<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Mushroom_life_in_the_forest.png<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Forest Microbiome &amp; Ecosystem Ecology'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Soils are alive. Incredibly diverse forest microbial communities have profound impacts on our world that we are just beginning to grasp. My team studies the forest microbiome. How does incredible microbial diversity affect which trees are in a forest, forest carbon sequestration and climate change forecasts? I focus on the ecology of mycorrhizal fungi - fungi that form a symbiosis with the roots of most plants on Earth – however I am broadly interested in links between microbes and ecosystems.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.colinaverill.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Relational Reality by Charlene Spretnak.png]]<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Relational_Reality_by_Charlene_Spretnak.png<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth System Science]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Forest]]<br /> [[Category:Forests]]<br /> [[Category:Green Graphics]]<br /> [[Category:Microbiology]]<br /> [[Category:Microorganism]]<br /> [[Category:Nature]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Soil]]<br /> [[Category:Wildlife]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=File:Forest_Moss_and_unseen_%27tiny_little_ones%27.PNG&diff=138385 2026-10-10T18:17:10Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> By the way... look closely, look at the connections, the relationships<br /> <br /> Underfoot, above and below, inside and all around are the &quot;tiny little ones&quot;<br /> <br /> e.g., 1 gram of moss, 132,000 tardigrades<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tardi1.jpg]]<br /> <br /> Tardigrades ! <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-05796-x<br /> <br /> * http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150313-the-toughest-animals-on-earth<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Tardigrades Are Tiny &amp; Tough'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Waterbear-2014.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&quot;The deeply relational nature of reality&quot; ...&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Mushroom life in the forest.png]]<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Mushroom_life_in_the_forest.png<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Forest Microbiome &amp; Ecosystem Ecology'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Soils are alive. Incredibly diverse forest microbial communities have profound impacts on our world that we are just beginning to grasp. My team studies the forest microbiome. How does incredible microbial diversity affect which trees are in a forest, forest carbon sequestration and climate change forecasts? I focus on the ecology of mycorrhizal fungi - fungi that form a symbiosis with the roots of most plants on Earth – however I am broadly interested in links between microbes and ecosystems.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.colinaverill.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Relational Reality by Charlene Spretnak.png]]<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Relational_Reality_by_Charlene_Spretnak.png<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Forest]]<br /> [[Category:Forests]]<br /> [[Category:Green Graphics]]<br /> [[Category:Microbiology]]<br /> [[Category:Microorganism]]<br /> [[Category:Nature]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Soil]]<br /> [[Category:Wildlife]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Tree_of_Life&diff=138384 2026-10-10T18:16:02Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[It's All Related]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Nature Us and Veins of a Green Leaf.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/It%27s_All_Related&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Let's begin with a life of a leaf... Freddie The Leaf by Leo Buscaglia<br /> <br /> * https://www.buscaglia.com/the-fall-of-freddie-the-leaf-a-story-of-life-for-all-ages/<br /> <br /> * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/841110.The_Fall_of_Freddie_the_Leaf<br /> <br /> <br /> Then on to a story of a tree, a 'Mother Tree' ....<br /> <br /> <br /> In the 1990s, Canadian ecologist Suzanne Simard made a groundbreaking discovery that challenged everything we thought we knew about how forests work. While studying managed forests in British Columbia, she noticed something puzzling: when birch trees were removed to promote the growth of valuable Douglas firs, the firs did not flourish as expected, they actually struggled and grew more slowly.<br /> <br /> Determined to understand why, Simard traced the movement of nutrients using radioactive carbon isotopes. What she found was astonishing. Trees were actively sharing resources through vast underground fungal networks known as mycorrhizae. These delicate, thread-like fungi connect the roots of different trees across the forest floor, forming a complex web that allows the exchange of carbon, water, nutrients, and even chemical signals, sometimes between entirely different species.<br /> <br /> She discovered that older, larger trees often serve as central &quot;hubs&quot; or &quot;mother trees,&quot; supporting younger saplings by redistributing vital resources and helping the entire ecosystem remain resilient. When these key trees are removed, the underground network weakens, and the health of the remaining forest declines.<br /> <br /> Simard’s research overturned the traditional Darwinian view of forests as battlegrounds of ruthless competition. Instead, she revealed a far more sophisticated reality: forests operate as highly cooperative systems where trees communicate, support one another, and even warn neighboring trees about threats like drought, disease, or insect attacks.<br /> <br /> What appears to the human eye as a silent, still forest is, in truth, a vibrant, interconnected living network, built not on isolation and rivalry, but on deep connection and mutual aid.<br /> <br /> * https://x.com/rainmaker1973/status/2108923002679144662?s=58&amp;t=14LnFHA-cgLSdk-DhRp7cw<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/14/my-ideas-are-a-little-revolutionary-ecologist-suzanne-simard-on-intelligent-forests-the-climate-and-her-critics<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''When the Forest Breathes'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/667786/when-the-forest-breathes-by-suzanne-simard/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Finding the Mother Tree'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://mothertreeproject.org/<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finding_the_Mother_Tree<br /> <br /> <br /> Suzanne Simard, University of British Columbia<br /> <br /> * https://forestry.ubc.ca/faculty-profile/suzanne-simard/<br /> <br /> * https://suzannesimard.com/research/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[It's All Related]]<br /> <br /> Exploring Connections, previously unseen and unknown....<br /> <br /> and then Earth Scientist comes along with new vision....<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Bioneers]]'''<br /> <br /> * https://bioneers.org/when-the-forest-breathes-suzanne-simard-on-regeneration-and-relationship-ze0z2603/<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://emergencemagazine.org/conversation/the-scaffolding-of-life/<br /> <br /> * https://growwild.kew.org/blog/suzanne-simard-wood-wide-web-mother-trees-and-power-collective-action<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Mushroom life in the forest.png]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Mushroom_life_in_the_forest.png&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> There's more to forests than meets the eye and ear ...<br /> <br /> : Go underground, to the roots and web of life connections<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ························································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Remembering E.O. Wilson and Thomas Lovejoy.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Remembering E.O. Wilson and Thomas Lovejoy'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''We celebrate today the lives of two great ecologists: E.O. Wilson, who passed away on December 26 at the age of 92, and Tom Lovejoy, who passed away onDecember 25 at the age of 80. Each made extraordinary contributions to the field of bio-diversity and to the greater public dialog about humans and nature...''<br /> <br /> * https://www.garrisoninstitute.org/blog/remembering-e-o-wilson-and-thomas-lovejoy/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Tom and Ed, Pioneering Conservation Biology'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Thomas Lovejoy and Edward O. Wilson<br /> <br /> ''The two scientists first met in the mid-nineteen-seventies. At that point, Wilson was in his mid-forties, and teaching biology at Harvard. Lovejoy, a dozen years younger, was working for the World Wildlife Fund. Over lunch, they got to talking about where the W.W.F. should focus its efforts. They agreed that it should be in the tropics, because the tropics are where most species actually live. There wasn’t a good term for what they were trying to preserve, so they tossed one around—“biological diversity”—and put it into circulation. “People just started using it,” Lovejoy recalled, in an interview in 2015. (Later, the phrase would be shortened to “biodiversity.”)''<br /> <br /> * https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/honoring-the-legacy-of-e-o-wilson-and-tom-lovejoy<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ························································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''World Animal Foundation'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://worldanimalfoundation.org/advocate/how-many-animals-are-in-the-world/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Quantifying the Amazing Diversity of Life'''<br /> <br /> '''2023''' <br /> <br /> ~ From the Total of 8.7 Million Species, 2.16 Million Are Animal<br /> ~ 97% of All Animals Are Invertebrates<br /> ~ More Than 62,000 Vertebrate Species Have Been Identified<br /> ~ The Estimated Species of Insects Is 10 Quintillion<br /> ~ The Described Species of Birds and Reptiles Is 11,188 and 11,733, Respectively<br /> ~ About 6,596 Described Species of Mammals Exist in the World<br /> ~ The Current Amphibians Database Shows There Are 8,698 Existing Species of Amphibians<br /> ~ The Estimated Number of Fish in the World Is 3.5 Trillion<br /> ~ 86% and 91% of All the Land and Sea Species Respectively Have Not Been Discovered<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Earth BioGenome Project'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Working to sequence 1.5+ million genomes<br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07279-z<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The Earth BioGenome Project aims to sequence the genomes of the roughly 1.5 million+ known animal, plant, protozoan and fungal species — collectively known as eukaryotes — worldwide over the next decade. The initiative is estimated to cost US$4.7 billion, although only a small proportion of that money has been committed so far.''<br /> <br /> ''The project comprises more than a dozen existing sequencing projects that are focused on, for instance, specific branches of the tree of life — such as birds, insects and plants — or on the biodiversity in a particular country, such as the UK effort, officially called the Darwin Tree of Life Project.''<br /> <br /> ''“We don’t need one genome project to rule them all,” says Lewin. Rather, the effort’s raison d’etre, he says, is to ensure that ongoing biodiversity sequencing efforts are standardized.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ''“Variation is the fount of all genetic knowledge... The more variation you have the better — so why not sequence everything?”''<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Tree of Life video.png | link=https://youtu.be/AjvLQJ6PIiU]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://youtu.be/AjvLQJ6PIiU<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew-6WuTo1Is <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :::::[[File:You are here on the cladogenetic tree m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ······················································································ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;GreenPolicy360 'Science Idea of the Day'&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Carl Zimmer<br /> <br /> * https://carlzimmer.com/what-is-a-species-398/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;What is a species?&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Long before the dawn of science, humans were naming species. To be able to hunt animals and gather plants, people had to know what they were talking about. Taxonomy, the modern science of naming species, emerged in the 1600s and came into its own in the next century, thanks largely to the work of Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus. Linnaeus invented a system to sort living things into groups, inside which were smaller groups. Every member of a particular group shared certain key traits. Humans belonged to the mammal class, and within that class the primate order, and within that order the genus Homo, and within that genus the species Homo sapiens. Linnaeus declared that each species had existed since creation. “There are as many species as the Infinite Being produced diverse forms in the beginning,” he wrote.''<br /> <br /> ''Linnaeus’s new order made the work of taxonomists much easier, but trying to draw the lines between species often proved frustrating. Two species of mice might interbreed where their ranges overlapped, raising the question of what name to give to the hybrids. Within a species there was confusion as well. The willow ptarmigans in Ireland, for example, have a slightly different plumage than the willow ptarmigans in Finland, which differ in turn from the ones in Norway. Naturalists could not agree about whether they belonged to different ptarmigan species or were just varieties–subsets, in other words–of a single species.''<br /> <br /> ''Charles Darwin, for one, was amused by these struggles. “It is really laughable to see what different ideas are prominent in various naturalists’ minds, when they speak of ‘species,’” he wrote in 1856. “It all comes, I believe, from trying to define the indefinable.” Species, Darwin argued, were not fixed since creation. They had evolved. Each group of organisms that we call a species starts out as a variety of an older species. Over time natural selection transforms them as they adapt to their environment. Meanwhile other varieties become extinct. An old variety ends up markedly different from all other organism–what we see as a species in its own right.'' <br /> <br /> ''“I look at the term ‘species’ as one arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience, to a set of individuals closely resembling each other,” Darwin declared...''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Like the taxonomists before him, Darwin could study species only with the naked eye, observing the color of a bird’s feathers or counting the plates on a barnacle. It would not be until the early 20th century that scientists could start to examine the genetic differences among species. Their research led to a new way of thinking. What made a species a species were the barriers to reproducing with other species. Genes could flow among its members as they mated, but these individuals usually remained within the species, thanks to reproductive barriers. Species might spawn at different times of the year, they might find courtship songs of other species unattractive, or their DNA might simply be incompatible.''<br /> <br /> ''The best understood way for these barriers to evolve is through isolation. Some members of an existing specie–a population–have to become unable to mate with the rest of their species. A glacier could thrust across their range, for example. The isolated population evolves new genes, and some of those new genes may make interbreeding difficult or impossible. Over hundreds of thousands of years so many barriers evolve that the isolated population becomes a distinct species.''<br /> <br /> ''This understanding of how species evolve led to a new concept of what it meant to be a species. Ernst Mayr, a German ornithologist, boldly declared that species were not convenient labels but real entities, like mountains or people. In 1942 he defined a species as a gene pool, calling it a set of populations that can reproduce with one another and that are unable to mate successfully with other populations.''<br /> <br /> ''The biological species concept, as it is now called, became the textbook standard...''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Related organisms share traits because they share the same ancestry. Humans, giraffes and bats all descend from ancient mammals, and as a result they all have hair and milk. Within mammals, humans share a closer common ancestry with other primates. From the common primate ancestor, primates inherited other traits, such as forward-facing eyes. You can zoom in on smaller and smaller sets of organisms this way. Eventually, though, the zooming in comes to a stop. There are organisms that form groups that can no longer be split. These, according to the phylogenetic species concept, are species. In a sense, this concept takes Linnaeus’s original system and updates it in light of evolution. The phylogenetic species concept has been embraced by researchers who need to identify species rather than just contemplate them. Recognizing a species is a matter of finding a group of organisms that shares certain clear-cut traits. Scientists do not have to depend on slippery qualities like reproductive isolation.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Tiny Species / Microorganisms'''<br /> <br /> ''Most of the work that has been done on the species concept in recent years has been directed at animals and plants. That bias is the result of history: animals and plants were the only things that Linnaeus and other early taxonomists could study. But today scientists know that the vast majority of genetic diversity lies in the invisible world of microbes. And microbes have long posed the biggest puzzle of all when it comes to the nature of species.''<br /> <br /> ''When microbiologists began naming species in the 1800s, they could not inspect feathers or flowers like zoologists and botanists can. Microorganisms–especially bacteria and archaea–generally look a lot like one another. Some are rod-shaped, for example, and some are tiny spheres. To distinguish two rod-shaped bacteria from each other, microbiologists would run experiments on their metabolism. One kind of microbe might be able to feed on, say, lactose, whereas the other could not. From clues of this sort, microbiologists described such species as Escherichia coli or Vibrio cholerae. Underlying their work, however, was no clear concept of what it meant for microbes to belong to a species. And when Mayr came up with his biological species concept, it seemed to exclude many microbes. After all, bacteria are not made up of males and females that have to reproduce sexually like animals. They can just split in two.''<br /> <br /> ''The confusion got worse when scientists began to analyze the DNA of microbes. They tried to figure out how different the DNA of two microbial species was, selecting small fragments for comparison. To their surprise, the differences could be huge. Two species of bacteria placed in the same genus based on their metabolism might be more different than humans are from all other primates. And the bacteria within a species could make their living in radically different ways. Some strains of E. coli live harmlessly in our gut, for example, whereas others can cause fatal diseases. “The genetic variation within a species is so enormous that the term species does not really have the same meaning for bacteria and archaea” as it does for multicellular plants or animals, says Jonathan Eisen of the University of California, Davis.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Tiny Little Ones... Inner Life of a Cell.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Microbes are not some minor exception to the rule that can be ignored. As investigators have surveyed the microbial world, they have discovered that the diversity of all animals is puny in comparison. “It’s always struck me as rather odd that if Mayr is right, then 90 percent of the tree of life doesn’t come in species,” says John Wilkins, a philosopher of science at the University of Queensland in Australia. “That’s got to give you some pause for thought.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> Excerpts from Scientific American 2008<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> =='''''Open source 'Tree of Life' including all species known to humans to date'''''==<br /> <br /> <br /> ''U.S. National Science Foundation'' / ''As of September 2015''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''First draft of ‘Tree of Life’ data diagrams include 2.3 million species'''''<br /> <br /> ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States''<br /> <br /> * http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-09/uom-ol091815.php<br /> <br /> * http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/09/16/1423041112<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Authors of the 2015 PNAS Study''<br /> <br /> ''Scientists have used gene sequences and morphological data to construct tens of thousands of evolutionary trees ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life_(biology) phylogenetic schematics]) that describe the evolutionary history of animals, plants, and microbes. '''This study is the first, to our knowledge, to apply an efficient and automated process for assembling published trees into a complete tree of life. This tree and the underlying data are available to browse and download from the Internet, facilitating subsequent analyses that require evolutionary trees. The tree can be easily updated with newly published data.''' Our analysis of coverage not only reveals gaps in sampling and naming biodiversity but also further demonstrates that most published phylogenies are not available in digital formats that can be summarized into a tree of life.''<br /> <br /> <br /> * http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/09/16/1423041112.full.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The realization that all organisms on Earth are related by common descent was one of the most profound insights in scientific history. The goal of reconstructing the tree of life is one of the most daunting challenges in biology. The scope of the problem is immense... most species have yet to be described. Despite decades of effort and thousands of phylogenetic studies on diverse clades, we lack a comprehensive tree of life, or even a summary of our current knowledge. One reason for this shortcoming is lack of data. GenBank contains DNA sequences for 411,000 species, only 22% of estimated named species. Although some gene regions have been widely sequenced across some lineages, they are insufficient for resolving relationships across the entire tree. Most recognized species have never been included in a phylogenetic analysis because no appropriate molecular or morphological data have been collected...''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''&quot;The Tiny Little Ones&quot;''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Microbiomes_at_Risk ''Microbiomes at Risk'']<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/12/science/scientists-unveil-new-tree-of-life.html &lt;big&gt;'''NYT: Scientists Unveil New ‘Tree of Life’ '''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> :* http://www.nature.com/articles/nmicrobiol201648<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tree of Life nmicrobiol201648-f1 via Nature.jpg | link=http://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/Tree_of_Life_nmicrobiol201648-f1_via_Nature.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Visit Life Explorer'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.evogeneao.com/explore/tree-of-life-explorer '''''Tree of Life Interactive Explorer''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tree of Life Explorer - Evogeneao.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.eol.org/ &lt;big&gt;'''Encyclopedia of Life'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> :* http://blog.eol.org/ -- https://twitter.com/eol<br /> <br /> :* https://www.flickr.com/groups/encyclopedia_of_life<br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> [http://ens-newswire.com/2015/09/21/tree-of-life-with-2-3-million-species-open-for-changes/ ''September 20, 2015 (ENS - Environment News Service)''] <br /> :''The relationships among living things, as they diverged from one another from the beginning of life on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago, are shown for the first time in a comprehensive Tree of Life... It is now available free online for anyone to use or edit, something like a Wikipedia for evolutionary trees.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> The current version of the Tree with underlying data and source code is available to browse and download at: https://tree.opentreeoflife.org<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Treemachine'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''View at GitHub'' / '''''OpenTreeofLife''''' -- ''https://github.com/OpenTreeOfLife/treemachine''<br /> <br /> ''The '''open source framework''' facilitates community comment and contribution, enabling the tree to be continuously updated when new phylogenetic and taxonomic data become digitally available...''<br /> <br /> ''Principal investigator Karen Cranston of Duke University said, “This is the first real attempt to connect the dots and put it all together. Think of it as Version 1.0”...'' <br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Open_Access ''Next steps in multiplying the research'']<br /> <br /> :* ''http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Open_Access''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''#OpenAccess''''' - ''https://twitter.com/hashtag/openaccess?src=hash''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Dimensions of Biodiversity Program / NSF'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Despite centuries of discovery, most of our planet's biodiversity remains unknown. The scale of the unknown diversity on Earth is especially troubling given the rapid and permanent loss of biodiversity across the globe. The goal of the Dimensions of Biodiversity campaign is to transform, by 2020, how we describe and understand the scope and role of life on Earth.''<br /> <br /> * http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2014/nsf14057/nsf14057.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> '''The innovative and interdisciplinary teams of the Dimensions of Biodiversity program “may accomplish in 10 years what, with a piecemeal approach, would have taken 50 years—a half century we can no longer afford to wait.”'''<br /> <br /> - Dr. Joann P. Roskoski, NSF Deputy Assistant Director for Biological Sciences<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ''NSF BIODIVERSITY STREAMS OF ACTIVITY - 2020 GOALS''<br /> <br /> ''*Research -- An integrated understanding of the key but unknown dimensions of biodiversity on earth<br /> <br /> ''*Cyberinfrastructure -- Informatics and infrastructure that support accessible, interoperable information capability for dimensions of biodiversity<br /> <br /> ''*Collections -- Digitization of collections and enhanced physical infrastructure to link to cyberinfrastructure and leverage the enormous investments of the past<br /> <br /> ''*Workforce -- A diverse, interdisciplinary, globally-engaged, scientific workforce capable of transforming and communicating our understanding of biodiversity on Earth<br /> <br /> ''*Synthesis -- Scientific analyses and syntheses that generate and disseminate useful information for scientists, educators and decision makers<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''As of 2014, projects funded by the Dimensions of Biodiversity Program are required to format and deposit phylogenetic character matrices and trees within the Open Tree of Life Project...'''<br /> <br /> Program Title:<br /> <br /> Dimensions of Biodiversity<br /> <br /> Synopsis of Program:<br /> <br /> ''Despite centuries of discovery, most of our planet's biodiversity remains unknown. The scale of the unknown diversity on Earth is especially troubling given the rapid and permanent loss of biodiversity across the globe. With this loss, humanity is losing links in the web of life that provide ecosystem services, forfeiting an understanding of the history and future of the living world, and losing opportunities for future beneficial discoveries in the domains of food, fiber, fuel, pharmaceuticals, and bio-inspired innovation.<br /> <br /> ''The goal of the Dimensions of Biodiversity campaign is to transform, by 2020, how we describe and understand the scope and role of life on Earth. The campaign promotes novel, integrated approaches to identify and understand the evolutionary and ecological significance of biodiversity amidst the changing environment of the present day and in the geologic past.<br /> <br /> ''This campaign seeks to characterize biodiversity on Earth by using integrative, innovative approaches to fill the most substantial gaps in our understanding of the diversity of life on Earth. It takes a broad view of biodiversity, and currently focuses on the integration of genetic, taxonomic/phylogenetic, and functional dimensions of biodiversity. Successful proposals should integrate these three dimensions to understand interactions and feedbacks among them. While this focus complements several core NSF programs, it differs by requiring that multiple dimensions of biodiversity be addressed simultaneously, in innovative or novel ways, to understand their synergistic roles in critical ecological and evolutionary processes.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioinformatics ''Bioinformatics'']<br /> <br /> [[File:TreeOfLifeArt s.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Treeoflife.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Aldo quote.gif]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Natural Resources and Intrinsic, Integral Ecology'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''SJS / GP360 Siterunner''': Essentially, the value of biodiversity extends far beyond the US National Science Foundation enumerated research goals of &quot;beneficial discoveries&quot; for &quot;food, fiber, fuel, pharmaceuticals and bio-inspired innovation&quot;. We speak of [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Natural_Capital &quot;Natural Capital&quot;], of the [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Natural_Resources natural resources] of Earth even as biodiversity on Earth has value inherently, an '''intrinsic value''' in and of itself, in ways seen and utilized as resources in human activity -- and in ways unseen and vital beyond human economic activity. An [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Integral_Ecology &quot;integral ecology&quot;] speaks to larger issues of interconnectedness, resilience and survivability over time. The biosphere and environmental security are integrally connected and life on Earth must be protected for future generations. <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life ''Tree of Life / Wikipedia citations'']<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://tolweb.org/tree/ '''The Tree of Life Project - Related History'']<br /> <br /> [http://www.tolweb.org/tree/home.pages/media.html ''Tree of Life Media: Images, Movies, Sounds'']<br /> <br /> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=H6IrUUDboZo ''Tree of Life / Video'']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Plant Family Tree - US Botanic Garden 800x600.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Tree_of_Life_video.png<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :: [[File:Tree of Life opensourcetreeoflife m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Nature Us.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> :::[[File:Tree of Life on Hand.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Agriculture]]<br /> [[Category:Animals]]<br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:Biogeosciences]]<br /> [[Category:Biosphere]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth System Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Law]]<br /> [[Category:Ecological Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-ethics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-Spirituality]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:Endangered Species]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Full-cost Accounting]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Laws]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Protection]]<br /> [[Category:Evolutionary Biology]]<br /> [[Category:Extinction]]<br /> [[Category:Fisheries]]<br /> [[Category:Forests]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Green Values]]<br /> [[Category:Land Ethic]]<br /> [[Category:Microbiology]]<br /> [[Category:Microorganism]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Capital]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resources]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resource Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Nature]]<br /> [[Category:Oceans]]<br /> [[Category:Ocean Science]]<br /> [[Category:Ocean Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Open Access]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Rights of Nature]]<br /> [[Category:Seventh Generation Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability Policies]]<br /> [[Category:Wetlands]]<br /> [[Category:Wildlife]]<br /> [[Category:Zoology]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Tree_of_Life&diff=138383 2026-10-10T18:00:34Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[It's All Related]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Nature Us and Veins of a Green Leaf.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/It%27s_All_Related&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Let's begin with a life of a leaf... Freddie The Leaf by Leo Buscaglia<br /> <br /> * https://www.buscaglia.com/the-fall-of-freddie-the-leaf-a-story-of-life-for-all-ages/<br /> <br /> * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/841110.The_Fall_of_Freddie_the_Leaf<br /> <br /> <br /> Then on to a story of a tree, a 'mother tree' ....<br /> <br /> <br /> In the 1990s, Canadian ecologist Suzanne Simard made a groundbreaking discovery that challenged everything we thought we knew about how forests work. While studying managed forests in British Columbia, she noticed something puzzling: when birch trees were removed to promote the growth of valuable Douglas firs, the firs did not flourish as expected, they actually struggled and grew more slowly.<br /> <br /> Determined to understand why, Simard traced the movement of nutrients using radioactive carbon isotopes. What she found was astonishing. Trees were actively sharing resources through vast underground fungal networks known as mycorrhizae. These delicate, thread-like fungi connect the roots of different trees across the forest floor, forming a complex web that allows the exchange of carbon, water, nutrients, and even chemical signals, sometimes between entirely different species.<br /> <br /> She discovered that older, larger trees often serve as central &quot;hubs&quot; or &quot;mother trees,&quot; supporting younger saplings by redistributing vital resources and helping the entire ecosystem remain resilient. When these key trees are removed, the underground network weakens, and the health of the remaining forest declines.<br /> <br /> Simard’s research overturned the traditional Darwinian view of forests as battlegrounds of ruthless competition. Instead, she revealed a far more sophisticated reality: forests operate as highly cooperative systems where trees communicate, support one another, and even warn neighboring trees about threats like drought, disease, or insect attacks.<br /> <br /> What appears to the human eye as a silent, still forest is, in truth, a vibrant, interconnected living network, built not on isolation and rivalry, but on deep connection and mutual aid.<br /> <br /> * https://x.com/rainmaker1973/status/2108923002679144662?s=58&amp;t=14LnFHA-cgLSdk-DhRp7cw<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/14/my-ideas-are-a-little-revolutionary-ecologist-suzanne-simard-on-intelligent-forests-the-climate-and-her-critics<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''When the Forest Breathes'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/667786/when-the-forest-breathes-by-suzanne-simard/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Finding the Mother Tree'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://mothertreeproject.org/<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finding_the_Mother_Tree<br /> <br /> <br /> Suzanne Simard, University of British Columbia<br /> <br /> * https://forestry.ubc.ca/faculty-profile/suzanne-simard/<br /> <br /> * https://suzannesimard.com/research/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[It's All Related]]<br /> <br /> Exploring Connections, previously unseen and unknown....<br /> <br /> and then Earth Scientist comes along with new vision....<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Bioneers]]'''<br /> <br /> * https://bioneers.org/when-the-forest-breathes-suzanne-simard-on-regeneration-and-relationship-ze0z2603/<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://emergencemagazine.org/conversation/the-scaffolding-of-life/<br /> <br /> * https://growwild.kew.org/blog/suzanne-simard-wood-wide-web-mother-trees-and-power-collective-action<br /> <br /> <br /> ························································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Remembering E.O. Wilson and Thomas Lovejoy.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Remembering E.O. Wilson and Thomas Lovejoy'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''We celebrate today the lives of two great ecologists: E.O. Wilson, who passed away on December 26 at the age of 92, and Tom Lovejoy, who passed away onDecember 25 at the age of 80. Each made extraordinary contributions to the field of bio-diversity and to the greater public dialog about humans and nature...''<br /> <br /> * https://www.garrisoninstitute.org/blog/remembering-e-o-wilson-and-thomas-lovejoy/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Tom and Ed, Pioneering Conservation Biology'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Thomas Lovejoy and Edward O. Wilson<br /> <br /> ''The two scientists first met in the mid-nineteen-seventies. At that point, Wilson was in his mid-forties, and teaching biology at Harvard. Lovejoy, a dozen years younger, was working for the World Wildlife Fund. Over lunch, they got to talking about where the W.W.F. should focus its efforts. They agreed that it should be in the tropics, because the tropics are where most species actually live. There wasn’t a good term for what they were trying to preserve, so they tossed one around—“biological diversity”—and put it into circulation. “People just started using it,” Lovejoy recalled, in an interview in 2015. (Later, the phrase would be shortened to “biodiversity.”)''<br /> <br /> * https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/honoring-the-legacy-of-e-o-wilson-and-tom-lovejoy<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ························································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''World Animal Foundation'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://worldanimalfoundation.org/advocate/how-many-animals-are-in-the-world/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Quantifying the Amazing Diversity of Life'''<br /> <br /> '''2023''' <br /> <br /> ~ From the Total of 8.7 Million Species, 2.16 Million Are Animal<br /> ~ 97% of All Animals Are Invertebrates<br /> ~ More Than 62,000 Vertebrate Species Have Been Identified<br /> ~ The Estimated Species of Insects Is 10 Quintillion<br /> ~ The Described Species of Birds and Reptiles Is 11,188 and 11,733, Respectively<br /> ~ About 6,596 Described Species of Mammals Exist in the World<br /> ~ The Current Amphibians Database Shows There Are 8,698 Existing Species of Amphibians<br /> ~ The Estimated Number of Fish in the World Is 3.5 Trillion<br /> ~ 86% and 91% of All the Land and Sea Species Respectively Have Not Been Discovered<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Earth BioGenome Project'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Working to sequence 1.5+ million genomes<br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07279-z<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The Earth BioGenome Project aims to sequence the genomes of the roughly 1.5 million+ known animal, plant, protozoan and fungal species — collectively known as eukaryotes — worldwide over the next decade. The initiative is estimated to cost US$4.7 billion, although only a small proportion of that money has been committed so far.''<br /> <br /> ''The project comprises more than a dozen existing sequencing projects that are focused on, for instance, specific branches of the tree of life — such as birds, insects and plants — or on the biodiversity in a particular country, such as the UK effort, officially called the Darwin Tree of Life Project.''<br /> <br /> ''“We don’t need one genome project to rule them all,” says Lewin. Rather, the effort’s raison d’etre, he says, is to ensure that ongoing biodiversity sequencing efforts are standardized.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ''“Variation is the fount of all genetic knowledge... The more variation you have the better — so why not sequence everything?”''<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Tree of Life video.png | link=https://youtu.be/AjvLQJ6PIiU]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://youtu.be/AjvLQJ6PIiU<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew-6WuTo1Is <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :::::[[File:You are here on the cladogenetic tree m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ······················································································ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;GreenPolicy360 'Science Idea of the Day'&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Carl Zimmer<br /> <br /> * https://carlzimmer.com/what-is-a-species-398/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;What is a species?&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Long before the dawn of science, humans were naming species. To be able to hunt animals and gather plants, people had to know what they were talking about. Taxonomy, the modern science of naming species, emerged in the 1600s and came into its own in the next century, thanks largely to the work of Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus. Linnaeus invented a system to sort living things into groups, inside which were smaller groups. Every member of a particular group shared certain key traits. Humans belonged to the mammal class, and within that class the primate order, and within that order the genus Homo, and within that genus the species Homo sapiens. Linnaeus declared that each species had existed since creation. “There are as many species as the Infinite Being produced diverse forms in the beginning,” he wrote.''<br /> <br /> ''Linnaeus’s new order made the work of taxonomists much easier, but trying to draw the lines between species often proved frustrating. Two species of mice might interbreed where their ranges overlapped, raising the question of what name to give to the hybrids. Within a species there was confusion as well. The willow ptarmigans in Ireland, for example, have a slightly different plumage than the willow ptarmigans in Finland, which differ in turn from the ones in Norway. Naturalists could not agree about whether they belonged to different ptarmigan species or were just varieties–subsets, in other words–of a single species.''<br /> <br /> ''Charles Darwin, for one, was amused by these struggles. “It is really laughable to see what different ideas are prominent in various naturalists’ minds, when they speak of ‘species,’” he wrote in 1856. “It all comes, I believe, from trying to define the indefinable.” Species, Darwin argued, were not fixed since creation. They had evolved. Each group of organisms that we call a species starts out as a variety of an older species. Over time natural selection transforms them as they adapt to their environment. Meanwhile other varieties become extinct. An old variety ends up markedly different from all other organism–what we see as a species in its own right.'' <br /> <br /> ''“I look at the term ‘species’ as one arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience, to a set of individuals closely resembling each other,” Darwin declared...''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Like the taxonomists before him, Darwin could study species only with the naked eye, observing the color of a bird’s feathers or counting the plates on a barnacle. It would not be until the early 20th century that scientists could start to examine the genetic differences among species. Their research led to a new way of thinking. What made a species a species were the barriers to reproducing with other species. Genes could flow among its members as they mated, but these individuals usually remained within the species, thanks to reproductive barriers. Species might spawn at different times of the year, they might find courtship songs of other species unattractive, or their DNA might simply be incompatible.''<br /> <br /> ''The best understood way for these barriers to evolve is through isolation. Some members of an existing specie–a population–have to become unable to mate with the rest of their species. A glacier could thrust across their range, for example. The isolated population evolves new genes, and some of those new genes may make interbreeding difficult or impossible. Over hundreds of thousands of years so many barriers evolve that the isolated population becomes a distinct species.''<br /> <br /> ''This understanding of how species evolve led to a new concept of what it meant to be a species. Ernst Mayr, a German ornithologist, boldly declared that species were not convenient labels but real entities, like mountains or people. In 1942 he defined a species as a gene pool, calling it a set of populations that can reproduce with one another and that are unable to mate successfully with other populations.''<br /> <br /> ''The biological species concept, as it is now called, became the textbook standard...''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Related organisms share traits because they share the same ancestry. Humans, giraffes and bats all descend from ancient mammals, and as a result they all have hair and milk. Within mammals, humans share a closer common ancestry with other primates. From the common primate ancestor, primates inherited other traits, such as forward-facing eyes. You can zoom in on smaller and smaller sets of organisms this way. Eventually, though, the zooming in comes to a stop. There are organisms that form groups that can no longer be split. These, according to the phylogenetic species concept, are species. In a sense, this concept takes Linnaeus’s original system and updates it in light of evolution. The phylogenetic species concept has been embraced by researchers who need to identify species rather than just contemplate them. Recognizing a species is a matter of finding a group of organisms that shares certain clear-cut traits. Scientists do not have to depend on slippery qualities like reproductive isolation.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Tiny Species / Microorganisms'''<br /> <br /> ''Most of the work that has been done on the species concept in recent years has been directed at animals and plants. That bias is the result of history: animals and plants were the only things that Linnaeus and other early taxonomists could study. But today scientists know that the vast majority of genetic diversity lies in the invisible world of microbes. And microbes have long posed the biggest puzzle of all when it comes to the nature of species.''<br /> <br /> ''When microbiologists began naming species in the 1800s, they could not inspect feathers or flowers like zoologists and botanists can. Microorganisms–especially bacteria and archaea–generally look a lot like one another. Some are rod-shaped, for example, and some are tiny spheres. To distinguish two rod-shaped bacteria from each other, microbiologists would run experiments on their metabolism. One kind of microbe might be able to feed on, say, lactose, whereas the other could not. From clues of this sort, microbiologists described such species as Escherichia coli or Vibrio cholerae. Underlying their work, however, was no clear concept of what it meant for microbes to belong to a species. And when Mayr came up with his biological species concept, it seemed to exclude many microbes. After all, bacteria are not made up of males and females that have to reproduce sexually like animals. They can just split in two.''<br /> <br /> ''The confusion got worse when scientists began to analyze the DNA of microbes. They tried to figure out how different the DNA of two microbial species was, selecting small fragments for comparison. To their surprise, the differences could be huge. Two species of bacteria placed in the same genus based on their metabolism might be more different than humans are from all other primates. And the bacteria within a species could make their living in radically different ways. Some strains of E. coli live harmlessly in our gut, for example, whereas others can cause fatal diseases. “The genetic variation within a species is so enormous that the term species does not really have the same meaning for bacteria and archaea” as it does for multicellular plants or animals, says Jonathan Eisen of the University of California, Davis.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Tiny Little Ones... Inner Life of a Cell.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Microbes are not some minor exception to the rule that can be ignored. As investigators have surveyed the microbial world, they have discovered that the diversity of all animals is puny in comparison. “It’s always struck me as rather odd that if Mayr is right, then 90 percent of the tree of life doesn’t come in species,” says John Wilkins, a philosopher of science at the University of Queensland in Australia. “That’s got to give you some pause for thought.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> Excerpts from Scientific American 2008<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> =='''''Open source 'Tree of Life' including all species known to humans to date'''''==<br /> <br /> <br /> ''U.S. National Science Foundation'' / ''As of September 2015''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''First draft of ‘Tree of Life’ data diagrams include 2.3 million species'''''<br /> <br /> ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States''<br /> <br /> * http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-09/uom-ol091815.php<br /> <br /> * http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/09/16/1423041112<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Authors of the 2015 PNAS Study''<br /> <br /> ''Scientists have used gene sequences and morphological data to construct tens of thousands of evolutionary trees ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life_(biology) phylogenetic schematics]) that describe the evolutionary history of animals, plants, and microbes. '''This study is the first, to our knowledge, to apply an efficient and automated process for assembling published trees into a complete tree of life. This tree and the underlying data are available to browse and download from the Internet, facilitating subsequent analyses that require evolutionary trees. The tree can be easily updated with newly published data.''' Our analysis of coverage not only reveals gaps in sampling and naming biodiversity but also further demonstrates that most published phylogenies are not available in digital formats that can be summarized into a tree of life.''<br /> <br /> <br /> * http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/09/16/1423041112.full.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The realization that all organisms on Earth are related by common descent was one of the most profound insights in scientific history. The goal of reconstructing the tree of life is one of the most daunting challenges in biology. The scope of the problem is immense... most species have yet to be described. Despite decades of effort and thousands of phylogenetic studies on diverse clades, we lack a comprehensive tree of life, or even a summary of our current knowledge. One reason for this shortcoming is lack of data. GenBank contains DNA sequences for 411,000 species, only 22% of estimated named species. Although some gene regions have been widely sequenced across some lineages, they are insufficient for resolving relationships across the entire tree. Most recognized species have never been included in a phylogenetic analysis because no appropriate molecular or morphological data have been collected...''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''&quot;The Tiny Little Ones&quot;''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Microbiomes_at_Risk ''Microbiomes at Risk'']<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/12/science/scientists-unveil-new-tree-of-life.html &lt;big&gt;'''NYT: Scientists Unveil New ‘Tree of Life’ '''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> :* http://www.nature.com/articles/nmicrobiol201648<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tree of Life nmicrobiol201648-f1 via Nature.jpg | link=http://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/Tree_of_Life_nmicrobiol201648-f1_via_Nature.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Visit Life Explorer'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.evogeneao.com/explore/tree-of-life-explorer '''''Tree of Life Interactive Explorer''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tree of Life Explorer - Evogeneao.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.eol.org/ &lt;big&gt;'''Encyclopedia of Life'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> :* http://blog.eol.org/ -- https://twitter.com/eol<br /> <br /> :* https://www.flickr.com/groups/encyclopedia_of_life<br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> [http://ens-newswire.com/2015/09/21/tree-of-life-with-2-3-million-species-open-for-changes/ ''September 20, 2015 (ENS - Environment News Service)''] <br /> :''The relationships among living things, as they diverged from one another from the beginning of life on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago, are shown for the first time in a comprehensive Tree of Life... It is now available free online for anyone to use or edit, something like a Wikipedia for evolutionary trees.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> The current version of the Tree with underlying data and source code is available to browse and download at: https://tree.opentreeoflife.org<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Treemachine'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''View at GitHub'' / '''''OpenTreeofLife''''' -- ''https://github.com/OpenTreeOfLife/treemachine''<br /> <br /> ''The '''open source framework''' facilitates community comment and contribution, enabling the tree to be continuously updated when new phylogenetic and taxonomic data become digitally available...''<br /> <br /> ''Principal investigator Karen Cranston of Duke University said, “This is the first real attempt to connect the dots and put it all together. Think of it as Version 1.0”...'' <br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Open_Access ''Next steps in multiplying the research'']<br /> <br /> :* ''http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Open_Access''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''#OpenAccess''''' - ''https://twitter.com/hashtag/openaccess?src=hash''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Dimensions of Biodiversity Program / NSF'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Despite centuries of discovery, most of our planet's biodiversity remains unknown. The scale of the unknown diversity on Earth is especially troubling given the rapid and permanent loss of biodiversity across the globe. The goal of the Dimensions of Biodiversity campaign is to transform, by 2020, how we describe and understand the scope and role of life on Earth.''<br /> <br /> * http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2014/nsf14057/nsf14057.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> '''The innovative and interdisciplinary teams of the Dimensions of Biodiversity program “may accomplish in 10 years what, with a piecemeal approach, would have taken 50 years—a half century we can no longer afford to wait.”'''<br /> <br /> - Dr. Joann P. Roskoski, NSF Deputy Assistant Director for Biological Sciences<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ''NSF BIODIVERSITY STREAMS OF ACTIVITY - 2020 GOALS''<br /> <br /> ''*Research -- An integrated understanding of the key but unknown dimensions of biodiversity on earth<br /> <br /> ''*Cyberinfrastructure -- Informatics and infrastructure that support accessible, interoperable information capability for dimensions of biodiversity<br /> <br /> ''*Collections -- Digitization of collections and enhanced physical infrastructure to link to cyberinfrastructure and leverage the enormous investments of the past<br /> <br /> ''*Workforce -- A diverse, interdisciplinary, globally-engaged, scientific workforce capable of transforming and communicating our understanding of biodiversity on Earth<br /> <br /> ''*Synthesis -- Scientific analyses and syntheses that generate and disseminate useful information for scientists, educators and decision makers<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''As of 2014, projects funded by the Dimensions of Biodiversity Program are required to format and deposit phylogenetic character matrices and trees within the Open Tree of Life Project...'''<br /> <br /> Program Title:<br /> <br /> Dimensions of Biodiversity<br /> <br /> Synopsis of Program:<br /> <br /> ''Despite centuries of discovery, most of our planet's biodiversity remains unknown. The scale of the unknown diversity on Earth is especially troubling given the rapid and permanent loss of biodiversity across the globe. With this loss, humanity is losing links in the web of life that provide ecosystem services, forfeiting an understanding of the history and future of the living world, and losing opportunities for future beneficial discoveries in the domains of food, fiber, fuel, pharmaceuticals, and bio-inspired innovation.<br /> <br /> ''The goal of the Dimensions of Biodiversity campaign is to transform, by 2020, how we describe and understand the scope and role of life on Earth. The campaign promotes novel, integrated approaches to identify and understand the evolutionary and ecological significance of biodiversity amidst the changing environment of the present day and in the geologic past.<br /> <br /> ''This campaign seeks to characterize biodiversity on Earth by using integrative, innovative approaches to fill the most substantial gaps in our understanding of the diversity of life on Earth. It takes a broad view of biodiversity, and currently focuses on the integration of genetic, taxonomic/phylogenetic, and functional dimensions of biodiversity. Successful proposals should integrate these three dimensions to understand interactions and feedbacks among them. While this focus complements several core NSF programs, it differs by requiring that multiple dimensions of biodiversity be addressed simultaneously, in innovative or novel ways, to understand their synergistic roles in critical ecological and evolutionary processes.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioinformatics ''Bioinformatics'']<br /> <br /> [[File:TreeOfLifeArt s.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Treeoflife.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Aldo quote.gif]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Natural Resources and Intrinsic, Integral Ecology'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''SJS / GP360 Siterunner''': Essentially, the value of biodiversity extends far beyond the US National Science Foundation enumerated research goals of &quot;beneficial discoveries&quot; for &quot;food, fiber, fuel, pharmaceuticals and bio-inspired innovation&quot;. We speak of [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Natural_Capital &quot;Natural Capital&quot;], of the [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Natural_Resources natural resources] of Earth even as biodiversity on Earth has value inherently, an '''intrinsic value''' in and of itself, in ways seen and utilized as resources in human activity -- and in ways unseen and vital beyond human economic activity. An [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Integral_Ecology &quot;integral ecology&quot;] speaks to larger issues of interconnectedness, resilience and survivability over time. The biosphere and environmental security are integrally connected and life on Earth must be protected for future generations. <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life ''Tree of Life / Wikipedia citations'']<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://tolweb.org/tree/ '''The Tree of Life Project - Related History'']<br /> <br /> [http://www.tolweb.org/tree/home.pages/media.html ''Tree of Life Media: Images, Movies, Sounds'']<br /> <br /> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=H6IrUUDboZo ''Tree of Life / Video'']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Plant Family Tree - US Botanic Garden 800x600.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Tree_of_Life_video.png<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :: [[File:Tree of Life opensourcetreeoflife m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Nature Us.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> :::[[File:Tree of Life on Hand.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Agriculture]]<br /> [[Category:Animals]]<br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:Biogeosciences]]<br /> [[Category:Biosphere]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth System Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Law]]<br /> [[Category:Ecological Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-ethics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-Spirituality]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:Endangered Species]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Full-cost Accounting]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Laws]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Protection]]<br /> [[Category:Evolutionary Biology]]<br /> [[Category:Extinction]]<br /> [[Category:Fisheries]]<br /> [[Category:Forests]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Green Values]]<br /> [[Category:Land Ethic]]<br /> [[Category:Microbiology]]<br /> [[Category:Microorganism]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Capital]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resources]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resource Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Nature]]<br /> [[Category:Oceans]]<br /> [[Category:Ocean Science]]<br /> [[Category:Ocean Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Open Access]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Rights of Nature]]<br /> [[Category:Seventh Generation Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability Policies]]<br /> [[Category:Wetlands]]<br /> [[Category:Wildlife]]<br /> [[Category:Zoology]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Tree_of_Life&diff=138382 2026-10-10T17:58:44Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[It's All Related]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Nature Us and Veins of a Green Leaf.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/It%27s_All_Related&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Let's begin with a life of a leaf... Freddy The Leaf by Leo Buscaglia<br /> <br /> * https://www.buscaglia.com/the-fall-of-freddie-the-leaf-a-story-of-life-for-all-ages/<br /> <br /> * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/841110.The_Fall_of_Freddie_the_Leaf<br /> <br /> <br /> Then on to a story of a tree, a 'mother tree' ....<br /> <br /> <br /> In the 1990s, Canadian ecologist Suzanne Simard made a groundbreaking discovery that challenged everything we thought we knew about how forests work. While studying managed forests in British Columbia, she noticed something puzzling: when birch trees were removed to promote the growth of valuable Douglas firs, the firs did not flourish as expected, they actually struggled and grew more slowly.<br /> <br /> Determined to understand why, Simard traced the movement of nutrients using radioactive carbon isotopes. What she found was astonishing. Trees were actively sharing resources through vast underground fungal networks known as mycorrhizae. These delicate, thread-like fungi connect the roots of different trees across the forest floor, forming a complex web that allows the exchange of carbon, water, nutrients, and even chemical signals, sometimes between entirely different species.<br /> <br /> She discovered that older, larger trees often serve as central &quot;hubs&quot; or &quot;mother trees,&quot; supporting younger saplings by redistributing vital resources and helping the entire ecosystem remain resilient. When these key trees are removed, the underground network weakens, and the health of the remaining forest declines.<br /> <br /> Simard’s research overturned the traditional Darwinian view of forests as battlegrounds of ruthless competition. Instead, she revealed a far more sophisticated reality: forests operate as highly cooperative systems where trees communicate, support one another, and even warn neighboring trees about threats like drought, disease, or insect attacks.<br /> <br /> What appears to the human eye as a silent, still forest is, in truth, a vibrant, interconnected living network, built not on isolation and rivalry, but on deep connection and mutual aid.<br /> <br /> * https://x.com/rainmaker1973/status/2108923002679144662?s=58&amp;t=14LnFHA-cgLSdk-DhRp7cw<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/14/my-ideas-are-a-little-revolutionary-ecologist-suzanne-simard-on-intelligent-forests-the-climate-and-her-critics<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''When the Forest Breathes'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/667786/when-the-forest-breathes-by-suzanne-simard/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Finding the Mother Tree'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://mothertreeproject.org/<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finding_the_Mother_Tree<br /> <br /> <br /> Suzanne Simard, University of British Columbia<br /> <br /> * https://forestry.ubc.ca/faculty-profile/suzanne-simard/<br /> <br /> * https://suzannesimard.com/research/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[It's All Related]]<br /> <br /> Exploring Connections, previously unseen and unknown....<br /> <br /> and then Earth Scientist comes along with new vision....<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Bioneers]]'''<br /> <br /> * https://bioneers.org/when-the-forest-breathes-suzanne-simard-on-regeneration-and-relationship-ze0z2603/<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://emergencemagazine.org/conversation/the-scaffolding-of-life/<br /> <br /> * https://growwild.kew.org/blog/suzanne-simard-wood-wide-web-mother-trees-and-power-collective-action<br /> <br /> <br /> ························································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Remembering E.O. Wilson and Thomas Lovejoy.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Remembering E.O. Wilson and Thomas Lovejoy'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''We celebrate today the lives of two great ecologists: E.O. Wilson, who passed away on December 26 at the age of 92, and Tom Lovejoy, who passed away onDecember 25 at the age of 80. Each made extraordinary contributions to the field of bio-diversity and to the greater public dialog about humans and nature...''<br /> <br /> * https://www.garrisoninstitute.org/blog/remembering-e-o-wilson-and-thomas-lovejoy/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Tom and Ed, Pioneering Conservation Biology'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Thomas Lovejoy and Edward O. Wilson<br /> <br /> ''The two scientists first met in the mid-nineteen-seventies. At that point, Wilson was in his mid-forties, and teaching biology at Harvard. Lovejoy, a dozen years younger, was working for the World Wildlife Fund. Over lunch, they got to talking about where the W.W.F. should focus its efforts. They agreed that it should be in the tropics, because the tropics are where most species actually live. There wasn’t a good term for what they were trying to preserve, so they tossed one around—“biological diversity”—and put it into circulation. “People just started using it,” Lovejoy recalled, in an interview in 2015. (Later, the phrase would be shortened to “biodiversity.”)''<br /> <br /> * https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/honoring-the-legacy-of-e-o-wilson-and-tom-lovejoy<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ························································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''World Animal Foundation'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://worldanimalfoundation.org/advocate/how-many-animals-are-in-the-world/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Quantifying the Amazing Diversity of Life'''<br /> <br /> '''2023''' <br /> <br /> ~ From the Total of 8.7 Million Species, 2.16 Million Are Animal<br /> ~ 97% of All Animals Are Invertebrates<br /> ~ More Than 62,000 Vertebrate Species Have Been Identified<br /> ~ The Estimated Species of Insects Is 10 Quintillion<br /> ~ The Described Species of Birds and Reptiles Is 11,188 and 11,733, Respectively<br /> ~ About 6,596 Described Species of Mammals Exist in the World<br /> ~ The Current Amphibians Database Shows There Are 8,698 Existing Species of Amphibians<br /> ~ The Estimated Number of Fish in the World Is 3.5 Trillion<br /> ~ 86% and 91% of All the Land and Sea Species Respectively Have Not Been Discovered<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Earth BioGenome Project'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Working to sequence 1.5+ million genomes<br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07279-z<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The Earth BioGenome Project aims to sequence the genomes of the roughly 1.5 million+ known animal, plant, protozoan and fungal species — collectively known as eukaryotes — worldwide over the next decade. The initiative is estimated to cost US$4.7 billion, although only a small proportion of that money has been committed so far.''<br /> <br /> ''The project comprises more than a dozen existing sequencing projects that are focused on, for instance, specific branches of the tree of life — such as birds, insects and plants — or on the biodiversity in a particular country, such as the UK effort, officially called the Darwin Tree of Life Project.''<br /> <br /> ''“We don’t need one genome project to rule them all,” says Lewin. Rather, the effort’s raison d’etre, he says, is to ensure that ongoing biodiversity sequencing efforts are standardized.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ''“Variation is the fount of all genetic knowledge... The more variation you have the better — so why not sequence everything?”''<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Tree of Life video.png | link=https://youtu.be/AjvLQJ6PIiU]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://youtu.be/AjvLQJ6PIiU<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew-6WuTo1Is <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :::::[[File:You are here on the cladogenetic tree m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ······················································································ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;GreenPolicy360 'Science Idea of the Day'&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Carl Zimmer<br /> <br /> * https://carlzimmer.com/what-is-a-species-398/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;What is a species?&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Long before the dawn of science, humans were naming species. To be able to hunt animals and gather plants, people had to know what they were talking about. Taxonomy, the modern science of naming species, emerged in the 1600s and came into its own in the next century, thanks largely to the work of Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus. Linnaeus invented a system to sort living things into groups, inside which were smaller groups. Every member of a particular group shared certain key traits. Humans belonged to the mammal class, and within that class the primate order, and within that order the genus Homo, and within that genus the species Homo sapiens. Linnaeus declared that each species had existed since creation. “There are as many species as the Infinite Being produced diverse forms in the beginning,” he wrote.''<br /> <br /> ''Linnaeus’s new order made the work of taxonomists much easier, but trying to draw the lines between species often proved frustrating. Two species of mice might interbreed where their ranges overlapped, raising the question of what name to give to the hybrids. Within a species there was confusion as well. The willow ptarmigans in Ireland, for example, have a slightly different plumage than the willow ptarmigans in Finland, which differ in turn from the ones in Norway. Naturalists could not agree about whether they belonged to different ptarmigan species or were just varieties–subsets, in other words–of a single species.''<br /> <br /> ''Charles Darwin, for one, was amused by these struggles. “It is really laughable to see what different ideas are prominent in various naturalists’ minds, when they speak of ‘species,’” he wrote in 1856. “It all comes, I believe, from trying to define the indefinable.” Species, Darwin argued, were not fixed since creation. They had evolved. Each group of organisms that we call a species starts out as a variety of an older species. Over time natural selection transforms them as they adapt to their environment. Meanwhile other varieties become extinct. An old variety ends up markedly different from all other organism–what we see as a species in its own right.'' <br /> <br /> ''“I look at the term ‘species’ as one arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience, to a set of individuals closely resembling each other,” Darwin declared...''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Like the taxonomists before him, Darwin could study species only with the naked eye, observing the color of a bird’s feathers or counting the plates on a barnacle. It would not be until the early 20th century that scientists could start to examine the genetic differences among species. Their research led to a new way of thinking. What made a species a species were the barriers to reproducing with other species. Genes could flow among its members as they mated, but these individuals usually remained within the species, thanks to reproductive barriers. Species might spawn at different times of the year, they might find courtship songs of other species unattractive, or their DNA might simply be incompatible.''<br /> <br /> ''The best understood way for these barriers to evolve is through isolation. Some members of an existing specie–a population–have to become unable to mate with the rest of their species. A glacier could thrust across their range, for example. The isolated population evolves new genes, and some of those new genes may make interbreeding difficult or impossible. Over hundreds of thousands of years so many barriers evolve that the isolated population becomes a distinct species.''<br /> <br /> ''This understanding of how species evolve led to a new concept of what it meant to be a species. Ernst Mayr, a German ornithologist, boldly declared that species were not convenient labels but real entities, like mountains or people. In 1942 he defined a species as a gene pool, calling it a set of populations that can reproduce with one another and that are unable to mate successfully with other populations.''<br /> <br /> ''The biological species concept, as it is now called, became the textbook standard...''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Related organisms share traits because they share the same ancestry. Humans, giraffes and bats all descend from ancient mammals, and as a result they all have hair and milk. Within mammals, humans share a closer common ancestry with other primates. From the common primate ancestor, primates inherited other traits, such as forward-facing eyes. You can zoom in on smaller and smaller sets of organisms this way. Eventually, though, the zooming in comes to a stop. There are organisms that form groups that can no longer be split. These, according to the phylogenetic species concept, are species. In a sense, this concept takes Linnaeus’s original system and updates it in light of evolution. The phylogenetic species concept has been embraced by researchers who need to identify species rather than just contemplate them. Recognizing a species is a matter of finding a group of organisms that shares certain clear-cut traits. Scientists do not have to depend on slippery qualities like reproductive isolation.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Tiny Species / Microorganisms'''<br /> <br /> ''Most of the work that has been done on the species concept in recent years has been directed at animals and plants. That bias is the result of history: animals and plants were the only things that Linnaeus and other early taxonomists could study. But today scientists know that the vast majority of genetic diversity lies in the invisible world of microbes. And microbes have long posed the biggest puzzle of all when it comes to the nature of species.''<br /> <br /> ''When microbiologists began naming species in the 1800s, they could not inspect feathers or flowers like zoologists and botanists can. Microorganisms–especially bacteria and archaea–generally look a lot like one another. Some are rod-shaped, for example, and some are tiny spheres. To distinguish two rod-shaped bacteria from each other, microbiologists would run experiments on their metabolism. One kind of microbe might be able to feed on, say, lactose, whereas the other could not. From clues of this sort, microbiologists described such species as Escherichia coli or Vibrio cholerae. Underlying their work, however, was no clear concept of what it meant for microbes to belong to a species. And when Mayr came up with his biological species concept, it seemed to exclude many microbes. After all, bacteria are not made up of males and females that have to reproduce sexually like animals. They can just split in two.''<br /> <br /> ''The confusion got worse when scientists began to analyze the DNA of microbes. They tried to figure out how different the DNA of two microbial species was, selecting small fragments for comparison. To their surprise, the differences could be huge. Two species of bacteria placed in the same genus based on their metabolism might be more different than humans are from all other primates. And the bacteria within a species could make their living in radically different ways. Some strains of E. coli live harmlessly in our gut, for example, whereas others can cause fatal diseases. “The genetic variation within a species is so enormous that the term species does not really have the same meaning for bacteria and archaea” as it does for multicellular plants or animals, says Jonathan Eisen of the University of California, Davis.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Tiny Little Ones... Inner Life of a Cell.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Microbes are not some minor exception to the rule that can be ignored. As investigators have surveyed the microbial world, they have discovered that the diversity of all animals is puny in comparison. “It’s always struck me as rather odd that if Mayr is right, then 90 percent of the tree of life doesn’t come in species,” says John Wilkins, a philosopher of science at the University of Queensland in Australia. “That’s got to give you some pause for thought.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> Excerpts from Scientific American 2008<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> =='''''Open source 'Tree of Life' including all species known to humans to date'''''==<br /> <br /> <br /> ''U.S. National Science Foundation'' / ''As of September 2015''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''First draft of ‘Tree of Life’ data diagrams include 2.3 million species'''''<br /> <br /> ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States''<br /> <br /> * http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-09/uom-ol091815.php<br /> <br /> * http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/09/16/1423041112<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Authors of the 2015 PNAS Study''<br /> <br /> ''Scientists have used gene sequences and morphological data to construct tens of thousands of evolutionary trees ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life_(biology) phylogenetic schematics]) that describe the evolutionary history of animals, plants, and microbes. '''This study is the first, to our knowledge, to apply an efficient and automated process for assembling published trees into a complete tree of life. This tree and the underlying data are available to browse and download from the Internet, facilitating subsequent analyses that require evolutionary trees. The tree can be easily updated with newly published data.''' Our analysis of coverage not only reveals gaps in sampling and naming biodiversity but also further demonstrates that most published phylogenies are not available in digital formats that can be summarized into a tree of life.''<br /> <br /> <br /> * http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/09/16/1423041112.full.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The realization that all organisms on Earth are related by common descent was one of the most profound insights in scientific history. The goal of reconstructing the tree of life is one of the most daunting challenges in biology. The scope of the problem is immense... most species have yet to be described. Despite decades of effort and thousands of phylogenetic studies on diverse clades, we lack a comprehensive tree of life, or even a summary of our current knowledge. One reason for this shortcoming is lack of data. GenBank contains DNA sequences for 411,000 species, only 22% of estimated named species. Although some gene regions have been widely sequenced across some lineages, they are insufficient for resolving relationships across the entire tree. Most recognized species have never been included in a phylogenetic analysis because no appropriate molecular or morphological data have been collected...''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''&quot;The Tiny Little Ones&quot;''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Microbiomes_at_Risk ''Microbiomes at Risk'']<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/12/science/scientists-unveil-new-tree-of-life.html &lt;big&gt;'''NYT: Scientists Unveil New ‘Tree of Life’ '''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> :* http://www.nature.com/articles/nmicrobiol201648<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tree of Life nmicrobiol201648-f1 via Nature.jpg | link=http://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/Tree_of_Life_nmicrobiol201648-f1_via_Nature.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Visit Life Explorer'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.evogeneao.com/explore/tree-of-life-explorer '''''Tree of Life Interactive Explorer''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tree of Life Explorer - Evogeneao.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.eol.org/ &lt;big&gt;'''Encyclopedia of Life'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> :* http://blog.eol.org/ -- https://twitter.com/eol<br /> <br /> :* https://www.flickr.com/groups/encyclopedia_of_life<br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> [http://ens-newswire.com/2015/09/21/tree-of-life-with-2-3-million-species-open-for-changes/ ''September 20, 2015 (ENS - Environment News Service)''] <br /> :''The relationships among living things, as they diverged from one another from the beginning of life on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago, are shown for the first time in a comprehensive Tree of Life... It is now available free online for anyone to use or edit, something like a Wikipedia for evolutionary trees.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> The current version of the Tree with underlying data and source code is available to browse and download at: https://tree.opentreeoflife.org<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Treemachine'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''View at GitHub'' / '''''OpenTreeofLife''''' -- ''https://github.com/OpenTreeOfLife/treemachine''<br /> <br /> ''The '''open source framework''' facilitates community comment and contribution, enabling the tree to be continuously updated when new phylogenetic and taxonomic data become digitally available...''<br /> <br /> ''Principal investigator Karen Cranston of Duke University said, “This is the first real attempt to connect the dots and put it all together. Think of it as Version 1.0”...'' <br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Open_Access ''Next steps in multiplying the research'']<br /> <br /> :* ''http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Open_Access''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''#OpenAccess''''' - ''https://twitter.com/hashtag/openaccess?src=hash''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Dimensions of Biodiversity Program / NSF'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Despite centuries of discovery, most of our planet's biodiversity remains unknown. The scale of the unknown diversity on Earth is especially troubling given the rapid and permanent loss of biodiversity across the globe. The goal of the Dimensions of Biodiversity campaign is to transform, by 2020, how we describe and understand the scope and role of life on Earth.''<br /> <br /> * http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2014/nsf14057/nsf14057.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> '''The innovative and interdisciplinary teams of the Dimensions of Biodiversity program “may accomplish in 10 years what, with a piecemeal approach, would have taken 50 years—a half century we can no longer afford to wait.”'''<br /> <br /> - Dr. Joann P. Roskoski, NSF Deputy Assistant Director for Biological Sciences<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ''NSF BIODIVERSITY STREAMS OF ACTIVITY - 2020 GOALS''<br /> <br /> ''*Research -- An integrated understanding of the key but unknown dimensions of biodiversity on earth<br /> <br /> ''*Cyberinfrastructure -- Informatics and infrastructure that support accessible, interoperable information capability for dimensions of biodiversity<br /> <br /> ''*Collections -- Digitization of collections and enhanced physical infrastructure to link to cyberinfrastructure and leverage the enormous investments of the past<br /> <br /> ''*Workforce -- A diverse, interdisciplinary, globally-engaged, scientific workforce capable of transforming and communicating our understanding of biodiversity on Earth<br /> <br /> ''*Synthesis -- Scientific analyses and syntheses that generate and disseminate useful information for scientists, educators and decision makers<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''As of 2014, projects funded by the Dimensions of Biodiversity Program are required to format and deposit phylogenetic character matrices and trees within the Open Tree of Life Project...'''<br /> <br /> Program Title:<br /> <br /> Dimensions of Biodiversity<br /> <br /> Synopsis of Program:<br /> <br /> ''Despite centuries of discovery, most of our planet's biodiversity remains unknown. The scale of the unknown diversity on Earth is especially troubling given the rapid and permanent loss of biodiversity across the globe. With this loss, humanity is losing links in the web of life that provide ecosystem services, forfeiting an understanding of the history and future of the living world, and losing opportunities for future beneficial discoveries in the domains of food, fiber, fuel, pharmaceuticals, and bio-inspired innovation.<br /> <br /> ''The goal of the Dimensions of Biodiversity campaign is to transform, by 2020, how we describe and understand the scope and role of life on Earth. The campaign promotes novel, integrated approaches to identify and understand the evolutionary and ecological significance of biodiversity amidst the changing environment of the present day and in the geologic past.<br /> <br /> ''This campaign seeks to characterize biodiversity on Earth by using integrative, innovative approaches to fill the most substantial gaps in our understanding of the diversity of life on Earth. It takes a broad view of biodiversity, and currently focuses on the integration of genetic, taxonomic/phylogenetic, and functional dimensions of biodiversity. Successful proposals should integrate these three dimensions to understand interactions and feedbacks among them. While this focus complements several core NSF programs, it differs by requiring that multiple dimensions of biodiversity be addressed simultaneously, in innovative or novel ways, to understand their synergistic roles in critical ecological and evolutionary processes.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioinformatics ''Bioinformatics'']<br /> <br /> [[File:TreeOfLifeArt s.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Treeoflife.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Aldo quote.gif]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Natural Resources and Intrinsic, Integral Ecology'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''SJS / GP360 Siterunner''': Essentially, the value of biodiversity extends far beyond the US National Science Foundation enumerated research goals of &quot;beneficial discoveries&quot; for &quot;food, fiber, fuel, pharmaceuticals and bio-inspired innovation&quot;. We speak of [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Natural_Capital &quot;Natural Capital&quot;], of the [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Natural_Resources natural resources] of Earth even as biodiversity on Earth has value inherently, an '''intrinsic value''' in and of itself, in ways seen and utilized as resources in human activity -- and in ways unseen and vital beyond human economic activity. An [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Integral_Ecology &quot;integral ecology&quot;] speaks to larger issues of interconnectedness, resilience and survivability over time. The biosphere and environmental security are integrally connected and life on Earth must be protected for future generations. <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life ''Tree of Life / Wikipedia citations'']<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://tolweb.org/tree/ '''The Tree of Life Project - Related History'']<br /> <br /> [http://www.tolweb.org/tree/home.pages/media.html ''Tree of Life Media: Images, Movies, Sounds'']<br /> <br /> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=H6IrUUDboZo ''Tree of Life / Video'']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Plant Family Tree - US Botanic Garden 800x600.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Tree_of_Life_video.png<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :: [[File:Tree of Life opensourcetreeoflife m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Nature Us.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> :::[[File:Tree of Life on Hand.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Agriculture]]<br /> [[Category:Animals]]<br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:Biogeosciences]]<br /> [[Category:Biosphere]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth System Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Law]]<br /> [[Category:Ecological Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-ethics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-Spirituality]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:Endangered Species]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Full-cost Accounting]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Laws]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Protection]]<br /> [[Category:Evolutionary Biology]]<br /> [[Category:Extinction]]<br /> [[Category:Fisheries]]<br /> [[Category:Forests]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Green Values]]<br /> [[Category:Land Ethic]]<br /> [[Category:Microbiology]]<br /> [[Category:Microorganism]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Capital]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resources]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resource Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Nature]]<br /> [[Category:Oceans]]<br /> [[Category:Ocean Science]]<br /> [[Category:Ocean Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Open Access]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Rights of Nature]]<br /> [[Category:Seventh Generation Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability Policies]]<br /> [[Category:Wetlands]]<br /> [[Category:Wildlife]]<br /> [[Category:Zoology]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Tree_of_Life&diff=138381 2026-10-10T17:57:43Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[It's All Related]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Nature Us and Veins of a Green Leaf.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> Let's begin with a life of a leaf... Freddy The Leaf by Leo Buscaglia<br /> <br /> * https://www.buscaglia.com/the-fall-of-freddie-the-leaf-a-story-of-life-for-all-ages/<br /> <br /> * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/841110.The_Fall_of_Freddie_the_Leaf<br /> <br /> <br /> Then on to a story of a tree, a 'mother tree' ....<br /> <br /> <br /> In the 1990s, Canadian ecologist Suzanne Simard made a groundbreaking discovery that challenged everything we thought we knew about how forests work. While studying managed forests in British Columbia, she noticed something puzzling: when birch trees were removed to promote the growth of valuable Douglas firs, the firs did not flourish as expected, they actually struggled and grew more slowly.<br /> <br /> Determined to understand why, Simard traced the movement of nutrients using radioactive carbon isotopes. What she found was astonishing. Trees were actively sharing resources through vast underground fungal networks known as mycorrhizae. These delicate, thread-like fungi connect the roots of different trees across the forest floor, forming a complex web that allows the exchange of carbon, water, nutrients, and even chemical signals, sometimes between entirely different species.<br /> <br /> She discovered that older, larger trees often serve as central &quot;hubs&quot; or &quot;mother trees,&quot; supporting younger saplings by redistributing vital resources and helping the entire ecosystem remain resilient. When these key trees are removed, the underground network weakens, and the health of the remaining forest declines.<br /> <br /> Simard’s research overturned the traditional Darwinian view of forests as battlegrounds of ruthless competition. Instead, she revealed a far more sophisticated reality: forests operate as highly cooperative systems where trees communicate, support one another, and even warn neighboring trees about threats like drought, disease, or insect attacks.<br /> <br /> What appears to the human eye as a silent, still forest is, in truth, a vibrant, interconnected living network, built not on isolation and rivalry, but on deep connection and mutual aid.<br /> <br /> * https://x.com/rainmaker1973/status/2108923002679144662?s=58&amp;t=14LnFHA-cgLSdk-DhRp7cw<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/14/my-ideas-are-a-little-revolutionary-ecologist-suzanne-simard-on-intelligent-forests-the-climate-and-her-critics<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''When the Forest Breathes'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/667786/when-the-forest-breathes-by-suzanne-simard/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Finding the Mother Tree'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://mothertreeproject.org/<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finding_the_Mother_Tree<br /> <br /> <br /> Suzanne Simard, University of British Columbia<br /> <br /> * https://forestry.ubc.ca/faculty-profile/suzanne-simard/<br /> <br /> * https://suzannesimard.com/research/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[It's All Related]]<br /> <br /> Exploring Connections, previously unseen and unknown....<br /> <br /> and then Earth Scientist comes along with new vision....<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Bioneers]]'''<br /> <br /> * https://bioneers.org/when-the-forest-breathes-suzanne-simard-on-regeneration-and-relationship-ze0z2603/<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://emergencemagazine.org/conversation/the-scaffolding-of-life/<br /> <br /> * https://growwild.kew.org/blog/suzanne-simard-wood-wide-web-mother-trees-and-power-collective-action<br /> <br /> <br /> ························································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Remembering E.O. Wilson and Thomas Lovejoy.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Remembering E.O. Wilson and Thomas Lovejoy'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''We celebrate today the lives of two great ecologists: E.O. Wilson, who passed away on December 26 at the age of 92, and Tom Lovejoy, who passed away onDecember 25 at the age of 80. Each made extraordinary contributions to the field of bio-diversity and to the greater public dialog about humans and nature...''<br /> <br /> * https://www.garrisoninstitute.org/blog/remembering-e-o-wilson-and-thomas-lovejoy/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Tom and Ed, Pioneering Conservation Biology'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Thomas Lovejoy and Edward O. Wilson<br /> <br /> ''The two scientists first met in the mid-nineteen-seventies. At that point, Wilson was in his mid-forties, and teaching biology at Harvard. Lovejoy, a dozen years younger, was working for the World Wildlife Fund. Over lunch, they got to talking about where the W.W.F. should focus its efforts. They agreed that it should be in the tropics, because the tropics are where most species actually live. There wasn’t a good term for what they were trying to preserve, so they tossed one around—“biological diversity”—and put it into circulation. “People just started using it,” Lovejoy recalled, in an interview in 2015. (Later, the phrase would be shortened to “biodiversity.”)''<br /> <br /> * https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/honoring-the-legacy-of-e-o-wilson-and-tom-lovejoy<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ························································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''World Animal Foundation'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://worldanimalfoundation.org/advocate/how-many-animals-are-in-the-world/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Quantifying the Amazing Diversity of Life'''<br /> <br /> '''2023''' <br /> <br /> ~ From the Total of 8.7 Million Species, 2.16 Million Are Animal<br /> ~ 97% of All Animals Are Invertebrates<br /> ~ More Than 62,000 Vertebrate Species Have Been Identified<br /> ~ The Estimated Species of Insects Is 10 Quintillion<br /> ~ The Described Species of Birds and Reptiles Is 11,188 and 11,733, Respectively<br /> ~ About 6,596 Described Species of Mammals Exist in the World<br /> ~ The Current Amphibians Database Shows There Are 8,698 Existing Species of Amphibians<br /> ~ The Estimated Number of Fish in the World Is 3.5 Trillion<br /> ~ 86% and 91% of All the Land and Sea Species Respectively Have Not Been Discovered<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Earth BioGenome Project'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Working to sequence 1.5+ million genomes<br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07279-z<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The Earth BioGenome Project aims to sequence the genomes of the roughly 1.5 million+ known animal, plant, protozoan and fungal species — collectively known as eukaryotes — worldwide over the next decade. The initiative is estimated to cost US$4.7 billion, although only a small proportion of that money has been committed so far.''<br /> <br /> ''The project comprises more than a dozen existing sequencing projects that are focused on, for instance, specific branches of the tree of life — such as birds, insects and plants — or on the biodiversity in a particular country, such as the UK effort, officially called the Darwin Tree of Life Project.''<br /> <br /> ''“We don’t need one genome project to rule them all,” says Lewin. Rather, the effort’s raison d’etre, he says, is to ensure that ongoing biodiversity sequencing efforts are standardized.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ''“Variation is the fount of all genetic knowledge... The more variation you have the better — so why not sequence everything?”''<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Tree of Life video.png | link=https://youtu.be/AjvLQJ6PIiU]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://youtu.be/AjvLQJ6PIiU<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew-6WuTo1Is <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :::::[[File:You are here on the cladogenetic tree m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ······················································································ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;GreenPolicy360 'Science Idea of the Day'&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Carl Zimmer<br /> <br /> * https://carlzimmer.com/what-is-a-species-398/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;What is a species?&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Long before the dawn of science, humans were naming species. To be able to hunt animals and gather plants, people had to know what they were talking about. Taxonomy, the modern science of naming species, emerged in the 1600s and came into its own in the next century, thanks largely to the work of Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus. Linnaeus invented a system to sort living things into groups, inside which were smaller groups. Every member of a particular group shared certain key traits. Humans belonged to the mammal class, and within that class the primate order, and within that order the genus Homo, and within that genus the species Homo sapiens. Linnaeus declared that each species had existed since creation. “There are as many species as the Infinite Being produced diverse forms in the beginning,” he wrote.''<br /> <br /> ''Linnaeus’s new order made the work of taxonomists much easier, but trying to draw the lines between species often proved frustrating. Two species of mice might interbreed where their ranges overlapped, raising the question of what name to give to the hybrids. Within a species there was confusion as well. The willow ptarmigans in Ireland, for example, have a slightly different plumage than the willow ptarmigans in Finland, which differ in turn from the ones in Norway. Naturalists could not agree about whether they belonged to different ptarmigan species or were just varieties–subsets, in other words–of a single species.''<br /> <br /> ''Charles Darwin, for one, was amused by these struggles. “It is really laughable to see what different ideas are prominent in various naturalists’ minds, when they speak of ‘species,’” he wrote in 1856. “It all comes, I believe, from trying to define the indefinable.” Species, Darwin argued, were not fixed since creation. They had evolved. Each group of organisms that we call a species starts out as a variety of an older species. Over time natural selection transforms them as they adapt to their environment. Meanwhile other varieties become extinct. An old variety ends up markedly different from all other organism–what we see as a species in its own right.'' <br /> <br /> ''“I look at the term ‘species’ as one arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience, to a set of individuals closely resembling each other,” Darwin declared...''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Like the taxonomists before him, Darwin could study species only with the naked eye, observing the color of a bird’s feathers or counting the plates on a barnacle. It would not be until the early 20th century that scientists could start to examine the genetic differences among species. Their research led to a new way of thinking. What made a species a species were the barriers to reproducing with other species. Genes could flow among its members as they mated, but these individuals usually remained within the species, thanks to reproductive barriers. Species might spawn at different times of the year, they might find courtship songs of other species unattractive, or their DNA might simply be incompatible.''<br /> <br /> ''The best understood way for these barriers to evolve is through isolation. Some members of an existing specie–a population–have to become unable to mate with the rest of their species. A glacier could thrust across their range, for example. The isolated population evolves new genes, and some of those new genes may make interbreeding difficult or impossible. Over hundreds of thousands of years so many barriers evolve that the isolated population becomes a distinct species.''<br /> <br /> ''This understanding of how species evolve led to a new concept of what it meant to be a species. Ernst Mayr, a German ornithologist, boldly declared that species were not convenient labels but real entities, like mountains or people. In 1942 he defined a species as a gene pool, calling it a set of populations that can reproduce with one another and that are unable to mate successfully with other populations.''<br /> <br /> ''The biological species concept, as it is now called, became the textbook standard...''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Related organisms share traits because they share the same ancestry. Humans, giraffes and bats all descend from ancient mammals, and as a result they all have hair and milk. Within mammals, humans share a closer common ancestry with other primates. From the common primate ancestor, primates inherited other traits, such as forward-facing eyes. You can zoom in on smaller and smaller sets of organisms this way. Eventually, though, the zooming in comes to a stop. There are organisms that form groups that can no longer be split. These, according to the phylogenetic species concept, are species. In a sense, this concept takes Linnaeus’s original system and updates it in light of evolution. The phylogenetic species concept has been embraced by researchers who need to identify species rather than just contemplate them. Recognizing a species is a matter of finding a group of organisms that shares certain clear-cut traits. Scientists do not have to depend on slippery qualities like reproductive isolation.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Tiny Species / Microorganisms'''<br /> <br /> ''Most of the work that has been done on the species concept in recent years has been directed at animals and plants. That bias is the result of history: animals and plants were the only things that Linnaeus and other early taxonomists could study. But today scientists know that the vast majority of genetic diversity lies in the invisible world of microbes. And microbes have long posed the biggest puzzle of all when it comes to the nature of species.''<br /> <br /> ''When microbiologists began naming species in the 1800s, they could not inspect feathers or flowers like zoologists and botanists can. Microorganisms–especially bacteria and archaea–generally look a lot like one another. Some are rod-shaped, for example, and some are tiny spheres. To distinguish two rod-shaped bacteria from each other, microbiologists would run experiments on their metabolism. One kind of microbe might be able to feed on, say, lactose, whereas the other could not. From clues of this sort, microbiologists described such species as Escherichia coli or Vibrio cholerae. Underlying their work, however, was no clear concept of what it meant for microbes to belong to a species. And when Mayr came up with his biological species concept, it seemed to exclude many microbes. After all, bacteria are not made up of males and females that have to reproduce sexually like animals. They can just split in two.''<br /> <br /> ''The confusion got worse when scientists began to analyze the DNA of microbes. They tried to figure out how different the DNA of two microbial species was, selecting small fragments for comparison. To their surprise, the differences could be huge. Two species of bacteria placed in the same genus based on their metabolism might be more different than humans are from all other primates. And the bacteria within a species could make their living in radically different ways. Some strains of E. coli live harmlessly in our gut, for example, whereas others can cause fatal diseases. “The genetic variation within a species is so enormous that the term species does not really have the same meaning for bacteria and archaea” as it does for multicellular plants or animals, says Jonathan Eisen of the University of California, Davis.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Tiny Little Ones... Inner Life of a Cell.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Microbes are not some minor exception to the rule that can be ignored. As investigators have surveyed the microbial world, they have discovered that the diversity of all animals is puny in comparison. “It’s always struck me as rather odd that if Mayr is right, then 90 percent of the tree of life doesn’t come in species,” says John Wilkins, a philosopher of science at the University of Queensland in Australia. “That’s got to give you some pause for thought.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> Excerpts from Scientific American 2008<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> =='''''Open source 'Tree of Life' including all species known to humans to date'''''==<br /> <br /> <br /> ''U.S. National Science Foundation'' / ''As of September 2015''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''First draft of ‘Tree of Life’ data diagrams include 2.3 million species'''''<br /> <br /> ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States''<br /> <br /> * http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-09/uom-ol091815.php<br /> <br /> * http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/09/16/1423041112<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Authors of the 2015 PNAS Study''<br /> <br /> ''Scientists have used gene sequences and morphological data to construct tens of thousands of evolutionary trees ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life_(biology) phylogenetic schematics]) that describe the evolutionary history of animals, plants, and microbes. '''This study is the first, to our knowledge, to apply an efficient and automated process for assembling published trees into a complete tree of life. This tree and the underlying data are available to browse and download from the Internet, facilitating subsequent analyses that require evolutionary trees. The tree can be easily updated with newly published data.''' Our analysis of coverage not only reveals gaps in sampling and naming biodiversity but also further demonstrates that most published phylogenies are not available in digital formats that can be summarized into a tree of life.''<br /> <br /> <br /> * http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/09/16/1423041112.full.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The realization that all organisms on Earth are related by common descent was one of the most profound insights in scientific history. The goal of reconstructing the tree of life is one of the most daunting challenges in biology. The scope of the problem is immense... most species have yet to be described. Despite decades of effort and thousands of phylogenetic studies on diverse clades, we lack a comprehensive tree of life, or even a summary of our current knowledge. One reason for this shortcoming is lack of data. GenBank contains DNA sequences for 411,000 species, only 22% of estimated named species. Although some gene regions have been widely sequenced across some lineages, they are insufficient for resolving relationships across the entire tree. Most recognized species have never been included in a phylogenetic analysis because no appropriate molecular or morphological data have been collected...''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''&quot;The Tiny Little Ones&quot;''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Microbiomes_at_Risk ''Microbiomes at Risk'']<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/12/science/scientists-unveil-new-tree-of-life.html &lt;big&gt;'''NYT: Scientists Unveil New ‘Tree of Life’ '''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> :* http://www.nature.com/articles/nmicrobiol201648<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tree of Life nmicrobiol201648-f1 via Nature.jpg | link=http://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/Tree_of_Life_nmicrobiol201648-f1_via_Nature.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Visit Life Explorer'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.evogeneao.com/explore/tree-of-life-explorer '''''Tree of Life Interactive Explorer''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tree of Life Explorer - Evogeneao.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.eol.org/ &lt;big&gt;'''Encyclopedia of Life'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> :* http://blog.eol.org/ -- https://twitter.com/eol<br /> <br /> :* https://www.flickr.com/groups/encyclopedia_of_life<br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> [http://ens-newswire.com/2015/09/21/tree-of-life-with-2-3-million-species-open-for-changes/ ''September 20, 2015 (ENS - Environment News Service)''] <br /> :''The relationships among living things, as they diverged from one another from the beginning of life on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago, are shown for the first time in a comprehensive Tree of Life... It is now available free online for anyone to use or edit, something like a Wikipedia for evolutionary trees.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> The current version of the Tree with underlying data and source code is available to browse and download at: https://tree.opentreeoflife.org<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Treemachine'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''View at GitHub'' / '''''OpenTreeofLife''''' -- ''https://github.com/OpenTreeOfLife/treemachine''<br /> <br /> ''The '''open source framework''' facilitates community comment and contribution, enabling the tree to be continuously updated when new phylogenetic and taxonomic data become digitally available...''<br /> <br /> ''Principal investigator Karen Cranston of Duke University said, “This is the first real attempt to connect the dots and put it all together. Think of it as Version 1.0”...'' <br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Open_Access ''Next steps in multiplying the research'']<br /> <br /> :* ''http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Open_Access''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''#OpenAccess''''' - ''https://twitter.com/hashtag/openaccess?src=hash''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Dimensions of Biodiversity Program / NSF'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Despite centuries of discovery, most of our planet's biodiversity remains unknown. The scale of the unknown diversity on Earth is especially troubling given the rapid and permanent loss of biodiversity across the globe. The goal of the Dimensions of Biodiversity campaign is to transform, by 2020, how we describe and understand the scope and role of life on Earth.''<br /> <br /> * http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2014/nsf14057/nsf14057.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> '''The innovative and interdisciplinary teams of the Dimensions of Biodiversity program “may accomplish in 10 years what, with a piecemeal approach, would have taken 50 years—a half century we can no longer afford to wait.”'''<br /> <br /> - Dr. Joann P. Roskoski, NSF Deputy Assistant Director for Biological Sciences<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ''NSF BIODIVERSITY STREAMS OF ACTIVITY - 2020 GOALS''<br /> <br /> ''*Research -- An integrated understanding of the key but unknown dimensions of biodiversity on earth<br /> <br /> ''*Cyberinfrastructure -- Informatics and infrastructure that support accessible, interoperable information capability for dimensions of biodiversity<br /> <br /> ''*Collections -- Digitization of collections and enhanced physical infrastructure to link to cyberinfrastructure and leverage the enormous investments of the past<br /> <br /> ''*Workforce -- A diverse, interdisciplinary, globally-engaged, scientific workforce capable of transforming and communicating our understanding of biodiversity on Earth<br /> <br /> ''*Synthesis -- Scientific analyses and syntheses that generate and disseminate useful information for scientists, educators and decision makers<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''As of 2014, projects funded by the Dimensions of Biodiversity Program are required to format and deposit phylogenetic character matrices and trees within the Open Tree of Life Project...'''<br /> <br /> Program Title:<br /> <br /> Dimensions of Biodiversity<br /> <br /> Synopsis of Program:<br /> <br /> ''Despite centuries of discovery, most of our planet's biodiversity remains unknown. The scale of the unknown diversity on Earth is especially troubling given the rapid and permanent loss of biodiversity across the globe. With this loss, humanity is losing links in the web of life that provide ecosystem services, forfeiting an understanding of the history and future of the living world, and losing opportunities for future beneficial discoveries in the domains of food, fiber, fuel, pharmaceuticals, and bio-inspired innovation.<br /> <br /> ''The goal of the Dimensions of Biodiversity campaign is to transform, by 2020, how we describe and understand the scope and role of life on Earth. The campaign promotes novel, integrated approaches to identify and understand the evolutionary and ecological significance of biodiversity amidst the changing environment of the present day and in the geologic past.<br /> <br /> ''This campaign seeks to characterize biodiversity on Earth by using integrative, innovative approaches to fill the most substantial gaps in our understanding of the diversity of life on Earth. It takes a broad view of biodiversity, and currently focuses on the integration of genetic, taxonomic/phylogenetic, and functional dimensions of biodiversity. Successful proposals should integrate these three dimensions to understand interactions and feedbacks among them. While this focus complements several core NSF programs, it differs by requiring that multiple dimensions of biodiversity be addressed simultaneously, in innovative or novel ways, to understand their synergistic roles in critical ecological and evolutionary processes.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioinformatics ''Bioinformatics'']<br /> <br /> [[File:TreeOfLifeArt s.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Treeoflife.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Aldo quote.gif]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Natural Resources and Intrinsic, Integral Ecology'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''SJS / GP360 Siterunner''': Essentially, the value of biodiversity extends far beyond the US National Science Foundation enumerated research goals of &quot;beneficial discoveries&quot; for &quot;food, fiber, fuel, pharmaceuticals and bio-inspired innovation&quot;. We speak of [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Natural_Capital &quot;Natural Capital&quot;], of the [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Natural_Resources natural resources] of Earth even as biodiversity on Earth has value inherently, an '''intrinsic value''' in and of itself, in ways seen and utilized as resources in human activity -- and in ways unseen and vital beyond human economic activity. An [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Integral_Ecology &quot;integral ecology&quot;] speaks to larger issues of interconnectedness, resilience and survivability over time. The biosphere and environmental security are integrally connected and life on Earth must be protected for future generations. <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life ''Tree of Life / Wikipedia citations'']<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://tolweb.org/tree/ '''The Tree of Life Project - Related History'']<br /> <br /> [http://www.tolweb.org/tree/home.pages/media.html ''Tree of Life Media: Images, Movies, Sounds'']<br /> <br /> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=H6IrUUDboZo ''Tree of Life / Video'']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Plant Family Tree - US Botanic Garden 800x600.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Tree_of_Life_video.png<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :: [[File:Tree of Life opensourcetreeoflife m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Nature Us.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> :::[[File:Tree of Life on Hand.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Agriculture]]<br /> [[Category:Animals]]<br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:Biogeosciences]]<br /> [[Category:Biosphere]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth System Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Law]]<br /> [[Category:Ecological Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-ethics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-Spirituality]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:Endangered Species]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Full-cost Accounting]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Laws]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Protection]]<br /> [[Category:Evolutionary Biology]]<br /> [[Category:Extinction]]<br /> [[Category:Fisheries]]<br /> [[Category:Forests]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Green Values]]<br /> [[Category:Land Ethic]]<br /> [[Category:Microbiology]]<br /> [[Category:Microorganism]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Capital]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resources]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resource Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Nature]]<br /> [[Category:Oceans]]<br /> [[Category:Ocean Science]]<br /> [[Category:Ocean Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Open Access]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Rights of Nature]]<br /> [[Category:Seventh Generation Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability Policies]]<br /> [[Category:Wetlands]]<br /> [[Category:Wildlife]]<br /> [[Category:Zoology]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Tree_of_Life&diff=138380 2026-10-10T17:37:32Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[It's All Related]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Nature Us and Veins of a Green Leaf.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> In the 1990s, Canadian ecologist Suzanne Simard made a groundbreaking discovery that challenged everything we thought we knew about how forests work. While studying managed forests in British Columbia, she noticed something puzzling: when birch trees were removed to promote the growth of valuable Douglas firs, the firs did not flourish as expected, they actually struggled and grew more slowly.<br /> <br /> Determined to understand why, Simard traced the movement of nutrients using radioactive carbon isotopes. What she found was astonishing. Trees were actively sharing resources through vast underground fungal networks known as mycorrhizae. These delicate, thread-like fungi connect the roots of different trees across the forest floor, forming a complex web that allows the exchange of carbon, water, nutrients, and even chemical signals, sometimes between entirely different species.<br /> <br /> She discovered that older, larger trees often serve as central &quot;hubs&quot; or &quot;mother trees,&quot; supporting younger saplings by redistributing vital resources and helping the entire ecosystem remain resilient. When these key trees are removed, the underground network weakens, and the health of the remaining forest declines.<br /> <br /> Simard’s research overturned the traditional Darwinian view of forests as battlegrounds of ruthless competition. Instead, she revealed a far more sophisticated reality: forests operate as highly cooperative systems where trees communicate, support one another, and even warn neighboring trees about threats like drought, disease, or insect attacks.<br /> <br /> What appears to the human eye as a silent, still forest is, in truth, a vibrant, interconnected living network, built not on isolation and rivalry, but on deep connection and mutual aid.<br /> <br /> * https://x.com/rainmaker1973/status/2108923002679144662?s=58&amp;t=14LnFHA-cgLSdk-DhRp7cw<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/14/my-ideas-are-a-little-revolutionary-ecologist-suzanne-simard-on-intelligent-forests-the-climate-and-her-critics<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''When the Forest Breathes'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/667786/when-the-forest-breathes-by-suzanne-simard/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Finding the Mother Tree'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://mothertreeproject.org/<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finding_the_Mother_Tree<br /> <br /> <br /> Suzanne Simard, University of British Columbia<br /> <br /> * https://forestry.ubc.ca/faculty-profile/suzanne-simard/<br /> <br /> * https://suzannesimard.com/research/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[It's All Related]]<br /> <br /> Exploring Connections, previously unseen and unknown....<br /> <br /> and then Earth Scientist comes along with new vision....<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Bioneers]]'''<br /> <br /> * https://bioneers.org/when-the-forest-breathes-suzanne-simard-on-regeneration-and-relationship-ze0z2603/<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://emergencemagazine.org/conversation/the-scaffolding-of-life/<br /> <br /> * https://growwild.kew.org/blog/suzanne-simard-wood-wide-web-mother-trees-and-power-collective-action<br /> <br /> <br /> ························································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Remembering E.O. Wilson and Thomas Lovejoy.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Remembering E.O. Wilson and Thomas Lovejoy'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''We celebrate today the lives of two great ecologists: E.O. Wilson, who passed away on December 26 at the age of 92, and Tom Lovejoy, who passed away onDecember 25 at the age of 80. Each made extraordinary contributions to the field of bio-diversity and to the greater public dialog about humans and nature...''<br /> <br /> * https://www.garrisoninstitute.org/blog/remembering-e-o-wilson-and-thomas-lovejoy/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Tom and Ed, Pioneering Conservation Biology'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Thomas Lovejoy and Edward O. Wilson<br /> <br /> ''The two scientists first met in the mid-nineteen-seventies. At that point, Wilson was in his mid-forties, and teaching biology at Harvard. Lovejoy, a dozen years younger, was working for the World Wildlife Fund. Over lunch, they got to talking about where the W.W.F. should focus its efforts. They agreed that it should be in the tropics, because the tropics are where most species actually live. There wasn’t a good term for what they were trying to preserve, so they tossed one around—“biological diversity”—and put it into circulation. “People just started using it,” Lovejoy recalled, in an interview in 2015. (Later, the phrase would be shortened to “biodiversity.”)''<br /> <br /> * https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/honoring-the-legacy-of-e-o-wilson-and-tom-lovejoy<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ························································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''World Animal Foundation'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://worldanimalfoundation.org/advocate/how-many-animals-are-in-the-world/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Quantifying the Amazing Diversity of Life'''<br /> <br /> '''2023''' <br /> <br /> ~ From the Total of 8.7 Million Species, 2.16 Million Are Animal<br /> ~ 97% of All Animals Are Invertebrates<br /> ~ More Than 62,000 Vertebrate Species Have Been Identified<br /> ~ The Estimated Species of Insects Is 10 Quintillion<br /> ~ The Described Species of Birds and Reptiles Is 11,188 and 11,733, Respectively<br /> ~ About 6,596 Described Species of Mammals Exist in the World<br /> ~ The Current Amphibians Database Shows There Are 8,698 Existing Species of Amphibians<br /> ~ The Estimated Number of Fish in the World Is 3.5 Trillion<br /> ~ 86% and 91% of All the Land and Sea Species Respectively Have Not Been Discovered<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Earth BioGenome Project'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Working to sequence 1.5+ million genomes<br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07279-z<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The Earth BioGenome Project aims to sequence the genomes of the roughly 1.5 million+ known animal, plant, protozoan and fungal species — collectively known as eukaryotes — worldwide over the next decade. The initiative is estimated to cost US$4.7 billion, although only a small proportion of that money has been committed so far.''<br /> <br /> ''The project comprises more than a dozen existing sequencing projects that are focused on, for instance, specific branches of the tree of life — such as birds, insects and plants — or on the biodiversity in a particular country, such as the UK effort, officially called the Darwin Tree of Life Project.''<br /> <br /> ''“We don’t need one genome project to rule them all,” says Lewin. Rather, the effort’s raison d’etre, he says, is to ensure that ongoing biodiversity sequencing efforts are standardized.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ''“Variation is the fount of all genetic knowledge... The more variation you have the better — so why not sequence everything?”''<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Tree of Life video.png | link=https://youtu.be/AjvLQJ6PIiU]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://youtu.be/AjvLQJ6PIiU<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew-6WuTo1Is <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :::::[[File:You are here on the cladogenetic tree m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ······················································································ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;GreenPolicy360 'Science Idea of the Day'&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Carl Zimmer<br /> <br /> * https://carlzimmer.com/what-is-a-species-398/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;What is a species?&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Long before the dawn of science, humans were naming species. To be able to hunt animals and gather plants, people had to know what they were talking about. Taxonomy, the modern science of naming species, emerged in the 1600s and came into its own in the next century, thanks largely to the work of Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus. Linnaeus invented a system to sort living things into groups, inside which were smaller groups. Every member of a particular group shared certain key traits. Humans belonged to the mammal class, and within that class the primate order, and within that order the genus Homo, and within that genus the species Homo sapiens. Linnaeus declared that each species had existed since creation. “There are as many species as the Infinite Being produced diverse forms in the beginning,” he wrote.''<br /> <br /> ''Linnaeus’s new order made the work of taxonomists much easier, but trying to draw the lines between species often proved frustrating. Two species of mice might interbreed where their ranges overlapped, raising the question of what name to give to the hybrids. Within a species there was confusion as well. The willow ptarmigans in Ireland, for example, have a slightly different plumage than the willow ptarmigans in Finland, which differ in turn from the ones in Norway. Naturalists could not agree about whether they belonged to different ptarmigan species or were just varieties–subsets, in other words–of a single species.''<br /> <br /> ''Charles Darwin, for one, was amused by these struggles. “It is really laughable to see what different ideas are prominent in various naturalists’ minds, when they speak of ‘species,’” he wrote in 1856. “It all comes, I believe, from trying to define the indefinable.” Species, Darwin argued, were not fixed since creation. They had evolved. Each group of organisms that we call a species starts out as a variety of an older species. Over time natural selection transforms them as they adapt to their environment. Meanwhile other varieties become extinct. An old variety ends up markedly different from all other organism–what we see as a species in its own right.'' <br /> <br /> ''“I look at the term ‘species’ as one arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience, to a set of individuals closely resembling each other,” Darwin declared...''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Like the taxonomists before him, Darwin could study species only with the naked eye, observing the color of a bird’s feathers or counting the plates on a barnacle. It would not be until the early 20th century that scientists could start to examine the genetic differences among species. Their research led to a new way of thinking. What made a species a species were the barriers to reproducing with other species. Genes could flow among its members as they mated, but these individuals usually remained within the species, thanks to reproductive barriers. Species might spawn at different times of the year, they might find courtship songs of other species unattractive, or their DNA might simply be incompatible.''<br /> <br /> ''The best understood way for these barriers to evolve is through isolation. Some members of an existing specie–a population–have to become unable to mate with the rest of their species. A glacier could thrust across their range, for example. The isolated population evolves new genes, and some of those new genes may make interbreeding difficult or impossible. Over hundreds of thousands of years so many barriers evolve that the isolated population becomes a distinct species.''<br /> <br /> ''This understanding of how species evolve led to a new concept of what it meant to be a species. Ernst Mayr, a German ornithologist, boldly declared that species were not convenient labels but real entities, like mountains or people. In 1942 he defined a species as a gene pool, calling it a set of populations that can reproduce with one another and that are unable to mate successfully with other populations.''<br /> <br /> ''The biological species concept, as it is now called, became the textbook standard...''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Related organisms share traits because they share the same ancestry. Humans, giraffes and bats all descend from ancient mammals, and as a result they all have hair and milk. Within mammals, humans share a closer common ancestry with other primates. From the common primate ancestor, primates inherited other traits, such as forward-facing eyes. You can zoom in on smaller and smaller sets of organisms this way. Eventually, though, the zooming in comes to a stop. There are organisms that form groups that can no longer be split. These, according to the phylogenetic species concept, are species. In a sense, this concept takes Linnaeus’s original system and updates it in light of evolution. The phylogenetic species concept has been embraced by researchers who need to identify species rather than just contemplate them. Recognizing a species is a matter of finding a group of organisms that shares certain clear-cut traits. Scientists do not have to depend on slippery qualities like reproductive isolation.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Tiny Species / Microorganisms'''<br /> <br /> ''Most of the work that has been done on the species concept in recent years has been directed at animals and plants. That bias is the result of history: animals and plants were the only things that Linnaeus and other early taxonomists could study. But today scientists know that the vast majority of genetic diversity lies in the invisible world of microbes. And microbes have long posed the biggest puzzle of all when it comes to the nature of species.''<br /> <br /> ''When microbiologists began naming species in the 1800s, they could not inspect feathers or flowers like zoologists and botanists can. Microorganisms–especially bacteria and archaea–generally look a lot like one another. Some are rod-shaped, for example, and some are tiny spheres. To distinguish two rod-shaped bacteria from each other, microbiologists would run experiments on their metabolism. One kind of microbe might be able to feed on, say, lactose, whereas the other could not. From clues of this sort, microbiologists described such species as Escherichia coli or Vibrio cholerae. Underlying their work, however, was no clear concept of what it meant for microbes to belong to a species. And when Mayr came up with his biological species concept, it seemed to exclude many microbes. After all, bacteria are not made up of males and females that have to reproduce sexually like animals. They can just split in two.''<br /> <br /> ''The confusion got worse when scientists began to analyze the DNA of microbes. They tried to figure out how different the DNA of two microbial species was, selecting small fragments for comparison. To their surprise, the differences could be huge. Two species of bacteria placed in the same genus based on their metabolism might be more different than humans are from all other primates. And the bacteria within a species could make their living in radically different ways. Some strains of E. coli live harmlessly in our gut, for example, whereas others can cause fatal diseases. “The genetic variation within a species is so enormous that the term species does not really have the same meaning for bacteria and archaea” as it does for multicellular plants or animals, says Jonathan Eisen of the University of California, Davis.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Tiny Little Ones... Inner Life of a Cell.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Microbes are not some minor exception to the rule that can be ignored. As investigators have surveyed the microbial world, they have discovered that the diversity of all animals is puny in comparison. “It’s always struck me as rather odd that if Mayr is right, then 90 percent of the tree of life doesn’t come in species,” says John Wilkins, a philosopher of science at the University of Queensland in Australia. “That’s got to give you some pause for thought.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> Excerpts from Scientific American 2008<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> =='''''Open source 'Tree of Life' including all species known to humans to date'''''==<br /> <br /> <br /> ''U.S. National Science Foundation'' / ''As of September 2015''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''First draft of ‘Tree of Life’ data diagrams include 2.3 million species'''''<br /> <br /> ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States''<br /> <br /> * http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-09/uom-ol091815.php<br /> <br /> * http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/09/16/1423041112<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Authors of the 2015 PNAS Study''<br /> <br /> ''Scientists have used gene sequences and morphological data to construct tens of thousands of evolutionary trees ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life_(biology) phylogenetic schematics]) that describe the evolutionary history of animals, plants, and microbes. '''This study is the first, to our knowledge, to apply an efficient and automated process for assembling published trees into a complete tree of life. This tree and the underlying data are available to browse and download from the Internet, facilitating subsequent analyses that require evolutionary trees. The tree can be easily updated with newly published data.''' Our analysis of coverage not only reveals gaps in sampling and naming biodiversity but also further demonstrates that most published phylogenies are not available in digital formats that can be summarized into a tree of life.''<br /> <br /> <br /> * http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/09/16/1423041112.full.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The realization that all organisms on Earth are related by common descent was one of the most profound insights in scientific history. The goal of reconstructing the tree of life is one of the most daunting challenges in biology. The scope of the problem is immense... most species have yet to be described. Despite decades of effort and thousands of phylogenetic studies on diverse clades, we lack a comprehensive tree of life, or even a summary of our current knowledge. One reason for this shortcoming is lack of data. GenBank contains DNA sequences for 411,000 species, only 22% of estimated named species. Although some gene regions have been widely sequenced across some lineages, they are insufficient for resolving relationships across the entire tree. Most recognized species have never been included in a phylogenetic analysis because no appropriate molecular or morphological data have been collected...''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''&quot;The Tiny Little Ones&quot;''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Microbiomes_at_Risk ''Microbiomes at Risk'']<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/12/science/scientists-unveil-new-tree-of-life.html &lt;big&gt;'''NYT: Scientists Unveil New ‘Tree of Life’ '''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> :* http://www.nature.com/articles/nmicrobiol201648<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tree of Life nmicrobiol201648-f1 via Nature.jpg | link=http://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/Tree_of_Life_nmicrobiol201648-f1_via_Nature.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Visit Life Explorer'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.evogeneao.com/explore/tree-of-life-explorer '''''Tree of Life Interactive Explorer''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tree of Life Explorer - Evogeneao.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.eol.org/ &lt;big&gt;'''Encyclopedia of Life'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> :* http://blog.eol.org/ -- https://twitter.com/eol<br /> <br /> :* https://www.flickr.com/groups/encyclopedia_of_life<br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> [http://ens-newswire.com/2015/09/21/tree-of-life-with-2-3-million-species-open-for-changes/ ''September 20, 2015 (ENS - Environment News Service)''] <br /> :''The relationships among living things, as they diverged from one another from the beginning of life on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago, are shown for the first time in a comprehensive Tree of Life... It is now available free online for anyone to use or edit, something like a Wikipedia for evolutionary trees.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> The current version of the Tree with underlying data and source code is available to browse and download at: https://tree.opentreeoflife.org<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Treemachine'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''View at GitHub'' / '''''OpenTreeofLife''''' -- ''https://github.com/OpenTreeOfLife/treemachine''<br /> <br /> ''The '''open source framework''' facilitates community comment and contribution, enabling the tree to be continuously updated when new phylogenetic and taxonomic data become digitally available...''<br /> <br /> ''Principal investigator Karen Cranston of Duke University said, “This is the first real attempt to connect the dots and put it all together. Think of it as Version 1.0”...'' <br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Open_Access ''Next steps in multiplying the research'']<br /> <br /> :* ''http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Open_Access''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''#OpenAccess''''' - ''https://twitter.com/hashtag/openaccess?src=hash''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Dimensions of Biodiversity Program / NSF'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Despite centuries of discovery, most of our planet's biodiversity remains unknown. The scale of the unknown diversity on Earth is especially troubling given the rapid and permanent loss of biodiversity across the globe. The goal of the Dimensions of Biodiversity campaign is to transform, by 2020, how we describe and understand the scope and role of life on Earth.''<br /> <br /> * http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2014/nsf14057/nsf14057.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> '''The innovative and interdisciplinary teams of the Dimensions of Biodiversity program “may accomplish in 10 years what, with a piecemeal approach, would have taken 50 years—a half century we can no longer afford to wait.”'''<br /> <br /> - Dr. Joann P. Roskoski, NSF Deputy Assistant Director for Biological Sciences<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ''NSF BIODIVERSITY STREAMS OF ACTIVITY - 2020 GOALS''<br /> <br /> ''*Research -- An integrated understanding of the key but unknown dimensions of biodiversity on earth<br /> <br /> ''*Cyberinfrastructure -- Informatics and infrastructure that support accessible, interoperable information capability for dimensions of biodiversity<br /> <br /> ''*Collections -- Digitization of collections and enhanced physical infrastructure to link to cyberinfrastructure and leverage the enormous investments of the past<br /> <br /> ''*Workforce -- A diverse, interdisciplinary, globally-engaged, scientific workforce capable of transforming and communicating our understanding of biodiversity on Earth<br /> <br /> ''*Synthesis -- Scientific analyses and syntheses that generate and disseminate useful information for scientists, educators and decision makers<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''As of 2014, projects funded by the Dimensions of Biodiversity Program are required to format and deposit phylogenetic character matrices and trees within the Open Tree of Life Project...'''<br /> <br /> Program Title:<br /> <br /> Dimensions of Biodiversity<br /> <br /> Synopsis of Program:<br /> <br /> ''Despite centuries of discovery, most of our planet's biodiversity remains unknown. The scale of the unknown diversity on Earth is especially troubling given the rapid and permanent loss of biodiversity across the globe. With this loss, humanity is losing links in the web of life that provide ecosystem services, forfeiting an understanding of the history and future of the living world, and losing opportunities for future beneficial discoveries in the domains of food, fiber, fuel, pharmaceuticals, and bio-inspired innovation.<br /> <br /> ''The goal of the Dimensions of Biodiversity campaign is to transform, by 2020, how we describe and understand the scope and role of life on Earth. The campaign promotes novel, integrated approaches to identify and understand the evolutionary and ecological significance of biodiversity amidst the changing environment of the present day and in the geologic past.<br /> <br /> ''This campaign seeks to characterize biodiversity on Earth by using integrative, innovative approaches to fill the most substantial gaps in our understanding of the diversity of life on Earth. It takes a broad view of biodiversity, and currently focuses on the integration of genetic, taxonomic/phylogenetic, and functional dimensions of biodiversity. Successful proposals should integrate these three dimensions to understand interactions and feedbacks among them. While this focus complements several core NSF programs, it differs by requiring that multiple dimensions of biodiversity be addressed simultaneously, in innovative or novel ways, to understand their synergistic roles in critical ecological and evolutionary processes.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioinformatics ''Bioinformatics'']<br /> <br /> [[File:TreeOfLifeArt s.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Treeoflife.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Aldo quote.gif]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Natural Resources and Intrinsic, Integral Ecology'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''SJS / GP360 Siterunner''': Essentially, the value of biodiversity extends far beyond the US National Science Foundation enumerated research goals of &quot;beneficial discoveries&quot; for &quot;food, fiber, fuel, pharmaceuticals and bio-inspired innovation&quot;. We speak of [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Natural_Capital &quot;Natural Capital&quot;], of the [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Natural_Resources natural resources] of Earth even as biodiversity on Earth has value inherently, an '''intrinsic value''' in and of itself, in ways seen and utilized as resources in human activity -- and in ways unseen and vital beyond human economic activity. An [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Integral_Ecology &quot;integral ecology&quot;] speaks to larger issues of interconnectedness, resilience and survivability over time. The biosphere and environmental security are integrally connected and life on Earth must be protected for future generations. <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life ''Tree of Life / Wikipedia citations'']<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://tolweb.org/tree/ '''The Tree of Life Project - Related History'']<br /> <br /> [http://www.tolweb.org/tree/home.pages/media.html ''Tree of Life Media: Images, Movies, Sounds'']<br /> <br /> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=H6IrUUDboZo ''Tree of Life / Video'']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Plant Family Tree - US Botanic Garden 800x600.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Tree_of_Life_video.png<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :: [[File:Tree of Life opensourcetreeoflife m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Nature Us.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> :::[[File:Tree of Life on Hand.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Agriculture]]<br /> [[Category:Animals]]<br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:Biogeosciences]]<br /> [[Category:Biosphere]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth System Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Law]]<br /> [[Category:Ecological Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-ethics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-Spirituality]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:Endangered Species]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Full-cost Accounting]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Laws]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Protection]]<br /> [[Category:Evolutionary Biology]]<br /> [[Category:Extinction]]<br /> [[Category:Fisheries]]<br /> [[Category:Forests]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Green Values]]<br /> [[Category:Land Ethic]]<br /> [[Category:Microbiology]]<br /> [[Category:Microorganism]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Capital]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resources]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resource Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Nature]]<br /> [[Category:Oceans]]<br /> [[Category:Ocean Science]]<br /> [[Category:Ocean Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Open Access]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Rights of Nature]]<br /> [[Category:Seventh Generation Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability Policies]]<br /> [[Category:Wetlands]]<br /> [[Category:Wildlife]]<br /> [[Category:Zoology]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Green_Stories_of_the_Day&diff=138379 2026-10-10T01:53:40Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> __notoc__<br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&quot;Green Stories Changing Our World&quot;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''For the Young &amp; Old, Across Continents, Community-to-Community'''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt; ''@GreenPolicy360: An eOS Network with Hundreds of Millions of Views &amp; Shares''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Earth dynamic global map.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/1000hPa/orthographic &lt;big&gt;&lt;font color=green&gt;'''#PlanetCitizens360'''&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/big&gt;] <br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Planet Citizens]]''' <br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[The Commons]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[EarthPOV]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Earth Right Now]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Earth Science Vital Signs]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''GRN360: &quot;Vita Activa&quot;, Turning Visions into Reality'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Green_Networking &lt;big&gt;'''Green Networking, Green Best Practices'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Living Earth.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Planet Citizen Vision of Living Earth]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_Citizen_Vision_of_Living_Earth<br /> <br /> <br /> :✅ [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Plans_Enforcement_-_Resources '''The Climate Plans Enforcement Initiative''']<br /> <br /> :✅ [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenLinks '''GreenLinks: Global Green Networking with Web 3.0''']<br /> <br /> :✅ [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_Best_Practices '''Green Best Practices: Community-to-Community'''] <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Liberty Bell.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Photo by mbell1975&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''A Democratic Republic, a 'Great Experiment' in the United States'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> 🗒️ Ours is a democracy, a republic, a work-in-progress continuing to this day, a heritage worth protecting...<br /> <br /> <br /> As the 250th anniversary of the signing of the US Declaration of Independence approaches, we will celebrate an agenda of rights, inalienable rights, human rights, put forward with and embodied in a [https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/full-text '''founding US Constitution'''], [https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/bill-of-rights/what-does-it-say '''a Bill of Rights'''] and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_amendments_to_the_Constitution_of_the_United_States '''Constitutional Amendments'''] -- together a Constitutional government envisioning a living Democratic Republic. <br /> <br /> <br /> On July 2, 1776, the Second Continental Congress passed a “Resolution for Independence” declaring “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”<br /> The signing of the United States Declaration of Independence occurred primarily on August 2, 1776, at the Pennsylvania State House, later renamed Independence Hall, in Philadelphia. The 56 delegates to the Second Continental Congress represented the Thirteen Colonies, of which 12 voted to approve the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[In Defense of Democracy and Freedom]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;'''[[Democracy Quotes]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;[https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Democracy '''A 'Working Democracy' ''']&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;[https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Fact_Checking,_Facts_Count '''In Democracy, 'Facts Count' ''']&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Surviving Victory - Liberty at Risk.jpg]]<br /> <br /> 🌅 'Surviving Victory'&lt;big&gt;🔥&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/surviving-victory-from-the-archive/<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''October 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''US imposes sanctions on ICC after former ICC judge wins Nobel Peace Prize'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Beyond defense, as the US continues to move away from international support while advocating an era of 'America First' <br /> <br /> <br /> Oct 9 (Reuters) - US President Donald Trump's administration imposed sanctions on the ​International Criminal Court (ICC) on Friday, hours after one of its former judges won the Nobel Peace Prize, putting Washington on a diplomatic collision course with European allies.<br /> <br /> The court denounced the ‌move as an &quot;assault on the rule of law and on the very foundations of the international legal order,&quot; and called on its 125 member states to take action to defend it.<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/world/us-imposes-sanctions-international-criminal-court-hours-after-former-judge-wins-2026-10-09/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Announces Its 2026-2030 Strategic Plan'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : As with prior EPA plans, budgets, and proposed changes, a legislative and judicial reordering will follow<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;EPA's Fiscal Year (FY) 2026–2030 Strategic Plan&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2026-10/fy-2026-2030-epa-strategic-plan-final-for-publication-october-2026.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Thought for the Day&quot;<br /> <br /> October 1, 2026<br /> <br /> In a recent series of private meetings in San Francisco, after a tasting menu dinner, Anthropic consulted religious scholars to help instill morality into its A.I. models ... a case was being made that Claude could be or become conscious.<br /> <br /> What would it mean for humanity’s future if artificial intelligence systems possessed a consciousness that rivals our own?<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-morals-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FVE.kDTO.OTLs6iwx7swF&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''September 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Canada's Prime Minister Steps Onto the World Stage'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/mark-carney-talks-geopolitics/<br /> <br /> Strategic Demands: A extraordinary interview and timestamp documenting geopolitical realities faced by the Canadian Prime Minister. Here, we see the navigation skills required and demonstrated by an exceptionally trained and talented man who guides his ship of state through shifting winds… At StratDem we speak of the need for “Strategic Realism” in international relations, of security competition and values-based politics in foreign policy. Canada is fortunate, in our opinion, to have such a person at the helm of its representative democratic governance.<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Telling the Truth to the World'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Facts are key to understanding, and key to unlocking the truth<br /> <br /> : Any speech to a world audience, as at the United Nations, should be time for facts and truth<br /> <br /> <br /> The Fact Checking writer for CNN has no easy 'news beat' as he has to follow the U.S. president's pronouncements<br /> <br /> * https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/22/politics/fact-check-trump-united-nations<br /> <br /> By: Daniel Dale / CNN<br /> <br /> (Note: After a court decision, CNN was re-instituted w/ press credentials on Sept. 24)<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Fact check: Trump’s false claims to the United Nations'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> (Excerpt) <br /> <br /> Global warming<br /> <br /> Trump scoffed at dire warnings that artificial intelligence might eventually attack or kill people, claiming they are coming from “the very same people who said we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming, a name since reborn to climate change because the planet was cooling, not warming, and nobody was dead.”<br /> <br /> There are at least four things wrong with his sentence about global warming.<br /> <br /> First, the phrase “global warming” remains in widespread use even though the phrase “climate change” is also common; they mean different things. Climate scientists use both, often saying “global warming” when referring to the long-term trend of increasing global temperature and “climate change” when referring to the numerous effects the world is experiencing because of that trend. (NASA, part of the Trump-led federal government, [https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/faq/whats-the-difference-between-climate-change-and-global-warming/ explains] the difference between the terms on its website.) For example, a [https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_SYR_SPM.pdf 2023 report] from the UN’s climate change panel is titled “Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report,” but it says this: “Human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases, have unequivocally caused global warming, with global surface temperature reaching 1.1°C above 1850-1900 in 2011-2020.”<br /> <br /> Second, while Trump didn’t say what time period he was talking about, he didn’t acknowledge that the world has continued to get warmer, not cooler. The UN’s World Meteorological Organization [https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/wmo-confirms-2025-was-one-of-warmest-years-record reported] in January that “the past 11 years have been the 11 warmest on record,” with 2023, 2024 and 2025 the three very warmest — as NASA [https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5607/ also found] — though 2025 wasn’t as hot as 2024.<br /> <br /> Third, experts [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/opinion/environment/climate-change-death-toll.html widely disagree] that “nobody” has died from the various impacts of a warming world. It’s impossible to pinpoint a precise death number, but [https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2025/10/30/how-many-people-are-already-being-killed-by-climate-change some] [https://www.eenews.net/articles/people-are-dying-from-climate-change-but-how-many/ estimates] total in the millions. The deaths are likely to continue; the World Health Organization [https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-change-and-health says], “Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year, from under nutrition, malaria, diarrhea and heat stress alone.”<br /> <br /> Fourth, while somebody somewhere might have said that “we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming,” that [https://insideclimatenews.org/news/27082019/12-years-climate-change-explained-ipcc-science-solutions/ isn’t] how an expert report framed the issue.<br /> <br /> A widely discussed 2018 report from climate scientists said the world needed to sharply cut carbon emissions within the next 12 years to be on track to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels; scientists said above that threshold, the potential deadly impacts from climate change would be [https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/science/climate-issues/degrees-matter larger]. Though the 2018 report was often oversimplified by politicians, the expert claim was never that “we’ll all be dead in 12 years” — it was that significant action was needed within 12 years to improve the future. (The UN program [https://wedocs.unep.org/rest/api/core/bitstreams/9f6bd957-8d35-402d-bb4e-c7c17096e592/content reported] earlier this month that the world is set to exceed the 1.5-degree increase, “likely within the next few years&quot;.)<br /> <br /> <br /> More re: Facts and Fact Checking at GreenPolicy360:<br /> <br /> '''Facts Protecting Democracy'''<br /> <br /> At GreenPolicy360, our mission statement supports fact finding and the '3 Ds' -- Discussion ➡️ Debate ➡️ Decision-Making<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 continues a multi-year defense of facts, science, &amp; 'critical thinking skills'<br /> <br /> -- &quot;In Democracy, Facts Count&quot; <br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Fact_Checking<br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Fact_Checking,_Facts_Count<br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Disinformation_-_Online_-_Dangerous<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Taking Time to Take Another Look at the Deepening Costs of War'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 &amp; Strategic Demands<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/costsofwar/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Demanding 'New Definitions of National Security' '''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:New_Definitions_of_National_Security_-_2.png<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Strategic_Demands_of_the_21st_Century,_a_New_Vision_re_Surviving_Victory_conf.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Deep Costs of War StratDem.png]]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Disinformation_-_Online_-_Dangerous<br /> <br /> <br /> A Faith-Announcement in Support of [[The Commons]]<br /> <br /> The Catholic Church continues forward with the message of [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Laudato_Si '''Laudato Si'''] (2015), the first papal encyclical to advance formal environmental protection doctrine. Pope Francis, who was named after St. Francis, the patron saint of the environment, acted to open new doors for theological and spiritual belief within the Catholic tradition. Now, Pope Leo follows on with more ''' 'On Caring for Our Common Home' '''...<br /> <br /> <br /> Challenges of 'ecological turning point'<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''International Theological Commission that calls Christians to view care for creation'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &quot;Caring for Our Common Home&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2026-09/ict-document-care-for-creation-ecology-theology-church-pope.html<br /> * https://www.osservatoreromano.va/en/news/2026-09/ing-009/a-fraternal-response-to-the-triune-god.html<br /> * https://www.americamagazine.org/news/2026/09/03/vatican-creation-sin/<br /> * https://www.thefloridacatholic.org/news/vatican/vatican-theological-commission-defines-sin-against-creation-and-the-creator-in-new-document/article_a6edad02-a5c2-482b-bf7f-fefcf1a8f3ed.html<br /> <br /> <br /> The Vatican has officially declared environmental destruction a ”sin against creation and the Creator” in a major new doctrinal text.<br /> <br /> The document, “Caring for Our Common Home – A Responsible and Fraternal Response to the Triune God,” was published Sept. 2 with the authorization of Pope Leo XIV, according to Vatican News. <br /> <br /> The 29,000-word document, titled '''Caring for Our Common Home''', elevates ecological concern from a merely political or scientific issue into a direct matter of personal faith. <br /> <br /> “Everything is interrelated” within “a single community of life,” according to Vatican News. The commission says this understanding calls Christians to practice gratitude toward God, mercy and solidarity toward others, and responsible care for the common home.<br /> <br /> Authorized under Pope Leo XIV, the text declares that destroying natural habitats, polluting, and exploiting resources are not just civic failures, but a 'sin against creation and against the Creator' that directly violates God's plan.<br /> <br /> This shift from Pope Francis' earlier concept of 'ecological sin' to a more explicit 'sin against the Creator' is designed to reshape how believers view their daily environmental impact. The Vatican emphasizes that failing to safeguard the planet severely harms the poorest populations and future generations, distorting the core relationships that define humanity. <br /> <br /> By placing ecological action squarely in the realm of moral responsibility, the Church is challenging millions of people to treat environmental care as a fundamental requirement of their faith.<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:St. Francis with birds listening.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Faith Traditions Are Growing in Their Calls for Eco-Stewardship'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''&quot;The World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation&quot;'''<br /> <br /> This day is bringing awareness and a call to action<br /> <br /> The spiritual and secular find common ground here in a protection of [[The Commons]]<br /> <br /> <br /> The Catholic Church observes September 1 as the [https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2026-06/vatican-theme-2026-world-day-of-prayer-for-the-care-of-creation.html '''&quot;World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation&quot;'''], a day dedicated to thanking God for the gift of creation and renewing the Church’s commitment to ecological stewardship.<br /> <br /> What the Day Is:<br /> <br /> An annual Catholic observance established by Pope Francis in 2015 as a concrete follow‑up to Laudato Si’.<br /> <br /> Shared with the Orthodox Church, which first designated September 1 as a creation‑focused '''&quot;Day of Prayers for Natural Environment&quot;''' in 1989.<br /> <br /> The opening of the global '''&quot;Season of Creation&quot;''', which runs from September 1 to October 4 (Feast of St. Francis of Assisi).<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:St Francis with the birds.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> Pope St. John Paul II in 1979 <br /> <br /> declared Francis the patron saint of ecology<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Visit Pope Francis' Eco-Encyclical [[Laudato Si]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> More: https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=File:St_Francis_with_the_birds.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://fosfanariou.gr/index.php/2026/08/30/patriarchal-message-for-the-beginning-of-the-ecclesiastical-year-and-the-solemn-day-of-prayers-for-natural-environment-2/ &quot;Solemn Day of Prayers for Natural Environment&quot;, Orthodox Catholic, September 1]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_denominations_by_number_of_members 'Christianity is the largest religious group in the world...]<br /> <br /> The largest denominations -- Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox -- have an estimated 2.3 to 2.6 billion adherents <br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 / On Earth...<br /> <br /> Religious traditions -- faith and spirituality as practiced -- have an intimate connection to life's protection, quality, and humanity's future<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''August 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> TicToc TicToc <br /> <br /> <br /> '''3, 2, 1''' ... '''Launch ... Go, Go, Go'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ⬆️ <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''NASA Goes Looking for Life in the Universe'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Nancy Grace Roman Is the Name of the (biggest- and best-ever) Telescope<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Astro 'Big Picture' Sites]]<br /> <br /> <br /> August 30, 2026<br /> <br /> News from the Florida East Coast<br /> <br /> [https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/30/science/nancy-grace-roman-space-telescope-launch (CNN)] A massive observatory that scientists have called a “discovery machine” has launched toward the cosmos, beginning a journey that could mark a significant shift in our understanding of the universe.<br /> <br /> Designed to seek out otherwise invisible and faint space objects, '''NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope''' lifted off aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket at 7:26 a.m. ET Sunday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The observatory reached orbit about 10 minutes later.<br /> <br /> <br /> (NYT) At a news conference on Saturday morning, Nicola Fox, the associate administrator of NASA’s science mission directorate, explained that Roman’s vast gaze would contribute to solving some of the grandest mysteries about our universe, including how it works, what it is made of and if we are alone out there.<br /> <br /> “To put it in perspective, it will be as if Hubble and James Webb kind of peered through a keyhole at the universe,” Dr. Fox said, referring to two other telescopes NASA has launched into space. “Well, Nancy Grace Roman will kick the door down.”<br /> <br /> <br /> (GRN360) Get ready for 'Exo's in Space' ... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet Exoplanets] ...... with discernible, measurable signs of extraterrestrial life&lt;big&gt;✨ ❇️ ✨&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> 'Up' there ⬆️<br /> <br /> As seen from 'down' here on our terrestrial Home Planet<br /> <br /> Go we go, we're looking 'around'. We're going Exploring ❇️<br /> <br /> <br /> NASA's Exoplanet Archive<br /> <br /> * https://science.nasa.gov/exoplanets/discoveries-dashboard/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> ⬇️<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Trump numbers continue downward.png]]<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Numbers Continue Trending Downward'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via the Washington Post<br /> <br /> August 24, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/08/24/trumps-attempts-intimidate-home-abroad-have-backfired/<br /> <br /> <br /> In the CNN Poll of Polls, 36 percent approved of (Trump's) job performance, while 63 percent disapproved. That’s far below the historical average for presidents. He is even more unpopular abroad — and international disapproval of the president has translated into disapproval of the country he leads. A [https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2026/06/23/trump-gets-negative-reviews-internationally-as-fewer-say-u-s-is-a-reliable-partner/ '''Pew Research Center poll of 36 countries'''], conducted earlier this summer, found that 76 percent of respondents had “no confidence” in Trump and 57 percent had an unfavorable opinion of the United States. In most of the countries Pew surveyed, people had a more positive impression of China than of the U.S.<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Today &amp; Tomorrow: A Couple Memories'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Today: A Green-Skinned Actress (a Famed Witch) who has the same name as a NASA Software-engineer (who wrote the essential code for the Apollo moon mission)<br /> <br /> <br /> SJS/GreenPolicy360 editor: <br /> <br /> A quick flight of the mind, as I received two online stories this morning -- one brought a memory of when I lived in New York City in the Gramercy Park neighborhood and regularly saw a distinguished looking older women walking her dogs around the park. She had a distinctive profile and one day I briefly talked to her. She said she was an actress, and that she still worked (this was in the mid-1970s) 'in the theater'. Her dogs were anxious to move on so we parted. Later, I learned from a neighbor that she was 'thee Margaret Hamilton.'<br /> <br /> Let's call her Margaret from the West (although here in NYC she lived in a building on the East)...<br /> <br /> [[File:Gramercy Park East.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Wicked Witch of the West.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> And as those of you who are familiar with the work of GreenPolicy360, you may remember we have focused our work over decades on what we call [[The Modern Environmental Movement]]. Your founder/siterunner was among those who were there alongside a [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr Congressman named George Brown], who put into development a first generation of Earth Science missions from space. The Apollo-NASA missions to the moon changed the way humanity saw ourselves, as [[Apollo 8]] sent home the first-ever full-color images of our living planet home. What some called a 'cognitive shift' occurred for many of us who were there as the image that became known as '[[Earthrise]]' appeared in the media, most prominently [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Earthrise_Life_Magazine_January_1969.png on the cover] of biggest magazine of the era.<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''“We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.&quot; – Astronaut Bill Anders, Aboard Apollo, December 24, 1968''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earthrise - NASA original Anders photo.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> What your editor carried away was inspiration... and today I am remembering one of the greats of the Apollo mission who made the flights and vision of planet Earth possible. Her name is Margaret Hamilton.<br /> <br /> She literally [https://www.softwareheritage.org/2019/07/20/archiving-and-referencing-the-apollo-source-code/ wrote the source code] that guided the missions to the moon, and her code (as I learned today) from the Apollo 8 'Earthrise' mission acted to make possible the correction of the Apollo 11 landing and return from the moon.<br /> <br /> <br /> _________________________________________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : August 17, 2026 - Happy 90th birthday to Margaret Hamilton -- the software engineer who wrote the computer code that saved the Apollo 11 moon landing and who, in the process, invented the discipline of software engineering itself! The system that kept that landing from being aborted began, improbably, with her 4-year-old daughter crashing a simulated moon mission.<br /> : Margaret Hamilton's daughter, Lauren, came along to the MIT lab on nights and weekends while her mother wrote the software that would fly astronauts to the moon. &quot;There wasn't a time when we weren't working,&quot; Hamilton said. Lauren liked to play astronaut, because she had watched her mother do it in simulations. One evening she started hitting keys, and the simulation began to run. Then she hit another, and everything fell apart -- she had selected a program meant to be run before launch, and the computer, which had almost no memory to spare, wiped the navigation data that was taking her to the moon.<br /> : Hamilton saw what it meant immediately. &quot;I thought: my God -- this could inadvertently happen in a real mission.&quot; She proposed a change to the software that would stop a prelaunch program from being selected in flight. Her superiors at MIT and NASA told her not to bother. The astronauts were too well trained to make a mistake like that.<br /> : On the very next mission, Apollo 8, an astronaut made exactly that mistake -- wiping the navigation data midway to the moon, just as Lauren had. Hamilton called it the Lauren bug. &quot;It created much havoc and required the mission to be reconfigured,&quot; she said. &quot;After that, they let me put the program change in, all right.&quot;<br /> <br /> :Hamilton was born in Paoli, Indiana, in 1936, earned a degree in mathematics with a minor in philosophy from Earlham College, and went to MIT in 1959 to support her family while her husband attended Harvard Law. She learned to program in the lab of Edward Lorenz, the meteorologist who would become the father of chaos theory, because there was nowhere else to learn it. &quot;Computer science and software engineering were not yet disciplines,&quot; she said. &quot;Instead, programmers learned on the job.&quot;<br /> :In 1964 her husband spotted a newspaper advertisement: the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory was looking for people to write the software to send a man to the moon. &quot;I was attracted both by the sheer idea and the fact that it had never been done before,&quot; Hamilton said. &quot;I was the first programmer to join and the first woman they hired.&quot;<br /> : She was gradually promoted until she was directing the team -- eventually about a hundred people -- that wrote the onboard flight software for both Apollo spacecraft. When she was given the job, one of the senior men told her he had no doubt she could do it but worried the men under her might rebel. &quot;Well,&quot; she said, &quot;they didn't.&quot;<br /> :Almost nobody thought the software mattered. It was not in the original schedule; it was not in the budget. &quot;Software during the early days of this project was treated like a stepchild,&quot; Hamilton later wrote, &quot;and it was regarded as an art and as magic, not a science.&quot; Out of what she called desperation, she started calling what she did software engineering -- a phrase invented to make a point.<br /> :&quot;It was out of desperation I came up with the term, to say: 'Hey, we're engineering too.' It was an ongoing joke for a long time.&quot; The joke ended in a meeting, when one of the laboratory's most respected hardware men stood up and said she was right.<br /> :Then came July 20, 1969. Three minutes above the Sea of Tranquility, with two men aboard a vehicle that had never landed anywhere, the Apollo Guidance Computer began throwing alarms -- 1202, then 1201, five of them in four minutes -- because a rendezvous radar switch had been left in the wrong position and the machine was drowning in work it had no time to finish. On virtually any other computer of that decade, this was the end of the story: a freeze, a crash, a mission aborted.<br /> :Hamilton stood watching in the monitoring room at MIT while her software did what she had built it to do, which was to decide what mattered. It recognized the overload, discarded the low-priority jobs, restarted itself in a controlled and orderly way, and held onto the tasks that were flying the spacecraft. &quot;It quickly became clear the software was not only informing everyone that there was a hardware-related problem,&quot; she said, &quot;but was compensating for it.&quot;<br /> :In Houston a 26-year-old guidance officer named Steve Bales had a few seconds to call an abort, and because the computer was visibly managing itself, he called go. Neil Armstrong flew Eagle past a field of boulders and set it down with about twenty-five seconds of fuel remaining.<br /> :&quot;If the computer hadn't recognized this problem and taken recovery action,&quot; Hamilton wrote two years afterward, &quot;I doubt if Apollo 11 would have been the successful moon landing it was.&quot;<br /> :There is a famous photograph of her from that summer, standing beside a stack of Apollo source-code listings taller than she is. :&quot;We got carried away and grabbed all the Apollo listings in my office and created the tower,&quot; she said. &quot;I was trying to find a way of keeping the stack up.&quot;<br /> :Hamilton's standards held. In all the crewed Apollo missions that followed, no software bug was ever known to have occurred.<br /> :Hamilton went unrecognized for decades. In 2016 President Barack Obama gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, calling her emblematic of &quot;that generation of unsung women who helped send humankind into space,&quot; and a year later she appeared, as a LEGO figurine. <br /> :Now ninety, Margaret Hamilton still argues that software should be designed at the start not to fail, rather than patched after it does ....<br /> <br /> :For young women who want to follow in her footsteps, she offers this advice: &quot;Don't let fear get in the way, and don't be afraid to say 'I don't know' or 'I don't understand' -- no question is a dumb question. And don't always listen to the so-called experts.&quot; :To introduce this inspiring trailblazer to kids, consider the picture book &quot;Margaret and the Moon&quot; for ages 5 to 9 at https://www.amightygirl.com/margaret-and-the-moon) and the children's biography &quot;Space Engineer and Scientist Margaret Hamilton&quot; for ages 7 to 10 at https://www.amightygirl.com/margaret-hamilton<br /> :She is also featured in an activity book about pioneering women in technology, which includes a variety of hands-on STEM projects: &quot;Gutsy Girls Go for Science: Programmers&quot; for ages 8 to 11 at https://www.amightygirl.com/gutsy-girls-programmers<br /> <br /> :For adult readers who want the wider story of the women who put Americans in space, &quot;Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars&quot; tells of the mathematicians recruited by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in the 1940s and 50s at https://www.amightygirl.com/rise-of-the-rocket-girls <br /> <br /> <br /> _________________________________________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> So, in memory of two classic, talented, game-changing, creative women -- <br /> <br /> Here's a deep bow and a flourishing wave of our green cap. <br /> <br /> We remember you !!<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Fact_Checking Facts Count]<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Are AI companies scanning and destroying millions of books, including rare titles?'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> Via Snopes.com<br /> <br /> Artificial intelligence companies are scanning millions of books, some of which are rare, and destroying them.<br /> <br /> * https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ai-companies-destroying-rare-books/<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''July 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:A Quokka, which one.jpg]]<br /> <br /> A Human &amp; Quokka Species, on Behalf of All Species <br /> <br /> : Historic, Country-wide Wild Fires Threaten Australia<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''PyroCbs, &quot;Fire Clouds&quot;'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''France / Spain ... &quot;Unprecedented&quot; ... &quot;Extreme Weather&quot;'''<br /> <br /> [https://apnews.com/article/europe-wildfires-france-spain-93678a31ff53fc46564b6dfd9934eae1 250,000 Evacuated]<br /> <br /> Via NYT<br /> <br /> As the hot air rises, it expands and cools, causing its moisture to condense. The water vapor and ash particles combine to form a gray or brown cloud that can then develop into a pyrocumulonimbus (pyro means “fire” in Greek) storm cloud.<br /> <br /> They produce lightning and burning embers that can spark more fires, and they generate high and unpredictable winds that fan the flames and spread the embers.<br /> <br /> In the Gironde region, 103,000 acres have burned, according to officials, and 220,000 people have been asked to evacuate from Gironde and the neighboring Landes region.<br /> <br /> The pyrocumulonimbus phenomenon presents extreme challenges for firefighters.<br /> <br /> “These fire-generated clouds are linked to extreme fire behavior that impedes firefighting efforts and can devastate communities,” according to NASA, which emphasized the need to better understand the clouds “given the ongoing and projected increases in fire activity and severity.”<br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://espo.nasa.gov/inspyre<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Elon Musk Opens Up in an Interview'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Economist Editor Presses the Controversial 'Trillionaire'<br /> <br /> :: Elon Musk's 'Vision of the Future'<br /> <br /> * https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/23/elon-musks-vision-of-the-future<br /> <br /> <br /> “People don’t realise that what I’m saying will come to pass,” he tells The Economist in a 90-minute interview held at a giant Tesla factory in Texas where electric cars drive themselves off the assembly line. That may be because his future-gazing ranges from the unsettling to the downright weird. <br /> <br /> Mr. Musk predicts that, within five years, artificial-intelligence systems may surpass the sum of all human intelligence. Within ten years, robots in the workplace will help usher in an era of such “amazing abundance” that money will become meaningless....<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-killer-robots-ai-abundance-progress-unstoppable-2026-7<br /> <br /> <br /> Musk proposes peer review for frontier AI models in Economist interview<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/musk-proposes-peer-review-frontier-ai-models-economist-interview-2026-07-23/<br /> <br /> <br /> Musk says he got ‘carried away’ with Trump – but still holds on to contentious political views<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/23/elon-musk-regret-trump-doge-ai<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Mix of Comments:<br /> <br /> * https://beincrypto.com/elon-musk-real-force-european-politics/<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/07/24/elon-musk-speaks-to-the-economist-editor-in-chief-zanny-minton-beddoes-on-the-key-takeaways.html<br /> * https://futurism.com/elon-musk-interviewer-npc<br /> * https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-economist-interview-2000790016<br /> * https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/nonsense-elon-musk-lashes-out-in-fiery-interview-after-hes-accused-of-supporting-the-far-right/<br /> * https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2026/07/23/musk_admonishes_the_economist_editor_what_is_far_right_about_having_secure_borders_safe_cities_and_sensible_spending.html<br /> * https://zeteo.com/p/top-economist-trump-musk-starmer<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:ECO.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Big Picture'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> Humanity Looks up to the Heavens, [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:ECO.png 'Inspired' by the Stars]<br /> <br /> : Earth Art &amp; Heliophysics, An Art Project 50 Years in the Making Opens Up<br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Charles Ross, Star Axis in New Mexico.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> July 21, 2026<br /> <br /> U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations<br /> <br /> The Topic -- Supplemental Federal Aid<br /> <br /> The Question -- Why More Government Funding for the Military, and Agriculture Producers, is urgently needed<br /> <br /> The Secretary of War explains that $1.5 trillion in needed in the next budget year, a 'generational' budget, one year increase request of over $500 billion... and tens of billion more are needed immediately for war fighting, training, munitions...<br /> <br /> Then ... on July 21st, with minimal media coverage, the following is put into the record -- to explain why billions more than a half trillion more, are needed for farmers and agriculture.<br /> <br /> <br /> ''“For many agricultural producers, 2025 was a year in which the cost of growing their crop at times exceeded what they could earn from selling it. Severe weather compounded these losses... producers had to contend with a combination of challenging market conditions.&quot;<br /> <br /> ''“... We will hear a great deal today about how declining commodity prices, rising input costs, labor shortages, trade disruptions, pests and disease, and increasingly volatile weather are squeezing farmers’ already thin margins.''<br /> <br /> ''“Nationwide, we have lost nearly 200,000 farms in the last decade.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> Let's parse this list of what 'we will hear'... the causes are what we will focus on here.<br /> <br /> The choice of going to war, and resulting increases in oil/gas prices, the resulting prices of fertilizer spiking, the boycotts and tariffs of U.S. farm products resulting from boycotts and tariffs in international markets (Trade War consequences of U.S. policies), the reasons for 'labor shortages' in the U.S. agriculture industry, and increases in extreme weather events and damages... <br /> <br /> These consequential facts seem to be set aside, ignored, and not explored by committee hearing speakers and the majority party running the hearing (the Chair is a Senator from Maine and is running for re-election).<br /> <br /> Look more closely at the [https://strategicdemands.com/costsofwar/ 'Deep Costs, Costs of War'] that the people of the U.S., and many others, are paying.<br /> <br /> It is time for new policies, facts, costs of failed policies, and more realistic debate and discussion...<br /> <br /> Enough said...<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> July 16, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[Fact Checking, Facts Count]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Consider the Facts, Pay Attention to the Reality<br /> <br /> As an audience listens in while an American president talks, we, at GreenPolicy, have a bottom line request -- our bottom line is '''Facts Count'''<br /> <br /> Go with the Reality, not the Marketing<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Attribution of Extreme Weather and Climate Events and Their Impacts'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * This 2026 National Academies of Science Study and Report Will Have Consequences<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We are reminded of the mid-1970s National Academies of Sciences Study and Report that led to Congressional Hearings and the First US National Climate Act Program. We watched as Representative George E. Brown - (D) Los Angeles pushed for the scientific research and moved to hearings and legislation.<br /> <br /> The era of modern climate science moved forward with lasting contributions ...<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/climate/national-academies-extreme-weather-attribution.html?unlocked_article_code=1.yFA.38oJ.3B0p4MCCutBL&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> * https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/28590/chapter/1<br /> <br /> <br /> Read about the foundational 1970s National Climate science report, hearings, and legislation here -- <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr#/media/File%3ANational_Climate_Program_Act_Hearings_May_1976.jpg<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr#/media/File%3AUS_Public_Law_95-367.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr#/media/File%3APublic_Law_95-367%2C_1978.jpeg<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Congressman george.e.brown.gif]]<br /> <br /> Rep. George E Brown<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Generation Green]] [[Going Green]]'''<br /> <br /> '''[[The Modern Environmental Movement]]'''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360: Our Outlook, Perspective and Work is Local/National/Global, Individual and Community-to-Community'''<br /> <br /> : '''[[Green Best Practices]]'''<br /> <br /> : [[File:Climate First Bank Florida.png]]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Climate_First_Bank_Florida.png<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''An Interview with Bill McKibben'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> The Very Good and Very Bad News on Climate<br /> <br /> July 10, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-bill-mckibben.html?unlocked_article_code=1.wlA.b4se.muIpmtiO6j6_&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> Here’s the good news: Green energy is getting better and cheaper, faster than we had ever dared hope.<br /> <br /> This next sentence was unimaginable even a few years ago: In April, the energy think tank Ember found that all of the new electricity demand around the world in 2025 was met with green power. That is wild.<br /> <br /> But here is the bad news: Climate change is accelerating. We’re discovering new ways that the climate system is more fragile, more sensitive to emissions, than we previously had thought.<br /> <br /> We have not been talking that much about climate change lately, but that doesn’t mean it has stopped happening. Europe is in the midst of an extraordinary heat wave. The world is staring down the barrel of a powerful El Niño.<br /> <br /> And climate politics is in almost total disarray. Donald Trump has gutted the Inflation Reduction Act. His administration is accelerating fossil fuel production and kneecapping green energy.<br /> <br /> <br /> But here’s the possibility, a bit of optimism: The advances in green technology make a new climate politics possible — one that doesn’t just talk about sacrifice and disaster prevention but presents decarbonization and green energy as a way station on the path to somewhere better.<br /> <br /> Clean energy abundance, a new form of energetic wealth, the possibility of the left actually offering a future of more and better — not less and worse — was a hard case to make even a few years ago. But now we cannot only imagine it, we can see it, touch it, live in it. It is here.<br /> <br /> So how do we talk about it? How do we make it happen?<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-bill-mckibben.html?unlocked_article_code=1.wlA.b4se.muIpmtiO6j6_&amp;smid=em-share '''Read the McKibben Interview Here for more:''']<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Even better than the E.V. is the e-bike, which I think may turn out to be the transformative invention of our time on Earth.&quot; -- Bill McKibben<br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-bill-mckibben.html?unlocked_article_code=1.wlA.b4se.muIpmtiO6j6_&amp;smid=em-share '''Click Here for more about Bill McKibben at GreenPolicy360'''] <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:America250 logo.svg.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/In_Defense_of_Democracy_and_Freedom<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Democracy_Quotes<br /> <br /> <br /> We recall a quote of Benjamin Franklin responding to a question in 1787 about the newly announced birth of the US as he left Independence Hall after the Constitutional Convention:<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''We have &quot;a Republic, if you can keep it.&quot;'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Today's generation, and future generations, would be wise to remember Franklin's words of warning.'''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> '''July 4th, 1776'''<br /> <br /> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness...<br /> <br /> * https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''June 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''June 30, 2026'''<br /> <br /> <br /> NATIONAL REPUBLICAN SENATORIAL COMMITTEE ET AL. v. FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION ET AL.<br /> <br /> * https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-621_h315.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Millionaires &amp; Billionaires Applaud'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : U.S. Supreme Court Increases Influence of '''[[Money in Politics]]'''<br /> <br /> :: New SCOTUS Ruling Memorializes 'Pay to Play' Transactional Politics<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360's associate [http://www.politicopay.com '''PoliticoPay.com'''], has been tracking the escalating money in politics trend for years.<br /> <br /> We have warned of the consequences of profligate spending on politicians and campaigns. These warnings have become a reality -- and further challenge to good government. <br /> <br /> * https://politicopay.com/buckley-valeo-a-mega-money-future<br /> <br /> * https://politicopay.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''NPR re: Decision No. 24–621'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''(The Supreme Court) decision means that parties get the best of both worlds. They can both coordinate with candidates and raise unlimited funds.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''At issue in the case was a post-Watergate law that Congress passed to limit the amount of money individuals can give to political parties. The law, the Federal Election Campaign Act, also limited how much money political parties can spend on their candidates. Other types of organizations, like political action committees and Super PACs, have no limits on the amount of money they can raise and spend on elections...''<br /> <br /> ''Republicans, including Vice President Vance and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, challenged the law as an unconstitutional violation of political parties' First Amendment right to raise and spend money on their candidates.''<br /> <br /> ''Backed by the Trump Justice Department, they contended that the only justification for imposing a fundraising limit on parties is to prevent corruption, but they maintained that there is no evidence that the law has prevented corruption.''<br /> <br /> This decision overturns a 2001 Supreme Court case that declared the limits on party spending to be constitutional. It's the latest in a series of rulings since then that have unraveled campaign finance regulations.<br /> <br /> ''The saga began in 2010, when the court ruled in Citizens United that corporations have a First Amendment right to unlimited spending on elections...''<br /> <br /> * https://www.npr.org/2026/06/30/nx-s1-5827039/supreme-court-campaign-finance<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Speaking of the Influence of Big Money on Consequential Political Decisions'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Michael Mann's new book, Coming Back to Earth.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Michael Mann has news of science, politics, and life impacting policies --''' <br /> <br /> A new book on the state of climate science and politics is in the works with Michael Mann @ Public Affairs...<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 especially appreciates the publication notice:<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Coming Back to Earth'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Providing grounded, evidence-based reasons to be optimistic about our ability to confront climate change.'''<br /> <br /> <br /> We're reminded of his most recent book 'The New Climate War', which he inscribed for GreenPolicy360. <br /> <br /> '''Thanks Michael, Onward we go !'''<br /> <br /> <br /> and as we say here at the top of each online page as our site and green network is being read by millions around the Earth...<br /> <br /> '''Each of us can make a positive difference by stepping up &amp; doing our best'''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Generation Green]] | [[Planet Citizens]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''' &quot;We have to identify the problem, then act in many ways to solve the problem. Global warming is the threat of our times.&quot;''' &lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;-- [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Governor_Jerry_Brown '''Jerry Brown, California Governor''']&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''' &quot;We’re going to need to use every tool in the toolbox if we’re going to solve this problem.&quot; '''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;-- [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Michael_E_Mann_--_act_with_hope_not_fear.jpg '''Michael E. Mann''']&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Consequences of Another War in the Middle East'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> : Deep Costs to the U.S. and Its Future -- Come into View<br /> <br /> :: U.S. Allies Suffer with Shifts in Global Economics -- the Mid East Continues in Crisis<br /> <br /> <br /> '''With the deepening costs of oil/gas wars adding trillions to expanding U.S. debt -- with a multi-trillion dollars Iraq war, Afghanistan war, and ongoing Israel/Syria/Lebanon/Palestine-Gaza conflicts -- we witness decades of failed policy and generational roll over... The national/international costs and changes brought on by the U.S./Iran war, with its severe global energy disruptions, begin to come into a wider global view ...'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/business/energy-environment/china-energy-battery-grid.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qlA.iKfE.kO9ONgn1Q7pG&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:US_Reliability_Falls_in_Europe.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Visit GreenPolicy360's Associate, Strategic Demands, for Continued Perspective on the Middle East Wars and the Far-Reaching Consequences and Damaged U.S. Relations'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''June 14, 2026'''<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/costsofwar/<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/business/energy-environment/china-energy-battery-grid.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qlA.iKfE.kO9ONgn1Q7pG&amp;smid=url-share '''China benefits as Petrol Politics of Oil/Gas and Mideast Wars push alternative energy sources''']<br /> <br /> [[File:China electrostate benefits from efx of Mideast war.png|link=https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/business/energy-environment/china-energy-battery-grid.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qlA.iKfE.kO9ONgn1Q7pG&amp;smid=url-share]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''China's electrostate is poised to win from war in the Middle East'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/business/energy-environment/china-energy-battery-grid.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qlA.iKfE.kO9ONgn1Q7pG&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> More on [https://strategicdemands.com/new-definitions-of-security/ 'new definitions of national/global security']<br /> <br /> ''In April, wind and solar generated more electricity globally than gas for the first time.''<br /> <br /> <br /> Scan the energy production data<br /> <br /> * https://ember-energy.org/<br /> <br /> <br /> Data into action<br /> <br /> Open data and intelligent policy analysis to unlock a clean, electrified energy future<br /> <br /> <br /> Spring 2026<br /> <br /> '''&quot;And then came Hormuz&quot; ... Iran war analysis via Ember<br /> <br /> :If the defining economic story of the century is the rise of Asia, the defining energy story is the rise of electricity. The two are usually told apart. This report argues they are one: Asia’s rise is electric, and the electric age hastens Asia’s rise.<br /> <br /> :Electricity has been the century’s fastest-growing energy carrier, overtaking oil in 2007 as the leading supplier of useful energy worldwide. Over the same years, Asia has been the fastest-growing region. In 2016, China passed the United States in purchasing-power terms, and South and Southeast Asia together passed the European Union in 2021. Two features bind these stories together.<br /> <br /> :The first is that Asia is taking an electric path. Since the turn of the century, Asia has driven three quarters of the growth in global electricity. In the West, GDP and electricity demand decoupled long ago; in Asia, they rise in lock-step. Asia has achieved greater electrification at lower incomes per capita. No growth in history has been this electric.<br /> <br /> :The second runs deeper. It is a change in what energy is. Coal, oil and gas are commodities, dug from the ground. Solar panels, batteries and wind turbines are technologies, built on a production line. The energy revolution is the shift from extraction to manufacturing.<br /> <br /> <br /> :Enter Asia – the world’s factory. Asia builds most of the world’s solar panels, batteries, power electronics, electric motors and cars. Its strengths fit the new energy system.<br /> <br /> :Such a shift carries historical weight. After 1800 the West pulled ahead of Asia, a parting of fortunes known as the Great Divergence. Energy sat at the core of this divergence: first coal, then oil, and the engines built to burn them. These innovations favoured Western strengths and underwrote two centuries of wealth and power.<br /> <br /> :The Great Convergence – the East closing in on the West – also has an energy story, and it runs the other way. The new vector is electricity, and the electro-technologies that run on it. The new centre is Asia. Its lack of oil and gas was a weakness in a fossil world. It is a blessing in an electric one.<br /> <br /> :China is, of course, the giant. But change is radiating outwards. From Vietnam to Bangladesh, electrification rates are higher than in Europe or the United States. From Pakistan to Japan, solar’s share of power beats the US. From Thailand to Nepal and Indonesia to Singapore, EV uptake is ahead. Strip China out, and the rest of Asia still outbuilds the world in solar modules and battery components.<br /> <br /> :For years the economics of electrotech have been improving rapidly. A decade ago, solar began to beat coal, and electric cars beat petrol over their lifetimes, once fuel was counted. Today solar and EVs are cheaper to buy outright, even before the fuel savings. For economies short of capital, the door is now open to rapid change.<br /> <br /> :Then came Hormuz: the closure of Asia’s petrol station. The region buys nearly half of its oil from the Gulf, a deeper reliance than Europe had on Russia. It is the second blow in four years. The first came in 2022, when Russia cut off Europe, and Europe outbid Asia for gas, pricing out poorer countries. If electrotech is the pull of opportunity, the twin fossil shock is the push of necessity.<br /> <br /> :Economics, security and industrial opportunity now all point in the same direction. Asia holds half the world’s people and 4% of its oil and gas, but three quarters of the electrotech factories that can replace the fuel it lacks. <br /> <br /> : The Great Divergence was powered by the energy the West mastered. The Great Convergence runs on the energy that Asia manufactures. If this is to be the Asian century, its path will be electric.<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Electric Asia'''<br /> <br /> * How Asia is leading the electric age, powering its rise and reshaping the global order<br /> <br /> <br /> '''“What was five years ago maybe barely competitive, now is almost already clearly cheaper...”'''<br /> <br /> '''&quot;Investments in renewables have become a better bet, promising returns in closer to two years instead of 30.&quot;'''<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: The shift globally to renewable energy comes against a backdrop of historic policy decisions in the two terms of the Trump administration, a government-wide retreat away from renewable energy. The Trump 'retro-vision' that touts fossil fuels and denigrates renewables is, in fact, setting back U.S. competitiveness in meeting new demands for electrification across industrial sectors.<br /> <br /> As the economies of the world move forward, in transportation (EVs, e-motorcycles, e-bikes... e-buses, e-trucks, city e-grids with light rail, and soon aerial copters and planes, boats and ships, and e-power tools, e-tractors, e-smart homes and battery technologies (powering grids, cities, factories, consumer products), and e-robots and a gamut of AI technologies .... and on and on, the retro-actions of the Trump period are delivering a backward-looking blow to U.S. competitiveness that will have decades-long consequences.<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''June 7, 2026'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''As the War with Iran Reaches Day 100'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : And War in Ukraine Continues to Flare<br /> <br /> :: And War in Lebanon Expands<br /> <br /> :: And War in the Middle East Seems Endless<br /> <br /> ::: With Escalations, Reverberations, Proliferation of 'WMDs', and Incalculable Worldwide Costs <br /> <br /> We listen in and watch as the issues and questions roil across an informed and hard discussion between voices 'in the know' ...<br /> <br /> * https://substack.com/home/post/p-201011581<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''June 4'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''PREMIERE of a New Documentary Film about the Threat of Nuclear Weapons'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''In this 29-minute documentary, renowned whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg provides a powerful wakeup call about the global threat posed by nuclear weapons and advocates how we can dramatically reduce the real and present danger of nuclear annihilation.'' <br /> <br /> ''Before he released the top secret Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, Ellsberg was a nuclear war planner with access to classified information on U.S. nuclear strategy.''<br /> <br /> <br /> Wikipedia Bio / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Filmed one year before his death at age 92, Ellsberg speaks with clarity and urgency about the dangers we face, noting, &quot;I’ve long said that to my last breath I will be doing what I can to postpone and avert the risk of nuclear war.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''With ongoing conflicts heightening nuclear tensions, and with the recent end of the New START treaty potentially triggering a renewed arms race, &quot;An Ordinary Insanity&quot; is a timely film to help mobilize broad public concern and action for arms control and nuclear disarmament.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360 &amp; Strategic Demands''':<br /> <br /> A message from beyond, words of warning from an old friend of ours, Dan Ellsberg.<br /> <br /> Listen in to words of wisdom, even as a US president postures to be anti-nuke, and proposes nuclear weapons funding at all time highs...<br /> <br /> In fact, nuclear funding and Trump administration nuclear weapons development and 'usable' delivery platforms have spurred an out of control Nuclear Arms Race between the US, Russia and now China<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> “We’re continuing year-by-year deliberately with a posture and a policy and threats that make a significant risk of near extinction possible.” <br /> <br /> — DANIEL ELLSBERG in &quot;An Ordinary Insanity&quot; <br /> <br /> * https://www.anordinaryinsanity.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''More about Dan Ellsberg''' [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?search=dan+ellsberg&amp;title=Special%3ASearch&amp;profile=advanced&amp;fulltext=1&amp;ns0=1&amp;ns6=1&amp;ns14=1 @ '''GreenPolicy360'''] &amp; [https://strategicdemands.com/?s=dan+ellsberg @ '''Strategic Demands''']<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Nuclear_Weapons<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/nuclear-arms-race-3-0/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Truth and Consequence - Dan Ellsberg.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''May 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''David Attenborough Turns 100 Years Old'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/arts/television/david-attenborough-100-birthday.html?unlocked_article_code=1.hFA.HXVb.qSlnB3rq8Hbe&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> ''&quot;The next few decades represent a final opportunity to build a stable home for ourselves and restore the rich, healthy and wonderful world that we inherited from our distant ancestors. Our future on the planet, the only place as far as we know where life of any kind exists, is at stake.” -- David Attenborough, &quot;A Life on Our Planet&quot;, 2020<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We agree with David, we very deeply agree...<br /> <br /> And to Leo DiCaprio, a fellow [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Bioneers '''Bioneer'''], we agree too. David is a protector and close up story teller of the natural world who is a unique and valued voice whose wisdom will remain for years, and years and years...<br /> <br /> * https://deadline.com/2026/05/leonardo-dicaprio-david-attenborough-tribute-100th-birthday-1236888075/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Lee Zeldin E&amp;E News.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Photo by E&amp;E News&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin this past week defended deep budget cuts proposed by President Donald Trump'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Zeldin appeared at a trio of congressional hearings, dueling with House members and senators over the administration’s plan to reduce EPA’s annual funding to $4.2 billion in fiscal 2027 — or more than half of the agency’s enacted spending'' (E&amp;E)<br /> <br /> <br /> Green Policy: Lee Zeldin is Donald Trump's zealous attorney/administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. (We note he is also being discussed in the news as a leading candidate for the next US Attorney General). Zeldin for now is showing himself as a man with a cause. The cause he is pursuing, as he wields expanded administrative power, is dismantling and defunding the agency charged with protecting the environment, as the EPA's title straightforwardly declares. <br /> <br /> Since the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Environmental_Protection_Agency '''Environmental Protection Agency establishment in 1970'''], the EPA has followed its mission over decades. Congress after Congress envisioned, developed, and approved its work. Popular support was nationwide. Memorable achievements followed. We won't go into the long list of health-protections and science that EPA has given the nation and its communities, the air-quality, water-quality, health- and living-quality advances are there to see and experience.<br /> <br /> In Lee Zeldin's short time in office, however, the record of achievements is not seen as achievements to be built on... Zeldin has instead turned the valued agency into a storm of firings, cuts, closing of departments, ending research, terminating projects, eliminating oversight programs, announcing the EPA is no longer in the business of doing the people's work of enforcing the statutory mandates and directions of the US Congress.<br /> <br /> When asked under what authority he is dismantling the EPA, he answers with authoritative assurance -- that of the Supreme Court's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_questions_doctrine?wprov=sfti1 ''''Major Questions Doctrine''''] and the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loper_Bright_Enterprises_v._Raimondo '''Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo'''] decision.<br /> <br /> Zeldin and the current administration go on to explain they have 'different' policy priorities' that allow them to cut, cut, cut the EPA, turning it into a shell of what it was -- and away from Congressional votes, decisions and budgets since the 1970s intended to support viable, effective environmental protection. <br /> <br /> Yet, a remade Supreme Court has now enabled a dramatic and demanding new level of explicit text in Statutory law. The Court's novel doctrine of 'Major Questions' and the Loper Bright decision that Lee Zeldin wave as he orders dismantling is the order coming from the president. Given on the ground, deep and popular support, Zeldin's orders won't stand the test of time.<br /> <br /> Congressional staffs will bring in experts and act to redraft the letter of the law. Future administrations will support will act to pass legally specific text across most all environmental laws that are being summarily dismissed by Lee Zeldin, Esq.<br /> <br /> What Zeldin seems to forget, as he flaunts the Scotus recent turn, is that the clock is ticking, the people see and learn what is needed and what to do to deliver the kind of government they are demanding.<br /> <br /> Top of list -- quality of life. This includes protection against toxics and pollution. Moving toward a goal of clean, breathable air, drinkable water, and sustainable, enjoyable, healthy communities, towns and cities. <br /> <br /> We understand the need for the EPA's work. Most everyone does.<br /> <br /> When Lee Zeldin goes away, within a brief time a renewed Environmental Protection Agency with new Presidential executive orders and Congressional support will be the order of the day. <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''April 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Remade Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS) Remakes Civil Rights &amp; the Voting Rights Act'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : SCOTUS Voting Act Decision Acts to Reshape the 2026 Mid-term Congressional Election <br /> <br /> :: Partisan Reconfiguration of Congressional Districts Goes into Overdrive<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Voting Rights and Control of Congress'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Media news headlines from across the US deliver Temper of the Times <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-voting-rights-act-louisiana-alabama-4e3225083caccda5ec73a98533a79add '''Supreme Court hollows out a landmark law that had protected minority voting rights for 6 decades'''] '''Associated Press / April 30, 2026'''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act--.png]] 🏛️[[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-01.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-02.png]] 🏛️ [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-03.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-04.png]] 🏛️ [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-05.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-.png]] 🏛️ [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-07.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-08.png]] 🏛️ [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-09.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Memorable Words from the British King Addressing a Joint Session of the US Congress'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Charles navigates fraught politics with reminders of the Magna Carta of 1215, citizen rights, and calling for today's democratic governments to have high purpose<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''&quot;[O]ur generation must decide how to address the collapse of critical natural systems, which threatens far more than the harmony and essential diversity of Nature.”'''''<br /> <br /> '''''&quot;Reflect on our shared responsibility to safeguard Nature, our most precious and irreplaceable asset.&quot;''''' ...<br /> <br /> <br /> The modern representative of the UK went on to speak of the British Enlightenment, and the rights and duties of today's democratic governments.<br /> <br /> <br /> ''“We do not embark on these remarkable endeavours together out of sentiment, we do so because they build greater shared resilience for the future, so making our citizens safer for generations to come.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''“Our common ideals were not only crucial for liberty and equality, they are also the foundation of our shared prosperity. The Rule of Law: the certainty of stable and accessible rules, an independent judiciary resolving disputes and delivering impartial justice.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> ... ''&quot;It is here in these very halls that this spirit of liberty and the promise of America’s Founders is present in every session and every vote cast” ... political debate enriched “by the deliberation of many, representing the living mosaic of the United States. In both of our countries it is the very fact of our vibrant, diverse and free societies that gives us our collective strength.”''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;The essence of our two Nations is a generosity of spirit and a duty to foster compassion, to promote peace, to deepen mutual understanding and to value all people, of all faiths, and of none.”''<br /> <br /> -- King Charles III, April 28, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;''''Earth Day', April 22, 1970, Carries On &amp; On'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''April 22, 2026 🧤 Teach-In Memory Time'''<br /> <br /> <br /> At GreenPolicy360 we tell of 'being there' and being directly involved in the envisioning and planning of a first Earth Day <br /> <br /> Tip of our Green Hat to Representative George E. Brown<br /> <br /> <br /> Personal recollection -- <br /> <br /> <br /> A Story of 'Earthrise' to 'Earth Day' and Far Beyond....<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Day_Memories_on_the_50th_Anniversary<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;[[Earth Day]]&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''[[Earth Day Is Every Day]]'''<br /> <br /> :* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Earth_Day<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth-Day.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Every Day Is Earth Day.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Above Our Living Earth.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :🌎<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> : [[File:Earthrise to Earthset.png]]<br /> <br /> :: &lt;small&gt;Round &amp; Round We Go ....&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Day &lt;big&gt;''''Earthrise' to a First 'Earth Day' '''&lt;/big&gt;] ... [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Earth_in_Human_Hands.jpg &lt;big&gt;'''Now Earth Is in Your Hands'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''Earthrise', December 24, 1968 to 'Earthset', April 6, 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Earthrise<br /> * https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/earthset/<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;'''[[The Modern Environmental Movement]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Apollo.jpg]]<br /> <br /> : &lt;small&gt;NASA / December 1968&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?search=earthrise&amp;title=Special%3ASearch&amp;profile=advanced&amp;fulltext=1&amp;ns0=1 '''Earthrise Thoughts at GreenPolicy360''']<br /> <br /> <br /> : '''A half century on, fifty years after Apollo 8, humanity again visits the Moon and looks back at Planet Earth'''<br /> <br /> <br /> :[https://greenpolicy360.net/images/Moon_and_Earth_from_Artemis%2C_April_2026.jpg '''Reflection on the experience of watching the Earth set over the Moon, via Astronaut Reid Wiseman''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earthset.png]]<br /> <br /> :: &lt;small&gt;NASA / April 2026&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Artemis II, Journey from Earth to the Moon'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nasa.gov/gallery/journey-to-the-moon/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Artemis looking at Earth home.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth from Artemis II.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;NASA&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''March 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Another War'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> As the US and Israel launch war with Iran, the following words hover front of mind. <br /> <br /> “People predicting disaster: The odds are in your favor, but you cannot be sure, and you should not hope to be right. People celebrating: Maybe wanna wait a bit. The odds, historically, are definitely not on your side. Anyone certain they know what happens next is making it up.” -- Tom Nichols <br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;The world needs to renew a focus on human rights with quality of life high on every nation's agenda.&quot; -- GreenPolicy360<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''February 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> February 18, 2026<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Environmental Groups Sue Trump’s EPA Rollback of Climate Science Finding'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via The Guardian <br /> <br /> More than a dozen health and environmental justice non-profits have sued the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over its revocation of the legal determination that underpins US federal climate regulations.<br /> <br /> ''Filed in Washington DC circuit court, the lawsuit challenges the EPA’s rollback of the “endangerment finding”, which states that the buildup of heat-trapping pollution in the atmosphere endangers public health and welfare and has allowed the EPA to limit those emissions from vehicles, power plants and other industrial sources since 2009. The rollback was widely seen as a major setback to US efforts to combat the climate crisis.''<br /> <br /> ''The suit was brought by the American Public Health Association, the American Lung Association, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club and 11 other public health and environmental organizations. The lawsuit was filed by green legal organizations Clean Air Task Force and Earthjustice and it names the EPA and the agency’s administrator, Lee Zeldin, as defendants...''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Trump, Rejecting Science and Climate Change - Feb 2026.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Photo from the LA Times&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''An Attack on a Foundational Law, EPA Findings and a Supporting Court Decision'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/12/trump-epa-rollback-pollution-regulation-endangerment-finding<br /> <br /> <br /> ('''Updated, with this Trump order''') &quot;The United States will essentially have no laws on the books that enforce how efficient America’s passenger cars and trucks should be.&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/16/climate/endangerment-finding-auto-emissions-regulations.html?unlocked_article_code=1.M1A.1MMD.Cox7hRsyuiae&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''A Trump Legacy: Rejecting Science, Climate Change, and the Environmental Protection Agency'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : A Moment in History That Will Be Remembered<br /> <br /> <br /> Reading 'Top of the News' headlines this week, the world's people encounter a nation's president who rejects a half-century of a scientific, military, educational and security studies, data, knowledge -- and warnings.<br /> <br /> President Trump orders environmental cuts and rollbacks, retrogressive policies that turn around the Environmental Protection Agency's progress for the nation.<br /> <br /> Five plus decades of vision, foundational work, projects and programs, NASA/NOAA, EPA, USGS, across US colleges and universities, health and medical research, and on and on are now being diminished and degraded.<br /> <br /> Time will tell the full story of the Trump presidency.<br /> <br /> <br /> For now, let's take a quick look back at actions taken to advance environmental protection and the nation's well being, the beginnings of the EPA, atmospheric/climate/earth science, national security, health, and a better future for all.<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:SMOG_be_gone.jpg<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Tracking_science_policy_across_the_Trump_administration.png<br /> <br /> * https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title42/chapter85&amp;edition=prelim<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: <br /> <br /> Let's call this Trump rejection of science what it is -- an act of hubris, an decision that will not stand in the face of physics...<br /> <br /> Donald Trump's administration, with an EPA taken over by anti-science purveyors who callously and destructively set aside fifty plus years of scientific data, now act to put their legacy into the history books. Their action to deny the overwhelmingly evident dangers of climate change, a gathering storm threatening US and world environmental security, is an ignominious day.<br /> <br /> We, today's generation and future generations will live to mark this moment as a tragedy, one that accelerates real-world physics of earth systems, delivering climate impacts, disruptions, security lost... <br /> <br /> The Trump administration have delivered 'retro' thinking, anti-science destructiveness. <br /> <br /> The Clean Air Acts and accompanying model regulations, [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr '''ideas beginning in California to deal with its &quot;smog&quot;'''] in the 1960s/70s, were shared and spread throughout the US -- and the world's cities and communities. Profound progress, meant explicitly to deal with hazardous air pollutants and remedy the climate-related costs, the damages of atmospheric pollution to health, environment and future well being that adversely impacts life across nations and regions of Earth, was achieved and continues to be achieved. The Trump attempt to block this progress will fail.<br /> <br /> Yet, the time lost to Trumpian folly will add additional costs to humanity's journey forward.<br /> <br /> We mark these days in February 2026 as times to be remembered -- and judged -- for what they are. <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EPA 1a.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EPA 2a.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EPA 3a.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EPA 4a.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:PlanetCitizen banner 800x163.jpg|link=https://greenpolicy360.net/w/PlanetCitizen]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> February 1, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Another Warning Among Many'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Excerpt from a Chapter in a new book by Thom Hartmann...<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Climate Collapse Presidency'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Climate change is the single greatest threat to a sustainable future<br /> : but, at the same time, addressing the climate challenge presents a<br /> : golden opportunity to promote prosperity, security and a brighter<br /> : future for all. <br /> :—- Ban Ki-moon, former UN Secretary-General,<br /> : Remarks at Climate Leaders’ Summit, April 11, 2024<br /> <br /> <br /> Thom Hartmann @https://hartmannreport.com:<br /> <br /> The greatest existential threat humanity faces isn’t hiding in a military bunker or a terrorist cell. It’s in plain sight: the accelerating collapse of our only home’s life-support systems.<br /> <br /> Trump’s first term was environmental arson. He gutted the EPA, installed fossil fuel executives in key positions, shredded over one hundred environmental protections, and abandoned the Paris Climate Agreement. <br /> <br /> Scientists were silenced. Research was suppressed. The words “climate change” vanished from government websites as if deleting terms could delete reality.<br /> <br /> When confronted about climate’s role in the devastating 2020 wildfires, Trump smirked: “I don’t think science knows, actually.”<br /> <br /> <br /> --<br /> <br /> <br /> An AI response:<br /> <br /> Daniel Solomon<br /> <br /> I asked AI what is the effect of Trump #47 on the climate? Ans. below:<br /> <br /> <br /> ''In his second term as the 47th President, Donald Trump has moved aggressively to reverse U.S. climate progress by prioritizing fossil fuel production and dismantling federal environmental oversight.<br /> <br /> ''Key effects on the climate and policy include:''<br /> <br /> ''Withdrawal from International Agreements: On January 27, 2026, the U.S. officially withdrew from the Paris Agreement for the second time. Additionally, the administration has announced departures from over 60 international bodies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).''<br /> <br /> ''Increased Carbon Emissions: Projections suggest that the administration's rollbacks could lead to an additional 4 billion metric tons of CO2-equivalent emissions by 2030 compared to previous trajectories.''<br /> <br /> ''Dismantling Regulatory Foundations: The EPA is currently working to repeal the 2009 Endangerment Finding, which is the legal basis for nearly all federal greenhouse gas regulations.''<br /> <br /> ''Expansion of Fossil Fuels: Under the mantra &quot;drill, baby, drill,&quot; the administration has fast-tracked deep-sea mining, reopened Alaskan refuges for oil development, and granted roughly $40 billion in new subsidies to the fossil fuel industry.''<br /> <br /> ''Stalling Clean Energy: Federal support for wind and solar has been slashed, including the elimination of the $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit and nearly $13 billion in green energy funding.''<br /> <br /> ''Information and Data Gaps: The administration has removed past National Climate Assessments from federal sites, deleted climate science webpages, and cut funding for climate research programs, creating significant gaps in global climate tracking.''<br /> <br /> ''While federal action has stalled, market forces and state-led initiatives — particularly in California and Texas — continue to drive some growth in renewable capacity despite federal headwinds.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Trump admin losses est 35B in clean energy projects - 2025.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Deep Losses in Clean-Renewable Production &amp; Competitiveness'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : US Policy Goes Retro with Fossil Fuels<br /> <br /> : * https://grist.org/politics/trump-2025-renewable-energy-investment-electric-vehicles/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tracking science policy across the Trump administration.png]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Tracking_science_policy_across_the_Trump_administration.png&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''January 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> January 7th, a Day to Remember ... <br /> <br /> This day in America delivered a deadly shooting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a death recorded live by a number of video recordings taken and distributed by citizens who observed the killing. Today is going to become etched in the memory of US history.<br /> <br /> The death, as witnessed by those who viewed and reviewed the video recordings, was tragic -- and much more...<br /> <br /> The lies told by government officials following the shooting of a woman in her car were painfully far from the facts and now remain another in a line of political lies that are spreading like a fire inflaming communities across the country.<br /> <br /> Today, it is again time to remember the warnings of Hannah Arendt.<br /> <br /> Take time to read her writing of lies, big lies, repeated lies -- and the threats and dangers they pose.<br /> <br /> These lies are, again, as history teaches, deliverers of dangerous times.<br /> <br /> Echoes from the propagandists that brought on World War II.<br /> <br /> Echoes of lies to recall...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''&quot;Truth and Politics&quot;'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Hannah Arendt<br /> <br /> 1967 in the New Yorker Magazine<br /> <br /> * https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/praxis1313/files/2018/08/Arendt_-Truth-and-Politics-LQ.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?search=hannah+arendt&amp;title=Special%3ASearch '''More from Hannah Arendt''']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[Earth Day]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;'''[[Earth Day Is Every Day]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :[[File:Earth-Day.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ==''Recent GreenPolicy360 Story Highlights''==<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> ''[[Green Stories of the Day - GreenPolicy360 Archive]]''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2025'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2025 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2025'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2025]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2024'''''&lt;/big&gt;'''''===<br /> <br /> [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2024 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2024'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2024]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2023'''''&lt;/big&gt;'''''===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2023 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2023'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2023]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2022'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2022 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2022'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2022]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2021'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2021 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2021'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2021]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2020'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2020 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2020'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2020]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2019'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2019 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2019'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2019]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2018'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2018 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2018'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2018]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2017'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2017 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2017'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2017]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2016'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2016 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2016'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2016]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2015'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2015 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2015'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2015]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2014'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2014 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2014'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2014]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2013'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2013 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2013'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2013]] <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:GP360_NewPages]]<br 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Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Green_Stories_of_the_Day&diff=138378 2026-10-10T01:52:08Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> __notoc__<br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&quot;Green Stories Changing Our World&quot;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''For the Young &amp; Old, Across Continents, Community-to-Community'''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt; ''@GreenPolicy360: An eOS Network with Hundreds of Millions of Views &amp; Shares''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Earth dynamic global map.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/1000hPa/orthographic &lt;big&gt;&lt;font color=green&gt;'''#PlanetCitizens360'''&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/big&gt;] <br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Planet Citizens]]''' <br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[The Commons]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[EarthPOV]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Earth Right Now]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Earth Science Vital Signs]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''GRN360: &quot;Vita Activa&quot;, Turning Visions into Reality'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Green_Networking &lt;big&gt;'''Green Networking, Green Best Practices'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Living Earth.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Planet Citizen Vision of Living Earth]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_Citizen_Vision_of_Living_Earth<br /> <br /> <br /> :✅ [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Plans_Enforcement_-_Resources '''The Climate Plans Enforcement Initiative''']<br /> <br /> :✅ [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenLinks '''GreenLinks: Global Green Networking with Web 3.0''']<br /> <br /> :✅ [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_Best_Practices '''Green Best Practices: Community-to-Community'''] <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Liberty Bell.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Photo by mbell1975&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''A Democratic Republic, a 'Great Experiment' in the United States'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> 🗒️ Ours is a democracy, a republic, a work-in-progress continuing to this day, a heritage worth protecting...<br /> <br /> <br /> As the 250th anniversary of the signing of the US Declaration of Independence approaches, we will celebrate an agenda of rights, inalienable rights, human rights, put forward with and embodied in a [https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/full-text '''founding US Constitution'''], [https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/bill-of-rights/what-does-it-say '''a Bill of Rights'''] and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_amendments_to_the_Constitution_of_the_United_States '''Constitutional Amendments'''] -- together a Constitutional government envisioning a living Democratic Republic. <br /> <br /> <br /> On July 2, 1776, the Second Continental Congress passed a “Resolution for Independence” declaring “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”<br /> The signing of the United States Declaration of Independence occurred primarily on August 2, 1776, at the Pennsylvania State House, later renamed Independence Hall, in Philadelphia. The 56 delegates to the Second Continental Congress represented the Thirteen Colonies, of which 12 voted to approve the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[In Defense of Democracy and Freedom]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;'''[[Democracy Quotes]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;[https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Democracy '''A 'Working Democracy' ''']&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;[https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Fact_Checking,_Facts_Count '''In Democracy, 'Facts Count' ''']&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Surviving Victory - Liberty at Risk.jpg]]<br /> <br /> 🌅 'Surviving Victory'&lt;big&gt;🔥&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/surviving-victory-from-the-archive/<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''October 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''US imposes sanctions on ICC after former ICC judge wins Nobel Peace Prize'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Beyond defense, as the US continues to move away from international support while advocating an era of 'America First' <br /> <br /> <br /> Oct 9 (Reuters) - US President Donald Trump's administration imposed sanctions on the ​International Criminal Court (ICC) on Friday, hours after one of its former judges won the Nobel Peace Prize, putting Washington on a diplomatic collision course with European allies.<br /> <br /> The court denounced the ‌move as an &quot;assault on the rule of law and on the very foundations of the international legal order,&quot; and called on its 125 member states to take action to defend it.<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/world/us-imposes-sanctions-international-criminal-court-hours-after-former-judge-wins-2026-10-09/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Announces Its 2026-2030 Strategic Plan'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : As with prior EPA plans, budgets, and proposed changes, a legislative and judicial reordering will follow<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;EPA's Fiscal Year (FY) 2026–2030 Strategic Plan&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2026-10/fy-2026-2030-epa-strategic-plan-final-for-publication-october-2026.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Thought for the Day&quot;<br /> <br /> October 1, 2026<br /> <br /> In a recent series of private meetings in San Francisco, after a tasting menu dinner, Anthropic consulted religious scholars to help instill morality into its A.I. models ... a case was being made that Claude could be or become conscious.<br /> <br /> What would it mean for humanity’s future if artificial intelligence systems possessed a consciousness that rivals our own?<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-morals-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FVE.kDTO.OTLs6iwx7swF&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''September 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Canada's Prime Minister Steps Onto the World Stage'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/mark-carney-talks-geopolitics/<br /> <br /> Strategic Demands: A extraordinary interview and timestamp documenting geopolitical realities faced by the Canadian Prime Minister. Here, we see the navigation skills required and demonstrated by an exceptionally trained and talented man who guides his ship of state through shifting winds… At StratDem we speak of the need for “Strategic Realism” in international relations, of security competition and values-based politics in foreign policy. Canada is fortunate, in our opinion, to have such a person at the helm of its representative democratic governance.<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Telling the Truth to the World'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Facts are key to understanding, and key to unlocking the truth<br /> <br /> : Any speech to a world audience, as at the United Nations, should be time for facts and truth<br /> <br /> <br /> The Fact Checking writer for CNN has no easy 'news beat' as he has to follow the U.S. president's pronouncements<br /> <br /> * https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/22/politics/fact-check-trump-united-nations<br /> <br /> By: Daniel Dale / CNN<br /> <br /> (Note: After a court decision, CNN was re-instituted w/ press credentials on Sept. 24)<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Fact check: Trump’s false claims to the United Nations'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> (Excerpt) <br /> <br /> Global warming<br /> <br /> Trump scoffed at dire warnings that artificial intelligence might eventually attack or kill people, claiming they are coming from “the very same people who said we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming, a name since reborn to climate change because the planet was cooling, not warming, and nobody was dead.”<br /> <br /> There are at least four things wrong with his sentence about global warming.<br /> <br /> First, the phrase “global warming” remains in widespread use even though the phrase “climate change” is also common; they mean different things. Climate scientists use both, often saying “global warming” when referring to the long-term trend of increasing global temperature and “climate change” when referring to the numerous effects the world is experiencing because of that trend. (NASA, part of the Trump-led federal government, [https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/faq/whats-the-difference-between-climate-change-and-global-warming/ explains] the difference between the terms on its website.) For example, a [https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_SYR_SPM.pdf 2023 report] from the UN’s climate change panel is titled “Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report,” but it says this: “Human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases, have unequivocally caused global warming, with global surface temperature reaching 1.1°C above 1850-1900 in 2011-2020.”<br /> <br /> Second, while Trump didn’t say what time period he was talking about, he didn’t acknowledge that the world has continued to get warmer, not cooler. The UN’s World Meteorological Organization [https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/wmo-confirms-2025-was-one-of-warmest-years-record reported] in January that “the past 11 years have been the 11 warmest on record,” with 2023, 2024 and 2025 the three very warmest — as NASA [https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5607/ also found] — though 2025 wasn’t as hot as 2024.<br /> <br /> Third, experts [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/opinion/environment/climate-change-death-toll.html widely disagree] that “nobody” has died from the various impacts of a warming world. It’s impossible to pinpoint a precise death number, but [https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2025/10/30/how-many-people-are-already-being-killed-by-climate-change some] [https://www.eenews.net/articles/people-are-dying-from-climate-change-but-how-many/ estimates] total in the millions. The deaths are likely to continue; the World Health Organization [https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-change-and-health says], “Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year, from under nutrition, malaria, diarrhea and heat stress alone.”<br /> <br /> Fourth, while somebody somewhere might have said that “we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming,” that [https://insideclimatenews.org/news/27082019/12-years-climate-change-explained-ipcc-science-solutions/ isn’t] how an expert report framed the issue.<br /> <br /> A widely discussed 2018 report from climate scientists said the world needed to sharply cut carbon emissions within the next 12 years to be on track to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels; scientists said above that threshold, the potential deadly impacts from climate change would be [https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/science/climate-issues/degrees-matter larger]. Though the 2018 report was often oversimplified by politicians, the expert claim was never that “we’ll all be dead in 12 years” — it was that significant action was needed within 12 years to improve the future. (The UN program [https://wedocs.unep.org/rest/api/core/bitstreams/9f6bd957-8d35-402d-bb4e-c7c17096e592/content reported] earlier this month that the world is set to exceed the 1.5-degree increase, “likely within the next few years&quot;.)<br /> <br /> <br /> More re: Facts and Fact Checking at GreenPolicy360:<br /> <br /> '''Facts Protecting Democracy'''<br /> <br /> At GreenPolicy360, our mission statement supports fact finding and the '3 Ds' -- Discussion ➡️ Debate ➡️ Decision-Making<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 continues a multi-year defense of facts, science, &amp; 'critical thinking skills'<br /> <br /> -- &quot;In Democracy, Facts Count&quot; <br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Fact_Checking<br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Fact_Checking,_Facts_Count<br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Disinformation_-_Online_-_Dangerous<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Taking Time to Take Another Look at the Deepening Costs of War'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 &amp; Strategic Demands<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/costsofwar/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Demanding 'New Definitions of National Security' '''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:New_Definitions_of_National_Security_-_2.png<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Strategic_Demands_of_the_21st_Century,_a_New_Vision_re_Surviving_Victory_conf.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Deep Costs of War StratDem.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Disinformation_-_Online_-_Dangerous<br /> <br /> <br /> A Faith-Announcement in Support of [[The Commons]]<br /> <br /> The Catholic Church continues forward with the message of [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Laudato_Si '''Laudato Si'''] (2015), the first papal encyclical to advance formal environmental protection doctrine. Pope Francis, who was named after St. Francis, the patron saint of the environment, acted to open new doors for theological and spiritual belief within the Catholic tradition. Now, Pope Leo follows on with more ''' 'On Caring for Our Common Home' '''...<br /> <br /> <br /> Challenges of 'ecological turning point'<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''International Theological Commission that calls Christians to view care for creation'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &quot;Caring for Our Common Home&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2026-09/ict-document-care-for-creation-ecology-theology-church-pope.html<br /> * https://www.osservatoreromano.va/en/news/2026-09/ing-009/a-fraternal-response-to-the-triune-god.html<br /> * https://www.americamagazine.org/news/2026/09/03/vatican-creation-sin/<br /> * https://www.thefloridacatholic.org/news/vatican/vatican-theological-commission-defines-sin-against-creation-and-the-creator-in-new-document/article_a6edad02-a5c2-482b-bf7f-fefcf1a8f3ed.html<br /> <br /> <br /> The Vatican has officially declared environmental destruction a ”sin against creation and the Creator” in a major new doctrinal text.<br /> <br /> The document, “Caring for Our Common Home – A Responsible and Fraternal Response to the Triune God,” was published Sept. 2 with the authorization of Pope Leo XIV, according to Vatican News. <br /> <br /> The 29,000-word document, titled '''Caring for Our Common Home''', elevates ecological concern from a merely political or scientific issue into a direct matter of personal faith. <br /> <br /> “Everything is interrelated” within “a single community of life,” according to Vatican News. The commission says this understanding calls Christians to practice gratitude toward God, mercy and solidarity toward others, and responsible care for the common home.<br /> <br /> Authorized under Pope Leo XIV, the text declares that destroying natural habitats, polluting, and exploiting resources are not just civic failures, but a 'sin against creation and against the Creator' that directly violates God's plan.<br /> <br /> This shift from Pope Francis' earlier concept of 'ecological sin' to a more explicit 'sin against the Creator' is designed to reshape how believers view their daily environmental impact. The Vatican emphasizes that failing to safeguard the planet severely harms the poorest populations and future generations, distorting the core relationships that define humanity. <br /> <br /> By placing ecological action squarely in the realm of moral responsibility, the Church is challenging millions of people to treat environmental care as a fundamental requirement of their faith.<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:St. Francis with birds listening.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Faith Traditions Are Growing in Their Calls for Eco-Stewardship'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''&quot;The World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation&quot;'''<br /> <br /> This day is bringing awareness and a call to action<br /> <br /> The spiritual and secular find common ground here in a protection of [[The Commons]]<br /> <br /> <br /> The Catholic Church observes September 1 as the [https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2026-06/vatican-theme-2026-world-day-of-prayer-for-the-care-of-creation.html '''&quot;World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation&quot;'''], a day dedicated to thanking God for the gift of creation and renewing the Church’s commitment to ecological stewardship.<br /> <br /> What the Day Is:<br /> <br /> An annual Catholic observance established by Pope Francis in 2015 as a concrete follow‑up to Laudato Si’.<br /> <br /> Shared with the Orthodox Church, which first designated September 1 as a creation‑focused '''&quot;Day of Prayers for Natural Environment&quot;''' in 1989.<br /> <br /> The opening of the global '''&quot;Season of Creation&quot;''', which runs from September 1 to October 4 (Feast of St. Francis of Assisi).<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:St Francis with the birds.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> Pope St. John Paul II in 1979 <br /> <br /> declared Francis the patron saint of ecology<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Visit Pope Francis' Eco-Encyclical [[Laudato Si]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> More: https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=File:St_Francis_with_the_birds.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://fosfanariou.gr/index.php/2026/08/30/patriarchal-message-for-the-beginning-of-the-ecclesiastical-year-and-the-solemn-day-of-prayers-for-natural-environment-2/ &quot;Solemn Day of Prayers for Natural Environment&quot;, Orthodox Catholic, September 1]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_denominations_by_number_of_members 'Christianity is the largest religious group in the world...]<br /> <br /> The largest denominations -- Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox -- have an estimated 2.3 to 2.6 billion adherents <br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 / On Earth...<br /> <br /> Religious traditions -- faith and spirituality as practiced -- have an intimate connection to life's protection, quality, and humanity's future<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''August 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> TicToc TicToc <br /> <br /> <br /> '''3, 2, 1''' ... '''Launch ... Go, Go, Go'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ⬆️ <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''NASA Goes Looking for Life in the Universe'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Nancy Grace Roman Is the Name of the (biggest- and best-ever) Telescope<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Astro 'Big Picture' Sites]]<br /> <br /> <br /> August 30, 2026<br /> <br /> News from the Florida East Coast<br /> <br /> [https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/30/science/nancy-grace-roman-space-telescope-launch (CNN)] A massive observatory that scientists have called a “discovery machine” has launched toward the cosmos, beginning a journey that could mark a significant shift in our understanding of the universe.<br /> <br /> Designed to seek out otherwise invisible and faint space objects, '''NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope''' lifted off aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket at 7:26 a.m. ET Sunday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The observatory reached orbit about 10 minutes later.<br /> <br /> <br /> (NYT) At a news conference on Saturday morning, Nicola Fox, the associate administrator of NASA’s science mission directorate, explained that Roman’s vast gaze would contribute to solving some of the grandest mysteries about our universe, including how it works, what it is made of and if we are alone out there.<br /> <br /> “To put it in perspective, it will be as if Hubble and James Webb kind of peered through a keyhole at the universe,” Dr. Fox said, referring to two other telescopes NASA has launched into space. “Well, Nancy Grace Roman will kick the door down.”<br /> <br /> <br /> (GRN360) Get ready for 'Exo's in Space' ... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet Exoplanets] ...... with discernible, measurable signs of extraterrestrial life&lt;big&gt;✨ ❇️ ✨&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> 'Up' there ⬆️<br /> <br /> As seen from 'down' here on our terrestrial Home Planet<br /> <br /> Go we go, we're looking 'around'. We're going Exploring ❇️<br /> <br /> <br /> NASA's Exoplanet Archive<br /> <br /> * https://science.nasa.gov/exoplanets/discoveries-dashboard/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> ⬇️<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Trump numbers continue downward.png]]<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Numbers Continue Trending Downward'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via the Washington Post<br /> <br /> August 24, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/08/24/trumps-attempts-intimidate-home-abroad-have-backfired/<br /> <br /> <br /> In the CNN Poll of Polls, 36 percent approved of (Trump's) job performance, while 63 percent disapproved. That’s far below the historical average for presidents. He is even more unpopular abroad — and international disapproval of the president has translated into disapproval of the country he leads. A [https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2026/06/23/trump-gets-negative-reviews-internationally-as-fewer-say-u-s-is-a-reliable-partner/ '''Pew Research Center poll of 36 countries'''], conducted earlier this summer, found that 76 percent of respondents had “no confidence” in Trump and 57 percent had an unfavorable opinion of the United States. In most of the countries Pew surveyed, people had a more positive impression of China than of the U.S.<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Today &amp; Tomorrow: A Couple Memories'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Today: A Green-Skinned Actress (a Famed Witch) who has the same name as a NASA Software-engineer (who wrote the essential code for the Apollo moon mission)<br /> <br /> <br /> SJS/GreenPolicy360 editor: <br /> <br /> A quick flight of the mind, as I received two online stories this morning -- one brought a memory of when I lived in New York City in the Gramercy Park neighborhood and regularly saw a distinguished looking older women walking her dogs around the park. She had a distinctive profile and one day I briefly talked to her. She said she was an actress, and that she still worked (this was in the mid-1970s) 'in the theater'. Her dogs were anxious to move on so we parted. Later, I learned from a neighbor that she was 'thee Margaret Hamilton.'<br /> <br /> Let's call her Margaret from the West (although here in NYC she lived in a building on the East)...<br /> <br /> [[File:Gramercy Park East.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Wicked Witch of the West.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> And as those of you who are familiar with the work of GreenPolicy360, you may remember we have focused our work over decades on what we call [[The Modern Environmental Movement]]. Your founder/siterunner was among those who were there alongside a [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr Congressman named George Brown], who put into development a first generation of Earth Science missions from space. The Apollo-NASA missions to the moon changed the way humanity saw ourselves, as [[Apollo 8]] sent home the first-ever full-color images of our living planet home. What some called a 'cognitive shift' occurred for many of us who were there as the image that became known as '[[Earthrise]]' appeared in the media, most prominently [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Earthrise_Life_Magazine_January_1969.png on the cover] of biggest magazine of the era.<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''“We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.&quot; – Astronaut Bill Anders, Aboard Apollo, December 24, 1968''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earthrise - NASA original Anders photo.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> What your editor carried away was inspiration... and today I am remembering one of the greats of the Apollo mission who made the flights and vision of planet Earth possible. Her name is Margaret Hamilton.<br /> <br /> She literally [https://www.softwareheritage.org/2019/07/20/archiving-and-referencing-the-apollo-source-code/ wrote the source code] that guided the missions to the moon, and her code (as I learned today) from the Apollo 8 'Earthrise' mission acted to make possible the correction of the Apollo 11 landing and return from the moon.<br /> <br /> <br /> _________________________________________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : August 17, 2026 - Happy 90th birthday to Margaret Hamilton -- the software engineer who wrote the computer code that saved the Apollo 11 moon landing and who, in the process, invented the discipline of software engineering itself! The system that kept that landing from being aborted began, improbably, with her 4-year-old daughter crashing a simulated moon mission.<br /> : Margaret Hamilton's daughter, Lauren, came along to the MIT lab on nights and weekends while her mother wrote the software that would fly astronauts to the moon. &quot;There wasn't a time when we weren't working,&quot; Hamilton said. Lauren liked to play astronaut, because she had watched her mother do it in simulations. One evening she started hitting keys, and the simulation began to run. Then she hit another, and everything fell apart -- she had selected a program meant to be run before launch, and the computer, which had almost no memory to spare, wiped the navigation data that was taking her to the moon.<br /> : Hamilton saw what it meant immediately. &quot;I thought: my God -- this could inadvertently happen in a real mission.&quot; She proposed a change to the software that would stop a prelaunch program from being selected in flight. Her superiors at MIT and NASA told her not to bother. The astronauts were too well trained to make a mistake like that.<br /> : On the very next mission, Apollo 8, an astronaut made exactly that mistake -- wiping the navigation data midway to the moon, just as Lauren had. Hamilton called it the Lauren bug. &quot;It created much havoc and required the mission to be reconfigured,&quot; she said. &quot;After that, they let me put the program change in, all right.&quot;<br /> <br /> :Hamilton was born in Paoli, Indiana, in 1936, earned a degree in mathematics with a minor in philosophy from Earlham College, and went to MIT in 1959 to support her family while her husband attended Harvard Law. She learned to program in the lab of Edward Lorenz, the meteorologist who would become the father of chaos theory, because there was nowhere else to learn it. &quot;Computer science and software engineering were not yet disciplines,&quot; she said. &quot;Instead, programmers learned on the job.&quot;<br /> :In 1964 her husband spotted a newspaper advertisement: the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory was looking for people to write the software to send a man to the moon. &quot;I was attracted both by the sheer idea and the fact that it had never been done before,&quot; Hamilton said. &quot;I was the first programmer to join and the first woman they hired.&quot;<br /> : She was gradually promoted until she was directing the team -- eventually about a hundred people -- that wrote the onboard flight software for both Apollo spacecraft. When she was given the job, one of the senior men told her he had no doubt she could do it but worried the men under her might rebel. &quot;Well,&quot; she said, &quot;they didn't.&quot;<br /> :Almost nobody thought the software mattered. It was not in the original schedule; it was not in the budget. &quot;Software during the early days of this project was treated like a stepchild,&quot; Hamilton later wrote, &quot;and it was regarded as an art and as magic, not a science.&quot; Out of what she called desperation, she started calling what she did software engineering -- a phrase invented to make a point.<br /> :&quot;It was out of desperation I came up with the term, to say: 'Hey, we're engineering too.' It was an ongoing joke for a long time.&quot; The joke ended in a meeting, when one of the laboratory's most respected hardware men stood up and said she was right.<br /> :Then came July 20, 1969. Three minutes above the Sea of Tranquility, with two men aboard a vehicle that had never landed anywhere, the Apollo Guidance Computer began throwing alarms -- 1202, then 1201, five of them in four minutes -- because a rendezvous radar switch had been left in the wrong position and the machine was drowning in work it had no time to finish. On virtually any other computer of that decade, this was the end of the story: a freeze, a crash, a mission aborted.<br /> :Hamilton stood watching in the monitoring room at MIT while her software did what she had built it to do, which was to decide what mattered. It recognized the overload, discarded the low-priority jobs, restarted itself in a controlled and orderly way, and held onto the tasks that were flying the spacecraft. &quot;It quickly became clear the software was not only informing everyone that there was a hardware-related problem,&quot; she said, &quot;but was compensating for it.&quot;<br /> :In Houston a 26-year-old guidance officer named Steve Bales had a few seconds to call an abort, and because the computer was visibly managing itself, he called go. Neil Armstrong flew Eagle past a field of boulders and set it down with about twenty-five seconds of fuel remaining.<br /> :&quot;If the computer hadn't recognized this problem and taken recovery action,&quot; Hamilton wrote two years afterward, &quot;I doubt if Apollo 11 would have been the successful moon landing it was.&quot;<br /> :There is a famous photograph of her from that summer, standing beside a stack of Apollo source-code listings taller than she is. :&quot;We got carried away and grabbed all the Apollo listings in my office and created the tower,&quot; she said. &quot;I was trying to find a way of keeping the stack up.&quot;<br /> :Hamilton's standards held. In all the crewed Apollo missions that followed, no software bug was ever known to have occurred.<br /> :Hamilton went unrecognized for decades. In 2016 President Barack Obama gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, calling her emblematic of &quot;that generation of unsung women who helped send humankind into space,&quot; and a year later she appeared, as a LEGO figurine. <br /> :Now ninety, Margaret Hamilton still argues that software should be designed at the start not to fail, rather than patched after it does ....<br /> <br /> :For young women who want to follow in her footsteps, she offers this advice: &quot;Don't let fear get in the way, and don't be afraid to say 'I don't know' or 'I don't understand' -- no question is a dumb question. And don't always listen to the so-called experts.&quot; :To introduce this inspiring trailblazer to kids, consider the picture book &quot;Margaret and the Moon&quot; for ages 5 to 9 at https://www.amightygirl.com/margaret-and-the-moon) and the children's biography &quot;Space Engineer and Scientist Margaret Hamilton&quot; for ages 7 to 10 at https://www.amightygirl.com/margaret-hamilton<br /> :She is also featured in an activity book about pioneering women in technology, which includes a variety of hands-on STEM projects: &quot;Gutsy Girls Go for Science: Programmers&quot; for ages 8 to 11 at https://www.amightygirl.com/gutsy-girls-programmers<br /> <br /> :For adult readers who want the wider story of the women who put Americans in space, &quot;Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars&quot; tells of the mathematicians recruited by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in the 1940s and 50s at https://www.amightygirl.com/rise-of-the-rocket-girls <br /> <br /> <br /> _________________________________________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> So, in memory of two classic, talented, game-changing, creative women -- <br /> <br /> Here's a deep bow and a flourishing wave of our green cap. <br /> <br /> We remember you !!<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Fact_Checking Facts Count]<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Are AI companies scanning and destroying millions of books, including rare titles?'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> Via Snopes.com<br /> <br /> Artificial intelligence companies are scanning millions of books, some of which are rare, and destroying them.<br /> <br /> * https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ai-companies-destroying-rare-books/<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''July 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:A Quokka, which one.jpg]]<br /> <br /> A Human &amp; Quokka Species, on Behalf of All Species <br /> <br /> : Historic, Country-wide Wild Fires Threaten Australia<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''PyroCbs, &quot;Fire Clouds&quot;'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''France / Spain ... &quot;Unprecedented&quot; ... &quot;Extreme Weather&quot;'''<br /> <br /> [https://apnews.com/article/europe-wildfires-france-spain-93678a31ff53fc46564b6dfd9934eae1 250,000 Evacuated]<br /> <br /> Via NYT<br /> <br /> As the hot air rises, it expands and cools, causing its moisture to condense. The water vapor and ash particles combine to form a gray or brown cloud that can then develop into a pyrocumulonimbus (pyro means “fire” in Greek) storm cloud.<br /> <br /> They produce lightning and burning embers that can spark more fires, and they generate high and unpredictable winds that fan the flames and spread the embers.<br /> <br /> In the Gironde region, 103,000 acres have burned, according to officials, and 220,000 people have been asked to evacuate from Gironde and the neighboring Landes region.<br /> <br /> The pyrocumulonimbus phenomenon presents extreme challenges for firefighters.<br /> <br /> “These fire-generated clouds are linked to extreme fire behavior that impedes firefighting efforts and can devastate communities,” according to NASA, which emphasized the need to better understand the clouds “given the ongoing and projected increases in fire activity and severity.”<br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://espo.nasa.gov/inspyre<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Elon Musk Opens Up in an Interview'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Economist Editor Presses the Controversial 'Trillionaire'<br /> <br /> :: Elon Musk's 'Vision of the Future'<br /> <br /> * https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/23/elon-musks-vision-of-the-future<br /> <br /> <br /> “People don’t realise that what I’m saying will come to pass,” he tells The Economist in a 90-minute interview held at a giant Tesla factory in Texas where electric cars drive themselves off the assembly line. That may be because his future-gazing ranges from the unsettling to the downright weird. <br /> <br /> Mr. Musk predicts that, within five years, artificial-intelligence systems may surpass the sum of all human intelligence. Within ten years, robots in the workplace will help usher in an era of such “amazing abundance” that money will become meaningless....<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-killer-robots-ai-abundance-progress-unstoppable-2026-7<br /> <br /> <br /> Musk proposes peer review for frontier AI models in Economist interview<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/musk-proposes-peer-review-frontier-ai-models-economist-interview-2026-07-23/<br /> <br /> <br /> Musk says he got ‘carried away’ with Trump – but still holds on to contentious political views<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/23/elon-musk-regret-trump-doge-ai<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Mix of Comments:<br /> <br /> * https://beincrypto.com/elon-musk-real-force-european-politics/<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/07/24/elon-musk-speaks-to-the-economist-editor-in-chief-zanny-minton-beddoes-on-the-key-takeaways.html<br /> * https://futurism.com/elon-musk-interviewer-npc<br /> * https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-economist-interview-2000790016<br /> * https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/nonsense-elon-musk-lashes-out-in-fiery-interview-after-hes-accused-of-supporting-the-far-right/<br /> * https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2026/07/23/musk_admonishes_the_economist_editor_what_is_far_right_about_having_secure_borders_safe_cities_and_sensible_spending.html<br /> * https://zeteo.com/p/top-economist-trump-musk-starmer<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:ECO.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Big Picture'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> Humanity Looks up to the Heavens, [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:ECO.png 'Inspired' by the Stars]<br /> <br /> : Earth Art &amp; Heliophysics, An Art Project 50 Years in the Making Opens Up<br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Charles Ross, Star Axis in New Mexico.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> July 21, 2026<br /> <br /> U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations<br /> <br /> The Topic -- Supplemental Federal Aid<br /> <br /> The Question -- Why More Government Funding for the Military, and Agriculture Producers, is urgently needed<br /> <br /> The Secretary of War explains that $1.5 trillion in needed in the next budget year, a 'generational' budget, one year increase request of over $500 billion... and tens of billion more are needed immediately for war fighting, training, munitions...<br /> <br /> Then ... on July 21st, with minimal media coverage, the following is put into the record -- to explain why billions more than a half trillion more, are needed for farmers and agriculture.<br /> <br /> <br /> ''“For many agricultural producers, 2025 was a year in which the cost of growing their crop at times exceeded what they could earn from selling it. Severe weather compounded these losses... producers had to contend with a combination of challenging market conditions.&quot;<br /> <br /> ''“... We will hear a great deal today about how declining commodity prices, rising input costs, labor shortages, trade disruptions, pests and disease, and increasingly volatile weather are squeezing farmers’ already thin margins.''<br /> <br /> ''“Nationwide, we have lost nearly 200,000 farms in the last decade.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> Let's parse this list of what 'we will hear'... the causes are what we will focus on here.<br /> <br /> The choice of going to war, and resulting increases in oil/gas prices, the resulting prices of fertilizer spiking, the boycotts and tariffs of U.S. farm products resulting from boycotts and tariffs in international markets (Trade War consequences of U.S. policies), the reasons for 'labor shortages' in the U.S. agriculture industry, and increases in extreme weather events and damages... <br /> <br /> These consequential facts seem to be set aside, ignored, and not explored by committee hearing speakers and the majority party running the hearing (the Chair is a Senator from Maine and is running for re-election).<br /> <br /> Look more closely at the [https://strategicdemands.com/costsofwar/ 'Deep Costs, Costs of War'] that the people of the U.S., and many others, are paying.<br /> <br /> It is time for new policies, facts, costs of failed policies, and more realistic debate and discussion...<br /> <br /> Enough said...<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> July 16, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[Fact Checking, Facts Count]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Consider the Facts, Pay Attention to the Reality<br /> <br /> As an audience listens in while an American president talks, we, at GreenPolicy, have a bottom line request -- our bottom line is '''Facts Count'''<br /> <br /> Go with the Reality, not the Marketing<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Attribution of Extreme Weather and Climate Events and Their Impacts'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * This 2026 National Academies of Science Study and Report Will Have Consequences<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We are reminded of the mid-1970s National Academies of Sciences Study and Report that led to Congressional Hearings and the First US National Climate Act Program. We watched as Representative George E. Brown - (D) Los Angeles pushed for the scientific research and moved to hearings and legislation.<br /> <br /> The era of modern climate science moved forward with lasting contributions ...<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/climate/national-academies-extreme-weather-attribution.html?unlocked_article_code=1.yFA.38oJ.3B0p4MCCutBL&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> * https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/28590/chapter/1<br /> <br /> <br /> Read about the foundational 1970s National Climate science report, hearings, and legislation here -- <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr#/media/File%3ANational_Climate_Program_Act_Hearings_May_1976.jpg<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr#/media/File%3AUS_Public_Law_95-367.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr#/media/File%3APublic_Law_95-367%2C_1978.jpeg<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Congressman george.e.brown.gif]]<br /> <br /> Rep. George E Brown<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Generation Green]] [[Going Green]]'''<br /> <br /> '''[[The Modern Environmental Movement]]'''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360: Our Outlook, Perspective and Work is Local/National/Global, Individual and Community-to-Community'''<br /> <br /> : '''[[Green Best Practices]]'''<br /> <br /> : [[File:Climate First Bank Florida.png]]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Climate_First_Bank_Florida.png<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''An Interview with Bill McKibben'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> The Very Good and Very Bad News on Climate<br /> <br /> July 10, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-bill-mckibben.html?unlocked_article_code=1.wlA.b4se.muIpmtiO6j6_&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> Here’s the good news: Green energy is getting better and cheaper, faster than we had ever dared hope.<br /> <br /> This next sentence was unimaginable even a few years ago: In April, the energy think tank Ember found that all of the new electricity demand around the world in 2025 was met with green power. That is wild.<br /> <br /> But here is the bad news: Climate change is accelerating. We’re discovering new ways that the climate system is more fragile, more sensitive to emissions, than we previously had thought.<br /> <br /> We have not been talking that much about climate change lately, but that doesn’t mean it has stopped happening. Europe is in the midst of an extraordinary heat wave. The world is staring down the barrel of a powerful El Niño.<br /> <br /> And climate politics is in almost total disarray. Donald Trump has gutted the Inflation Reduction Act. His administration is accelerating fossil fuel production and kneecapping green energy.<br /> <br /> <br /> But here’s the possibility, a bit of optimism: The advances in green technology make a new climate politics possible — one that doesn’t just talk about sacrifice and disaster prevention but presents decarbonization and green energy as a way station on the path to somewhere better.<br /> <br /> Clean energy abundance, a new form of energetic wealth, the possibility of the left actually offering a future of more and better — not less and worse — was a hard case to make even a few years ago. But now we cannot only imagine it, we can see it, touch it, live in it. It is here.<br /> <br /> So how do we talk about it? How do we make it happen?<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-bill-mckibben.html?unlocked_article_code=1.wlA.b4se.muIpmtiO6j6_&amp;smid=em-share '''Read the McKibben Interview Here for more:''']<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Even better than the E.V. is the e-bike, which I think may turn out to be the transformative invention of our time on Earth.&quot; -- Bill McKibben<br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-bill-mckibben.html?unlocked_article_code=1.wlA.b4se.muIpmtiO6j6_&amp;smid=em-share '''Click Here for more about Bill McKibben at GreenPolicy360'''] <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:America250 logo.svg.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/In_Defense_of_Democracy_and_Freedom<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Democracy_Quotes<br /> <br /> <br /> We recall a quote of Benjamin Franklin responding to a question in 1787 about the newly announced birth of the US as he left Independence Hall after the Constitutional Convention:<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''We have &quot;a Republic, if you can keep it.&quot;'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Today's generation, and future generations, would be wise to remember Franklin's words of warning.'''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> '''July 4th, 1776'''<br /> <br /> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness...<br /> <br /> * https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''June 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''June 30, 2026'''<br /> <br /> <br /> NATIONAL REPUBLICAN SENATORIAL COMMITTEE ET AL. v. FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION ET AL.<br /> <br /> * https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-621_h315.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Millionaires &amp; Billionaires Applaud'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : U.S. Supreme Court Increases Influence of '''[[Money in Politics]]'''<br /> <br /> :: New SCOTUS Ruling Memorializes 'Pay to Play' Transactional Politics<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360's associate [http://www.politicopay.com '''PoliticoPay.com'''], has been tracking the escalating money in politics trend for years.<br /> <br /> We have warned of the consequences of profligate spending on politicians and campaigns. These warnings have become a reality -- and further challenge to good government. <br /> <br /> * https://politicopay.com/buckley-valeo-a-mega-money-future<br /> <br /> * https://politicopay.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''NPR re: Decision No. 24–621'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''(The Supreme Court) decision means that parties get the best of both worlds. They can both coordinate with candidates and raise unlimited funds.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''At issue in the case was a post-Watergate law that Congress passed to limit the amount of money individuals can give to political parties. The law, the Federal Election Campaign Act, also limited how much money political parties can spend on their candidates. Other types of organizations, like political action committees and Super PACs, have no limits on the amount of money they can raise and spend on elections...''<br /> <br /> ''Republicans, including Vice President Vance and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, challenged the law as an unconstitutional violation of political parties' First Amendment right to raise and spend money on their candidates.''<br /> <br /> ''Backed by the Trump Justice Department, they contended that the only justification for imposing a fundraising limit on parties is to prevent corruption, but they maintained that there is no evidence that the law has prevented corruption.''<br /> <br /> This decision overturns a 2001 Supreme Court case that declared the limits on party spending to be constitutional. It's the latest in a series of rulings since then that have unraveled campaign finance regulations.<br /> <br /> ''The saga began in 2010, when the court ruled in Citizens United that corporations have a First Amendment right to unlimited spending on elections...''<br /> <br /> * https://www.npr.org/2026/06/30/nx-s1-5827039/supreme-court-campaign-finance<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Speaking of the Influence of Big Money on Consequential Political Decisions'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Michael Mann's new book, Coming Back to Earth.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Michael Mann has news of science, politics, and life impacting policies --''' <br /> <br /> A new book on the state of climate science and politics is in the works with Michael Mann @ Public Affairs...<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 especially appreciates the publication notice:<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Coming Back to Earth'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Providing grounded, evidence-based reasons to be optimistic about our ability to confront climate change.'''<br /> <br /> <br /> We're reminded of his most recent book 'The New Climate War', which he inscribed for GreenPolicy360. <br /> <br /> '''Thanks Michael, Onward we go !'''<br /> <br /> <br /> and as we say here at the top of each online page as our site and green network is being read by millions around the Earth...<br /> <br /> '''Each of us can make a positive difference by stepping up &amp; doing our best'''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Generation Green]] | [[Planet Citizens]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''' &quot;We have to identify the problem, then act in many ways to solve the problem. Global warming is the threat of our times.&quot;''' &lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;-- [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Governor_Jerry_Brown '''Jerry Brown, California Governor''']&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''' &quot;We’re going to need to use every tool in the toolbox if we’re going to solve this problem.&quot; '''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;-- [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Michael_E_Mann_--_act_with_hope_not_fear.jpg '''Michael E. Mann''']&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Consequences of Another War in the Middle East'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> : Deep Costs to the U.S. and Its Future -- Come into View<br /> <br /> :: U.S. Allies Suffer with Shifts in Global Economics -- the Mid East Continues in Crisis<br /> <br /> <br /> '''With the deepening costs of oil/gas wars adding trillions to expanding U.S. debt -- with a multi-trillion dollars Iraq war, Afghanistan war, and ongoing Israel/Syria/Lebanon/Palestine-Gaza conflicts -- we witness decades of failed policy and generational roll over... The national/international costs and changes brought on by the U.S./Iran war, with its severe global energy disruptions, begin to come into a wider global view ...'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/business/energy-environment/china-energy-battery-grid.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qlA.iKfE.kO9ONgn1Q7pG&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:US_Reliability_Falls_in_Europe.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Visit GreenPolicy360's Associate, Strategic Demands, for Continued Perspective on the Middle East Wars and the Far-Reaching Consequences and Damaged U.S. Relations'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''June 14, 2026'''<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/costsofwar/<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/business/energy-environment/china-energy-battery-grid.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qlA.iKfE.kO9ONgn1Q7pG&amp;smid=url-share '''China benefits as Petrol Politics of Oil/Gas and Mideast Wars push alternative energy sources''']<br /> <br /> [[File:China electrostate benefits from efx of Mideast war.png|link=https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/business/energy-environment/china-energy-battery-grid.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qlA.iKfE.kO9ONgn1Q7pG&amp;smid=url-share]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''China's electrostate is poised to win from war in the Middle East'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/business/energy-environment/china-energy-battery-grid.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qlA.iKfE.kO9ONgn1Q7pG&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> More on [https://strategicdemands.com/new-definitions-of-security/ 'new definitions of national/global security']<br /> <br /> ''In April, wind and solar generated more electricity globally than gas for the first time.''<br /> <br /> <br /> Scan the energy production data<br /> <br /> * https://ember-energy.org/<br /> <br /> <br /> Data into action<br /> <br /> Open data and intelligent policy analysis to unlock a clean, electrified energy future<br /> <br /> <br /> Spring 2026<br /> <br /> '''&quot;And then came Hormuz&quot; ... Iran war analysis via Ember<br /> <br /> :If the defining economic story of the century is the rise of Asia, the defining energy story is the rise of electricity. The two are usually told apart. This report argues they are one: Asia’s rise is electric, and the electric age hastens Asia’s rise.<br /> <br /> :Electricity has been the century’s fastest-growing energy carrier, overtaking oil in 2007 as the leading supplier of useful energy worldwide. Over the same years, Asia has been the fastest-growing region. In 2016, China passed the United States in purchasing-power terms, and South and Southeast Asia together passed the European Union in 2021. Two features bind these stories together.<br /> <br /> :The first is that Asia is taking an electric path. Since the turn of the century, Asia has driven three quarters of the growth in global electricity. In the West, GDP and electricity demand decoupled long ago; in Asia, they rise in lock-step. Asia has achieved greater electrification at lower incomes per capita. No growth in history has been this electric.<br /> <br /> :The second runs deeper. It is a change in what energy is. Coal, oil and gas are commodities, dug from the ground. Solar panels, batteries and wind turbines are technologies, built on a production line. The energy revolution is the shift from extraction to manufacturing.<br /> <br /> <br /> :Enter Asia – the world’s factory. Asia builds most of the world’s solar panels, batteries, power electronics, electric motors and cars. Its strengths fit the new energy system.<br /> <br /> :Such a shift carries historical weight. After 1800 the West pulled ahead of Asia, a parting of fortunes known as the Great Divergence. Energy sat at the core of this divergence: first coal, then oil, and the engines built to burn them. These innovations favoured Western strengths and underwrote two centuries of wealth and power.<br /> <br /> :The Great Convergence – the East closing in on the West – also has an energy story, and it runs the other way. The new vector is electricity, and the electro-technologies that run on it. The new centre is Asia. Its lack of oil and gas was a weakness in a fossil world. It is a blessing in an electric one.<br /> <br /> :China is, of course, the giant. But change is radiating outwards. From Vietnam to Bangladesh, electrification rates are higher than in Europe or the United States. From Pakistan to Japan, solar’s share of power beats the US. From Thailand to Nepal and Indonesia to Singapore, EV uptake is ahead. Strip China out, and the rest of Asia still outbuilds the world in solar modules and battery components.<br /> <br /> :For years the economics of electrotech have been improving rapidly. A decade ago, solar began to beat coal, and electric cars beat petrol over their lifetimes, once fuel was counted. Today solar and EVs are cheaper to buy outright, even before the fuel savings. For economies short of capital, the door is now open to rapid change.<br /> <br /> :Then came Hormuz: the closure of Asia’s petrol station. The region buys nearly half of its oil from the Gulf, a deeper reliance than Europe had on Russia. It is the second blow in four years. The first came in 2022, when Russia cut off Europe, and Europe outbid Asia for gas, pricing out poorer countries. If electrotech is the pull of opportunity, the twin fossil shock is the push of necessity.<br /> <br /> :Economics, security and industrial opportunity now all point in the same direction. Asia holds half the world’s people and 4% of its oil and gas, but three quarters of the electrotech factories that can replace the fuel it lacks. <br /> <br /> : The Great Divergence was powered by the energy the West mastered. The Great Convergence runs on the energy that Asia manufactures. If this is to be the Asian century, its path will be electric.<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Electric Asia'''<br /> <br /> * How Asia is leading the electric age, powering its rise and reshaping the global order<br /> <br /> <br /> '''“What was five years ago maybe barely competitive, now is almost already clearly cheaper...”'''<br /> <br /> '''&quot;Investments in renewables have become a better bet, promising returns in closer to two years instead of 30.&quot;'''<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: The shift globally to renewable energy comes against a backdrop of historic policy decisions in the two terms of the Trump administration, a government-wide retreat away from renewable energy. The Trump 'retro-vision' that touts fossil fuels and denigrates renewables is, in fact, setting back U.S. competitiveness in meeting new demands for electrification across industrial sectors.<br /> <br /> As the economies of the world move forward, in transportation (EVs, e-motorcycles, e-bikes... e-buses, e-trucks, city e-grids with light rail, and soon aerial copters and planes, boats and ships, and e-power tools, e-tractors, e-smart homes and battery technologies (powering grids, cities, factories, consumer products), and e-robots and a gamut of AI technologies .... and on and on, the retro-actions of the Trump period are delivering a backward-looking blow to U.S. competitiveness that will have decades-long consequences.<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''June 7, 2026'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''As the War with Iran Reaches Day 100'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : And War in Ukraine Continues to Flare<br /> <br /> :: And War in Lebanon Expands<br /> <br /> :: And War in the Middle East Seems Endless<br /> <br /> ::: With Escalations, Reverberations, Proliferation of 'WMDs', and Incalculable Worldwide Costs <br /> <br /> We listen in and watch as the issues and questions roil across an informed and hard discussion between voices 'in the know' ...<br /> <br /> * https://substack.com/home/post/p-201011581<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''June 4'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''PREMIERE of a New Documentary Film about the Threat of Nuclear Weapons'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''In this 29-minute documentary, renowned whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg provides a powerful wakeup call about the global threat posed by nuclear weapons and advocates how we can dramatically reduce the real and present danger of nuclear annihilation.'' <br /> <br /> ''Before he released the top secret Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, Ellsberg was a nuclear war planner with access to classified information on U.S. nuclear strategy.''<br /> <br /> <br /> Wikipedia Bio / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Filmed one year before his death at age 92, Ellsberg speaks with clarity and urgency about the dangers we face, noting, &quot;I’ve long said that to my last breath I will be doing what I can to postpone and avert the risk of nuclear war.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''With ongoing conflicts heightening nuclear tensions, and with the recent end of the New START treaty potentially triggering a renewed arms race, &quot;An Ordinary Insanity&quot; is a timely film to help mobilize broad public concern and action for arms control and nuclear disarmament.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360 &amp; Strategic Demands''':<br /> <br /> A message from beyond, words of warning from an old friend of ours, Dan Ellsberg.<br /> <br /> Listen in to words of wisdom, even as a US president postures to be anti-nuke, and proposes nuclear weapons funding at all time highs...<br /> <br /> In fact, nuclear funding and Trump administration nuclear weapons development and 'usable' delivery platforms have spurred an out of control Nuclear Arms Race between the US, Russia and now China<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> “We’re continuing year-by-year deliberately with a posture and a policy and threats that make a significant risk of near extinction possible.” <br /> <br /> — DANIEL ELLSBERG in &quot;An Ordinary Insanity&quot; <br /> <br /> * https://www.anordinaryinsanity.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''More about Dan Ellsberg''' [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?search=dan+ellsberg&amp;title=Special%3ASearch&amp;profile=advanced&amp;fulltext=1&amp;ns0=1&amp;ns6=1&amp;ns14=1 @ '''GreenPolicy360'''] &amp; [https://strategicdemands.com/?s=dan+ellsberg @ '''Strategic Demands''']<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Nuclear_Weapons<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/nuclear-arms-race-3-0/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Truth and Consequence - Dan Ellsberg.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''May 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''David Attenborough Turns 100 Years Old'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/arts/television/david-attenborough-100-birthday.html?unlocked_article_code=1.hFA.HXVb.qSlnB3rq8Hbe&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> ''&quot;The next few decades represent a final opportunity to build a stable home for ourselves and restore the rich, healthy and wonderful world that we inherited from our distant ancestors. Our future on the planet, the only place as far as we know where life of any kind exists, is at stake.” -- David Attenborough, &quot;A Life on Our Planet&quot;, 2020<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We agree with David, we very deeply agree...<br /> <br /> And to Leo DiCaprio, a fellow [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Bioneers '''Bioneer'''], we agree too. David is a protector and close up story teller of the natural world who is a unique and valued voice whose wisdom will remain for years, and years and years...<br /> <br /> * https://deadline.com/2026/05/leonardo-dicaprio-david-attenborough-tribute-100th-birthday-1236888075/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Lee Zeldin E&amp;E News.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Photo by E&amp;E News&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin this past week defended deep budget cuts proposed by President Donald Trump'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Zeldin appeared at a trio of congressional hearings, dueling with House members and senators over the administration’s plan to reduce EPA’s annual funding to $4.2 billion in fiscal 2027 — or more than half of the agency’s enacted spending'' (E&amp;E)<br /> <br /> <br /> Green Policy: Lee Zeldin is Donald Trump's zealous attorney/administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. (We note he is also being discussed in the news as a leading candidate for the next US Attorney General). Zeldin for now is showing himself as a man with a cause. The cause he is pursuing, as he wields expanded administrative power, is dismantling and defunding the agency charged with protecting the environment, as the EPA's title straightforwardly declares. <br /> <br /> Since the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Environmental_Protection_Agency '''Environmental Protection Agency establishment in 1970'''], the EPA has followed its mission over decades. Congress after Congress envisioned, developed, and approved its work. Popular support was nationwide. Memorable achievements followed. We won't go into the long list of health-protections and science that EPA has given the nation and its communities, the air-quality, water-quality, health- and living-quality advances are there to see and experience.<br /> <br /> In Lee Zeldin's short time in office, however, the record of achievements is not seen as achievements to be built on... Zeldin has instead turned the valued agency into a storm of firings, cuts, closing of departments, ending research, terminating projects, eliminating oversight programs, announcing the EPA is no longer in the business of doing the people's work of enforcing the statutory mandates and directions of the US Congress.<br /> <br /> When asked under what authority he is dismantling the EPA, he answers with authoritative assurance -- that of the Supreme Court's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_questions_doctrine?wprov=sfti1 ''''Major Questions Doctrine''''] and the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loper_Bright_Enterprises_v._Raimondo '''Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo'''] decision.<br /> <br /> Zeldin and the current administration go on to explain they have 'different' policy priorities' that allow them to cut, cut, cut the EPA, turning it into a shell of what it was -- and away from Congressional votes, decisions and budgets since the 1970s intended to support viable, effective environmental protection. <br /> <br /> Yet, a remade Supreme Court has now enabled a dramatic and demanding new level of explicit text in Statutory law. The Court's novel doctrine of 'Major Questions' and the Loper Bright decision that Lee Zeldin wave as he orders dismantling is the order coming from the president. Given on the ground, deep and popular support, Zeldin's orders won't stand the test of time.<br /> <br /> Congressional staffs will bring in experts and act to redraft the letter of the law. Future administrations will support will act to pass legally specific text across most all environmental laws that are being summarily dismissed by Lee Zeldin, Esq.<br /> <br /> What Zeldin seems to forget, as he flaunts the Scotus recent turn, is that the clock is ticking, the people see and learn what is needed and what to do to deliver the kind of government they are demanding.<br /> <br /> Top of list -- quality of life. This includes protection against toxics and pollution. Moving toward a goal of clean, breathable air, drinkable water, and sustainable, enjoyable, healthy communities, towns and cities. <br /> <br /> We understand the need for the EPA's work. Most everyone does.<br /> <br /> When Lee Zeldin goes away, within a brief time a renewed Environmental Protection Agency with new Presidential executive orders and Congressional support will be the order of the day. <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''April 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Remade Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS) Remakes Civil Rights &amp; the Voting Rights Act'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : SCOTUS Voting Act Decision Acts to Reshape the 2026 Mid-term Congressional Election <br /> <br /> :: Partisan Reconfiguration of Congressional Districts Goes into Overdrive<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Voting Rights and Control of Congress'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Media news headlines from across the US deliver Temper of the Times <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-voting-rights-act-louisiana-alabama-4e3225083caccda5ec73a98533a79add '''Supreme Court hollows out a landmark law that had protected minority voting rights for 6 decades'''] '''Associated Press / April 30, 2026'''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act--.png]] 🏛️[[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-01.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-02.png]] 🏛️ [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-03.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-04.png]] 🏛️ [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-05.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-.png]] 🏛️ [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-07.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-08.png]] 🏛️ [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-09.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Memorable Words from the British King Addressing a Joint Session of the US Congress'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Charles navigates fraught politics with reminders of the Magna Carta of 1215, citizen rights, and calling for today's democratic governments to have high purpose<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''&quot;[O]ur generation must decide how to address the collapse of critical natural systems, which threatens far more than the harmony and essential diversity of Nature.”'''''<br /> <br /> '''''&quot;Reflect on our shared responsibility to safeguard Nature, our most precious and irreplaceable asset.&quot;''''' ...<br /> <br /> <br /> The modern representative of the UK went on to speak of the British Enlightenment, and the rights and duties of today's democratic governments.<br /> <br /> <br /> ''“We do not embark on these remarkable endeavours together out of sentiment, we do so because they build greater shared resilience for the future, so making our citizens safer for generations to come.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''“Our common ideals were not only crucial for liberty and equality, they are also the foundation of our shared prosperity. The Rule of Law: the certainty of stable and accessible rules, an independent judiciary resolving disputes and delivering impartial justice.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> ... ''&quot;It is here in these very halls that this spirit of liberty and the promise of America’s Founders is present in every session and every vote cast” ... political debate enriched “by the deliberation of many, representing the living mosaic of the United States. In both of our countries it is the very fact of our vibrant, diverse and free societies that gives us our collective strength.”''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;The essence of our two Nations is a generosity of spirit and a duty to foster compassion, to promote peace, to deepen mutual understanding and to value all people, of all faiths, and of none.”''<br /> <br /> -- King Charles III, April 28, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;''''Earth Day', April 22, 1970, Carries On &amp; On'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''April 22, 2026 🧤 Teach-In Memory Time'''<br /> <br /> <br /> At GreenPolicy360 we tell of 'being there' and being directly involved in the envisioning and planning of a first Earth Day <br /> <br /> Tip of our Green Hat to Representative George E. Brown<br /> <br /> <br /> Personal recollection -- <br /> <br /> <br /> A Story of 'Earthrise' to 'Earth Day' and Far Beyond....<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Day_Memories_on_the_50th_Anniversary<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;[[Earth Day]]&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''[[Earth Day Is Every Day]]'''<br /> <br /> :* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Earth_Day<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth-Day.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Every Day Is Earth Day.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Above Our Living Earth.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :🌎<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> : [[File:Earthrise to Earthset.png]]<br /> <br /> :: &lt;small&gt;Round &amp; Round We Go ....&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Day &lt;big&gt;''''Earthrise' to a First 'Earth Day' '''&lt;/big&gt;] ... [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Earth_in_Human_Hands.jpg &lt;big&gt;'''Now Earth Is in Your Hands'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''Earthrise', December 24, 1968 to 'Earthset', April 6, 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Earthrise<br /> * https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/earthset/<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;'''[[The Modern Environmental Movement]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Apollo.jpg]]<br /> <br /> : &lt;small&gt;NASA / December 1968&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?search=earthrise&amp;title=Special%3ASearch&amp;profile=advanced&amp;fulltext=1&amp;ns0=1 '''Earthrise Thoughts at GreenPolicy360''']<br /> <br /> <br /> : '''A half century on, fifty years after Apollo 8, humanity again visits the Moon and looks back at Planet Earth'''<br /> <br /> <br /> :[https://greenpolicy360.net/images/Moon_and_Earth_from_Artemis%2C_April_2026.jpg '''Reflection on the experience of watching the Earth set over the Moon, via Astronaut Reid Wiseman''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earthset.png]]<br /> <br /> :: &lt;small&gt;NASA / April 2026&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Artemis II, Journey from Earth to the Moon'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nasa.gov/gallery/journey-to-the-moon/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Artemis looking at Earth home.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth from Artemis II.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;NASA&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''March 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Another War'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> As the US and Israel launch war with Iran, the following words hover front of mind. <br /> <br /> “People predicting disaster: The odds are in your favor, but you cannot be sure, and you should not hope to be right. People celebrating: Maybe wanna wait a bit. The odds, historically, are definitely not on your side. Anyone certain they know what happens next is making it up.” -- Tom Nichols <br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;The world needs to renew a focus on human rights with quality of life high on every nation's agenda.&quot; -- GreenPolicy360<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''February 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> February 18, 2026<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Environmental Groups Sue Trump’s EPA Rollback of Climate Science Finding'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via The Guardian <br /> <br /> More than a dozen health and environmental justice non-profits have sued the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over its revocation of the legal determination that underpins US federal climate regulations.<br /> <br /> ''Filed in Washington DC circuit court, the lawsuit challenges the EPA’s rollback of the “endangerment finding”, which states that the buildup of heat-trapping pollution in the atmosphere endangers public health and welfare and has allowed the EPA to limit those emissions from vehicles, power plants and other industrial sources since 2009. The rollback was widely seen as a major setback to US efforts to combat the climate crisis.''<br /> <br /> ''The suit was brought by the American Public Health Association, the American Lung Association, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club and 11 other public health and environmental organizations. The lawsuit was filed by green legal organizations Clean Air Task Force and Earthjustice and it names the EPA and the agency’s administrator, Lee Zeldin, as defendants...''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Trump, Rejecting Science and Climate Change - Feb 2026.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Photo from the LA Times&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''An Attack on a Foundational Law, EPA Findings and a Supporting Court Decision'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/12/trump-epa-rollback-pollution-regulation-endangerment-finding<br /> <br /> <br /> ('''Updated, with this Trump order''') &quot;The United States will essentially have no laws on the books that enforce how efficient America’s passenger cars and trucks should be.&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/16/climate/endangerment-finding-auto-emissions-regulations.html?unlocked_article_code=1.M1A.1MMD.Cox7hRsyuiae&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''A Trump Legacy: Rejecting Science, Climate Change, and the Environmental Protection Agency'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : A Moment in History That Will Be Remembered<br /> <br /> <br /> Reading 'Top of the News' headlines this week, the world's people encounter a nation's president who rejects a half-century of a scientific, military, educational and security studies, data, knowledge -- and warnings.<br /> <br /> President Trump orders environmental cuts and rollbacks, retrogressive policies that turn around the Environmental Protection Agency's progress for the nation.<br /> <br /> Five plus decades of vision, foundational work, projects and programs, NASA/NOAA, EPA, USGS, across US colleges and universities, health and medical research, and on and on are now being diminished and degraded.<br /> <br /> Time will tell the full story of the Trump presidency.<br /> <br /> <br /> For now, let's take a quick look back at actions taken to advance environmental protection and the nation's well being, the beginnings of the EPA, atmospheric/climate/earth science, national security, health, and a better future for all.<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:SMOG_be_gone.jpg<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Tracking_science_policy_across_the_Trump_administration.png<br /> <br /> * https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title42/chapter85&amp;edition=prelim<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: <br /> <br /> Let's call this Trump rejection of science what it is -- an act of hubris, an decision that will not stand in the face of physics...<br /> <br /> Donald Trump's administration, with an EPA taken over by anti-science purveyors who callously and destructively set aside fifty plus years of scientific data, now act to put their legacy into the history books. Their action to deny the overwhelmingly evident dangers of climate change, a gathering storm threatening US and world environmental security, is an ignominious day.<br /> <br /> We, today's generation and future generations will live to mark this moment as a tragedy, one that accelerates real-world physics of earth systems, delivering climate impacts, disruptions, security lost... <br /> <br /> The Trump administration have delivered 'retro' thinking, anti-science destructiveness. <br /> <br /> The Clean Air Acts and accompanying model regulations, [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr '''ideas beginning in California to deal with its &quot;smog&quot;'''] in the 1960s/70s, were shared and spread throughout the US -- and the world's cities and communities. Profound progress, meant explicitly to deal with hazardous air pollutants and remedy the climate-related costs, the damages of atmospheric pollution to health, environment and future well being that adversely impacts life across nations and regions of Earth, was achieved and continues to be achieved. The Trump attempt to block this progress will fail.<br /> <br /> Yet, the time lost to Trumpian folly will add additional costs to humanity's journey forward.<br /> <br /> We mark these days in February 2026 as times to be remembered -- and judged -- for what they are. <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EPA 1a.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EPA 2a.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EPA 3a.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EPA 4a.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:PlanetCitizen banner 800x163.jpg|link=https://greenpolicy360.net/w/PlanetCitizen]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> February 1, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Another Warning Among Many'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Excerpt from a Chapter in a new book by Thom Hartmann...<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Climate Collapse Presidency'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Climate change is the single greatest threat to a sustainable future<br /> : but, at the same time, addressing the climate challenge presents a<br /> : golden opportunity to promote prosperity, security and a brighter<br /> : future for all. <br /> :—- Ban Ki-moon, former UN Secretary-General,<br /> : Remarks at Climate Leaders’ Summit, April 11, 2024<br /> <br /> <br /> Thom Hartmann @https://hartmannreport.com:<br /> <br /> The greatest existential threat humanity faces isn’t hiding in a military bunker or a terrorist cell. It’s in plain sight: the accelerating collapse of our only home’s life-support systems.<br /> <br /> Trump’s first term was environmental arson. He gutted the EPA, installed fossil fuel executives in key positions, shredded over one hundred environmental protections, and abandoned the Paris Climate Agreement. <br /> <br /> Scientists were silenced. Research was suppressed. The words “climate change” vanished from government websites as if deleting terms could delete reality.<br /> <br /> When confronted about climate’s role in the devastating 2020 wildfires, Trump smirked: “I don’t think science knows, actually.”<br /> <br /> <br /> --<br /> <br /> <br /> An AI response:<br /> <br /> Daniel Solomon<br /> <br /> I asked AI what is the effect of Trump #47 on the climate? Ans. below:<br /> <br /> <br /> ''In his second term as the 47th President, Donald Trump has moved aggressively to reverse U.S. climate progress by prioritizing fossil fuel production and dismantling federal environmental oversight.<br /> <br /> ''Key effects on the climate and policy include:''<br /> <br /> ''Withdrawal from International Agreements: On January 27, 2026, the U.S. officially withdrew from the Paris Agreement for the second time. Additionally, the administration has announced departures from over 60 international bodies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).''<br /> <br /> ''Increased Carbon Emissions: Projections suggest that the administration's rollbacks could lead to an additional 4 billion metric tons of CO2-equivalent emissions by 2030 compared to previous trajectories.''<br /> <br /> ''Dismantling Regulatory Foundations: The EPA is currently working to repeal the 2009 Endangerment Finding, which is the legal basis for nearly all federal greenhouse gas regulations.''<br /> <br /> ''Expansion of Fossil Fuels: Under the mantra &quot;drill, baby, drill,&quot; the administration has fast-tracked deep-sea mining, reopened Alaskan refuges for oil development, and granted roughly $40 billion in new subsidies to the fossil fuel industry.''<br /> <br /> ''Stalling Clean Energy: Federal support for wind and solar has been slashed, including the elimination of the $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit and nearly $13 billion in green energy funding.''<br /> <br /> ''Information and Data Gaps: The administration has removed past National Climate Assessments from federal sites, deleted climate science webpages, and cut funding for climate research programs, creating significant gaps in global climate tracking.''<br /> <br /> ''While federal action has stalled, market forces and state-led initiatives — particularly in California and Texas — continue to drive some growth in renewable capacity despite federal headwinds.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Trump admin losses est 35B in clean energy projects - 2025.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Deep Losses in Clean-Renewable Production &amp; Competitiveness'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : US Policy Goes Retro with Fossil Fuels<br /> <br /> : * https://grist.org/politics/trump-2025-renewable-energy-investment-electric-vehicles/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tracking science policy across the Trump administration.png]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Tracking_science_policy_across_the_Trump_administration.png&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''January 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> January 7th, a Day to Remember ... <br /> <br /> This day in America delivered a deadly shooting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a death recorded live by a number of video recordings taken and distributed by citizens who observed the killing. Today is going to become etched in the memory of US history.<br /> <br /> The death, as witnessed by those who viewed and reviewed the video recordings, was tragic -- and much more...<br /> <br /> The lies told by government officials following the shooting of a woman in her car were painfully far from the facts and now remain another in a line of political lies that are spreading like a fire inflaming communities across the country.<br /> <br /> Today, it is again time to remember the warnings of Hannah Arendt.<br /> <br /> Take time to read her writing of lies, big lies, repeated lies -- and the threats and dangers they pose.<br /> <br /> These lies are, again, as history teaches, deliverers of dangerous times.<br /> <br /> Echoes from the propagandists that brought on World War II.<br /> <br /> Echoes of lies to recall...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''&quot;Truth and Politics&quot;'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Hannah Arendt<br /> <br /> 1967 in the New Yorker Magazine<br /> <br /> * https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/praxis1313/files/2018/08/Arendt_-Truth-and-Politics-LQ.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?search=hannah+arendt&amp;title=Special%3ASearch '''More from Hannah Arendt''']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[Earth Day]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;'''[[Earth Day Is Every Day]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :[[File:Earth-Day.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ==''Recent GreenPolicy360 Story Highlights''==<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> ''[[Green Stories of the Day - GreenPolicy360 Archive]]''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2025'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2025 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2025'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2025]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2024'''''&lt;/big&gt;'''''===<br /> <br /> [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2024 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2024'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2024]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2023'''''&lt;/big&gt;'''''===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2023 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2023'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2023]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2022'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2022 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2022'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2022]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2021'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2021 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2021'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2021]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2020'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2020 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2020'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2020]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2019'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2019 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2019'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2019]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2018'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2018 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2018'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2018]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2017'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2017 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2017'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2017]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2016'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2016 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2016'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2016]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2015'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2015 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2015'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2015]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2014'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2014 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2014'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2014]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2013'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2013 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2013'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2013]] <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:GP360_NewPages]]<br 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Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Green_Stories_of_the_Day&diff=138377 2026-10-10T01:50:55Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> __notoc__<br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&quot;Green Stories Changing Our World&quot;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''For the Young &amp; Old, Across Continents, Community-to-Community'''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt; ''@GreenPolicy360: An eOS Network with Hundreds of Millions of Views &amp; Shares''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Earth dynamic global map.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/1000hPa/orthographic &lt;big&gt;&lt;font color=green&gt;'''#PlanetCitizens360'''&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/big&gt;] <br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Planet Citizens]]''' <br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[The Commons]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[EarthPOV]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Earth Right Now]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Earth Science Vital Signs]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''GRN360: &quot;Vita Activa&quot;, Turning Visions into Reality'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Green_Networking &lt;big&gt;'''Green Networking, Green Best Practices'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Living Earth.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Planet Citizen Vision of Living Earth]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_Citizen_Vision_of_Living_Earth<br /> <br /> <br /> :✅ [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Plans_Enforcement_-_Resources '''The Climate Plans Enforcement Initiative''']<br /> <br /> :✅ [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenLinks '''GreenLinks: Global Green Networking with Web 3.0''']<br /> <br /> :✅ [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_Best_Practices '''Green Best Practices: Community-to-Community'''] <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Liberty Bell.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Photo by mbell1975&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''A Democratic Republic, a 'Great Experiment' in the United States'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> 🗒️ Ours is a democracy, a republic, a work-in-progress continuing to this day, a heritage worth protecting...<br /> <br /> <br /> As the 250th anniversary of the signing of the US Declaration of Independence approaches, we will celebrate an agenda of rights, inalienable rights, human rights, put forward with and embodied in a [https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/full-text '''founding US Constitution'''], [https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/bill-of-rights/what-does-it-say '''a Bill of Rights'''] and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_amendments_to_the_Constitution_of_the_United_States '''Constitutional Amendments'''] -- together a Constitutional government envisioning a living Democratic Republic. <br /> <br /> <br /> On July 2, 1776, the Second Continental Congress passed a “Resolution for Independence” declaring “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”<br /> The signing of the United States Declaration of Independence occurred primarily on August 2, 1776, at the Pennsylvania State House, later renamed Independence Hall, in Philadelphia. The 56 delegates to the Second Continental Congress represented the Thirteen Colonies, of which 12 voted to approve the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[In Defense of Democracy and Freedom]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;'''[[Democracy Quotes]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;[https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Democracy '''A 'Working Democracy' ''']&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;[https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Fact_Checking,_Facts_Count '''In Democracy, 'Facts Count' ''']&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Surviving Victory - Liberty at Risk.jpg]]<br /> <br /> 🌅 'Surviving Victory'&lt;big&gt;🔥&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/surviving-victory-from-the-archive/<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''October 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''US imposes sanctions on ICC after former ICC judge wins Nobel Peace Prize'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Beyond defense, as the US continues to move away from international support while advocating an era of 'America First' <br /> <br /> <br /> Oct 9 (Reuters) - US President Donald Trump's administration imposed sanctions on the ​International Criminal Court (ICC) on Friday, hours after one of its former judges won the Nobel Peace Prize, putting Washington on a diplomatic collision course with European allies.<br /> <br /> The court denounced the ‌move as an &quot;assault on the rule of law and on the very foundations of the international legal order,&quot; and called on its 125 member states to take action to defend it.<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/world/us-imposes-sanctions-international-criminal-court-hours-after-former-judge-wins-2026-10-09/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Announces Its 2026-2030 Strategic Plan'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : As with prior EPA plans, budgets, and proposed changes, a legislative and judicial reordering will follow<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;EPA's Fiscal Year (FY) 2026–2030 Strategic Plan&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2026-10/fy-2026-2030-epa-strategic-plan-final-for-publication-october-2026.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Thought for the Day&quot;<br /> <br /> October 1, 2026<br /> <br /> In a recent series of private meetings in San Francisco, after a tasting menu dinner, Anthropic consulted religious scholars to help instill morality into its A.I. models ... a case was being made that Claude could be or become conscious.<br /> <br /> What would it mean for humanity’s future if artificial intelligence systems possessed a consciousness that rivals our own?<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-morals-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FVE.kDTO.OTLs6iwx7swF&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''September 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Canada's Prime Minister Steps Onto the World Stage'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/mark-carney-talks-geopolitics/<br /> <br /> Strategic Demands: A extraordinary interview and timestamp documenting geopolitical realities faced by the Canadian Prime Minister. Here, we see the navigation skills required and demonstrated by an exceptionally trained and talented man who guides his ship of state through shifting winds… At StratDem we speak of the need for “Strategic Realism” in international relations, of security competition and values-based politics in foreign policy. Canada is fortunate, in our opinion, to have such a person at the helm of its representative democratic governance.<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Telling the Truth to the World'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Facts are key to understanding, and key to unlocking the truth<br /> <br /> : Any speech to a world audience, as at the United Nations, should be time for facts and truth<br /> <br /> <br /> The Fact Checking writer for CNN has no easy 'news beat' as he has to follow the U.S. president's pronouncements<br /> <br /> * https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/22/politics/fact-check-trump-united-nations<br /> <br /> By: Daniel Dale / CNN<br /> <br /> (Note: After a court decision, CNN was re-instituted w/ press credentials on Sept. 24)<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Fact check: Trump’s false claims to the United Nations'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> (Excerpt) <br /> <br /> Global warming<br /> <br /> Trump scoffed at dire warnings that artificial intelligence might eventually attack or kill people, claiming they are coming from “the very same people who said we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming, a name since reborn to climate change because the planet was cooling, not warming, and nobody was dead.”<br /> <br /> There are at least four things wrong with his sentence about global warming.<br /> <br /> First, the phrase “global warming” remains in widespread use even though the phrase “climate change” is also common; they mean different things. Climate scientists use both, often saying “global warming” when referring to the long-term trend of increasing global temperature and “climate change” when referring to the numerous effects the world is experiencing because of that trend. (NASA, part of the Trump-led federal government, [https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/faq/whats-the-difference-between-climate-change-and-global-warming/ explains] the difference between the terms on its website.) For example, a [https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_SYR_SPM.pdf 2023 report] from the UN’s climate change panel is titled “Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report,” but it says this: “Human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases, have unequivocally caused global warming, with global surface temperature reaching 1.1°C above 1850-1900 in 2011-2020.”<br /> <br /> Second, while Trump didn’t say what time period he was talking about, he didn’t acknowledge that the world has continued to get warmer, not cooler. The UN’s World Meteorological Organization [https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/wmo-confirms-2025-was-one-of-warmest-years-record reported] in January that “the past 11 years have been the 11 warmest on record,” with 2023, 2024 and 2025 the three very warmest — as NASA [https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5607/ also found] — though 2025 wasn’t as hot as 2024.<br /> <br /> Third, experts [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/opinion/environment/climate-change-death-toll.html widely disagree] that “nobody” has died from the various impacts of a warming world. It’s impossible to pinpoint a precise death number, but [https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2025/10/30/how-many-people-are-already-being-killed-by-climate-change some] [https://www.eenews.net/articles/people-are-dying-from-climate-change-but-how-many/ estimates] total in the millions. The deaths are likely to continue; the World Health Organization [https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-change-and-health says], “Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year, from under nutrition, malaria, diarrhea and heat stress alone.”<br /> <br /> Fourth, while somebody somewhere might have said that “we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming,” that [https://insideclimatenews.org/news/27082019/12-years-climate-change-explained-ipcc-science-solutions/ isn’t] how an expert report framed the issue.<br /> <br /> A widely discussed 2018 report from climate scientists said the world needed to sharply cut carbon emissions within the next 12 years to be on track to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels; scientists said above that threshold, the potential deadly impacts from climate change would be [https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/science/climate-issues/degrees-matter larger]. Though the 2018 report was often oversimplified by politicians, the expert claim was never that “we’ll all be dead in 12 years” — it was that significant action was needed within 12 years to improve the future. (The UN program [https://wedocs.unep.org/rest/api/core/bitstreams/9f6bd957-8d35-402d-bb4e-c7c17096e592/content reported] earlier this month that the world is set to exceed the 1.5-degree increase, “likely within the next few years&quot;.)<br /> <br /> <br /> More re: Facts and Fact Checking at GreenPolicy360:<br /> <br /> '''Facts Protecting Democracy'''<br /> <br /> At GreenPolicy360, our mission statement supports fact finding and the '3 Ds' -- Discussion ➡️ Debate ➡️ Decision-Making<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 continues a multi-year defense of facts, science, &amp; 'critical thinking skills'<br /> <br /> -- &quot;In Democracy, Facts Count&quot; <br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Fact_Checking<br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Fact_Checking,_Facts_Count<br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Disinformation_-_Online_-_Dangerous<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Taking Time to Take Another Look at the Deepening Costs of War'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 &amp; Strategic Demands<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/costsofwar/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Demanding 'New Definitions of National Security' '''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:New_Definitions_of_National_Security_-_2.png<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Strategic_Demands_of_the_21st_Century,_a_New_Vision_re_Surviving_Victory_conf.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Deep Costs of War StratDem.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Disinformation_-_Online_-_Dangerous<br /> <br /> <br /> A Faith-Announcement in Support of [[The Commons]]<br /> <br /> The Catholic Church continues forward with the message of [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Laudato_Si '''Laudato Si'''] (2015), the first papal encyclical to advance formal environmental protection doctrine. Pope Francis, who was named after St. Francis, the patron saint of the environment, acted to open new doors for theological and spiritual belief within the Catholic tradition. Now, Pope Leo follows on with more ''' 'On Caring for Our Common Home' '''...<br /> <br /> <br /> Challenges of 'ecological turning point'<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''International Theological Commission that calls Christians to view care for creation'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &quot;Caring for Our Common Home&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2026-09/ict-document-care-for-creation-ecology-theology-church-pope.html<br /> * https://www.osservatoreromano.va/en/news/2026-09/ing-009/a-fraternal-response-to-the-triune-god.html<br /> * https://www.americamagazine.org/news/2026/09/03/vatican-creation-sin/<br /> * https://www.thefloridacatholic.org/news/vatican/vatican-theological-commission-defines-sin-against-creation-and-the-creator-in-new-document/article_a6edad02-a5c2-482b-bf7f-fefcf1a8f3ed.html<br /> <br /> <br /> The Vatican has officially declared environmental destruction a ”sin against creation and the Creator” in a major new doctrinal text.<br /> <br /> The document, “Caring for Our Common Home – A Responsible and Fraternal Response to the Triune God,” was published Sept. 2 with the authorization of Pope Leo XIV, according to Vatican News. <br /> <br /> The 29,000-word document, titled '''Caring for Our Common Home''', elevates ecological concern from a merely political or scientific issue into a direct matter of personal faith. <br /> <br /> “Everything is interrelated” within “a single community of life,” according to Vatican News. The commission says this understanding calls Christians to practice gratitude toward God, mercy and solidarity toward others, and responsible care for the common home.<br /> <br /> Authorized under Pope Leo XIV, the text declares that destroying natural habitats, polluting, and exploiting resources are not just civic failures, but a 'sin against creation and against the Creator' that directly violates God's plan.<br /> <br /> This shift from Pope Francis' earlier concept of 'ecological sin' to a more explicit 'sin against the Creator' is designed to reshape how believers view their daily environmental impact. The Vatican emphasizes that failing to safeguard the planet severely harms the poorest populations and future generations, distorting the core relationships that define humanity. <br /> <br /> By placing ecological action squarely in the realm of moral responsibility, the Church is challenging millions of people to treat environmental care as a fundamental requirement of their faith.<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:St. Francis with birds listening.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Faith Traditions Are Growing in Their Calls for Eco-Stewardship'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''&quot;The World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation&quot;'''<br /> <br /> This day is bringing awareness and a call to action<br /> <br /> The spiritual and secular find common ground here in a protection of [[The Commons]]<br /> <br /> <br /> The Catholic Church observes September 1 as the [https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2026-06/vatican-theme-2026-world-day-of-prayer-for-the-care-of-creation.html '''&quot;World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation&quot;'''], a day dedicated to thanking God for the gift of creation and renewing the Church’s commitment to ecological stewardship.<br /> <br /> What the Day Is:<br /> <br /> An annual Catholic observance established by Pope Francis in 2015 as a concrete follow‑up to Laudato Si’.<br /> <br /> Shared with the Orthodox Church, which first designated September 1 as a creation‑focused '''&quot;Day of Prayers for Natural Environment&quot;''' in 1989.<br /> <br /> The opening of the global '''&quot;Season of Creation&quot;''', which runs from September 1 to October 4 (Feast of St. Francis of Assisi).<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:St Francis with the birds.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> Pope St. John Paul II in 1979 <br /> <br /> declared Francis the patron saint of ecology<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Visit Pope Francis' Eco-Encyclical [[Laudato Si]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> More: https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=File:St_Francis_with_the_birds.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://fosfanariou.gr/index.php/2026/08/30/patriarchal-message-for-the-beginning-of-the-ecclesiastical-year-and-the-solemn-day-of-prayers-for-natural-environment-2/ &quot;Solemn Day of Prayers for Natural Environment&quot;, Orthodox Catholic, September 1]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_denominations_by_number_of_members 'Christianity is the largest religious group in the world...]<br /> <br /> The largest denominations -- Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox -- have an estimated 2.3 to 2.6 billion adherents <br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 / On Earth...<br /> <br /> Religious traditions -- faith and spirituality as practiced -- have an intimate connection to life's protection, quality, and humanity's future<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''August 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> TicToc TicToc <br /> <br /> <br /> '''3, 2, 1''' ... '''Launch ... Go, Go, Go'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ⬆️ <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''NASA Goes Looking for Life in the Universe'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Nancy Grace Roman Is the Name of the (biggest- and best-ever) Telescope<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Astro 'Big Picture' Sites]]<br /> <br /> <br /> August 30, 2026<br /> <br /> News from the Florida East Coast<br /> <br /> [https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/30/science/nancy-grace-roman-space-telescope-launch (CNN)] A massive observatory that scientists have called a “discovery machine” has launched toward the cosmos, beginning a journey that could mark a significant shift in our understanding of the universe.<br /> <br /> Designed to seek out otherwise invisible and faint space objects, '''NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope''' lifted off aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket at 7:26 a.m. ET Sunday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The observatory reached orbit about 10 minutes later.<br /> <br /> <br /> (NYT) At a news conference on Saturday morning, Nicola Fox, the associate administrator of NASA’s science mission directorate, explained that Roman’s vast gaze would contribute to solving some of the grandest mysteries about our universe, including how it works, what it is made of and if we are alone out there.<br /> <br /> “To put it in perspective, it will be as if Hubble and James Webb kind of peered through a keyhole at the universe,” Dr. Fox said, referring to two other telescopes NASA has launched into space. “Well, Nancy Grace Roman will kick the door down.”<br /> <br /> <br /> (GRN360) Get ready for 'Exo's in Space' ... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet Exoplanets] ...... with discernible, measurable signs of extraterrestrial life&lt;big&gt;✨ ❇️ ✨&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> 'Up' there ⬆️<br /> <br /> As seen from 'down' here on our terrestrial Home Planet<br /> <br /> Go we go, we're looking 'around'. We're going Exploring ❇️<br /> <br /> <br /> NASA's Exoplanet Archive<br /> <br /> * https://science.nasa.gov/exoplanets/discoveries-dashboard/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> ⬇️<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Trump numbers continue downward.png]]<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Numbers Continue Trending Downward'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via the Washington Post<br /> <br /> August 24, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/08/24/trumps-attempts-intimidate-home-abroad-have-backfired/<br /> <br /> <br /> In the CNN Poll of Polls, 36 percent approved of (Trump's) job performance, while 63 percent disapproved. That’s far below the historical average for presidents. He is even more unpopular abroad — and international disapproval of the president has translated into disapproval of the country he leads. A [https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2026/06/23/trump-gets-negative-reviews-internationally-as-fewer-say-u-s-is-a-reliable-partner/ '''Pew Research Center poll of 36 countries'''], conducted earlier this summer, found that 76 percent of respondents had “no confidence” in Trump and 57 percent had an unfavorable opinion of the United States. In most of the countries Pew surveyed, people had a more positive impression of China than of the U.S.<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Today &amp; Tomorrow: A Couple Memories'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Today: A Green-Skinned Actress (a Famed Witch) who has the same name as a NASA Software-engineer (who wrote the essential code for the Apollo moon mission)<br /> <br /> <br /> SJS/GreenPolicy360 editor: <br /> <br /> A quick flight of the mind, as I received two online stories this morning -- one brought a memory of when I lived in New York City in the Gramercy Park neighborhood and regularly saw a distinguished looking older women walking her dogs around the park. She had a distinctive profile and one day I briefly talked to her. She said she was an actress, and that she still worked (this was in the mid-1970s) 'in the theater'. Her dogs were anxious to move on so we parted. Later, I learned from a neighbor that she was 'thee Margaret Hamilton.'<br /> <br /> Let's call her Margaret from the West (although here in NYC she lived in a building on the East)...<br /> <br /> [[File:Gramercy Park East.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Wicked Witch of the West.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> And as those of you who are familiar with the work of GreenPolicy360, you may remember we have focused our work over decades on what we call [[The Modern Environmental Movement]]. Your founder/siterunner was among those who were there alongside a [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr Congressman named George Brown], who put into development a first generation of Earth Science missions from space. The Apollo-NASA missions to the moon changed the way humanity saw ourselves, as [[Apollo 8]] sent home the first-ever full-color images of our living planet home. What some called a 'cognitive shift' occurred for many of us who were there as the image that became known as '[[Earthrise]]' appeared in the media, most prominently [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Earthrise_Life_Magazine_January_1969.png on the cover] of biggest magazine of the era.<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''“We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.&quot; – Astronaut Bill Anders, Aboard Apollo, December 24, 1968''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earthrise - NASA original Anders photo.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> What your editor carried away was inspiration... and today I am remembering one of the greats of the Apollo mission who made the flights and vision of planet Earth possible. Her name is Margaret Hamilton.<br /> <br /> She literally [https://www.softwareheritage.org/2019/07/20/archiving-and-referencing-the-apollo-source-code/ wrote the source code] that guided the missions to the moon, and her code (as I learned today) from the Apollo 8 'Earthrise' mission acted to make possible the correction of the Apollo 11 landing and return from the moon.<br /> <br /> <br /> _________________________________________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : August 17, 2026 - Happy 90th birthday to Margaret Hamilton -- the software engineer who wrote the computer code that saved the Apollo 11 moon landing and who, in the process, invented the discipline of software engineering itself! The system that kept that landing from being aborted began, improbably, with her 4-year-old daughter crashing a simulated moon mission.<br /> : Margaret Hamilton's daughter, Lauren, came along to the MIT lab on nights and weekends while her mother wrote the software that would fly astronauts to the moon. &quot;There wasn't a time when we weren't working,&quot; Hamilton said. Lauren liked to play astronaut, because she had watched her mother do it in simulations. One evening she started hitting keys, and the simulation began to run. Then she hit another, and everything fell apart -- she had selected a program meant to be run before launch, and the computer, which had almost no memory to spare, wiped the navigation data that was taking her to the moon.<br /> : Hamilton saw what it meant immediately. &quot;I thought: my God -- this could inadvertently happen in a real mission.&quot; She proposed a change to the software that would stop a prelaunch program from being selected in flight. Her superiors at MIT and NASA told her not to bother. The astronauts were too well trained to make a mistake like that.<br /> : On the very next mission, Apollo 8, an astronaut made exactly that mistake -- wiping the navigation data midway to the moon, just as Lauren had. Hamilton called it the Lauren bug. &quot;It created much havoc and required the mission to be reconfigured,&quot; she said. &quot;After that, they let me put the program change in, all right.&quot;<br /> <br /> :Hamilton was born in Paoli, Indiana, in 1936, earned a degree in mathematics with a minor in philosophy from Earlham College, and went to MIT in 1959 to support her family while her husband attended Harvard Law. She learned to program in the lab of Edward Lorenz, the meteorologist who would become the father of chaos theory, because there was nowhere else to learn it. &quot;Computer science and software engineering were not yet disciplines,&quot; she said. &quot;Instead, programmers learned on the job.&quot;<br /> :In 1964 her husband spotted a newspaper advertisement: the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory was looking for people to write the software to send a man to the moon. &quot;I was attracted both by the sheer idea and the fact that it had never been done before,&quot; Hamilton said. &quot;I was the first programmer to join and the first woman they hired.&quot;<br /> : She was gradually promoted until she was directing the team -- eventually about a hundred people -- that wrote the onboard flight software for both Apollo spacecraft. When she was given the job, one of the senior men told her he had no doubt she could do it but worried the men under her might rebel. &quot;Well,&quot; she said, &quot;they didn't.&quot;<br /> :Almost nobody thought the software mattered. It was not in the original schedule; it was not in the budget. &quot;Software during the early days of this project was treated like a stepchild,&quot; Hamilton later wrote, &quot;and it was regarded as an art and as magic, not a science.&quot; Out of what she called desperation, she started calling what she did software engineering -- a phrase invented to make a point.<br /> :&quot;It was out of desperation I came up with the term, to say: 'Hey, we're engineering too.' It was an ongoing joke for a long time.&quot; The joke ended in a meeting, when one of the laboratory's most respected hardware men stood up and said she was right.<br /> :Then came July 20, 1969. Three minutes above the Sea of Tranquility, with two men aboard a vehicle that had never landed anywhere, the Apollo Guidance Computer began throwing alarms -- 1202, then 1201, five of them in four minutes -- because a rendezvous radar switch had been left in the wrong position and the machine was drowning in work it had no time to finish. On virtually any other computer of that decade, this was the end of the story: a freeze, a crash, a mission aborted.<br /> :Hamilton stood watching in the monitoring room at MIT while her software did what she had built it to do, which was to decide what mattered. It recognized the overload, discarded the low-priority jobs, restarted itself in a controlled and orderly way, and held onto the tasks that were flying the spacecraft. &quot;It quickly became clear the software was not only informing everyone that there was a hardware-related problem,&quot; she said, &quot;but was compensating for it.&quot;<br /> :In Houston a 26-year-old guidance officer named Steve Bales had a few seconds to call an abort, and because the computer was visibly managing itself, he called go. Neil Armstrong flew Eagle past a field of boulders and set it down with about twenty-five seconds of fuel remaining.<br /> :&quot;If the computer hadn't recognized this problem and taken recovery action,&quot; Hamilton wrote two years afterward, &quot;I doubt if Apollo 11 would have been the successful moon landing it was.&quot;<br /> :There is a famous photograph of her from that summer, standing beside a stack of Apollo source-code listings taller than she is. :&quot;We got carried away and grabbed all the Apollo listings in my office and created the tower,&quot; she said. &quot;I was trying to find a way of keeping the stack up.&quot;<br /> :Hamilton's standards held. In all the crewed Apollo missions that followed, no software bug was ever known to have occurred.<br /> :Hamilton went unrecognized for decades. In 2016 President Barack Obama gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, calling her emblematic of &quot;that generation of unsung women who helped send humankind into space,&quot; and a year later she appeared, as a LEGO figurine. <br /> :Now ninety, Margaret Hamilton still argues that software should be designed at the start not to fail, rather than patched after it does ....<br /> <br /> :For young women who want to follow in her footsteps, she offers this advice: &quot;Don't let fear get in the way, and don't be afraid to say 'I don't know' or 'I don't understand' -- no question is a dumb question. And don't always listen to the so-called experts.&quot; :To introduce this inspiring trailblazer to kids, consider the picture book &quot;Margaret and the Moon&quot; for ages 5 to 9 at https://www.amightygirl.com/margaret-and-the-moon) and the children's biography &quot;Space Engineer and Scientist Margaret Hamilton&quot; for ages 7 to 10 at https://www.amightygirl.com/margaret-hamilton<br /> :She is also featured in an activity book about pioneering women in technology, which includes a variety of hands-on STEM projects: &quot;Gutsy Girls Go for Science: Programmers&quot; for ages 8 to 11 at https://www.amightygirl.com/gutsy-girls-programmers<br /> <br /> :For adult readers who want the wider story of the women who put Americans in space, &quot;Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars&quot; tells of the mathematicians recruited by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in the 1940s and 50s at https://www.amightygirl.com/rise-of-the-rocket-girls <br /> <br /> <br /> _________________________________________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> So, in memory of two classic, talented, game-changing, creative women -- <br /> <br /> Here's a deep bow and a flourishing wave of our green cap. <br /> <br /> We remember you !!<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Fact_Checking Facts Count]<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Are AI companies scanning and destroying millions of books, including rare titles?'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> Via Snopes.com<br /> <br /> Artificial intelligence companies are scanning millions of books, some of which are rare, and destroying them.<br /> <br /> * https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ai-companies-destroying-rare-books/<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''July 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:A Quokka, which one.jpg]]<br /> <br /> A Human &amp; Quokka Species, on Behalf of All Species <br /> <br /> : Historic, Country-wide Wild Fires Threaten Australia<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''PyroCbs, &quot;Fire Clouds&quot;'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''France / Spain ... &quot;Unprecedented&quot; ... &quot;Extreme Weather&quot;'''<br /> <br /> [https://apnews.com/article/europe-wildfires-france-spain-93678a31ff53fc46564b6dfd9934eae1 250,000 Evacuated]<br /> <br /> Via NYT<br /> <br /> As the hot air rises, it expands and cools, causing its moisture to condense. The water vapor and ash particles combine to form a gray or brown cloud that can then develop into a pyrocumulonimbus (pyro means “fire” in Greek) storm cloud.<br /> <br /> They produce lightning and burning embers that can spark more fires, and they generate high and unpredictable winds that fan the flames and spread the embers.<br /> <br /> In the Gironde region, 103,000 acres have burned, according to officials, and 220,000 people have been asked to evacuate from Gironde and the neighboring Landes region.<br /> <br /> The pyrocumulonimbus phenomenon presents extreme challenges for firefighters.<br /> <br /> “These fire-generated clouds are linked to extreme fire behavior that impedes firefighting efforts and can devastate communities,” according to NASA, which emphasized the need to better understand the clouds “given the ongoing and projected increases in fire activity and severity.”<br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://espo.nasa.gov/inspyre<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Elon Musk Opens Up in an Interview'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Economist Editor Presses the Controversial 'Trillionaire'<br /> <br /> :: Elon Musk's 'Vision of the Future'<br /> <br /> * https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/23/elon-musks-vision-of-the-future<br /> <br /> <br /> “People don’t realise that what I’m saying will come to pass,” he tells The Economist in a 90-minute interview held at a giant Tesla factory in Texas where electric cars drive themselves off the assembly line. That may be because his future-gazing ranges from the unsettling to the downright weird. <br /> <br /> Mr. Musk predicts that, within five years, artificial-intelligence systems may surpass the sum of all human intelligence. Within ten years, robots in the workplace will help usher in an era of such “amazing abundance” that money will become meaningless....<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-killer-robots-ai-abundance-progress-unstoppable-2026-7<br /> <br /> <br /> Musk proposes peer review for frontier AI models in Economist interview<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/musk-proposes-peer-review-frontier-ai-models-economist-interview-2026-07-23/<br /> <br /> <br /> Musk says he got ‘carried away’ with Trump – but still holds on to contentious political views<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/23/elon-musk-regret-trump-doge-ai<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Mix of Comments:<br /> <br /> * https://beincrypto.com/elon-musk-real-force-european-politics/<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/07/24/elon-musk-speaks-to-the-economist-editor-in-chief-zanny-minton-beddoes-on-the-key-takeaways.html<br /> * https://futurism.com/elon-musk-interviewer-npc<br /> * https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-economist-interview-2000790016<br /> * https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/nonsense-elon-musk-lashes-out-in-fiery-interview-after-hes-accused-of-supporting-the-far-right/<br /> * https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2026/07/23/musk_admonishes_the_economist_editor_what_is_far_right_about_having_secure_borders_safe_cities_and_sensible_spending.html<br /> * https://zeteo.com/p/top-economist-trump-musk-starmer<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:ECO.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Big Picture'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> Humanity Looks up to the Heavens, [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:ECO.png 'Inspired' by the Stars]<br /> <br /> : Earth Art &amp; Heliophysics, An Art Project 50 Years in the Making Opens Up<br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Charles Ross, Star Axis in New Mexico.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> July 21, 2026<br /> <br /> U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations<br /> <br /> The Topic -- Supplemental Federal Aid<br /> <br /> The Question -- Why More Government Funding for the Military, and Agriculture Producers, is urgently needed<br /> <br /> The Secretary of War explains that $1.5 trillion in needed in the next budget year, a 'generational' budget, one year increase request of over $500 billion... and tens of billion more are needed immediately for war fighting, training, munitions...<br /> <br /> Then ... on July 21st, with minimal media coverage, the following is put into the record -- to explain why billions more than a half trillion more, are needed for farmers and agriculture.<br /> <br /> <br /> ''“For many agricultural producers, 2025 was a year in which the cost of growing their crop at times exceeded what they could earn from selling it. Severe weather compounded these losses... producers had to contend with a combination of challenging market conditions.&quot;<br /> <br /> ''“... We will hear a great deal today about how declining commodity prices, rising input costs, labor shortages, trade disruptions, pests and disease, and increasingly volatile weather are squeezing farmers’ already thin margins.''<br /> <br /> ''“Nationwide, we have lost nearly 200,000 farms in the last decade.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> Let's parse this list of what 'we will hear'... the causes are what we will focus on here.<br /> <br /> The choice of going to war, and resulting increases in oil/gas prices, the resulting prices of fertilizer spiking, the boycotts and tariffs of U.S. farm products resulting from boycotts and tariffs in international markets (Trade War consequences of U.S. policies), the reasons for 'labor shortages' in the U.S. agriculture industry, and increases in extreme weather events and damages... <br /> <br /> These consequential facts seem to be set aside, ignored, and not explored by committee hearing speakers and the majority party running the hearing (the Chair is a Senator from Maine and is running for re-election).<br /> <br /> Look more closely at the [https://strategicdemands.com/costsofwar/ 'Deep Costs, Costs of War'] that the people of the U.S., and many others, are paying.<br /> <br /> It is time for new policies, facts, costs of failed policies, and more realistic debate and discussion...<br /> <br /> Enough said...<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> July 16, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[Fact Checking, Facts Count]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Consider the Facts, Pay Attention to the Reality<br /> <br /> As an audience listens in while an American president talks, we, at GreenPolicy, have a bottom line request -- our bottom line is '''Facts Count'''<br /> <br /> Go with the Reality, not the Marketing<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Attribution of Extreme Weather and Climate Events and Their Impacts'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * This 2026 National Academies of Science Study and Report Will Have Consequences<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We are reminded of the mid-1970s National Academies of Sciences Study and Report that led to Congressional Hearings and the First US National Climate Act Program. We watched as Representative George E. Brown - (D) Los Angeles pushed for the scientific research and moved to hearings and legislation.<br /> <br /> The era of modern climate science moved forward with lasting contributions ...<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/climate/national-academies-extreme-weather-attribution.html?unlocked_article_code=1.yFA.38oJ.3B0p4MCCutBL&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> * https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/28590/chapter/1<br /> <br /> <br /> Read about the foundational 1970s National Climate science report, hearings, and legislation here -- <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr#/media/File%3ANational_Climate_Program_Act_Hearings_May_1976.jpg<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr#/media/File%3AUS_Public_Law_95-367.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr#/media/File%3APublic_Law_95-367%2C_1978.jpeg<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Congressman george.e.brown.gif]]<br /> <br /> Rep. George E Brown<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Generation Green]] [[Going Green]]'''<br /> <br /> '''[[The Modern Environmental Movement]]'''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360: Our Outlook, Perspective and Work is Local/National/Global, Individual and Community-to-Community'''<br /> <br /> : '''[[Green Best Practices]]'''<br /> <br /> : [[File:Climate First Bank Florida.png]]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Climate_First_Bank_Florida.png<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''An Interview with Bill McKibben'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> The Very Good and Very Bad News on Climate<br /> <br /> July 10, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-bill-mckibben.html?unlocked_article_code=1.wlA.b4se.muIpmtiO6j6_&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> Here’s the good news: Green energy is getting better and cheaper, faster than we had ever dared hope.<br /> <br /> This next sentence was unimaginable even a few years ago: In April, the energy think tank Ember found that all of the new electricity demand around the world in 2025 was met with green power. That is wild.<br /> <br /> But here is the bad news: Climate change is accelerating. We’re discovering new ways that the climate system is more fragile, more sensitive to emissions, than we previously had thought.<br /> <br /> We have not been talking that much about climate change lately, but that doesn’t mean it has stopped happening. Europe is in the midst of an extraordinary heat wave. The world is staring down the barrel of a powerful El Niño.<br /> <br /> And climate politics is in almost total disarray. Donald Trump has gutted the Inflation Reduction Act. His administration is accelerating fossil fuel production and kneecapping green energy.<br /> <br /> <br /> But here’s the possibility, a bit of optimism: The advances in green technology make a new climate politics possible — one that doesn’t just talk about sacrifice and disaster prevention but presents decarbonization and green energy as a way station on the path to somewhere better.<br /> <br /> Clean energy abundance, a new form of energetic wealth, the possibility of the left actually offering a future of more and better — not less and worse — was a hard case to make even a few years ago. But now we cannot only imagine it, we can see it, touch it, live in it. It is here.<br /> <br /> So how do we talk about it? How do we make it happen?<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-bill-mckibben.html?unlocked_article_code=1.wlA.b4se.muIpmtiO6j6_&amp;smid=em-share '''Read the McKibben Interview Here for more:''']<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Even better than the E.V. is the e-bike, which I think may turn out to be the transformative invention of our time on Earth.&quot; -- Bill McKibben<br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-bill-mckibben.html?unlocked_article_code=1.wlA.b4se.muIpmtiO6j6_&amp;smid=em-share '''Click Here for more about Bill McKibben at GreenPolicy360'''] <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:America250 logo.svg.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/In_Defense_of_Democracy_and_Freedom<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Democracy_Quotes<br /> <br /> <br /> We recall a quote of Benjamin Franklin responding to a question in 1787 about the newly announced birth of the US as he left Independence Hall after the Constitutional Convention:<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''We have &quot;a Republic, if you can keep it.&quot;'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Today's generation, and future generations, would be wise to remember Franklin's words of warning.'''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> '''July 4th, 1776'''<br /> <br /> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness...<br /> <br /> * https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''June 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''June 30, 2026'''<br /> <br /> <br /> NATIONAL REPUBLICAN SENATORIAL COMMITTEE ET AL. v. FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION ET AL.<br /> <br /> * https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-621_h315.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Millionaires &amp; Billionaires Applaud'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : U.S. Supreme Court Increases Influence of '''[[Money in Politics]]'''<br /> <br /> :: New SCOTUS Ruling Memorializes 'Pay to Play' Transactional Politics<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360's associate [http://www.politicopay.com '''PoliticoPay.com'''], has been tracking the escalating money in politics trend for years.<br /> <br /> We have warned of the consequences of profligate spending on politicians and campaigns. These warnings have become a reality -- and further challenge to good government. <br /> <br /> * https://politicopay.com/buckley-valeo-a-mega-money-future<br /> <br /> * https://politicopay.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''NPR re: Decision No. 24–621'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''(The Supreme Court) decision means that parties get the best of both worlds. They can both coordinate with candidates and raise unlimited funds.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''At issue in the case was a post-Watergate law that Congress passed to limit the amount of money individuals can give to political parties. The law, the Federal Election Campaign Act, also limited how much money political parties can spend on their candidates. Other types of organizations, like political action committees and Super PACs, have no limits on the amount of money they can raise and spend on elections...''<br /> <br /> ''Republicans, including Vice President Vance and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, challenged the law as an unconstitutional violation of political parties' First Amendment right to raise and spend money on their candidates.''<br /> <br /> ''Backed by the Trump Justice Department, they contended that the only justification for imposing a fundraising limit on parties is to prevent corruption, but they maintained that there is no evidence that the law has prevented corruption.''<br /> <br /> This decision overturns a 2001 Supreme Court case that declared the limits on party spending to be constitutional. It's the latest in a series of rulings since then that have unraveled campaign finance regulations.<br /> <br /> ''The saga began in 2010, when the court ruled in Citizens United that corporations have a First Amendment right to unlimited spending on elections...''<br /> <br /> * https://www.npr.org/2026/06/30/nx-s1-5827039/supreme-court-campaign-finance<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Speaking of the Influence of Big Money on Consequential Political Decisions'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Michael Mann's new book, Coming Back to Earth.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Michael Mann has news of science, politics, and life impacting policies --''' <br /> <br /> A new book on the state of climate science and politics is in the works with Michael Mann @ Public Affairs...<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 especially appreciates the publication notice:<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Coming Back to Earth'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Providing grounded, evidence-based reasons to be optimistic about our ability to confront climate change.'''<br /> <br /> <br /> We're reminded of his most recent book 'The New Climate War', which he inscribed for GreenPolicy360. <br /> <br /> '''Thanks Michael, Onward we go !'''<br /> <br /> <br /> and as we say here at the top of each online page as our site and green network is being read by millions around the Earth...<br /> <br /> '''Each of us can make a positive difference by stepping up &amp; doing our best'''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Generation Green]] | [[Planet Citizens]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''' &quot;We have to identify the problem, then act in many ways to solve the problem. Global warming is the threat of our times.&quot;''' &lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;-- [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Governor_Jerry_Brown '''Jerry Brown, California Governor''']&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''' &quot;We’re going to need to use every tool in the toolbox if we’re going to solve this problem.&quot; '''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;-- [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Michael_E_Mann_--_act_with_hope_not_fear.jpg '''Michael E. Mann''']&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Consequences of Another War in the Middle East'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> : Deep Costs to the U.S. and Its Future -- Come into View<br /> <br /> :: U.S. Allies Suffer with Shifts in Global Economics -- the Mid East Continues in Crisis<br /> <br /> <br /> '''With the deepening costs of oil/gas wars adding trillions to expanding U.S. debt -- with a multi-trillion dollars Iraq war, Afghanistan war, and ongoing Israel/Syria/Lebanon/Palestine-Gaza conflicts -- we witness decades of failed policy and generational roll over... The national/international costs and changes brought on by the U.S./Iran war, with its severe global energy disruptions, begin to come into a wider global view ...'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/business/energy-environment/china-energy-battery-grid.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qlA.iKfE.kO9ONgn1Q7pG&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:US_Reliability_Falls_in_Europe.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Visit GreenPolicy360's Associate, Strategic Demands, for Continued Perspective on the Middle East Wars and the Far-Reaching Consequences and Damaged U.S. Relations'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''June 14, 2026'''<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/costsofwar/<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/business/energy-environment/china-energy-battery-grid.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qlA.iKfE.kO9ONgn1Q7pG&amp;smid=url-share '''China benefits as Petrol Politics of Oil/Gas and Mideast Wars push alternative energy sources''']<br /> <br /> [[File:China electrostate benefits from efx of Mideast war.png|link=https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/business/energy-environment/china-energy-battery-grid.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qlA.iKfE.kO9ONgn1Q7pG&amp;smid=url-share]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''China's electrostate is poised to win from war in the Middle East'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/business/energy-environment/china-energy-battery-grid.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qlA.iKfE.kO9ONgn1Q7pG&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> More on [https://strategicdemands.com/new-definitions-of-security/ 'new definitions of national/global security']<br /> <br /> ''In April, wind and solar generated more electricity globally than gas for the first time.''<br /> <br /> <br /> Scan the energy production data<br /> <br /> * https://ember-energy.org/<br /> <br /> <br /> Data into action<br /> <br /> Open data and intelligent policy analysis to unlock a clean, electrified energy future<br /> <br /> <br /> Spring 2026<br /> <br /> '''&quot;And then came Hormuz&quot; ... Iran war analysis via Ember<br /> <br /> :If the defining economic story of the century is the rise of Asia, the defining energy story is the rise of electricity. The two are usually told apart. This report argues they are one: Asia’s rise is electric, and the electric age hastens Asia’s rise.<br /> <br /> :Electricity has been the century’s fastest-growing energy carrier, overtaking oil in 2007 as the leading supplier of useful energy worldwide. Over the same years, Asia has been the fastest-growing region. In 2016, China passed the United States in purchasing-power terms, and South and Southeast Asia together passed the European Union in 2021. Two features bind these stories together.<br /> <br /> :The first is that Asia is taking an electric path. Since the turn of the century, Asia has driven three quarters of the growth in global electricity. In the West, GDP and electricity demand decoupled long ago; in Asia, they rise in lock-step. Asia has achieved greater electrification at lower incomes per capita. No growth in history has been this electric.<br /> <br /> :The second runs deeper. It is a change in what energy is. Coal, oil and gas are commodities, dug from the ground. Solar panels, batteries and wind turbines are technologies, built on a production line. The energy revolution is the shift from extraction to manufacturing.<br /> <br /> <br /> :Enter Asia – the world’s factory. Asia builds most of the world’s solar panels, batteries, power electronics, electric motors and cars. Its strengths fit the new energy system.<br /> <br /> :Such a shift carries historical weight. After 1800 the West pulled ahead of Asia, a parting of fortunes known as the Great Divergence. Energy sat at the core of this divergence: first coal, then oil, and the engines built to burn them. These innovations favoured Western strengths and underwrote two centuries of wealth and power.<br /> <br /> :The Great Convergence – the East closing in on the West – also has an energy story, and it runs the other way. The new vector is electricity, and the electro-technologies that run on it. The new centre is Asia. Its lack of oil and gas was a weakness in a fossil world. It is a blessing in an electric one.<br /> <br /> :China is, of course, the giant. But change is radiating outwards. From Vietnam to Bangladesh, electrification rates are higher than in Europe or the United States. From Pakistan to Japan, solar’s share of power beats the US. From Thailand to Nepal and Indonesia to Singapore, EV uptake is ahead. Strip China out, and the rest of Asia still outbuilds the world in solar modules and battery components.<br /> <br /> :For years the economics of electrotech have been improving rapidly. A decade ago, solar began to beat coal, and electric cars beat petrol over their lifetimes, once fuel was counted. Today solar and EVs are cheaper to buy outright, even before the fuel savings. For economies short of capital, the door is now open to rapid change.<br /> <br /> :Then came Hormuz: the closure of Asia’s petrol station. The region buys nearly half of its oil from the Gulf, a deeper reliance than Europe had on Russia. It is the second blow in four years. The first came in 2022, when Russia cut off Europe, and Europe outbid Asia for gas, pricing out poorer countries. If electrotech is the pull of opportunity, the twin fossil shock is the push of necessity.<br /> <br /> :Economics, security and industrial opportunity now all point in the same direction. Asia holds half the world’s people and 4% of its oil and gas, but three quarters of the electrotech factories that can replace the fuel it lacks. <br /> <br /> : The Great Divergence was powered by the energy the West mastered. The Great Convergence runs on the energy that Asia manufactures. If this is to be the Asian century, its path will be electric.<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Electric Asia'''<br /> <br /> * How Asia is leading the electric age, powering its rise and reshaping the global order<br /> <br /> <br /> '''“What was five years ago maybe barely competitive, now is almost already clearly cheaper...”'''<br /> <br /> '''&quot;Investments in renewables have become a better bet, promising returns in closer to two years instead of 30.&quot;'''<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: The shift globally to renewable energy comes against a backdrop of historic policy decisions in the two terms of the Trump administration, a government-wide retreat away from renewable energy. The Trump 'retro-vision' that touts fossil fuels and denigrates renewables is, in fact, setting back U.S. competitiveness in meeting new demands for electrification across industrial sectors.<br /> <br /> As the economies of the world move forward, in transportation (EVs, e-motorcycles, e-bikes... e-buses, e-trucks, city e-grids with light rail, and soon aerial copters and planes, boats and ships, and e-power tools, e-tractors, e-smart homes and battery technologies (powering grids, cities, factories, consumer products), and e-robots and a gamut of AI technologies .... and on and on, the retro-actions of the Trump period are delivering a backward-looking blow to U.S. competitiveness that will have decades-long consequences.<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''June 7, 2026'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''As the War with Iran Reaches Day 100'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : And War in Ukraine Continues to Flare<br /> <br /> :: And War in Lebanon Expands<br /> <br /> :: And War in the Middle East Seems Endless<br /> <br /> ::: With Escalations, Reverberations, Proliferation of 'WMDs', and Incalculable Worldwide Costs <br /> <br /> We listen in and watch as the issues and questions roil across an informed and hard discussion between voices 'in the know' ...<br /> <br /> * https://substack.com/home/post/p-201011581<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''June 4'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''PREMIERE of a New Documentary Film about the Threat of Nuclear Weapons'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''In this 29-minute documentary, renowned whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg provides a powerful wakeup call about the global threat posed by nuclear weapons and advocates how we can dramatically reduce the real and present danger of nuclear annihilation.'' <br /> <br /> ''Before he released the top secret Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, Ellsberg was a nuclear war planner with access to classified information on U.S. nuclear strategy.''<br /> <br /> <br /> Wikipedia Bio / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Filmed one year before his death at age 92, Ellsberg speaks with clarity and urgency about the dangers we face, noting, &quot;I’ve long said that to my last breath I will be doing what I can to postpone and avert the risk of nuclear war.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''With ongoing conflicts heightening nuclear tensions, and with the recent end of the New START treaty potentially triggering a renewed arms race, &quot;An Ordinary Insanity&quot; is a timely film to help mobilize broad public concern and action for arms control and nuclear disarmament.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360 &amp; Strategic Demands''':<br /> <br /> A message from beyond, words of warning from an old friend of ours, Dan Ellsberg.<br /> <br /> Listen in to words of wisdom, even as a US president postures to be anti-nuke, and proposes nuclear weapons funding at all time highs...<br /> <br /> In fact, nuclear funding and Trump administration nuclear weapons development and 'usable' delivery platforms have spurred an out of control Nuclear Arms Race between the US, Russia and now China<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> “We’re continuing year-by-year deliberately with a posture and a policy and threats that make a significant risk of near extinction possible.” <br /> <br /> — DANIEL ELLSBERG in &quot;An Ordinary Insanity&quot; <br /> <br /> * https://www.anordinaryinsanity.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''More about Dan Ellsberg''' [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?search=dan+ellsberg&amp;title=Special%3ASearch&amp;profile=advanced&amp;fulltext=1&amp;ns0=1&amp;ns6=1&amp;ns14=1 @ '''GreenPolicy360'''] &amp; [https://strategicdemands.com/?s=dan+ellsberg @ '''Strategic Demands''']<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Nuclear_Weapons<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/nuclear-arms-race-3-0/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Truth and Consequence - Dan Ellsberg.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''May 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''David Attenborough Turns 100 Years Old'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/arts/television/david-attenborough-100-birthday.html?unlocked_article_code=1.hFA.HXVb.qSlnB3rq8Hbe&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> ''&quot;The next few decades represent a final opportunity to build a stable home for ourselves and restore the rich, healthy and wonderful world that we inherited from our distant ancestors. Our future on the planet, the only place as far as we know where life of any kind exists, is at stake.” -- David Attenborough, &quot;A Life on Our Planet&quot;, 2020<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We agree with David, we very deeply agree...<br /> <br /> And to Leo DiCaprio, a fellow [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Bioneers '''Bioneer'''], we agree too. David is a protector and close up story teller of the natural world who is a unique and valued voice whose wisdom will remain for years, and years and years...<br /> <br /> * https://deadline.com/2026/05/leonardo-dicaprio-david-attenborough-tribute-100th-birthday-1236888075/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Lee Zeldin E&amp;E News.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Photo by E&amp;E News&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin this past week defended deep budget cuts proposed by President Donald Trump'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Zeldin appeared at a trio of congressional hearings, dueling with House members and senators over the administration’s plan to reduce EPA’s annual funding to $4.2 billion in fiscal 2027 — or more than half of the agency’s enacted spending'' (E&amp;E)<br /> <br /> <br /> Green Policy: Lee Zeldin is Donald Trump's zealous attorney/administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. (We note he is also being discussed in the news as a leading candidate for the next US Attorney General). Zeldin for now is showing himself as a man with a cause. The cause he is pursuing, as he wields expanded administrative power, is dismantling and defunding the agency charged with protecting the environment, as the EPA's title straightforwardly declares. <br /> <br /> Since the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Environmental_Protection_Agency '''Environmental Protection Agency establishment in 1970'''], the EPA has followed its mission over decades. Congress after Congress envisioned, developed, and approved its work. Popular support was nationwide. Memorable achievements followed. We won't go into the long list of health-protections and science that EPA has given the nation and its communities, the air-quality, water-quality, health- and living-quality advances are there to see and experience.<br /> <br /> In Lee Zeldin's short time in office, however, the record of achievements is not seen as achievements to be built on... Zeldin has instead turned the valued agency into a storm of firings, cuts, closing of departments, ending research, terminating projects, eliminating oversight programs, announcing the EPA is no longer in the business of doing the people's work of enforcing the statutory mandates and directions of the US Congress.<br /> <br /> When asked under what authority he is dismantling the EPA, he answers with authoritative assurance -- that of the Supreme Court's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_questions_doctrine?wprov=sfti1 ''''Major Questions Doctrine''''] and the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loper_Bright_Enterprises_v._Raimondo '''Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo'''] decision.<br /> <br /> Zeldin and the current administration go on to explain they have 'different' policy priorities' that allow them to cut, cut, cut the EPA, turning it into a shell of what it was -- and away from Congressional votes, decisions and budgets since the 1970s intended to support viable, effective environmental protection. <br /> <br /> Yet, a remade Supreme Court has now enabled a dramatic and demanding new level of explicit text in Statutory law. The Court's novel doctrine of 'Major Questions' and the Loper Bright decision that Lee Zeldin wave as he orders dismantling is the order coming from the president. Given on the ground, deep and popular support, Zeldin's orders won't stand the test of time.<br /> <br /> Congressional staffs will bring in experts and act to redraft the letter of the law. Future administrations will support will act to pass legally specific text across most all environmental laws that are being summarily dismissed by Lee Zeldin, Esq.<br /> <br /> What Zeldin seems to forget, as he flaunts the Scotus recent turn, is that the clock is ticking, the people see and learn what is needed and what to do to deliver the kind of government they are demanding.<br /> <br /> Top of list -- quality of life. This includes protection against toxics and pollution. Moving toward a goal of clean, breathable air, drinkable water, and sustainable, enjoyable, healthy communities, towns and cities. <br /> <br /> We understand the need for the EPA's work. Most everyone does.<br /> <br /> When Lee Zeldin goes away, within a brief time a renewed Environmental Protection Agency with new Presidential executive orders and Congressional support will be the order of the day. <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''April 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Remade Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS) Remakes Civil Rights &amp; the Voting Rights Act'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : SCOTUS Voting Act Decision Acts to Reshape the 2026 Mid-term Congressional Election <br /> <br /> :: Partisan Reconfiguration of Congressional Districts Goes into Overdrive<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Voting Rights and Control of Congress'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Media news headlines from across the US deliver Temper of the Times <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-voting-rights-act-louisiana-alabama-4e3225083caccda5ec73a98533a79add '''Supreme Court hollows out a landmark law that had protected minority voting rights for 6 decades'''] '''Associated Press / April 30, 2026'''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act--.png]] 🏛️[[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-01.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-02.png]] 🏛️ [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-03.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-04.png]] 🏛️ [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-05.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-.png]] 🏛️ [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-07.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-08.png]] 🏛️ [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-09.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Memorable Words from the British King Addressing a Joint Session of the US Congress'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Charles navigates fraught politics with reminders of the Magna Carta of 1215, citizen rights, and calling for today's democratic governments to have high purpose<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''&quot;[O]ur generation must decide how to address the collapse of critical natural systems, which threatens far more than the harmony and essential diversity of Nature.”'''''<br /> <br /> '''''&quot;Reflect on our shared responsibility to safeguard Nature, our most precious and irreplaceable asset.&quot;''''' ...<br /> <br /> <br /> The modern representative of the UK went on to speak of the British Enlightenment, and the rights and duties of today's democratic governments.<br /> <br /> <br /> ''“We do not embark on these remarkable endeavours together out of sentiment, we do so because they build greater shared resilience for the future, so making our citizens safer for generations to come.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''“Our common ideals were not only crucial for liberty and equality, they are also the foundation of our shared prosperity. The Rule of Law: the certainty of stable and accessible rules, an independent judiciary resolving disputes and delivering impartial justice.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> ... ''&quot;It is here in these very halls that this spirit of liberty and the promise of America’s Founders is present in every session and every vote cast” ... political debate enriched “by the deliberation of many, representing the living mosaic of the United States. In both of our countries it is the very fact of our vibrant, diverse and free societies that gives us our collective strength.”''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;The essence of our two Nations is a generosity of spirit and a duty to foster compassion, to promote peace, to deepen mutual understanding and to value all people, of all faiths, and of none.”''<br /> <br /> -- King Charles III, April 28, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;''''Earth Day', April 22, 1970, Carries On &amp; On'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''April 22, 2026 🧤 Teach-In Memory Time'''<br /> <br /> <br /> At GreenPolicy360 we tell of 'being there' and being directly involved in the envisioning and planning of a first Earth Day <br /> <br /> Tip of our Green Hat to Representative George E. Brown<br /> <br /> <br /> Personal recollection -- <br /> <br /> <br /> A Story of 'Earthrise' to 'Earth Day' and Far Beyond....<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Day_Memories_on_the_50th_Anniversary<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;[[Earth Day]]&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''[[Earth Day Is Every Day]]'''<br /> <br /> :* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Earth_Day<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth-Day.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Every Day Is Earth Day.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Above Our Living Earth.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :🌎<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> : [[File:Earthrise to Earthset.png]]<br /> <br /> :: &lt;small&gt;Round &amp; Round We Go ....&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Day &lt;big&gt;''''Earthrise' to a First 'Earth Day' '''&lt;/big&gt;] ... [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Earth_in_Human_Hands.jpg &lt;big&gt;'''Now Earth Is in Your Hands'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''Earthrise', December 24, 1968 to 'Earthset', April 6, 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Earthrise<br /> * https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/earthset/<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;'''[[The Modern Environmental Movement]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Apollo.jpg]]<br /> <br /> : &lt;small&gt;NASA / December 1968&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?search=earthrise&amp;title=Special%3ASearch&amp;profile=advanced&amp;fulltext=1&amp;ns0=1 '''Earthrise Thoughts at GreenPolicy360''']<br /> <br /> <br /> : '''A half century on, fifty years after Apollo 8, humanity again visits the Moon and looks back at Planet Earth'''<br /> <br /> <br /> :[https://greenpolicy360.net/images/Moon_and_Earth_from_Artemis%2C_April_2026.jpg '''Reflection on the experience of watching the Earth set over the Moon, via Astronaut Reid Wiseman''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earthset.png]]<br /> <br /> :: &lt;small&gt;NASA / April 2026&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Artemis II, Journey from Earth to the Moon'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nasa.gov/gallery/journey-to-the-moon/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Artemis looking at Earth home.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth from Artemis II.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;NASA&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''March 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Another War'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> As the US and Israel launch war with Iran, the following words hover front of mind. <br /> <br /> “People predicting disaster: The odds are in your favor, but you cannot be sure, and you should not hope to be right. People celebrating: Maybe wanna wait a bit. The odds, historically, are definitely not on your side. Anyone certain they know what happens next is making it up.” -- Tom Nichols <br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;The world needs to renew a focus on human rights with quality of life high on every nation's agenda.&quot; -- GreenPolicy360<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''February 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> February 18, 2026<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Environmental Groups Sue Trump’s EPA Rollback of Climate Science Finding'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via The Guardian <br /> <br /> More than a dozen health and environmental justice non-profits have sued the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over its revocation of the legal determination that underpins US federal climate regulations.<br /> <br /> ''Filed in Washington DC circuit court, the lawsuit challenges the EPA’s rollback of the “endangerment finding”, which states that the buildup of heat-trapping pollution in the atmosphere endangers public health and welfare and has allowed the EPA to limit those emissions from vehicles, power plants and other industrial sources since 2009. The rollback was widely seen as a major setback to US efforts to combat the climate crisis.''<br /> <br /> ''The suit was brought by the American Public Health Association, the American Lung Association, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club and 11 other public health and environmental organizations. The lawsuit was filed by green legal organizations Clean Air Task Force and Earthjustice and it names the EPA and the agency’s administrator, Lee Zeldin, as defendants...''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Trump, Rejecting Science and Climate Change - Feb 2026.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Photo from the LA Times&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''An Attack on a Foundational Law, EPA Findings and a Supporting Court Decision'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/12/trump-epa-rollback-pollution-regulation-endangerment-finding<br /> <br /> <br /> ('''Updated, with this Trump order''') &quot;The United States will essentially have no laws on the books that enforce how efficient America’s passenger cars and trucks should be.&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/16/climate/endangerment-finding-auto-emissions-regulations.html?unlocked_article_code=1.M1A.1MMD.Cox7hRsyuiae&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''A Trump Legacy: Rejecting Science, Climate Change, and the Environmental Protection Agency'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : A Moment in History That Will Be Remembered<br /> <br /> <br /> Reading 'Top of the News' headlines this week, the world's people encounter a nation's president who rejects a half-century of a scientific, military, educational and security studies, data, knowledge -- and warnings.<br /> <br /> President Trump orders environmental cuts and rollbacks, retrogressive policies that turn around the Environmental Protection Agency's progress for the nation.<br /> <br /> Five plus decades of vision, foundational work, projects and programs, NASA/NOAA, EPA, USGS, across US colleges and universities, health and medical research, and on and on are now being diminished and degraded.<br /> <br /> Time will tell the full story of the Trump presidency.<br /> <br /> <br /> For now, let's take a quick look back at actions taken to advance environmental protection and the nation's well being, the beginnings of the EPA, atmospheric/climate/earth science, national security, health, and a better future for all.<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:SMOG_be_gone.jpg<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Tracking_science_policy_across_the_Trump_administration.png<br /> <br /> * https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title42/chapter85&amp;edition=prelim<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: <br /> <br /> Let's call this Trump rejection of science what it is -- an act of hubris, an decision that will not stand in the face of physics...<br /> <br /> Donald Trump's administration, with an EPA taken over by anti-science purveyors who callously and destructively set aside fifty plus years of scientific data, now act to put their legacy into the history books. Their action to deny the overwhelmingly evident dangers of climate change, a gathering storm threatening US and world environmental security, is an ignominious day.<br /> <br /> We, today's generation and future generations will live to mark this moment as a tragedy, one that accelerates real-world physics of earth systems, delivering climate impacts, disruptions, security lost... <br /> <br /> The Trump administration have delivered 'retro' thinking, anti-science destructiveness. <br /> <br /> The Clean Air Acts and accompanying model regulations, [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr '''ideas beginning in California to deal with its &quot;smog&quot;'''] in the 1960s/70s, were shared and spread throughout the US -- and the world's cities and communities. Profound progress, meant explicitly to deal with hazardous air pollutants and remedy the climate-related costs, the damages of atmospheric pollution to health, environment and future well being that adversely impacts life across nations and regions of Earth, was achieved and continues to be achieved. The Trump attempt to block this progress will fail.<br /> <br /> Yet, the time lost to Trumpian folly will add additional costs to humanity's journey forward.<br /> <br /> We mark these days in February 2026 as times to be remembered -- and judged -- for what they are. <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EPA 1a.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EPA 2a.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EPA 3a.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EPA 4a.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:PlanetCitizen banner 800x163.jpg|link=https://greenpolicy360.net/w/PlanetCitizen]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> February 1, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Another Warning Among Many'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Excerpt from a Chapter in a new book by Thom Hartmann...<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Climate Collapse Presidency'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Climate change is the single greatest threat to a sustainable future<br /> : but, at the same time, addressing the climate challenge presents a<br /> : golden opportunity to promote prosperity, security and a brighter<br /> : future for all. <br /> :—- Ban Ki-moon, former UN Secretary-General,<br /> : Remarks at Climate Leaders’ Summit, April 11, 2024<br /> <br /> <br /> Thom Hartmann @https://hartmannreport.com:<br /> <br /> The greatest existential threat humanity faces isn’t hiding in a military bunker or a terrorist cell. It’s in plain sight: the accelerating collapse of our only home’s life-support systems.<br /> <br /> Trump’s first term was environmental arson. He gutted the EPA, installed fossil fuel executives in key positions, shredded over one hundred environmental protections, and abandoned the Paris Climate Agreement. <br /> <br /> Scientists were silenced. Research was suppressed. The words “climate change” vanished from government websites as if deleting terms could delete reality.<br /> <br /> When confronted about climate’s role in the devastating 2020 wildfires, Trump smirked: “I don’t think science knows, actually.”<br /> <br /> <br /> --<br /> <br /> <br /> An AI response:<br /> <br /> Daniel Solomon<br /> <br /> I asked AI what is the effect of Trump #47 on the climate? Ans. below:<br /> <br /> <br /> ''In his second term as the 47th President, Donald Trump has moved aggressively to reverse U.S. climate progress by prioritizing fossil fuel production and dismantling federal environmental oversight.<br /> <br /> ''Key effects on the climate and policy include:''<br /> <br /> ''Withdrawal from International Agreements: On January 27, 2026, the U.S. officially withdrew from the Paris Agreement for the second time. Additionally, the administration has announced departures from over 60 international bodies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).''<br /> <br /> ''Increased Carbon Emissions: Projections suggest that the administration's rollbacks could lead to an additional 4 billion metric tons of CO2-equivalent emissions by 2030 compared to previous trajectories.''<br /> <br /> ''Dismantling Regulatory Foundations: The EPA is currently working to repeal the 2009 Endangerment Finding, which is the legal basis for nearly all federal greenhouse gas regulations.''<br /> <br /> ''Expansion of Fossil Fuels: Under the mantra &quot;drill, baby, drill,&quot; the administration has fast-tracked deep-sea mining, reopened Alaskan refuges for oil development, and granted roughly $40 billion in new subsidies to the fossil fuel industry.''<br /> <br /> ''Stalling Clean Energy: Federal support for wind and solar has been slashed, including the elimination of the $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit and nearly $13 billion in green energy funding.''<br /> <br /> ''Information and Data Gaps: The administration has removed past National Climate Assessments from federal sites, deleted climate science webpages, and cut funding for climate research programs, creating significant gaps in global climate tracking.''<br /> <br /> ''While federal action has stalled, market forces and state-led initiatives — particularly in California and Texas — continue to drive some growth in renewable capacity despite federal headwinds.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Trump admin losses est 35B in clean energy projects - 2025.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Deep Losses in Clean-Renewable Production &amp; Competitiveness'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : US Policy Goes Retro with Fossil Fuels<br /> <br /> : * https://grist.org/politics/trump-2025-renewable-energy-investment-electric-vehicles/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tracking science policy across the Trump administration.png]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Tracking_science_policy_across_the_Trump_administration.png&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''January 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> January 7th, a Day to Remember ... <br /> <br /> This day in America delivered a deadly shooting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a death recorded live by a number of video recordings taken and distributed by citizens who observed the killing. Today is going to become etched in the memory of US history.<br /> <br /> The death, as witnessed by those who viewed and reviewed the video recordings, was tragic -- and much more...<br /> <br /> The lies told by government officials following the shooting of a woman in her car were painfully far from the facts and now remain another in a line of political lies that are spreading like a fire inflaming communities across the country.<br /> <br /> Today, it is again time to remember the warnings of Hannah Arendt.<br /> <br /> Take time to read her writing of lies, big lies, repeated lies -- and the threats and dangers they pose.<br /> <br /> These lies are, again, as history teaches, deliverers of dangerous times.<br /> <br /> Echoes from the propagandists that brought on World War II.<br /> <br /> Echoes of lies to recall...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''&quot;Truth and Politics&quot;'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Hannah Arendt<br /> <br /> 1967 in the New Yorker Magazine<br /> <br /> * https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/praxis1313/files/2018/08/Arendt_-Truth-and-Politics-LQ.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?search=hannah+arendt&amp;title=Special%3ASearch '''More from Hannah Arendt''']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[Earth Day]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;'''[[Earth Day Is Every Day]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :[[File:Earth-Day.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ==''Recent GreenPolicy360 Story Highlights''==<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> ''[[Green Stories of the Day - GreenPolicy360 Archive]]''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2025'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2025 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2025'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2025]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2024'''''&lt;/big&gt;'''''===<br /> <br /> [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2024 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2024'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2024]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2023'''''&lt;/big&gt;'''''===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2023 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2023'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2023]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2022'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2022 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2022'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2022]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2021'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2021 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2021'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2021]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2020'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2020 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2020'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2020]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2019'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2019 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2019'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2019]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2018'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2018 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2018'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2018]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2017'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2017 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2017'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2017]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2016'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2016 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2016'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2016]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2015'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2015 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2015'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect 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Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Green_Stories_of_the_Day&diff=138376 2026-10-10T01:48:20Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> __notoc__<br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&quot;Green Stories Changing Our World&quot;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''For the Young &amp; Old, Across Continents, Community-to-Community'''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt; ''@GreenPolicy360: An eOS Network with Hundreds of Millions of Views &amp; Shares''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Earth dynamic global map.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/1000hPa/orthographic &lt;big&gt;&lt;font color=green&gt;'''#PlanetCitizens360'''&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/big&gt;] <br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Planet Citizens]]''' <br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[The Commons]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[EarthPOV]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Earth Right Now]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Earth Science Vital Signs]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''GRN360: &quot;Vita Activa&quot;, Turning Visions into Reality'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Green_Networking &lt;big&gt;'''Green Networking, Green Best Practices'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Living Earth.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Planet Citizen Vision of Living Earth]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_Citizen_Vision_of_Living_Earth<br /> <br /> <br /> :✅ [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Plans_Enforcement_-_Resources '''The Climate Plans Enforcement Initiative''']<br /> <br /> :✅ [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenLinks '''GreenLinks: Global Green Networking with Web 3.0''']<br /> <br /> :✅ [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_Best_Practices '''Green Best Practices: Community-to-Community'''] <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Liberty Bell.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Photo by mbell1975&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''A Democratic Republic, a 'Great Experiment' in the United States'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> 🗒️ Ours is a democracy, a republic, a work-in-progress continuing to this day, a heritage worth protecting...<br /> <br /> <br /> As the 250th anniversary of the signing of the US Declaration of Independence approaches, we will celebrate an agenda of rights, inalienable rights, human rights, put forward with and embodied in a [https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/full-text '''founding US Constitution'''], [https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/bill-of-rights/what-does-it-say '''a Bill of Rights'''] and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_amendments_to_the_Constitution_of_the_United_States '''Constitutional Amendments'''] -- together a Constitutional government envisioning a living Democratic Republic. <br /> <br /> <br /> On July 2, 1776, the Second Continental Congress passed a “Resolution for Independence” declaring “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”<br /> The signing of the United States Declaration of Independence occurred primarily on August 2, 1776, at the Pennsylvania State House, later renamed Independence Hall, in Philadelphia. The 56 delegates to the Second Continental Congress represented the Thirteen Colonies, of which 12 voted to approve the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[In Defense of Democracy and Freedom]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;'''[[Democracy Quotes]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;[https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Democracy '''A 'Working Democracy' ''']&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;[https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Fact_Checking,_Facts_Count '''In Democracy, 'Facts Count' ''']&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Surviving Victory - Liberty at Risk.jpg]]<br /> <br /> 🌅 'Surviving Victory'&lt;big&gt;🔥&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/surviving-victory-from-the-archive/<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''October 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''US imposes sanctions on ICC after former ICC judge wins Nobel Peace Prize'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Beyond defense, as the US continues to move away from international support while advocating an era of 'America First' <br /> <br /> <br /> Oct 9 (Reuters) - US President Donald Trump's administration imposed sanctions on the ​International Criminal Court (ICC) on Friday, hours after one of its former judges won the Nobel Peace Prize, putting Washington on a diplomatic collision course with European allies.<br /> <br /> The court denounced the ‌move as an &quot;assault on the rule of law and on the very foundations of the international legal order,&quot; and called on its 125 member states to take action to defend it.<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/world/us-imposes-sanctions-international-criminal-court-hours-after-former-judge-wins-2026-10-09/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Announces Its 2026-2030 Strategic Plan'''<br /> <br /> : As with prior EPA plans, budgets, and proposed changes, a legislative and judicial reordering will follow<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;EPA's Fiscal Year (FY) 2026–2030 Strategic Plan&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2026-10/fy-2026-2030-epa-strategic-plan-final-for-publication-october-2026.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Thought for the Day&quot;<br /> <br /> October 1, 2026<br /> <br /> In a recent series of private meetings in San Francisco, after a tasting menu dinner, Anthropic consulted religious scholars to help instill morality into its A.I. models ... a case was being made that Claude could be or become conscious.<br /> <br /> What would it mean for humanity’s future if artificial intelligence systems possessed a consciousness that rivals our own?<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-morals-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FVE.kDTO.OTLs6iwx7swF&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''September 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Canada's Prime Minister Steps Onto the World Stage'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/mark-carney-talks-geopolitics/<br /> <br /> Strategic Demands: A extraordinary interview and timestamp documenting geopolitical realities faced by the Canadian Prime Minister. Here, we see the navigation skills required and demonstrated by an exceptionally trained and talented man who guides his ship of state through shifting winds… At StratDem we speak of the need for “Strategic Realism” in international relations, of security competition and values-based politics in foreign policy. Canada is fortunate, in our opinion, to have such a person at the helm of its representative democratic governance.<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Telling the Truth to the World'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Facts are key to understanding, and key to unlocking the truth<br /> <br /> : Any speech to a world audience, as at the United Nations, should be time for facts and truth<br /> <br /> <br /> The Fact Checking writer for CNN has no easy 'news beat' as he has to follow the U.S. president's pronouncements<br /> <br /> * https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/22/politics/fact-check-trump-united-nations<br /> <br /> By: Daniel Dale / CNN<br /> <br /> (Note: After a court decision, CNN was re-instituted w/ press credentials on Sept. 24)<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Fact check: Trump’s false claims to the United Nations'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> (Excerpt) <br /> <br /> Global warming<br /> <br /> Trump scoffed at dire warnings that artificial intelligence might eventually attack or kill people, claiming they are coming from “the very same people who said we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming, a name since reborn to climate change because the planet was cooling, not warming, and nobody was dead.”<br /> <br /> There are at least four things wrong with his sentence about global warming.<br /> <br /> First, the phrase “global warming” remains in widespread use even though the phrase “climate change” is also common; they mean different things. Climate scientists use both, often saying “global warming” when referring to the long-term trend of increasing global temperature and “climate change” when referring to the numerous effects the world is experiencing because of that trend. (NASA, part of the Trump-led federal government, [https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/faq/whats-the-difference-between-climate-change-and-global-warming/ explains] the difference between the terms on its website.) For example, a [https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_SYR_SPM.pdf 2023 report] from the UN’s climate change panel is titled “Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report,” but it says this: “Human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases, have unequivocally caused global warming, with global surface temperature reaching 1.1°C above 1850-1900 in 2011-2020.”<br /> <br /> Second, while Trump didn’t say what time period he was talking about, he didn’t acknowledge that the world has continued to get warmer, not cooler. The UN’s World Meteorological Organization [https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/wmo-confirms-2025-was-one-of-warmest-years-record reported] in January that “the past 11 years have been the 11 warmest on record,” with 2023, 2024 and 2025 the three very warmest — as NASA [https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5607/ also found] — though 2025 wasn’t as hot as 2024.<br /> <br /> Third, experts [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/opinion/environment/climate-change-death-toll.html widely disagree] that “nobody” has died from the various impacts of a warming world. It’s impossible to pinpoint a precise death number, but [https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2025/10/30/how-many-people-are-already-being-killed-by-climate-change some] [https://www.eenews.net/articles/people-are-dying-from-climate-change-but-how-many/ estimates] total in the millions. The deaths are likely to continue; the World Health Organization [https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-change-and-health says], “Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year, from under nutrition, malaria, diarrhea and heat stress alone.”<br /> <br /> Fourth, while somebody somewhere might have said that “we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming,” that [https://insideclimatenews.org/news/27082019/12-years-climate-change-explained-ipcc-science-solutions/ isn’t] how an expert report framed the issue.<br /> <br /> A widely discussed 2018 report from climate scientists said the world needed to sharply cut carbon emissions within the next 12 years to be on track to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels; scientists said above that threshold, the potential deadly impacts from climate change would be [https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/science/climate-issues/degrees-matter larger]. Though the 2018 report was often oversimplified by politicians, the expert claim was never that “we’ll all be dead in 12 years” — it was that significant action was needed within 12 years to improve the future. (The UN program [https://wedocs.unep.org/rest/api/core/bitstreams/9f6bd957-8d35-402d-bb4e-c7c17096e592/content reported] earlier this month that the world is set to exceed the 1.5-degree increase, “likely within the next few years&quot;.)<br /> <br /> <br /> More re: Facts and Fact Checking at GreenPolicy360:<br /> <br /> '''Facts Protecting Democracy'''<br /> <br /> At GreenPolicy360, our mission statement supports fact finding and the '3 Ds' -- Discussion ➡️ Debate ➡️ Decision-Making<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 continues a multi-year defense of facts, science, &amp; 'critical thinking skills'<br /> <br /> -- &quot;In Democracy, Facts Count&quot; <br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Fact_Checking<br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Fact_Checking,_Facts_Count<br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Disinformation_-_Online_-_Dangerous<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Taking Time to Take Another Look at the Deepening Costs of War'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 &amp; Strategic Demands<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/costsofwar/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Demanding 'New Definitions of National Security' '''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:New_Definitions_of_National_Security_-_2.png<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Strategic_Demands_of_the_21st_Century,_a_New_Vision_re_Surviving_Victory_conf.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Deep Costs of War StratDem.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Disinformation_-_Online_-_Dangerous<br /> <br /> <br /> A Faith-Announcement in Support of [[The Commons]]<br /> <br /> The Catholic Church continues forward with the message of [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Laudato_Si '''Laudato Si'''] (2015), the first papal encyclical to advance formal environmental protection doctrine. Pope Francis, who was named after St. Francis, the patron saint of the environment, acted to open new doors for theological and spiritual belief within the Catholic tradition. Now, Pope Leo follows on with more ''' 'On Caring for Our Common Home' '''...<br /> <br /> <br /> Challenges of 'ecological turning point'<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''International Theological Commission that calls Christians to view care for creation'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &quot;Caring for Our Common Home&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2026-09/ict-document-care-for-creation-ecology-theology-church-pope.html<br /> * https://www.osservatoreromano.va/en/news/2026-09/ing-009/a-fraternal-response-to-the-triune-god.html<br /> * https://www.americamagazine.org/news/2026/09/03/vatican-creation-sin/<br /> * https://www.thefloridacatholic.org/news/vatican/vatican-theological-commission-defines-sin-against-creation-and-the-creator-in-new-document/article_a6edad02-a5c2-482b-bf7f-fefcf1a8f3ed.html<br /> <br /> <br /> The Vatican has officially declared environmental destruction a ”sin against creation and the Creator” in a major new doctrinal text.<br /> <br /> The document, “Caring for Our Common Home – A Responsible and Fraternal Response to the Triune God,” was published Sept. 2 with the authorization of Pope Leo XIV, according to Vatican News. <br /> <br /> The 29,000-word document, titled '''Caring for Our Common Home''', elevates ecological concern from a merely political or scientific issue into a direct matter of personal faith. <br /> <br /> “Everything is interrelated” within “a single community of life,” according to Vatican News. The commission says this understanding calls Christians to practice gratitude toward God, mercy and solidarity toward others, and responsible care for the common home.<br /> <br /> Authorized under Pope Leo XIV, the text declares that destroying natural habitats, polluting, and exploiting resources are not just civic failures, but a 'sin against creation and against the Creator' that directly violates God's plan.<br /> <br /> This shift from Pope Francis' earlier concept of 'ecological sin' to a more explicit 'sin against the Creator' is designed to reshape how believers view their daily environmental impact. The Vatican emphasizes that failing to safeguard the planet severely harms the poorest populations and future generations, distorting the core relationships that define humanity. <br /> <br /> By placing ecological action squarely in the realm of moral responsibility, the Church is challenging millions of people to treat environmental care as a fundamental requirement of their faith.<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:St. Francis with birds listening.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Faith Traditions Are Growing in Their Calls for Eco-Stewardship'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''&quot;The World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation&quot;'''<br /> <br /> This day is bringing awareness and a call to action<br /> <br /> The spiritual and secular find common ground here in a protection of [[The Commons]]<br /> <br /> <br /> The Catholic Church observes September 1 as the [https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2026-06/vatican-theme-2026-world-day-of-prayer-for-the-care-of-creation.html '''&quot;World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation&quot;'''], a day dedicated to thanking God for the gift of creation and renewing the Church’s commitment to ecological stewardship.<br /> <br /> What the Day Is:<br /> <br /> An annual Catholic observance established by Pope Francis in 2015 as a concrete follow‑up to Laudato Si’.<br /> <br /> Shared with the Orthodox Church, which first designated September 1 as a creation‑focused '''&quot;Day of Prayers for Natural Environment&quot;''' in 1989.<br /> <br /> The opening of the global '''&quot;Season of Creation&quot;''', which runs from September 1 to October 4 (Feast of St. Francis of Assisi).<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:St Francis with the birds.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> Pope St. John Paul II in 1979 <br /> <br /> declared Francis the patron saint of ecology<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Visit Pope Francis' Eco-Encyclical [[Laudato Si]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> More: https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=File:St_Francis_with_the_birds.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://fosfanariou.gr/index.php/2026/08/30/patriarchal-message-for-the-beginning-of-the-ecclesiastical-year-and-the-solemn-day-of-prayers-for-natural-environment-2/ &quot;Solemn Day of Prayers for Natural Environment&quot;, Orthodox Catholic, September 1]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_denominations_by_number_of_members 'Christianity is the largest religious group in the world...]<br /> <br /> The largest denominations -- Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox -- have an estimated 2.3 to 2.6 billion adherents <br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 / On Earth...<br /> <br /> Religious traditions -- faith and spirituality as practiced -- have an intimate connection to life's protection, quality, and humanity's future<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''August 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> TicToc TicToc <br /> <br /> <br /> '''3, 2, 1''' ... '''Launch ... Go, Go, Go'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ⬆️ <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''NASA Goes Looking for Life in the Universe'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Nancy Grace Roman Is the Name of the (biggest- and best-ever) Telescope<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Astro 'Big Picture' Sites]]<br /> <br /> <br /> August 30, 2026<br /> <br /> News from the Florida East Coast<br /> <br /> [https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/30/science/nancy-grace-roman-space-telescope-launch (CNN)] A massive observatory that scientists have called a “discovery machine” has launched toward the cosmos, beginning a journey that could mark a significant shift in our understanding of the universe.<br /> <br /> Designed to seek out otherwise invisible and faint space objects, '''NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope''' lifted off aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket at 7:26 a.m. ET Sunday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The observatory reached orbit about 10 minutes later.<br /> <br /> <br /> (NYT) At a news conference on Saturday morning, Nicola Fox, the associate administrator of NASA’s science mission directorate, explained that Roman’s vast gaze would contribute to solving some of the grandest mysteries about our universe, including how it works, what it is made of and if we are alone out there.<br /> <br /> “To put it in perspective, it will be as if Hubble and James Webb kind of peered through a keyhole at the universe,” Dr. Fox said, referring to two other telescopes NASA has launched into space. “Well, Nancy Grace Roman will kick the door down.”<br /> <br /> <br /> (GRN360) Get ready for 'Exo's in Space' ... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet Exoplanets] ...... with discernible, measurable signs of extraterrestrial life&lt;big&gt;✨ ❇️ ✨&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> 'Up' there ⬆️<br /> <br /> As seen from 'down' here on our terrestrial Home Planet<br /> <br /> Go we go, we're looking 'around'. We're going Exploring ❇️<br /> <br /> <br /> NASA's Exoplanet Archive<br /> <br /> * https://science.nasa.gov/exoplanets/discoveries-dashboard/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> ⬇️<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Trump numbers continue downward.png]]<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Numbers Continue Trending Downward'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via the Washington Post<br /> <br /> August 24, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/08/24/trumps-attempts-intimidate-home-abroad-have-backfired/<br /> <br /> <br /> In the CNN Poll of Polls, 36 percent approved of (Trump's) job performance, while 63 percent disapproved. That’s far below the historical average for presidents. He is even more unpopular abroad — and international disapproval of the president has translated into disapproval of the country he leads. A [https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2026/06/23/trump-gets-negative-reviews-internationally-as-fewer-say-u-s-is-a-reliable-partner/ '''Pew Research Center poll of 36 countries'''], conducted earlier this summer, found that 76 percent of respondents had “no confidence” in Trump and 57 percent had an unfavorable opinion of the United States. In most of the countries Pew surveyed, people had a more positive impression of China than of the U.S.<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Today &amp; Tomorrow: A Couple Memories'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Today: A Green-Skinned Actress (a Famed Witch) who has the same name as a NASA Software-engineer (who wrote the essential code for the Apollo moon mission)<br /> <br /> <br /> SJS/GreenPolicy360 editor: <br /> <br /> A quick flight of the mind, as I received two online stories this morning -- one brought a memory of when I lived in New York City in the Gramercy Park neighborhood and regularly saw a distinguished looking older women walking her dogs around the park. She had a distinctive profile and one day I briefly talked to her. She said she was an actress, and that she still worked (this was in the mid-1970s) 'in the theater'. Her dogs were anxious to move on so we parted. Later, I learned from a neighbor that she was 'thee Margaret Hamilton.'<br /> <br /> Let's call her Margaret from the West (although here in NYC she lived in a building on the East)...<br /> <br /> [[File:Gramercy Park East.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Wicked Witch of the West.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> And as those of you who are familiar with the work of GreenPolicy360, you may remember we have focused our work over decades on what we call [[The Modern Environmental Movement]]. Your founder/siterunner was among those who were there alongside a [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr Congressman named George Brown], who put into development a first generation of Earth Science missions from space. The Apollo-NASA missions to the moon changed the way humanity saw ourselves, as [[Apollo 8]] sent home the first-ever full-color images of our living planet home. What some called a 'cognitive shift' occurred for many of us who were there as the image that became known as '[[Earthrise]]' appeared in the media, most prominently [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Earthrise_Life_Magazine_January_1969.png on the cover] of biggest magazine of the era.<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''“We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.&quot; – Astronaut Bill Anders, Aboard Apollo, December 24, 1968''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earthrise - NASA original Anders photo.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> What your editor carried away was inspiration... and today I am remembering one of the greats of the Apollo mission who made the flights and vision of planet Earth possible. Her name is Margaret Hamilton.<br /> <br /> She literally [https://www.softwareheritage.org/2019/07/20/archiving-and-referencing-the-apollo-source-code/ wrote the source code] that guided the missions to the moon, and her code (as I learned today) from the Apollo 8 'Earthrise' mission acted to make possible the correction of the Apollo 11 landing and return from the moon.<br /> <br /> <br /> _________________________________________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : August 17, 2026 - Happy 90th birthday to Margaret Hamilton -- the software engineer who wrote the computer code that saved the Apollo 11 moon landing and who, in the process, invented the discipline of software engineering itself! The system that kept that landing from being aborted began, improbably, with her 4-year-old daughter crashing a simulated moon mission.<br /> : Margaret Hamilton's daughter, Lauren, came along to the MIT lab on nights and weekends while her mother wrote the software that would fly astronauts to the moon. &quot;There wasn't a time when we weren't working,&quot; Hamilton said. Lauren liked to play astronaut, because she had watched her mother do it in simulations. One evening she started hitting keys, and the simulation began to run. Then she hit another, and everything fell apart -- she had selected a program meant to be run before launch, and the computer, which had almost no memory to spare, wiped the navigation data that was taking her to the moon.<br /> : Hamilton saw what it meant immediately. &quot;I thought: my God -- this could inadvertently happen in a real mission.&quot; She proposed a change to the software that would stop a prelaunch program from being selected in flight. Her superiors at MIT and NASA told her not to bother. The astronauts were too well trained to make a mistake like that.<br /> : On the very next mission, Apollo 8, an astronaut made exactly that mistake -- wiping the navigation data midway to the moon, just as Lauren had. Hamilton called it the Lauren bug. &quot;It created much havoc and required the mission to be reconfigured,&quot; she said. &quot;After that, they let me put the program change in, all right.&quot;<br /> <br /> :Hamilton was born in Paoli, Indiana, in 1936, earned a degree in mathematics with a minor in philosophy from Earlham College, and went to MIT in 1959 to support her family while her husband attended Harvard Law. She learned to program in the lab of Edward Lorenz, the meteorologist who would become the father of chaos theory, because there was nowhere else to learn it. &quot;Computer science and software engineering were not yet disciplines,&quot; she said. &quot;Instead, programmers learned on the job.&quot;<br /> :In 1964 her husband spotted a newspaper advertisement: the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory was looking for people to write the software to send a man to the moon. &quot;I was attracted both by the sheer idea and the fact that it had never been done before,&quot; Hamilton said. &quot;I was the first programmer to join and the first woman they hired.&quot;<br /> : She was gradually promoted until she was directing the team -- eventually about a hundred people -- that wrote the onboard flight software for both Apollo spacecraft. When she was given the job, one of the senior men told her he had no doubt she could do it but worried the men under her might rebel. &quot;Well,&quot; she said, &quot;they didn't.&quot;<br /> :Almost nobody thought the software mattered. It was not in the original schedule; it was not in the budget. &quot;Software during the early days of this project was treated like a stepchild,&quot; Hamilton later wrote, &quot;and it was regarded as an art and as magic, not a science.&quot; Out of what she called desperation, she started calling what she did software engineering -- a phrase invented to make a point.<br /> :&quot;It was out of desperation I came up with the term, to say: 'Hey, we're engineering too.' It was an ongoing joke for a long time.&quot; The joke ended in a meeting, when one of the laboratory's most respected hardware men stood up and said she was right.<br /> :Then came July 20, 1969. Three minutes above the Sea of Tranquility, with two men aboard a vehicle that had never landed anywhere, the Apollo Guidance Computer began throwing alarms -- 1202, then 1201, five of them in four minutes -- because a rendezvous radar switch had been left in the wrong position and the machine was drowning in work it had no time to finish. On virtually any other computer of that decade, this was the end of the story: a freeze, a crash, a mission aborted.<br /> :Hamilton stood watching in the monitoring room at MIT while her software did what she had built it to do, which was to decide what mattered. It recognized the overload, discarded the low-priority jobs, restarted itself in a controlled and orderly way, and held onto the tasks that were flying the spacecraft. &quot;It quickly became clear the software was not only informing everyone that there was a hardware-related problem,&quot; she said, &quot;but was compensating for it.&quot;<br /> :In Houston a 26-year-old guidance officer named Steve Bales had a few seconds to call an abort, and because the computer was visibly managing itself, he called go. Neil Armstrong flew Eagle past a field of boulders and set it down with about twenty-five seconds of fuel remaining.<br /> :&quot;If the computer hadn't recognized this problem and taken recovery action,&quot; Hamilton wrote two years afterward, &quot;I doubt if Apollo 11 would have been the successful moon landing it was.&quot;<br /> :There is a famous photograph of her from that summer, standing beside a stack of Apollo source-code listings taller than she is. :&quot;We got carried away and grabbed all the Apollo listings in my office and created the tower,&quot; she said. &quot;I was trying to find a way of keeping the stack up.&quot;<br /> :Hamilton's standards held. In all the crewed Apollo missions that followed, no software bug was ever known to have occurred.<br /> :Hamilton went unrecognized for decades. In 2016 President Barack Obama gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, calling her emblematic of &quot;that generation of unsung women who helped send humankind into space,&quot; and a year later she appeared, as a LEGO figurine. <br /> :Now ninety, Margaret Hamilton still argues that software should be designed at the start not to fail, rather than patched after it does ....<br /> <br /> :For young women who want to follow in her footsteps, she offers this advice: &quot;Don't let fear get in the way, and don't be afraid to say 'I don't know' or 'I don't understand' -- no question is a dumb question. And don't always listen to the so-called experts.&quot; :To introduce this inspiring trailblazer to kids, consider the picture book &quot;Margaret and the Moon&quot; for ages 5 to 9 at https://www.amightygirl.com/margaret-and-the-moon) and the children's biography &quot;Space Engineer and Scientist Margaret Hamilton&quot; for ages 7 to 10 at https://www.amightygirl.com/margaret-hamilton<br /> :She is also featured in an activity book about pioneering women in technology, which includes a variety of hands-on STEM projects: &quot;Gutsy Girls Go for Science: Programmers&quot; for ages 8 to 11 at https://www.amightygirl.com/gutsy-girls-programmers<br /> <br /> :For adult readers who want the wider story of the women who put Americans in space, &quot;Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars&quot; tells of the mathematicians recruited by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in the 1940s and 50s at https://www.amightygirl.com/rise-of-the-rocket-girls <br /> <br /> <br /> _________________________________________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> So, in memory of two classic, talented, game-changing, creative women -- <br /> <br /> Here's a deep bow and a flourishing wave of our green cap. <br /> <br /> We remember you !!<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Fact_Checking Facts Count]<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Are AI companies scanning and destroying millions of books, including rare titles?'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> Via Snopes.com<br /> <br /> Artificial intelligence companies are scanning millions of books, some of which are rare, and destroying them.<br /> <br /> * https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ai-companies-destroying-rare-books/<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''July 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:A Quokka, which one.jpg]]<br /> <br /> A Human &amp; Quokka Species, on Behalf of All Species <br /> <br /> : Historic, Country-wide Wild Fires Threaten Australia<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''PyroCbs, &quot;Fire Clouds&quot;'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''France / Spain ... &quot;Unprecedented&quot; ... &quot;Extreme Weather&quot;'''<br /> <br /> [https://apnews.com/article/europe-wildfires-france-spain-93678a31ff53fc46564b6dfd9934eae1 250,000 Evacuated]<br /> <br /> Via NYT<br /> <br /> As the hot air rises, it expands and cools, causing its moisture to condense. The water vapor and ash particles combine to form a gray or brown cloud that can then develop into a pyrocumulonimbus (pyro means “fire” in Greek) storm cloud.<br /> <br /> They produce lightning and burning embers that can spark more fires, and they generate high and unpredictable winds that fan the flames and spread the embers.<br /> <br /> In the Gironde region, 103,000 acres have burned, according to officials, and 220,000 people have been asked to evacuate from Gironde and the neighboring Landes region.<br /> <br /> The pyrocumulonimbus phenomenon presents extreme challenges for firefighters.<br /> <br /> “These fire-generated clouds are linked to extreme fire behavior that impedes firefighting efforts and can devastate communities,” according to NASA, which emphasized the need to better understand the clouds “given the ongoing and projected increases in fire activity and severity.”<br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://espo.nasa.gov/inspyre<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Elon Musk Opens Up in an Interview'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Economist Editor Presses the Controversial 'Trillionaire'<br /> <br /> :: Elon Musk's 'Vision of the Future'<br /> <br /> * https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/23/elon-musks-vision-of-the-future<br /> <br /> <br /> “People don’t realise that what I’m saying will come to pass,” he tells The Economist in a 90-minute interview held at a giant Tesla factory in Texas where electric cars drive themselves off the assembly line. That may be because his future-gazing ranges from the unsettling to the downright weird. <br /> <br /> Mr. Musk predicts that, within five years, artificial-intelligence systems may surpass the sum of all human intelligence. Within ten years, robots in the workplace will help usher in an era of such “amazing abundance” that money will become meaningless....<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-killer-robots-ai-abundance-progress-unstoppable-2026-7<br /> <br /> <br /> Musk proposes peer review for frontier AI models in Economist interview<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/musk-proposes-peer-review-frontier-ai-models-economist-interview-2026-07-23/<br /> <br /> <br /> Musk says he got ‘carried away’ with Trump – but still holds on to contentious political views<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/23/elon-musk-regret-trump-doge-ai<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Mix of Comments:<br /> <br /> * https://beincrypto.com/elon-musk-real-force-european-politics/<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/07/24/elon-musk-speaks-to-the-economist-editor-in-chief-zanny-minton-beddoes-on-the-key-takeaways.html<br /> * https://futurism.com/elon-musk-interviewer-npc<br /> * https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-economist-interview-2000790016<br /> * https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/nonsense-elon-musk-lashes-out-in-fiery-interview-after-hes-accused-of-supporting-the-far-right/<br /> * https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2026/07/23/musk_admonishes_the_economist_editor_what_is_far_right_about_having_secure_borders_safe_cities_and_sensible_spending.html<br /> * https://zeteo.com/p/top-economist-trump-musk-starmer<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:ECO.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Big Picture'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> Humanity Looks up to the Heavens, [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:ECO.png 'Inspired' by the Stars]<br /> <br /> : Earth Art &amp; Heliophysics, An Art Project 50 Years in the Making Opens Up<br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Charles Ross, Star Axis in New Mexico.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> July 21, 2026<br /> <br /> U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations<br /> <br /> The Topic -- Supplemental Federal Aid<br /> <br /> The Question -- Why More Government Funding for the Military, and Agriculture Producers, is urgently needed<br /> <br /> The Secretary of War explains that $1.5 trillion in needed in the next budget year, a 'generational' budget, one year increase request of over $500 billion... and tens of billion more are needed immediately for war fighting, training, munitions...<br /> <br /> Then ... on July 21st, with minimal media coverage, the following is put into the record -- to explain why billions more than a half trillion more, are needed for farmers and agriculture.<br /> <br /> <br /> ''“For many agricultural producers, 2025 was a year in which the cost of growing their crop at times exceeded what they could earn from selling it. Severe weather compounded these losses... producers had to contend with a combination of challenging market conditions.&quot;<br /> <br /> ''“... We will hear a great deal today about how declining commodity prices, rising input costs, labor shortages, trade disruptions, pests and disease, and increasingly volatile weather are squeezing farmers’ already thin margins.''<br /> <br /> ''“Nationwide, we have lost nearly 200,000 farms in the last decade.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> Let's parse this list of what 'we will hear'... the causes are what we will focus on here.<br /> <br /> The choice of going to war, and resulting increases in oil/gas prices, the resulting prices of fertilizer spiking, the boycotts and tariffs of U.S. farm products resulting from boycotts and tariffs in international markets (Trade War consequences of U.S. policies), the reasons for 'labor shortages' in the U.S. agriculture industry, and increases in extreme weather events and damages... <br /> <br /> These consequential facts seem to be set aside, ignored, and not explored by committee hearing speakers and the majority party running the hearing (the Chair is a Senator from Maine and is running for re-election).<br /> <br /> Look more closely at the [https://strategicdemands.com/costsofwar/ 'Deep Costs, Costs of War'] that the people of the U.S., and many others, are paying.<br /> <br /> It is time for new policies, facts, costs of failed policies, and more realistic debate and discussion...<br /> <br /> Enough said...<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> July 16, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[Fact Checking, Facts Count]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Consider the Facts, Pay Attention to the Reality<br /> <br /> As an audience listens in while an American president talks, we, at GreenPolicy, have a bottom line request -- our bottom line is '''Facts Count'''<br /> <br /> Go with the Reality, not the Marketing<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Attribution of Extreme Weather and Climate Events and Their Impacts'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * This 2026 National Academies of Science Study and Report Will Have Consequences<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We are reminded of the mid-1970s National Academies of Sciences Study and Report that led to Congressional Hearings and the First US National Climate Act Program. We watched as Representative George E. Brown - (D) Los Angeles pushed for the scientific research and moved to hearings and legislation.<br /> <br /> The era of modern climate science moved forward with lasting contributions ...<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/climate/national-academies-extreme-weather-attribution.html?unlocked_article_code=1.yFA.38oJ.3B0p4MCCutBL&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> * https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/28590/chapter/1<br /> <br /> <br /> Read about the foundational 1970s National Climate science report, hearings, and legislation here -- <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr#/media/File%3ANational_Climate_Program_Act_Hearings_May_1976.jpg<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr#/media/File%3AUS_Public_Law_95-367.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr#/media/File%3APublic_Law_95-367%2C_1978.jpeg<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Congressman george.e.brown.gif]]<br /> <br /> Rep. George E Brown<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Generation Green]] [[Going Green]]'''<br /> <br /> '''[[The Modern Environmental Movement]]'''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360: Our Outlook, Perspective and Work is Local/National/Global, Individual and Community-to-Community'''<br /> <br /> : '''[[Green Best Practices]]'''<br /> <br /> : [[File:Climate First Bank Florida.png]]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Climate_First_Bank_Florida.png<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''An Interview with Bill McKibben'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> The Very Good and Very Bad News on Climate<br /> <br /> July 10, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-bill-mckibben.html?unlocked_article_code=1.wlA.b4se.muIpmtiO6j6_&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> Here’s the good news: Green energy is getting better and cheaper, faster than we had ever dared hope.<br /> <br /> This next sentence was unimaginable even a few years ago: In April, the energy think tank Ember found that all of the new electricity demand around the world in 2025 was met with green power. That is wild.<br /> <br /> But here is the bad news: Climate change is accelerating. We’re discovering new ways that the climate system is more fragile, more sensitive to emissions, than we previously had thought.<br /> <br /> We have not been talking that much about climate change lately, but that doesn’t mean it has stopped happening. Europe is in the midst of an extraordinary heat wave. The world is staring down the barrel of a powerful El Niño.<br /> <br /> And climate politics is in almost total disarray. Donald Trump has gutted the Inflation Reduction Act. His administration is accelerating fossil fuel production and kneecapping green energy.<br /> <br /> <br /> But here’s the possibility, a bit of optimism: The advances in green technology make a new climate politics possible — one that doesn’t just talk about sacrifice and disaster prevention but presents decarbonization and green energy as a way station on the path to somewhere better.<br /> <br /> Clean energy abundance, a new form of energetic wealth, the possibility of the left actually offering a future of more and better — not less and worse — was a hard case to make even a few years ago. But now we cannot only imagine it, we can see it, touch it, live in it. It is here.<br /> <br /> So how do we talk about it? How do we make it happen?<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-bill-mckibben.html?unlocked_article_code=1.wlA.b4se.muIpmtiO6j6_&amp;smid=em-share '''Read the McKibben Interview Here for more:''']<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Even better than the E.V. is the e-bike, which I think may turn out to be the transformative invention of our time on Earth.&quot; -- Bill McKibben<br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-bill-mckibben.html?unlocked_article_code=1.wlA.b4se.muIpmtiO6j6_&amp;smid=em-share '''Click Here for more about Bill McKibben at GreenPolicy360'''] <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:America250 logo.svg.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/In_Defense_of_Democracy_and_Freedom<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Democracy_Quotes<br /> <br /> <br /> We recall a quote of Benjamin Franklin responding to a question in 1787 about the newly announced birth of the US as he left Independence Hall after the Constitutional Convention:<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''We have &quot;a Republic, if you can keep it.&quot;'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Today's generation, and future generations, would be wise to remember Franklin's words of warning.'''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> '''July 4th, 1776'''<br /> <br /> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness...<br /> <br /> * https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''June 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''June 30, 2026'''<br /> <br /> <br /> NATIONAL REPUBLICAN SENATORIAL COMMITTEE ET AL. v. FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION ET AL.<br /> <br /> * https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-621_h315.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Millionaires &amp; Billionaires Applaud'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : U.S. Supreme Court Increases Influence of '''[[Money in Politics]]'''<br /> <br /> :: New SCOTUS Ruling Memorializes 'Pay to Play' Transactional Politics<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360's associate [http://www.politicopay.com '''PoliticoPay.com'''], has been tracking the escalating money in politics trend for years.<br /> <br /> We have warned of the consequences of profligate spending on politicians and campaigns. These warnings have become a reality -- and further challenge to good government. <br /> <br /> * https://politicopay.com/buckley-valeo-a-mega-money-future<br /> <br /> * https://politicopay.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''NPR re: Decision No. 24–621'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''(The Supreme Court) decision means that parties get the best of both worlds. They can both coordinate with candidates and raise unlimited funds.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''At issue in the case was a post-Watergate law that Congress passed to limit the amount of money individuals can give to political parties. The law, the Federal Election Campaign Act, also limited how much money political parties can spend on their candidates. Other types of organizations, like political action committees and Super PACs, have no limits on the amount of money they can raise and spend on elections...''<br /> <br /> ''Republicans, including Vice President Vance and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, challenged the law as an unconstitutional violation of political parties' First Amendment right to raise and spend money on their candidates.''<br /> <br /> ''Backed by the Trump Justice Department, they contended that the only justification for imposing a fundraising limit on parties is to prevent corruption, but they maintained that there is no evidence that the law has prevented corruption.''<br /> <br /> This decision overturns a 2001 Supreme Court case that declared the limits on party spending to be constitutional. It's the latest in a series of rulings since then that have unraveled campaign finance regulations.<br /> <br /> ''The saga began in 2010, when the court ruled in Citizens United that corporations have a First Amendment right to unlimited spending on elections...''<br /> <br /> * https://www.npr.org/2026/06/30/nx-s1-5827039/supreme-court-campaign-finance<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Speaking of the Influence of Big Money on Consequential Political Decisions'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Michael Mann's new book, Coming Back to Earth.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Michael Mann has news of science, politics, and life impacting policies --''' <br /> <br /> A new book on the state of climate science and politics is in the works with Michael Mann @ Public Affairs...<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 especially appreciates the publication notice:<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Coming Back to Earth'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Providing grounded, evidence-based reasons to be optimistic about our ability to confront climate change.'''<br /> <br /> <br /> We're reminded of his most recent book 'The New Climate War', which he inscribed for GreenPolicy360. <br /> <br /> '''Thanks Michael, Onward we go !'''<br /> <br /> <br /> and as we say here at the top of each online page as our site and green network is being read by millions around the Earth...<br /> <br /> '''Each of us can make a positive difference by stepping up &amp; doing our best'''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Generation Green]] | [[Planet Citizens]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''' &quot;We have to identify the problem, then act in many ways to solve the problem. Global warming is the threat of our times.&quot;''' &lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;-- [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Governor_Jerry_Brown '''Jerry Brown, California Governor''']&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''' &quot;We’re going to need to use every tool in the toolbox if we’re going to solve this problem.&quot; '''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;-- [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Michael_E_Mann_--_act_with_hope_not_fear.jpg '''Michael E. Mann''']&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Consequences of Another War in the Middle East'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> : Deep Costs to the U.S. and Its Future -- Come into View<br /> <br /> :: U.S. Allies Suffer with Shifts in Global Economics -- the Mid East Continues in Crisis<br /> <br /> <br /> '''With the deepening costs of oil/gas wars adding trillions to expanding U.S. debt -- with a multi-trillion dollars Iraq war, Afghanistan war, and ongoing Israel/Syria/Lebanon/Palestine-Gaza conflicts -- we witness decades of failed policy and generational roll over... The national/international costs and changes brought on by the U.S./Iran war, with its severe global energy disruptions, begin to come into a wider global view ...'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/business/energy-environment/china-energy-battery-grid.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qlA.iKfE.kO9ONgn1Q7pG&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:US_Reliability_Falls_in_Europe.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Visit GreenPolicy360's Associate, Strategic Demands, for Continued Perspective on the Middle East Wars and the Far-Reaching Consequences and Damaged U.S. Relations'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''June 14, 2026'''<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/costsofwar/<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/business/energy-environment/china-energy-battery-grid.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qlA.iKfE.kO9ONgn1Q7pG&amp;smid=url-share '''China benefits as Petrol Politics of Oil/Gas and Mideast Wars push alternative energy sources''']<br /> <br /> [[File:China electrostate benefits from efx of Mideast war.png|link=https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/business/energy-environment/china-energy-battery-grid.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qlA.iKfE.kO9ONgn1Q7pG&amp;smid=url-share]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''China's electrostate is poised to win from war in the Middle East'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/business/energy-environment/china-energy-battery-grid.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qlA.iKfE.kO9ONgn1Q7pG&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> More on [https://strategicdemands.com/new-definitions-of-security/ 'new definitions of national/global security']<br /> <br /> ''In April, wind and solar generated more electricity globally than gas for the first time.''<br /> <br /> <br /> Scan the energy production data<br /> <br /> * https://ember-energy.org/<br /> <br /> <br /> Data into action<br /> <br /> Open data and intelligent policy analysis to unlock a clean, electrified energy future<br /> <br /> <br /> Spring 2026<br /> <br /> '''&quot;And then came Hormuz&quot; ... Iran war analysis via Ember<br /> <br /> :If the defining economic story of the century is the rise of Asia, the defining energy story is the rise of electricity. The two are usually told apart. This report argues they are one: Asia’s rise is electric, and the electric age hastens Asia’s rise.<br /> <br /> :Electricity has been the century’s fastest-growing energy carrier, overtaking oil in 2007 as the leading supplier of useful energy worldwide. Over the same years, Asia has been the fastest-growing region. In 2016, China passed the United States in purchasing-power terms, and South and Southeast Asia together passed the European Union in 2021. Two features bind these stories together.<br /> <br /> :The first is that Asia is taking an electric path. Since the turn of the century, Asia has driven three quarters of the growth in global electricity. In the West, GDP and electricity demand decoupled long ago; in Asia, they rise in lock-step. Asia has achieved greater electrification at lower incomes per capita. No growth in history has been this electric.<br /> <br /> :The second runs deeper. It is a change in what energy is. Coal, oil and gas are commodities, dug from the ground. Solar panels, batteries and wind turbines are technologies, built on a production line. The energy revolution is the shift from extraction to manufacturing.<br /> <br /> <br /> :Enter Asia – the world’s factory. Asia builds most of the world’s solar panels, batteries, power electronics, electric motors and cars. Its strengths fit the new energy system.<br /> <br /> :Such a shift carries historical weight. After 1800 the West pulled ahead of Asia, a parting of fortunes known as the Great Divergence. Energy sat at the core of this divergence: first coal, then oil, and the engines built to burn them. These innovations favoured Western strengths and underwrote two centuries of wealth and power.<br /> <br /> :The Great Convergence – the East closing in on the West – also has an energy story, and it runs the other way. The new vector is electricity, and the electro-technologies that run on it. The new centre is Asia. Its lack of oil and gas was a weakness in a fossil world. It is a blessing in an electric one.<br /> <br /> :China is, of course, the giant. But change is radiating outwards. From Vietnam to Bangladesh, electrification rates are higher than in Europe or the United States. From Pakistan to Japan, solar’s share of power beats the US. From Thailand to Nepal and Indonesia to Singapore, EV uptake is ahead. Strip China out, and the rest of Asia still outbuilds the world in solar modules and battery components.<br /> <br /> :For years the economics of electrotech have been improving rapidly. A decade ago, solar began to beat coal, and electric cars beat petrol over their lifetimes, once fuel was counted. Today solar and EVs are cheaper to buy outright, even before the fuel savings. For economies short of capital, the door is now open to rapid change.<br /> <br /> :Then came Hormuz: the closure of Asia’s petrol station. The region buys nearly half of its oil from the Gulf, a deeper reliance than Europe had on Russia. It is the second blow in four years. The first came in 2022, when Russia cut off Europe, and Europe outbid Asia for gas, pricing out poorer countries. If electrotech is the pull of opportunity, the twin fossil shock is the push of necessity.<br /> <br /> :Economics, security and industrial opportunity now all point in the same direction. Asia holds half the world’s people and 4% of its oil and gas, but three quarters of the electrotech factories that can replace the fuel it lacks. <br /> <br /> : The Great Divergence was powered by the energy the West mastered. The Great Convergence runs on the energy that Asia manufactures. If this is to be the Asian century, its path will be electric.<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Electric Asia'''<br /> <br /> * How Asia is leading the electric age, powering its rise and reshaping the global order<br /> <br /> <br /> '''“What was five years ago maybe barely competitive, now is almost already clearly cheaper...”'''<br /> <br /> '''&quot;Investments in renewables have become a better bet, promising returns in closer to two years instead of 30.&quot;'''<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: The shift globally to renewable energy comes against a backdrop of historic policy decisions in the two terms of the Trump administration, a government-wide retreat away from renewable energy. The Trump 'retro-vision' that touts fossil fuels and denigrates renewables is, in fact, setting back U.S. competitiveness in meeting new demands for electrification across industrial sectors.<br /> <br /> As the economies of the world move forward, in transportation (EVs, e-motorcycles, e-bikes... e-buses, e-trucks, city e-grids with light rail, and soon aerial copters and planes, boats and ships, and e-power tools, e-tractors, e-smart homes and battery technologies (powering grids, cities, factories, consumer products), and e-robots and a gamut of AI technologies .... and on and on, the retro-actions of the Trump period are delivering a backward-looking blow to U.S. competitiveness that will have decades-long consequences.<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''June 7, 2026'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''As the War with Iran Reaches Day 100'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : And War in Ukraine Continues to Flare<br /> <br /> :: And War in Lebanon Expands<br /> <br /> :: And War in the Middle East Seems Endless<br /> <br /> ::: With Escalations, Reverberations, Proliferation of 'WMDs', and Incalculable Worldwide Costs <br /> <br /> We listen in and watch as the issues and questions roil across an informed and hard discussion between voices 'in the know' ...<br /> <br /> * https://substack.com/home/post/p-201011581<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''June 4'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''PREMIERE of a New Documentary Film about the Threat of Nuclear Weapons'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''In this 29-minute documentary, renowned whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg provides a powerful wakeup call about the global threat posed by nuclear weapons and advocates how we can dramatically reduce the real and present danger of nuclear annihilation.'' <br /> <br /> ''Before he released the top secret Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, Ellsberg was a nuclear war planner with access to classified information on U.S. nuclear strategy.''<br /> <br /> <br /> Wikipedia Bio / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Filmed one year before his death at age 92, Ellsberg speaks with clarity and urgency about the dangers we face, noting, &quot;I’ve long said that to my last breath I will be doing what I can to postpone and avert the risk of nuclear war.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''With ongoing conflicts heightening nuclear tensions, and with the recent end of the New START treaty potentially triggering a renewed arms race, &quot;An Ordinary Insanity&quot; is a timely film to help mobilize broad public concern and action for arms control and nuclear disarmament.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360 &amp; Strategic Demands''':<br /> <br /> A message from beyond, words of warning from an old friend of ours, Dan Ellsberg.<br /> <br /> Listen in to words of wisdom, even as a US president postures to be anti-nuke, and proposes nuclear weapons funding at all time highs...<br /> <br /> In fact, nuclear funding and Trump administration nuclear weapons development and 'usable' delivery platforms have spurred an out of control Nuclear Arms Race between the US, Russia and now China<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> “We’re continuing year-by-year deliberately with a posture and a policy and threats that make a significant risk of near extinction possible.” <br /> <br /> — DANIEL ELLSBERG in &quot;An Ordinary Insanity&quot; <br /> <br /> * https://www.anordinaryinsanity.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''More about Dan Ellsberg''' [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?search=dan+ellsberg&amp;title=Special%3ASearch&amp;profile=advanced&amp;fulltext=1&amp;ns0=1&amp;ns6=1&amp;ns14=1 @ '''GreenPolicy360'''] &amp; [https://strategicdemands.com/?s=dan+ellsberg @ '''Strategic Demands''']<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Nuclear_Weapons<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/nuclear-arms-race-3-0/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Truth and Consequence - Dan Ellsberg.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''May 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''David Attenborough Turns 100 Years Old'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/arts/television/david-attenborough-100-birthday.html?unlocked_article_code=1.hFA.HXVb.qSlnB3rq8Hbe&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> ''&quot;The next few decades represent a final opportunity to build a stable home for ourselves and restore the rich, healthy and wonderful world that we inherited from our distant ancestors. Our future on the planet, the only place as far as we know where life of any kind exists, is at stake.” -- David Attenborough, &quot;A Life on Our Planet&quot;, 2020<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We agree with David, we very deeply agree...<br /> <br /> And to Leo DiCaprio, a fellow [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Bioneers '''Bioneer'''], we agree too. David is a protector and close up story teller of the natural world who is a unique and valued voice whose wisdom will remain for years, and years and years...<br /> <br /> * https://deadline.com/2026/05/leonardo-dicaprio-david-attenborough-tribute-100th-birthday-1236888075/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Lee Zeldin E&amp;E News.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Photo by E&amp;E News&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin this past week defended deep budget cuts proposed by President Donald Trump'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Zeldin appeared at a trio of congressional hearings, dueling with House members and senators over the administration’s plan to reduce EPA’s annual funding to $4.2 billion in fiscal 2027 — or more than half of the agency’s enacted spending'' (E&amp;E)<br /> <br /> <br /> Green Policy: Lee Zeldin is Donald Trump's zealous attorney/administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. (We note he is also being discussed in the news as a leading candidate for the next US Attorney General). Zeldin for now is showing himself as a man with a cause. The cause he is pursuing, as he wields expanded administrative power, is dismantling and defunding the agency charged with protecting the environment, as the EPA's title straightforwardly declares. <br /> <br /> Since the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Environmental_Protection_Agency '''Environmental Protection Agency establishment in 1970'''], the EPA has followed its mission over decades. Congress after Congress envisioned, developed, and approved its work. Popular support was nationwide. Memorable achievements followed. We won't go into the long list of health-protections and science that EPA has given the nation and its communities, the air-quality, water-quality, health- and living-quality advances are there to see and experience.<br /> <br /> In Lee Zeldin's short time in office, however, the record of achievements is not seen as achievements to be built on... Zeldin has instead turned the valued agency into a storm of firings, cuts, closing of departments, ending research, terminating projects, eliminating oversight programs, announcing the EPA is no longer in the business of doing the people's work of enforcing the statutory mandates and directions of the US Congress.<br /> <br /> When asked under what authority he is dismantling the EPA, he answers with authoritative assurance -- that of the Supreme Court's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_questions_doctrine?wprov=sfti1 ''''Major Questions Doctrine''''] and the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loper_Bright_Enterprises_v._Raimondo '''Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo'''] decision.<br /> <br /> Zeldin and the current administration go on to explain they have 'different' policy priorities' that allow them to cut, cut, cut the EPA, turning it into a shell of what it was -- and away from Congressional votes, decisions and budgets since the 1970s intended to support viable, effective environmental protection. <br /> <br /> Yet, a remade Supreme Court has now enabled a dramatic and demanding new level of explicit text in Statutory law. The Court's novel doctrine of 'Major Questions' and the Loper Bright decision that Lee Zeldin wave as he orders dismantling is the order coming from the president. Given on the ground, deep and popular support, Zeldin's orders won't stand the test of time.<br /> <br /> Congressional staffs will bring in experts and act to redraft the letter of the law. Future administrations will support will act to pass legally specific text across most all environmental laws that are being summarily dismissed by Lee Zeldin, Esq.<br /> <br /> What Zeldin seems to forget, as he flaunts the Scotus recent turn, is that the clock is ticking, the people see and learn what is needed and what to do to deliver the kind of government they are demanding.<br /> <br /> Top of list -- quality of life. This includes protection against toxics and pollution. Moving toward a goal of clean, breathable air, drinkable water, and sustainable, enjoyable, healthy communities, towns and cities. <br /> <br /> We understand the need for the EPA's work. Most everyone does.<br /> <br /> When Lee Zeldin goes away, within a brief time a renewed Environmental Protection Agency with new Presidential executive orders and Congressional support will be the order of the day. <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''April 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Remade Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS) Remakes Civil Rights &amp; the Voting Rights Act'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : SCOTUS Voting Act Decision Acts to Reshape the 2026 Mid-term Congressional Election <br /> <br /> :: Partisan Reconfiguration of Congressional Districts Goes into Overdrive<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Voting Rights and Control of Congress'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Media news headlines from across the US deliver Temper of the Times <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-voting-rights-act-louisiana-alabama-4e3225083caccda5ec73a98533a79add '''Supreme Court hollows out a landmark law that had protected minority voting rights for 6 decades'''] '''Associated Press / April 30, 2026'''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act--.png]] 🏛️[[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-01.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-02.png]] 🏛️ [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-03.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-04.png]] 🏛️ [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-05.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-.png]] 🏛️ [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-07.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-08.png]] 🏛️ [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-09.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Memorable Words from the British King Addressing a Joint Session of the US Congress'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Charles navigates fraught politics with reminders of the Magna Carta of 1215, citizen rights, and calling for today's democratic governments to have high purpose<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''&quot;[O]ur generation must decide how to address the collapse of critical natural systems, which threatens far more than the harmony and essential diversity of Nature.”'''''<br /> <br /> '''''&quot;Reflect on our shared responsibility to safeguard Nature, our most precious and irreplaceable asset.&quot;''''' ...<br /> <br /> <br /> The modern representative of the UK went on to speak of the British Enlightenment, and the rights and duties of today's democratic governments.<br /> <br /> <br /> ''“We do not embark on these remarkable endeavours together out of sentiment, we do so because they build greater shared resilience for the future, so making our citizens safer for generations to come.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''“Our common ideals were not only crucial for liberty and equality, they are also the foundation of our shared prosperity. The Rule of Law: the certainty of stable and accessible rules, an independent judiciary resolving disputes and delivering impartial justice.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> ... ''&quot;It is here in these very halls that this spirit of liberty and the promise of America’s Founders is present in every session and every vote cast” ... political debate enriched “by the deliberation of many, representing the living mosaic of the United States. In both of our countries it is the very fact of our vibrant, diverse and free societies that gives us our collective strength.”''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;The essence of our two Nations is a generosity of spirit and a duty to foster compassion, to promote peace, to deepen mutual understanding and to value all people, of all faiths, and of none.”''<br /> <br /> -- King Charles III, April 28, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;''''Earth Day', April 22, 1970, Carries On &amp; On'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''April 22, 2026 🧤 Teach-In Memory Time'''<br /> <br /> <br /> At GreenPolicy360 we tell of 'being there' and being directly involved in the envisioning and planning of a first Earth Day <br /> <br /> Tip of our Green Hat to Representative George E. Brown<br /> <br /> <br /> Personal recollection -- <br /> <br /> <br /> A Story of 'Earthrise' to 'Earth Day' and Far Beyond....<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Day_Memories_on_the_50th_Anniversary<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;[[Earth Day]]&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''[[Earth Day Is Every Day]]'''<br /> <br /> :* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Earth_Day<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth-Day.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Every Day Is Earth Day.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Above Our Living Earth.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :🌎<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> : [[File:Earthrise to Earthset.png]]<br /> <br /> :: &lt;small&gt;Round &amp; Round We Go ....&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Day &lt;big&gt;''''Earthrise' to a First 'Earth Day' '''&lt;/big&gt;] ... [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Earth_in_Human_Hands.jpg &lt;big&gt;'''Now Earth Is in Your Hands'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''Earthrise', December 24, 1968 to 'Earthset', April 6, 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Earthrise<br /> * https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/earthset/<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;'''[[The Modern Environmental Movement]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Apollo.jpg]]<br /> <br /> : &lt;small&gt;NASA / December 1968&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?search=earthrise&amp;title=Special%3ASearch&amp;profile=advanced&amp;fulltext=1&amp;ns0=1 '''Earthrise Thoughts at GreenPolicy360''']<br /> <br /> <br /> : '''A half century on, fifty years after Apollo 8, humanity again visits the Moon and looks back at Planet Earth'''<br /> <br /> <br /> :[https://greenpolicy360.net/images/Moon_and_Earth_from_Artemis%2C_April_2026.jpg '''Reflection on the experience of watching the Earth set over the Moon, via Astronaut Reid Wiseman''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earthset.png]]<br /> <br /> :: &lt;small&gt;NASA / April 2026&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Artemis II, Journey from Earth to the Moon'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nasa.gov/gallery/journey-to-the-moon/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Artemis looking at Earth home.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth from Artemis II.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;NASA&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''March 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Another War'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> As the US and Israel launch war with Iran, the following words hover front of mind. <br /> <br /> “People predicting disaster: The odds are in your favor, but you cannot be sure, and you should not hope to be right. People celebrating: Maybe wanna wait a bit. The odds, historically, are definitely not on your side. Anyone certain they know what happens next is making it up.” -- Tom Nichols <br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;The world needs to renew a focus on human rights with quality of life high on every nation's agenda.&quot; -- GreenPolicy360<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''February 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> February 18, 2026<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Environmental Groups Sue Trump’s EPA Rollback of Climate Science Finding'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via The Guardian <br /> <br /> More than a dozen health and environmental justice non-profits have sued the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over its revocation of the legal determination that underpins US federal climate regulations.<br /> <br /> ''Filed in Washington DC circuit court, the lawsuit challenges the EPA’s rollback of the “endangerment finding”, which states that the buildup of heat-trapping pollution in the atmosphere endangers public health and welfare and has allowed the EPA to limit those emissions from vehicles, power plants and other industrial sources since 2009. The rollback was widely seen as a major setback to US efforts to combat the climate crisis.''<br /> <br /> ''The suit was brought by the American Public Health Association, the American Lung Association, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club and 11 other public health and environmental organizations. The lawsuit was filed by green legal organizations Clean Air Task Force and Earthjustice and it names the EPA and the agency’s administrator, Lee Zeldin, as defendants...''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Trump, Rejecting Science and Climate Change - Feb 2026.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Photo from the LA Times&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''An Attack on a Foundational Law, EPA Findings and a Supporting Court Decision'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/12/trump-epa-rollback-pollution-regulation-endangerment-finding<br /> <br /> <br /> ('''Updated, with this Trump order''') &quot;The United States will essentially have no laws on the books that enforce how efficient America’s passenger cars and trucks should be.&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/16/climate/endangerment-finding-auto-emissions-regulations.html?unlocked_article_code=1.M1A.1MMD.Cox7hRsyuiae&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''A Trump Legacy: Rejecting Science, Climate Change, and the Environmental Protection Agency'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : A Moment in History That Will Be Remembered<br /> <br /> <br /> Reading 'Top of the News' headlines this week, the world's people encounter a nation's president who rejects a half-century of a scientific, military, educational and security studies, data, knowledge -- and warnings.<br /> <br /> President Trump orders environmental cuts and rollbacks, retrogressive policies that turn around the Environmental Protection Agency's progress for the nation.<br /> <br /> Five plus decades of vision, foundational work, projects and programs, NASA/NOAA, EPA, USGS, across US colleges and universities, health and medical research, and on and on are now being diminished and degraded.<br /> <br /> Time will tell the full story of the Trump presidency.<br /> <br /> <br /> For now, let's take a quick look back at actions taken to advance environmental protection and the nation's well being, the beginnings of the EPA, atmospheric/climate/earth science, national security, health, and a better future for all.<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:SMOG_be_gone.jpg<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Tracking_science_policy_across_the_Trump_administration.png<br /> <br /> * https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title42/chapter85&amp;edition=prelim<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: <br /> <br /> Let's call this Trump rejection of science what it is -- an act of hubris, an decision that will not stand in the face of physics...<br /> <br /> Donald Trump's administration, with an EPA taken over by anti-science purveyors who callously and destructively set aside fifty plus years of scientific data, now act to put their legacy into the history books. Their action to deny the overwhelmingly evident dangers of climate change, a gathering storm threatening US and world environmental security, is an ignominious day.<br /> <br /> We, today's generation and future generations will live to mark this moment as a tragedy, one that accelerates real-world physics of earth systems, delivering climate impacts, disruptions, security lost... <br /> <br /> The Trump administration have delivered 'retro' thinking, anti-science destructiveness. <br /> <br /> The Clean Air Acts and accompanying model regulations, [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr '''ideas beginning in California to deal with its &quot;smog&quot;'''] in the 1960s/70s, were shared and spread throughout the US -- and the world's cities and communities. Profound progress, meant explicitly to deal with hazardous air pollutants and remedy the climate-related costs, the damages of atmospheric pollution to health, environment and future well being that adversely impacts life across nations and regions of Earth, was achieved and continues to be achieved. The Trump attempt to block this progress will fail.<br /> <br /> Yet, the time lost to Trumpian folly will add additional costs to humanity's journey forward.<br /> <br /> We mark these days in February 2026 as times to be remembered -- and judged -- for what they are. <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EPA 1a.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EPA 2a.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EPA 3a.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EPA 4a.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:PlanetCitizen banner 800x163.jpg|link=https://greenpolicy360.net/w/PlanetCitizen]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> February 1, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Another Warning Among Many'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Excerpt from a Chapter in a new book by Thom Hartmann...<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Climate Collapse Presidency'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Climate change is the single greatest threat to a sustainable future<br /> : but, at the same time, addressing the climate challenge presents a<br /> : golden opportunity to promote prosperity, security and a brighter<br /> : future for all. <br /> :—- Ban Ki-moon, former UN Secretary-General,<br /> : Remarks at Climate Leaders’ Summit, April 11, 2024<br /> <br /> <br /> Thom Hartmann @https://hartmannreport.com:<br /> <br /> The greatest existential threat humanity faces isn’t hiding in a military bunker or a terrorist cell. It’s in plain sight: the accelerating collapse of our only home’s life-support systems.<br /> <br /> Trump’s first term was environmental arson. He gutted the EPA, installed fossil fuel executives in key positions, shredded over one hundred environmental protections, and abandoned the Paris Climate Agreement. <br /> <br /> Scientists were silenced. Research was suppressed. The words “climate change” vanished from government websites as if deleting terms could delete reality.<br /> <br /> When confronted about climate’s role in the devastating 2020 wildfires, Trump smirked: “I don’t think science knows, actually.”<br /> <br /> <br /> --<br /> <br /> <br /> An AI response:<br /> <br /> Daniel Solomon<br /> <br /> I asked AI what is the effect of Trump #47 on the climate? Ans. below:<br /> <br /> <br /> ''In his second term as the 47th President, Donald Trump has moved aggressively to reverse U.S. climate progress by prioritizing fossil fuel production and dismantling federal environmental oversight.<br /> <br /> ''Key effects on the climate and policy include:''<br /> <br /> ''Withdrawal from International Agreements: On January 27, 2026, the U.S. officially withdrew from the Paris Agreement for the second time. Additionally, the administration has announced departures from over 60 international bodies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).''<br /> <br /> ''Increased Carbon Emissions: Projections suggest that the administration's rollbacks could lead to an additional 4 billion metric tons of CO2-equivalent emissions by 2030 compared to previous trajectories.''<br /> <br /> ''Dismantling Regulatory Foundations: The EPA is currently working to repeal the 2009 Endangerment Finding, which is the legal basis for nearly all federal greenhouse gas regulations.''<br /> <br /> ''Expansion of Fossil Fuels: Under the mantra &quot;drill, baby, drill,&quot; the administration has fast-tracked deep-sea mining, reopened Alaskan refuges for oil development, and granted roughly $40 billion in new subsidies to the fossil fuel industry.''<br /> <br /> ''Stalling Clean Energy: Federal support for wind and solar has been slashed, including the elimination of the $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit and nearly $13 billion in green energy funding.''<br /> <br /> ''Information and Data Gaps: The administration has removed past National Climate Assessments from federal sites, deleted climate science webpages, and cut funding for climate research programs, creating significant gaps in global climate tracking.''<br /> <br /> ''While federal action has stalled, market forces and state-led initiatives — particularly in California and Texas — continue to drive some growth in renewable capacity despite federal headwinds.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Trump admin losses est 35B in clean energy projects - 2025.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Deep Losses in Clean-Renewable Production &amp; Competitiveness'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : US Policy Goes Retro with Fossil Fuels<br /> <br /> : * https://grist.org/politics/trump-2025-renewable-energy-investment-electric-vehicles/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tracking science policy across the Trump administration.png]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Tracking_science_policy_across_the_Trump_administration.png&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''January 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> January 7th, a Day to Remember ... <br /> <br /> This day in America delivered a deadly shooting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a death recorded live by a number of video recordings taken and distributed by citizens who observed the killing. Today is going to become etched in the memory of US history.<br /> <br /> The death, as witnessed by those who viewed and reviewed the video recordings, was tragic -- and much more...<br /> <br /> The lies told by government officials following the shooting of a woman in her car were painfully far from the facts and now remain another in a line of political lies that are spreading like a fire inflaming communities across the country.<br /> <br /> Today, it is again time to remember the warnings of Hannah Arendt.<br /> <br /> Take time to read her writing of lies, big lies, repeated lies -- and the threats and dangers they pose.<br /> <br /> These lies are, again, as history teaches, deliverers of dangerous times.<br /> <br /> Echoes from the propagandists that brought on World War II.<br /> <br /> Echoes of lies to recall...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''&quot;Truth and Politics&quot;'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Hannah Arendt<br /> <br /> 1967 in the New Yorker Magazine<br /> <br /> * https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/praxis1313/files/2018/08/Arendt_-Truth-and-Politics-LQ.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?search=hannah+arendt&amp;title=Special%3ASearch '''More from Hannah Arendt''']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[Earth Day]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;'''[[Earth Day Is Every Day]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :[[File:Earth-Day.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ==''Recent GreenPolicy360 Story Highlights''==<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> ''[[Green Stories of the Day - GreenPolicy360 Archive]]''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2025'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2025 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2025'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2025]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2024'''''&lt;/big&gt;'''''===<br /> <br /> [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2024 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2024'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2024]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2023'''''&lt;/big&gt;'''''===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2023 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2023'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2023]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2022'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2022 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2022'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2022]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2021'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2021 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2021'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2021]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2020'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2020 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2020'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2020]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2019'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2019 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2019'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2019]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2018'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2018 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2018'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2018]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2017'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2017 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2017'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2017]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2016'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2016 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2016'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2016]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2015'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2015 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2015'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2015]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2014'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2014 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2014'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2014]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2013'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2013 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2013'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2013]] <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:GP360_NewPages]]<br 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Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Green_Stories_of_the_Day&diff=138375 2026-10-09T22:18:43Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> __notoc__<br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&quot;Green Stories Changing Our World&quot;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''For the Young &amp; Old, Across Continents, Community-to-Community'''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt; ''@GreenPolicy360: An eOS Network with Hundreds of Millions of Views &amp; Shares''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Earth dynamic global map.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/1000hPa/orthographic &lt;big&gt;&lt;font color=green&gt;'''#PlanetCitizens360'''&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/big&gt;] <br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Planet Citizens]]''' <br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[The Commons]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[EarthPOV]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Earth Right Now]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Earth Science Vital Signs]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''GRN360: &quot;Vita Activa&quot;, Turning Visions into Reality'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Green_Networking &lt;big&gt;'''Green Networking, Green Best Practices'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Living Earth.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Planet Citizen Vision of Living Earth]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_Citizen_Vision_of_Living_Earth<br /> <br /> <br /> :✅ [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Plans_Enforcement_-_Resources '''The Climate Plans Enforcement Initiative''']<br /> <br /> :✅ [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenLinks '''GreenLinks: Global Green Networking with Web 3.0''']<br /> <br /> :✅ [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_Best_Practices '''Green Best Practices: Community-to-Community'''] <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Liberty Bell.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Photo by mbell1975&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''A Democratic Republic, a 'Great Experiment' in the United States'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> 🗒️ Ours is a democracy, a republic, a work-in-progress continuing to this day, a heritage worth protecting...<br /> <br /> <br /> As the 250th anniversary of the signing of the US Declaration of Independence approaches, we will celebrate an agenda of rights, inalienable rights, human rights, put forward with and embodied in a [https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/full-text '''founding US Constitution'''], [https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/bill-of-rights/what-does-it-say '''a Bill of Rights'''] and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_amendments_to_the_Constitution_of_the_United_States '''Constitutional Amendments'''] -- together a Constitutional government envisioning a living Democratic Republic. <br /> <br /> <br /> On July 2, 1776, the Second Continental Congress passed a “Resolution for Independence” declaring “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”<br /> The signing of the United States Declaration of Independence occurred primarily on August 2, 1776, at the Pennsylvania State House, later renamed Independence Hall, in Philadelphia. The 56 delegates to the Second Continental Congress represented the Thirteen Colonies, of which 12 voted to approve the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[In Defense of Democracy and Freedom]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;'''[[Democracy Quotes]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;[https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Democracy '''A 'Working Democracy' ''']&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;[https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Fact_Checking,_Facts_Count '''In Democracy, 'Facts Count' ''']&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Surviving Victory - Liberty at Risk.jpg]]<br /> <br /> 🌅 'Surviving Victory'&lt;big&gt;🔥&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/surviving-victory-from-the-archive/<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''October 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''US imposes sanctions on ICC after former ICC judge wins Nobel Peace Prize'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Beyond defense, as the US continues to move away from international support while advocating an era of 'America First' <br /> <br /> <br /> Oct 9 (Reuters) - US President Donald Trump's administration imposed sanctions on the ​International Criminal Court on Friday, hours after one of its former judges won the Nobel Peace Prize, putting Washington on a diplomatic collision course with European allies.<br /> <br /> The court denounced the ‌move as an &quot;assault on the rule of law and on the very foundations of the international legal order,&quot; and called on its 125 member states to take action to defend it.<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/world/us-imposes-sanctions-international-criminal-court-hours-after-former-judge-wins-2026-10-09/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Announces Its 2026-2030 Strategic Plan'''<br /> <br /> : As with prior EPA plans, budgets, and proposed changes, a legislative and judicial reordering will follow<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;EPA's Fiscal Year (FY) 2026–2030 Strategic Plan&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2026-10/fy-2026-2030-epa-strategic-plan-final-for-publication-october-2026.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Thought for the Day&quot;<br /> <br /> October 1, 2026<br /> <br /> In a recent series of private meetings in San Francisco, after a tasting menu dinner, Anthropic consulted religious scholars to help instill morality into its A.I. models ... a case was being made that Claude could be or become conscious.<br /> <br /> What would it mean for humanity’s future if artificial intelligence systems possessed a consciousness that rivals our own?<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-morals-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FVE.kDTO.OTLs6iwx7swF&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''September 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Canada's Prime Minister Steps Onto the World Stage'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/mark-carney-talks-geopolitics/<br /> <br /> Strategic Demands: A extraordinary interview and timestamp documenting geopolitical realities faced by the Canadian Prime Minister. Here, we see the navigation skills required and demonstrated by an exceptionally trained and talented man who guides his ship of state through shifting winds… At StratDem we speak of the need for “Strategic Realism” in international relations, of security competition and values-based politics in foreign policy. Canada is fortunate, in our opinion, to have such a person at the helm of its representative democratic governance.<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Telling the Truth to the World'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Facts are key to understanding, and key to unlocking the truth<br /> <br /> : Any speech to a world audience, as at the United Nations, should be time for facts and truth<br /> <br /> <br /> The Fact Checking writer for CNN has no easy 'news beat' as he has to follow the U.S. president's pronouncements<br /> <br /> * https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/22/politics/fact-check-trump-united-nations<br /> <br /> By: Daniel Dale / CNN<br /> <br /> (Note: After a court decision, CNN was re-instituted w/ press credentials on Sept. 24)<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Fact check: Trump’s false claims to the United Nations'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> (Excerpt) <br /> <br /> Global warming<br /> <br /> Trump scoffed at dire warnings that artificial intelligence might eventually attack or kill people, claiming they are coming from “the very same people who said we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming, a name since reborn to climate change because the planet was cooling, not warming, and nobody was dead.”<br /> <br /> There are at least four things wrong with his sentence about global warming.<br /> <br /> First, the phrase “global warming” remains in widespread use even though the phrase “climate change” is also common; they mean different things. Climate scientists use both, often saying “global warming” when referring to the long-term trend of increasing global temperature and “climate change” when referring to the numerous effects the world is experiencing because of that trend. (NASA, part of the Trump-led federal government, [https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/faq/whats-the-difference-between-climate-change-and-global-warming/ explains] the difference between the terms on its website.) For example, a [https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_SYR_SPM.pdf 2023 report] from the UN’s climate change panel is titled “Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report,” but it says this: “Human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases, have unequivocally caused global warming, with global surface temperature reaching 1.1°C above 1850-1900 in 2011-2020.”<br /> <br /> Second, while Trump didn’t say what time period he was talking about, he didn’t acknowledge that the world has continued to get warmer, not cooler. The UN’s World Meteorological Organization [https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/wmo-confirms-2025-was-one-of-warmest-years-record reported] in January that “the past 11 years have been the 11 warmest on record,” with 2023, 2024 and 2025 the three very warmest — as NASA [https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5607/ also found] — though 2025 wasn’t as hot as 2024.<br /> <br /> Third, experts [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/opinion/environment/climate-change-death-toll.html widely disagree] that “nobody” has died from the various impacts of a warming world. It’s impossible to pinpoint a precise death number, but [https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2025/10/30/how-many-people-are-already-being-killed-by-climate-change some] [https://www.eenews.net/articles/people-are-dying-from-climate-change-but-how-many/ estimates] total in the millions. The deaths are likely to continue; the World Health Organization [https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-change-and-health says], “Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year, from under nutrition, malaria, diarrhea and heat stress alone.”<br /> <br /> Fourth, while somebody somewhere might have said that “we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming,” that [https://insideclimatenews.org/news/27082019/12-years-climate-change-explained-ipcc-science-solutions/ isn’t] how an expert report framed the issue.<br /> <br /> A widely discussed 2018 report from climate scientists said the world needed to sharply cut carbon emissions within the next 12 years to be on track to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels; scientists said above that threshold, the potential deadly impacts from climate change would be [https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/science/climate-issues/degrees-matter larger]. Though the 2018 report was often oversimplified by politicians, the expert claim was never that “we’ll all be dead in 12 years” — it was that significant action was needed within 12 years to improve the future. (The UN program [https://wedocs.unep.org/rest/api/core/bitstreams/9f6bd957-8d35-402d-bb4e-c7c17096e592/content reported] earlier this month that the world is set to exceed the 1.5-degree increase, “likely within the next few years&quot;.)<br /> <br /> <br /> More re: Facts and Fact Checking at GreenPolicy360:<br /> <br /> '''Facts Protecting Democracy'''<br /> <br /> At GreenPolicy360, our mission statement supports fact finding and the '3 Ds' -- Discussion ➡️ Debate ➡️ Decision-Making<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 continues a multi-year defense of facts, science, &amp; 'critical thinking skills'<br /> <br /> -- &quot;In Democracy, Facts Count&quot; <br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Fact_Checking<br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Fact_Checking,_Facts_Count<br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Disinformation_-_Online_-_Dangerous<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Taking Time to Take Another Look at the Deepening Costs of War'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 &amp; Strategic Demands<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/costsofwar/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Demanding 'New Definitions of National Security' '''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:New_Definitions_of_National_Security_-_2.png<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Strategic_Demands_of_the_21st_Century,_a_New_Vision_re_Surviving_Victory_conf.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Deep Costs of War StratDem.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Disinformation_-_Online_-_Dangerous<br /> <br /> <br /> A Faith-Announcement in Support of [[The Commons]]<br /> <br /> The Catholic Church continues forward with the message of [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Laudato_Si '''Laudato Si'''] (2015), the first papal encyclical to advance formal environmental protection doctrine. Pope Francis, who was named after St. Francis, the patron saint of the environment, acted to open new doors for theological and spiritual belief within the Catholic tradition. Now, Pope Leo follows on with more ''' 'On Caring for Our Common Home' '''...<br /> <br /> <br /> Challenges of 'ecological turning point'<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''International Theological Commission that calls Christians to view care for creation'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &quot;Caring for Our Common Home&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2026-09/ict-document-care-for-creation-ecology-theology-church-pope.html<br /> * https://www.osservatoreromano.va/en/news/2026-09/ing-009/a-fraternal-response-to-the-triune-god.html<br /> * https://www.americamagazine.org/news/2026/09/03/vatican-creation-sin/<br /> * https://www.thefloridacatholic.org/news/vatican/vatican-theological-commission-defines-sin-against-creation-and-the-creator-in-new-document/article_a6edad02-a5c2-482b-bf7f-fefcf1a8f3ed.html<br /> <br /> <br /> The Vatican has officially declared environmental destruction a ”sin against creation and the Creator” in a major new doctrinal text.<br /> <br /> The document, “Caring for Our Common Home – A Responsible and Fraternal Response to the Triune God,” was published Sept. 2 with the authorization of Pope Leo XIV, according to Vatican News. <br /> <br /> The 29,000-word document, titled '''Caring for Our Common Home''', elevates ecological concern from a merely political or scientific issue into a direct matter of personal faith. <br /> <br /> “Everything is interrelated” within “a single community of life,” according to Vatican News. The commission says this understanding calls Christians to practice gratitude toward God, mercy and solidarity toward others, and responsible care for the common home.<br /> <br /> Authorized under Pope Leo XIV, the text declares that destroying natural habitats, polluting, and exploiting resources are not just civic failures, but a 'sin against creation and against the Creator' that directly violates God's plan.<br /> <br /> This shift from Pope Francis' earlier concept of 'ecological sin' to a more explicit 'sin against the Creator' is designed to reshape how believers view their daily environmental impact. The Vatican emphasizes that failing to safeguard the planet severely harms the poorest populations and future generations, distorting the core relationships that define humanity. <br /> <br /> By placing ecological action squarely in the realm of moral responsibility, the Church is challenging millions of people to treat environmental care as a fundamental requirement of their faith.<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:St. Francis with birds listening.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Faith Traditions Are Growing in Their Calls for Eco-Stewardship'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''&quot;The World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation&quot;'''<br /> <br /> This day is bringing awareness and a call to action<br /> <br /> The spiritual and secular find common ground here in a protection of [[The Commons]]<br /> <br /> <br /> The Catholic Church observes September 1 as the [https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2026-06/vatican-theme-2026-world-day-of-prayer-for-the-care-of-creation.html '''&quot;World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation&quot;'''], a day dedicated to thanking God for the gift of creation and renewing the Church’s commitment to ecological stewardship.<br /> <br /> What the Day Is:<br /> <br /> An annual Catholic observance established by Pope Francis in 2015 as a concrete follow‑up to Laudato Si’.<br /> <br /> Shared with the Orthodox Church, which first designated September 1 as a creation‑focused '''&quot;Day of Prayers for Natural Environment&quot;''' in 1989.<br /> <br /> The opening of the global '''&quot;Season of Creation&quot;''', which runs from September 1 to October 4 (Feast of St. Francis of Assisi).<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:St Francis with the birds.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> Pope St. John Paul II in 1979 <br /> <br /> declared Francis the patron saint of ecology<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Visit Pope Francis' Eco-Encyclical [[Laudato Si]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> More: https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=File:St_Francis_with_the_birds.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://fosfanariou.gr/index.php/2026/08/30/patriarchal-message-for-the-beginning-of-the-ecclesiastical-year-and-the-solemn-day-of-prayers-for-natural-environment-2/ &quot;Solemn Day of Prayers for Natural Environment&quot;, Orthodox Catholic, September 1]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_denominations_by_number_of_members 'Christianity is the largest religious group in the world...]<br /> <br /> The largest denominations -- Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox -- have an estimated 2.3 to 2.6 billion adherents <br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 / On Earth...<br /> <br /> Religious traditions -- faith and spirituality as practiced -- have an intimate connection to life's protection, quality, and humanity's future<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''August 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> TicToc TicToc <br /> <br /> <br /> '''3, 2, 1''' ... '''Launch ... Go, Go, Go'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ⬆️ <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''NASA Goes Looking for Life in the Universe'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Nancy Grace Roman Is the Name of the (biggest- and best-ever) Telescope<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Astro 'Big Picture' Sites]]<br /> <br /> <br /> August 30, 2026<br /> <br /> News from the Florida East Coast<br /> <br /> [https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/30/science/nancy-grace-roman-space-telescope-launch (CNN)] A massive observatory that scientists have called a “discovery machine” has launched toward the cosmos, beginning a journey that could mark a significant shift in our understanding of the universe.<br /> <br /> Designed to seek out otherwise invisible and faint space objects, '''NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope''' lifted off aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket at 7:26 a.m. ET Sunday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The observatory reached orbit about 10 minutes later.<br /> <br /> <br /> (NYT) At a news conference on Saturday morning, Nicola Fox, the associate administrator of NASA’s science mission directorate, explained that Roman’s vast gaze would contribute to solving some of the grandest mysteries about our universe, including how it works, what it is made of and if we are alone out there.<br /> <br /> “To put it in perspective, it will be as if Hubble and James Webb kind of peered through a keyhole at the universe,” Dr. Fox said, referring to two other telescopes NASA has launched into space. “Well, Nancy Grace Roman will kick the door down.”<br /> <br /> <br /> (GRN360) Get ready for 'Exo's in Space' ... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet Exoplanets] ...... with discernible, measurable signs of extraterrestrial life&lt;big&gt;✨ ❇️ ✨&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> 'Up' there ⬆️<br /> <br /> As seen from 'down' here on our terrestrial Home Planet<br /> <br /> Go we go, we're looking 'around'. We're going Exploring ❇️<br /> <br /> <br /> NASA's Exoplanet Archive<br /> <br /> * https://science.nasa.gov/exoplanets/discoveries-dashboard/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> ⬇️<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Trump numbers continue downward.png]]<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Numbers Continue Trending Downward'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via the Washington Post<br /> <br /> August 24, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/08/24/trumps-attempts-intimidate-home-abroad-have-backfired/<br /> <br /> <br /> In the CNN Poll of Polls, 36 percent approved of (Trump's) job performance, while 63 percent disapproved. That’s far below the historical average for presidents. He is even more unpopular abroad — and international disapproval of the president has translated into disapproval of the country he leads. A [https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2026/06/23/trump-gets-negative-reviews-internationally-as-fewer-say-u-s-is-a-reliable-partner/ '''Pew Research Center poll of 36 countries'''], conducted earlier this summer, found that 76 percent of respondents had “no confidence” in Trump and 57 percent had an unfavorable opinion of the United States. In most of the countries Pew surveyed, people had a more positive impression of China than of the U.S.<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Today &amp; Tomorrow: A Couple Memories'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Today: A Green-Skinned Actress (a Famed Witch) who has the same name as a NASA Software-engineer (who wrote the essential code for the Apollo moon mission)<br /> <br /> <br /> SJS/GreenPolicy360 editor: <br /> <br /> A quick flight of the mind, as I received two online stories this morning -- one brought a memory of when I lived in New York City in the Gramercy Park neighborhood and regularly saw a distinguished looking older women walking her dogs around the park. She had a distinctive profile and one day I briefly talked to her. She said she was an actress, and that she still worked (this was in the mid-1970s) 'in the theater'. Her dogs were anxious to move on so we parted. Later, I learned from a neighbor that she was 'thee Margaret Hamilton.'<br /> <br /> Let's call her Margaret from the West (although here in NYC she lived in a building on the East)...<br /> <br /> [[File:Gramercy Park East.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Wicked Witch of the West.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> And as those of you who are familiar with the work of GreenPolicy360, you may remember we have focused our work over decades on what we call [[The Modern Environmental Movement]]. Your founder/siterunner was among those who were there alongside a [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr Congressman named George Brown], who put into development a first generation of Earth Science missions from space. The Apollo-NASA missions to the moon changed the way humanity saw ourselves, as [[Apollo 8]] sent home the first-ever full-color images of our living planet home. What some called a 'cognitive shift' occurred for many of us who were there as the image that became known as '[[Earthrise]]' appeared in the media, most prominently [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Earthrise_Life_Magazine_January_1969.png on the cover] of biggest magazine of the era.<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''“We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.&quot; – Astronaut Bill Anders, Aboard Apollo, December 24, 1968''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earthrise - NASA original Anders photo.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> What your editor carried away was inspiration... and today I am remembering one of the greats of the Apollo mission who made the flights and vision of planet Earth possible. Her name is Margaret Hamilton.<br /> <br /> She literally [https://www.softwareheritage.org/2019/07/20/archiving-and-referencing-the-apollo-source-code/ wrote the source code] that guided the missions to the moon, and her code (as I learned today) from the Apollo 8 'Earthrise' mission acted to make possible the correction of the Apollo 11 landing and return from the moon.<br /> <br /> <br /> _________________________________________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : August 17, 2026 - Happy 90th birthday to Margaret Hamilton -- the software engineer who wrote the computer code that saved the Apollo 11 moon landing and who, in the process, invented the discipline of software engineering itself! The system that kept that landing from being aborted began, improbably, with her 4-year-old daughter crashing a simulated moon mission.<br /> : Margaret Hamilton's daughter, Lauren, came along to the MIT lab on nights and weekends while her mother wrote the software that would fly astronauts to the moon. &quot;There wasn't a time when we weren't working,&quot; Hamilton said. Lauren liked to play astronaut, because she had watched her mother do it in simulations. One evening she started hitting keys, and the simulation began to run. Then she hit another, and everything fell apart -- she had selected a program meant to be run before launch, and the computer, which had almost no memory to spare, wiped the navigation data that was taking her to the moon.<br /> : Hamilton saw what it meant immediately. &quot;I thought: my God -- this could inadvertently happen in a real mission.&quot; She proposed a change to the software that would stop a prelaunch program from being selected in flight. Her superiors at MIT and NASA told her not to bother. The astronauts were too well trained to make a mistake like that.<br /> : On the very next mission, Apollo 8, an astronaut made exactly that mistake -- wiping the navigation data midway to the moon, just as Lauren had. Hamilton called it the Lauren bug. &quot;It created much havoc and required the mission to be reconfigured,&quot; she said. &quot;After that, they let me put the program change in, all right.&quot;<br /> <br /> :Hamilton was born in Paoli, Indiana, in 1936, earned a degree in mathematics with a minor in philosophy from Earlham College, and went to MIT in 1959 to support her family while her husband attended Harvard Law. She learned to program in the lab of Edward Lorenz, the meteorologist who would become the father of chaos theory, because there was nowhere else to learn it. &quot;Computer science and software engineering were not yet disciplines,&quot; she said. &quot;Instead, programmers learned on the job.&quot;<br /> :In 1964 her husband spotted a newspaper advertisement: the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory was looking for people to write the software to send a man to the moon. &quot;I was attracted both by the sheer idea and the fact that it had never been done before,&quot; Hamilton said. &quot;I was the first programmer to join and the first woman they hired.&quot;<br /> : She was gradually promoted until she was directing the team -- eventually about a hundred people -- that wrote the onboard flight software for both Apollo spacecraft. When she was given the job, one of the senior men told her he had no doubt she could do it but worried the men under her might rebel. &quot;Well,&quot; she said, &quot;they didn't.&quot;<br /> :Almost nobody thought the software mattered. It was not in the original schedule; it was not in the budget. &quot;Software during the early days of this project was treated like a stepchild,&quot; Hamilton later wrote, &quot;and it was regarded as an art and as magic, not a science.&quot; Out of what she called desperation, she started calling what she did software engineering -- a phrase invented to make a point.<br /> :&quot;It was out of desperation I came up with the term, to say: 'Hey, we're engineering too.' It was an ongoing joke for a long time.&quot; The joke ended in a meeting, when one of the laboratory's most respected hardware men stood up and said she was right.<br /> :Then came July 20, 1969. Three minutes above the Sea of Tranquility, with two men aboard a vehicle that had never landed anywhere, the Apollo Guidance Computer began throwing alarms -- 1202, then 1201, five of them in four minutes -- because a rendezvous radar switch had been left in the wrong position and the machine was drowning in work it had no time to finish. On virtually any other computer of that decade, this was the end of the story: a freeze, a crash, a mission aborted.<br /> :Hamilton stood watching in the monitoring room at MIT while her software did what she had built it to do, which was to decide what mattered. It recognized the overload, discarded the low-priority jobs, restarted itself in a controlled and orderly way, and held onto the tasks that were flying the spacecraft. &quot;It quickly became clear the software was not only informing everyone that there was a hardware-related problem,&quot; she said, &quot;but was compensating for it.&quot;<br /> :In Houston a 26-year-old guidance officer named Steve Bales had a few seconds to call an abort, and because the computer was visibly managing itself, he called go. Neil Armstrong flew Eagle past a field of boulders and set it down with about twenty-five seconds of fuel remaining.<br /> :&quot;If the computer hadn't recognized this problem and taken recovery action,&quot; Hamilton wrote two years afterward, &quot;I doubt if Apollo 11 would have been the successful moon landing it was.&quot;<br /> :There is a famous photograph of her from that summer, standing beside a stack of Apollo source-code listings taller than she is. :&quot;We got carried away and grabbed all the Apollo listings in my office and created the tower,&quot; she said. &quot;I was trying to find a way of keeping the stack up.&quot;<br /> :Hamilton's standards held. In all the crewed Apollo missions that followed, no software bug was ever known to have occurred.<br /> :Hamilton went unrecognized for decades. In 2016 President Barack Obama gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, calling her emblematic of &quot;that generation of unsung women who helped send humankind into space,&quot; and a year later she appeared, as a LEGO figurine. <br /> :Now ninety, Margaret Hamilton still argues that software should be designed at the start not to fail, rather than patched after it does ....<br /> <br /> :For young women who want to follow in her footsteps, she offers this advice: &quot;Don't let fear get in the way, and don't be afraid to say 'I don't know' or 'I don't understand' -- no question is a dumb question. And don't always listen to the so-called experts.&quot; :To introduce this inspiring trailblazer to kids, consider the picture book &quot;Margaret and the Moon&quot; for ages 5 to 9 at https://www.amightygirl.com/margaret-and-the-moon) and the children's biography &quot;Space Engineer and Scientist Margaret Hamilton&quot; for ages 7 to 10 at https://www.amightygirl.com/margaret-hamilton<br /> :She is also featured in an activity book about pioneering women in technology, which includes a variety of hands-on STEM projects: &quot;Gutsy Girls Go for Science: Programmers&quot; for ages 8 to 11 at https://www.amightygirl.com/gutsy-girls-programmers<br /> <br /> :For adult readers who want the wider story of the women who put Americans in space, &quot;Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars&quot; tells of the mathematicians recruited by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in the 1940s and 50s at https://www.amightygirl.com/rise-of-the-rocket-girls <br /> <br /> <br /> _________________________________________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> So, in memory of two classic, talented, game-changing, creative women -- <br /> <br /> Here's a deep bow and a flourishing wave of our green cap. <br /> <br /> We remember you !!<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Fact_Checking Facts Count]<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Are AI companies scanning and destroying millions of books, including rare titles?'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> Via Snopes.com<br /> <br /> Artificial intelligence companies are scanning millions of books, some of which are rare, and destroying them.<br /> <br /> * https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ai-companies-destroying-rare-books/<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''July 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:A Quokka, which one.jpg]]<br /> <br /> A Human &amp; Quokka Species, on Behalf of All Species <br /> <br /> : Historic, Country-wide Wild Fires Threaten Australia<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''PyroCbs, &quot;Fire Clouds&quot;'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''France / Spain ... &quot;Unprecedented&quot; ... &quot;Extreme Weather&quot;'''<br /> <br /> [https://apnews.com/article/europe-wildfires-france-spain-93678a31ff53fc46564b6dfd9934eae1 250,000 Evacuated]<br /> <br /> Via NYT<br /> <br /> As the hot air rises, it expands and cools, causing its moisture to condense. The water vapor and ash particles combine to form a gray or brown cloud that can then develop into a pyrocumulonimbus (pyro means “fire” in Greek) storm cloud.<br /> <br /> They produce lightning and burning embers that can spark more fires, and they generate high and unpredictable winds that fan the flames and spread the embers.<br /> <br /> In the Gironde region, 103,000 acres have burned, according to officials, and 220,000 people have been asked to evacuate from Gironde and the neighboring Landes region.<br /> <br /> The pyrocumulonimbus phenomenon presents extreme challenges for firefighters.<br /> <br /> “These fire-generated clouds are linked to extreme fire behavior that impedes firefighting efforts and can devastate communities,” according to NASA, which emphasized the need to better understand the clouds “given the ongoing and projected increases in fire activity and severity.”<br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://espo.nasa.gov/inspyre<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Elon Musk Opens Up in an Interview'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Economist Editor Presses the Controversial 'Trillionaire'<br /> <br /> :: Elon Musk's 'Vision of the Future'<br /> <br /> * https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/23/elon-musks-vision-of-the-future<br /> <br /> <br /> “People don’t realise that what I’m saying will come to pass,” he tells The Economist in a 90-minute interview held at a giant Tesla factory in Texas where electric cars drive themselves off the assembly line. That may be because his future-gazing ranges from the unsettling to the downright weird. <br /> <br /> Mr. Musk predicts that, within five years, artificial-intelligence systems may surpass the sum of all human intelligence. Within ten years, robots in the workplace will help usher in an era of such “amazing abundance” that money will become meaningless....<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-killer-robots-ai-abundance-progress-unstoppable-2026-7<br /> <br /> <br /> Musk proposes peer review for frontier AI models in Economist interview<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/musk-proposes-peer-review-frontier-ai-models-economist-interview-2026-07-23/<br /> <br /> <br /> Musk says he got ‘carried away’ with Trump – but still holds on to contentious political views<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/23/elon-musk-regret-trump-doge-ai<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Mix of Comments:<br /> <br /> * https://beincrypto.com/elon-musk-real-force-european-politics/<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/07/24/elon-musk-speaks-to-the-economist-editor-in-chief-zanny-minton-beddoes-on-the-key-takeaways.html<br /> * https://futurism.com/elon-musk-interviewer-npc<br /> * https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-economist-interview-2000790016<br /> * https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/nonsense-elon-musk-lashes-out-in-fiery-interview-after-hes-accused-of-supporting-the-far-right/<br /> * https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2026/07/23/musk_admonishes_the_economist_editor_what_is_far_right_about_having_secure_borders_safe_cities_and_sensible_spending.html<br /> * https://zeteo.com/p/top-economist-trump-musk-starmer<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:ECO.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Big Picture'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> Humanity Looks up to the Heavens, [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:ECO.png 'Inspired' by the Stars]<br /> <br /> : Earth Art &amp; Heliophysics, An Art Project 50 Years in the Making Opens Up<br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Charles Ross, Star Axis in New Mexico.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> July 21, 2026<br /> <br /> U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations<br /> <br /> The Topic -- Supplemental Federal Aid<br /> <br /> The Question -- Why More Government Funding for the Military, and Agriculture Producers, is urgently needed<br /> <br /> The Secretary of War explains that $1.5 trillion in needed in the next budget year, a 'generational' budget, one year increase request of over $500 billion... and tens of billion more are needed immediately for war fighting, training, munitions...<br /> <br /> Then ... on July 21st, with minimal media coverage, the following is put into the record -- to explain why billions more than a half trillion more, are needed for farmers and agriculture.<br /> <br /> <br /> ''“For many agricultural producers, 2025 was a year in which the cost of growing their crop at times exceeded what they could earn from selling it. Severe weather compounded these losses... producers had to contend with a combination of challenging market conditions.&quot;<br /> <br /> ''“... We will hear a great deal today about how declining commodity prices, rising input costs, labor shortages, trade disruptions, pests and disease, and increasingly volatile weather are squeezing farmers’ already thin margins.''<br /> <br /> ''“Nationwide, we have lost nearly 200,000 farms in the last decade.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> Let's parse this list of what 'we will hear'... the causes are what we will focus on here.<br /> <br /> The choice of going to war, and resulting increases in oil/gas prices, the resulting prices of fertilizer spiking, the boycotts and tariffs of U.S. farm products resulting from boycotts and tariffs in international markets (Trade War consequences of U.S. policies), the reasons for 'labor shortages' in the U.S. agriculture industry, and increases in extreme weather events and damages... <br /> <br /> These consequential facts seem to be set aside, ignored, and not explored by committee hearing speakers and the majority party running the hearing (the Chair is a Senator from Maine and is running for re-election).<br /> <br /> Look more closely at the [https://strategicdemands.com/costsofwar/ 'Deep Costs, Costs of War'] that the people of the U.S., and many others, are paying.<br /> <br /> It is time for new policies, facts, costs of failed policies, and more realistic debate and discussion...<br /> <br /> Enough said...<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> July 16, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[Fact Checking, Facts Count]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Consider the Facts, Pay Attention to the Reality<br /> <br /> As an audience listens in while an American president talks, we, at GreenPolicy, have a bottom line request -- our bottom line is '''Facts Count'''<br /> <br /> Go with the Reality, not the Marketing<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Attribution of Extreme Weather and Climate Events and Their Impacts'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * This 2026 National Academies of Science Study and Report Will Have Consequences<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We are reminded of the mid-1970s National Academies of Sciences Study and Report that led to Congressional Hearings and the First US National Climate Act Program. We watched as Representative George E. Brown - (D) Los Angeles pushed for the scientific research and moved to hearings and legislation.<br /> <br /> The era of modern climate science moved forward with lasting contributions ...<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/climate/national-academies-extreme-weather-attribution.html?unlocked_article_code=1.yFA.38oJ.3B0p4MCCutBL&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> * https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/28590/chapter/1<br /> <br /> <br /> Read about the foundational 1970s National Climate science report, hearings, and legislation here -- <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr#/media/File%3ANational_Climate_Program_Act_Hearings_May_1976.jpg<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr#/media/File%3AUS_Public_Law_95-367.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr#/media/File%3APublic_Law_95-367%2C_1978.jpeg<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Congressman george.e.brown.gif]]<br /> <br /> Rep. George E Brown<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Generation Green]] [[Going Green]]'''<br /> <br /> '''[[The Modern Environmental Movement]]'''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360: Our Outlook, Perspective and Work is Local/National/Global, Individual and Community-to-Community'''<br /> <br /> : '''[[Green Best Practices]]'''<br /> <br /> : [[File:Climate First Bank Florida.png]]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Climate_First_Bank_Florida.png<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''An Interview with Bill McKibben'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> The Very Good and Very Bad News on Climate<br /> <br /> July 10, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-bill-mckibben.html?unlocked_article_code=1.wlA.b4se.muIpmtiO6j6_&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> Here’s the good news: Green energy is getting better and cheaper, faster than we had ever dared hope.<br /> <br /> This next sentence was unimaginable even a few years ago: In April, the energy think tank Ember found that all of the new electricity demand around the world in 2025 was met with green power. That is wild.<br /> <br /> But here is the bad news: Climate change is accelerating. We’re discovering new ways that the climate system is more fragile, more sensitive to emissions, than we previously had thought.<br /> <br /> We have not been talking that much about climate change lately, but that doesn’t mean it has stopped happening. Europe is in the midst of an extraordinary heat wave. The world is staring down the barrel of a powerful El Niño.<br /> <br /> And climate politics is in almost total disarray. Donald Trump has gutted the Inflation Reduction Act. His administration is accelerating fossil fuel production and kneecapping green energy.<br /> <br /> <br /> But here’s the possibility, a bit of optimism: The advances in green technology make a new climate politics possible — one that doesn’t just talk about sacrifice and disaster prevention but presents decarbonization and green energy as a way station on the path to somewhere better.<br /> <br /> Clean energy abundance, a new form of energetic wealth, the possibility of the left actually offering a future of more and better — not less and worse — was a hard case to make even a few years ago. But now we cannot only imagine it, we can see it, touch it, live in it. It is here.<br /> <br /> So how do we talk about it? How do we make it happen?<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-bill-mckibben.html?unlocked_article_code=1.wlA.b4se.muIpmtiO6j6_&amp;smid=em-share '''Read the McKibben Interview Here for more:''']<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Even better than the E.V. is the e-bike, which I think may turn out to be the transformative invention of our time on Earth.&quot; -- Bill McKibben<br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-bill-mckibben.html?unlocked_article_code=1.wlA.b4se.muIpmtiO6j6_&amp;smid=em-share '''Click Here for more about Bill McKibben at GreenPolicy360'''] <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:America250 logo.svg.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/In_Defense_of_Democracy_and_Freedom<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Democracy_Quotes<br /> <br /> <br /> We recall a quote of Benjamin Franklin responding to a question in 1787 about the newly announced birth of the US as he left Independence Hall after the Constitutional Convention:<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''We have &quot;a Republic, if you can keep it.&quot;'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Today's generation, and future generations, would be wise to remember Franklin's words of warning.'''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> '''July 4th, 1776'''<br /> <br /> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness...<br /> <br /> * https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''June 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''June 30, 2026'''<br /> <br /> <br /> NATIONAL REPUBLICAN SENATORIAL COMMITTEE ET AL. v. FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION ET AL.<br /> <br /> * https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-621_h315.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Millionaires &amp; Billionaires Applaud'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : U.S. Supreme Court Increases Influence of '''[[Money in Politics]]'''<br /> <br /> :: New SCOTUS Ruling Memorializes 'Pay to Play' Transactional Politics<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360's associate [http://www.politicopay.com '''PoliticoPay.com'''], has been tracking the escalating money in politics trend for years.<br /> <br /> We have warned of the consequences of profligate spending on politicians and campaigns. These warnings have become a reality -- and further challenge to good government. <br /> <br /> * https://politicopay.com/buckley-valeo-a-mega-money-future<br /> <br /> * https://politicopay.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''NPR re: Decision No. 24–621'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''(The Supreme Court) decision means that parties get the best of both worlds. They can both coordinate with candidates and raise unlimited funds.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''At issue in the case was a post-Watergate law that Congress passed to limit the amount of money individuals can give to political parties. The law, the Federal Election Campaign Act, also limited how much money political parties can spend on their candidates. Other types of organizations, like political action committees and Super PACs, have no limits on the amount of money they can raise and spend on elections...''<br /> <br /> ''Republicans, including Vice President Vance and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, challenged the law as an unconstitutional violation of political parties' First Amendment right to raise and spend money on their candidates.''<br /> <br /> ''Backed by the Trump Justice Department, they contended that the only justification for imposing a fundraising limit on parties is to prevent corruption, but they maintained that there is no evidence that the law has prevented corruption.''<br /> <br /> This decision overturns a 2001 Supreme Court case that declared the limits on party spending to be constitutional. It's the latest in a series of rulings since then that have unraveled campaign finance regulations.<br /> <br /> ''The saga began in 2010, when the court ruled in Citizens United that corporations have a First Amendment right to unlimited spending on elections...''<br /> <br /> * https://www.npr.org/2026/06/30/nx-s1-5827039/supreme-court-campaign-finance<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Speaking of the Influence of Big Money on Consequential Political Decisions'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Michael Mann's new book, Coming Back to Earth.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Michael Mann has news of science, politics, and life impacting policies --''' <br /> <br /> A new book on the state of climate science and politics is in the works with Michael Mann @ Public Affairs...<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 especially appreciates the publication notice:<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Coming Back to Earth'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Providing grounded, evidence-based reasons to be optimistic about our ability to confront climate change.'''<br /> <br /> <br /> We're reminded of his most recent book 'The New Climate War', which he inscribed for GreenPolicy360. <br /> <br /> '''Thanks Michael, Onward we go !'''<br /> <br /> <br /> and as we say here at the top of each online page as our site and green network is being read by millions around the Earth...<br /> <br /> '''Each of us can make a positive difference by stepping up &amp; doing our best'''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Generation Green]] | [[Planet Citizens]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''' &quot;We have to identify the problem, then act in many ways to solve the problem. Global warming is the threat of our times.&quot;''' &lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;-- [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Governor_Jerry_Brown '''Jerry Brown, California Governor''']&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''' &quot;We’re going to need to use every tool in the toolbox if we’re going to solve this problem.&quot; '''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;-- [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Michael_E_Mann_--_act_with_hope_not_fear.jpg '''Michael E. Mann''']&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Consequences of Another War in the Middle East'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> : Deep Costs to the U.S. and Its Future -- Come into View<br /> <br /> :: U.S. Allies Suffer with Shifts in Global Economics -- the Mid East Continues in Crisis<br /> <br /> <br /> '''With the deepening costs of oil/gas wars adding trillions to expanding U.S. debt -- with a multi-trillion dollars Iraq war, Afghanistan war, and ongoing Israel/Syria/Lebanon/Palestine-Gaza conflicts -- we witness decades of failed policy and generational roll over... The national/international costs and changes brought on by the U.S./Iran war, with its severe global energy disruptions, begin to come into a wider global view ...'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/business/energy-environment/china-energy-battery-grid.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qlA.iKfE.kO9ONgn1Q7pG&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:US_Reliability_Falls_in_Europe.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Visit GreenPolicy360's Associate, Strategic Demands, for Continued Perspective on the Middle East Wars and the Far-Reaching Consequences and Damaged U.S. Relations'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''June 14, 2026'''<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/costsofwar/<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/business/energy-environment/china-energy-battery-grid.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qlA.iKfE.kO9ONgn1Q7pG&amp;smid=url-share '''China benefits as Petrol Politics of Oil/Gas and Mideast Wars push alternative energy sources''']<br /> <br /> [[File:China electrostate benefits from efx of Mideast war.png|link=https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/business/energy-environment/china-energy-battery-grid.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qlA.iKfE.kO9ONgn1Q7pG&amp;smid=url-share]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''China's electrostate is poised to win from war in the Middle East'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/business/energy-environment/china-energy-battery-grid.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qlA.iKfE.kO9ONgn1Q7pG&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> More on [https://strategicdemands.com/new-definitions-of-security/ 'new definitions of national/global security']<br /> <br /> ''In April, wind and solar generated more electricity globally than gas for the first time.''<br /> <br /> <br /> Scan the energy production data<br /> <br /> * https://ember-energy.org/<br /> <br /> <br /> Data into action<br /> <br /> Open data and intelligent policy analysis to unlock a clean, electrified energy future<br /> <br /> <br /> Spring 2026<br /> <br /> '''&quot;And then came Hormuz&quot; ... Iran war analysis via Ember<br /> <br /> :If the defining economic story of the century is the rise of Asia, the defining energy story is the rise of electricity. The two are usually told apart. This report argues they are one: Asia’s rise is electric, and the electric age hastens Asia’s rise.<br /> <br /> :Electricity has been the century’s fastest-growing energy carrier, overtaking oil in 2007 as the leading supplier of useful energy worldwide. Over the same years, Asia has been the fastest-growing region. In 2016, China passed the United States in purchasing-power terms, and South and Southeast Asia together passed the European Union in 2021. Two features bind these stories together.<br /> <br /> :The first is that Asia is taking an electric path. Since the turn of the century, Asia has driven three quarters of the growth in global electricity. In the West, GDP and electricity demand decoupled long ago; in Asia, they rise in lock-step. Asia has achieved greater electrification at lower incomes per capita. No growth in history has been this electric.<br /> <br /> :The second runs deeper. It is a change in what energy is. Coal, oil and gas are commodities, dug from the ground. Solar panels, batteries and wind turbines are technologies, built on a production line. The energy revolution is the shift from extraction to manufacturing.<br /> <br /> <br /> :Enter Asia – the world’s factory. Asia builds most of the world’s solar panels, batteries, power electronics, electric motors and cars. Its strengths fit the new energy system.<br /> <br /> :Such a shift carries historical weight. After 1800 the West pulled ahead of Asia, a parting of fortunes known as the Great Divergence. Energy sat at the core of this divergence: first coal, then oil, and the engines built to burn them. These innovations favoured Western strengths and underwrote two centuries of wealth and power.<br /> <br /> :The Great Convergence – the East closing in on the West – also has an energy story, and it runs the other way. The new vector is electricity, and the electro-technologies that run on it. The new centre is Asia. Its lack of oil and gas was a weakness in a fossil world. It is a blessing in an electric one.<br /> <br /> :China is, of course, the giant. But change is radiating outwards. From Vietnam to Bangladesh, electrification rates are higher than in Europe or the United States. From Pakistan to Japan, solar’s share of power beats the US. From Thailand to Nepal and Indonesia to Singapore, EV uptake is ahead. Strip China out, and the rest of Asia still outbuilds the world in solar modules and battery components.<br /> <br /> :For years the economics of electrotech have been improving rapidly. A decade ago, solar began to beat coal, and electric cars beat petrol over their lifetimes, once fuel was counted. Today solar and EVs are cheaper to buy outright, even before the fuel savings. For economies short of capital, the door is now open to rapid change.<br /> <br /> :Then came Hormuz: the closure of Asia’s petrol station. The region buys nearly half of its oil from the Gulf, a deeper reliance than Europe had on Russia. It is the second blow in four years. The first came in 2022, when Russia cut off Europe, and Europe outbid Asia for gas, pricing out poorer countries. If electrotech is the pull of opportunity, the twin fossil shock is the push of necessity.<br /> <br /> :Economics, security and industrial opportunity now all point in the same direction. Asia holds half the world’s people and 4% of its oil and gas, but three quarters of the electrotech factories that can replace the fuel it lacks. <br /> <br /> : The Great Divergence was powered by the energy the West mastered. The Great Convergence runs on the energy that Asia manufactures. If this is to be the Asian century, its path will be electric.<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Electric Asia'''<br /> <br /> * How Asia is leading the electric age, powering its rise and reshaping the global order<br /> <br /> <br /> '''“What was five years ago maybe barely competitive, now is almost already clearly cheaper...”'''<br /> <br /> '''&quot;Investments in renewables have become a better bet, promising returns in closer to two years instead of 30.&quot;'''<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: The shift globally to renewable energy comes against a backdrop of historic policy decisions in the two terms of the Trump administration, a government-wide retreat away from renewable energy. The Trump 'retro-vision' that touts fossil fuels and denigrates renewables is, in fact, setting back U.S. competitiveness in meeting new demands for electrification across industrial sectors.<br /> <br /> As the economies of the world move forward, in transportation (EVs, e-motorcycles, e-bikes... e-buses, e-trucks, city e-grids with light rail, and soon aerial copters and planes, boats and ships, and e-power tools, e-tractors, e-smart homes and battery technologies (powering grids, cities, factories, consumer products), and e-robots and a gamut of AI technologies .... and on and on, the retro-actions of the Trump period are delivering a backward-looking blow to U.S. competitiveness that will have decades-long consequences.<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''June 7, 2026'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''As the War with Iran Reaches Day 100'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : And War in Ukraine Continues to Flare<br /> <br /> :: And War in Lebanon Expands<br /> <br /> :: And War in the Middle East Seems Endless<br /> <br /> ::: With Escalations, Reverberations, Proliferation of 'WMDs', and Incalculable Worldwide Costs <br /> <br /> We listen in and watch as the issues and questions roil across an informed and hard discussion between voices 'in the know' ...<br /> <br /> * https://substack.com/home/post/p-201011581<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''June 4'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''PREMIERE of a New Documentary Film about the Threat of Nuclear Weapons'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''In this 29-minute documentary, renowned whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg provides a powerful wakeup call about the global threat posed by nuclear weapons and advocates how we can dramatically reduce the real and present danger of nuclear annihilation.'' <br /> <br /> ''Before he released the top secret Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, Ellsberg was a nuclear war planner with access to classified information on U.S. nuclear strategy.''<br /> <br /> <br /> Wikipedia Bio / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Filmed one year before his death at age 92, Ellsberg speaks with clarity and urgency about the dangers we face, noting, &quot;I’ve long said that to my last breath I will be doing what I can to postpone and avert the risk of nuclear war.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''With ongoing conflicts heightening nuclear tensions, and with the recent end of the New START treaty potentially triggering a renewed arms race, &quot;An Ordinary Insanity&quot; is a timely film to help mobilize broad public concern and action for arms control and nuclear disarmament.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360 &amp; Strategic Demands''':<br /> <br /> A message from beyond, words of warning from an old friend of ours, Dan Ellsberg.<br /> <br /> Listen in to words of wisdom, even as a US president postures to be anti-nuke, and proposes nuclear weapons funding at all time highs...<br /> <br /> In fact, nuclear funding and Trump administration nuclear weapons development and 'usable' delivery platforms have spurred an out of control Nuclear Arms Race between the US, Russia and now China<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> “We’re continuing year-by-year deliberately with a posture and a policy and threats that make a significant risk of near extinction possible.” <br /> <br /> — DANIEL ELLSBERG in &quot;An Ordinary Insanity&quot; <br /> <br /> * https://www.anordinaryinsanity.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''More about Dan Ellsberg''' [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?search=dan+ellsberg&amp;title=Special%3ASearch&amp;profile=advanced&amp;fulltext=1&amp;ns0=1&amp;ns6=1&amp;ns14=1 @ '''GreenPolicy360'''] &amp; [https://strategicdemands.com/?s=dan+ellsberg @ '''Strategic Demands''']<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Nuclear_Weapons<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/nuclear-arms-race-3-0/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Truth and Consequence - Dan Ellsberg.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''May 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''David Attenborough Turns 100 Years Old'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/arts/television/david-attenborough-100-birthday.html?unlocked_article_code=1.hFA.HXVb.qSlnB3rq8Hbe&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> ''&quot;The next few decades represent a final opportunity to build a stable home for ourselves and restore the rich, healthy and wonderful world that we inherited from our distant ancestors. Our future on the planet, the only place as far as we know where life of any kind exists, is at stake.” -- David Attenborough, &quot;A Life on Our Planet&quot;, 2020<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We agree with David, we very deeply agree...<br /> <br /> And to Leo DiCaprio, a fellow [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Bioneers '''Bioneer'''], we agree too. David is a protector and close up story teller of the natural world who is a unique and valued voice whose wisdom will remain for years, and years and years...<br /> <br /> * https://deadline.com/2026/05/leonardo-dicaprio-david-attenborough-tribute-100th-birthday-1236888075/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Lee Zeldin E&amp;E News.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Photo by E&amp;E News&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin this past week defended deep budget cuts proposed by President Donald Trump'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Zeldin appeared at a trio of congressional hearings, dueling with House members and senators over the administration’s plan to reduce EPA’s annual funding to $4.2 billion in fiscal 2027 — or more than half of the agency’s enacted spending'' (E&amp;E)<br /> <br /> <br /> Green Policy: Lee Zeldin is Donald Trump's zealous attorney/administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. (We note he is also being discussed in the news as a leading candidate for the next US Attorney General). Zeldin for now is showing himself as a man with a cause. The cause he is pursuing, as he wields expanded administrative power, is dismantling and defunding the agency charged with protecting the environment, as the EPA's title straightforwardly declares. <br /> <br /> Since the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Environmental_Protection_Agency '''Environmental Protection Agency establishment in 1970'''], the EPA has followed its mission over decades. Congress after Congress envisioned, developed, and approved its work. Popular support was nationwide. Memorable achievements followed. We won't go into the long list of health-protections and science that EPA has given the nation and its communities, the air-quality, water-quality, health- and living-quality advances are there to see and experience.<br /> <br /> In Lee Zeldin's short time in office, however, the record of achievements is not seen as achievements to be built on... Zeldin has instead turned the valued agency into a storm of firings, cuts, closing of departments, ending research, terminating projects, eliminating oversight programs, announcing the EPA is no longer in the business of doing the people's work of enforcing the statutory mandates and directions of the US Congress.<br /> <br /> When asked under what authority he is dismantling the EPA, he answers with authoritative assurance -- that of the Supreme Court's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_questions_doctrine?wprov=sfti1 ''''Major Questions Doctrine''''] and the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loper_Bright_Enterprises_v._Raimondo '''Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo'''] decision.<br /> <br /> Zeldin and the current administration go on to explain they have 'different' policy priorities' that allow them to cut, cut, cut the EPA, turning it into a shell of what it was -- and away from Congressional votes, decisions and budgets since the 1970s intended to support viable, effective environmental protection. <br /> <br /> Yet, a remade Supreme Court has now enabled a dramatic and demanding new level of explicit text in Statutory law. The Court's novel doctrine of 'Major Questions' and the Loper Bright decision that Lee Zeldin wave as he orders dismantling is the order coming from the president. Given on the ground, deep and popular support, Zeldin's orders won't stand the test of time.<br /> <br /> Congressional staffs will bring in experts and act to redraft the letter of the law. Future administrations will support will act to pass legally specific text across most all environmental laws that are being summarily dismissed by Lee Zeldin, Esq.<br /> <br /> What Zeldin seems to forget, as he flaunts the Scotus recent turn, is that the clock is ticking, the people see and learn what is needed and what to do to deliver the kind of government they are demanding.<br /> <br /> Top of list -- quality of life. This includes protection against toxics and pollution. Moving toward a goal of clean, breathable air, drinkable water, and sustainable, enjoyable, healthy communities, towns and cities. <br /> <br /> We understand the need for the EPA's work. Most everyone does.<br /> <br /> When Lee Zeldin goes away, within a brief time a renewed Environmental Protection Agency with new Presidential executive orders and Congressional support will be the order of the day. <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''April 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Remade Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS) Remakes Civil Rights &amp; the Voting Rights Act'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : SCOTUS Voting Act Decision Acts to Reshape the 2026 Mid-term Congressional Election <br /> <br /> :: Partisan Reconfiguration of Congressional Districts Goes into Overdrive<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Voting Rights and Control of Congress'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Media news headlines from across the US deliver Temper of the Times <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-voting-rights-act-louisiana-alabama-4e3225083caccda5ec73a98533a79add '''Supreme Court hollows out a landmark law that had protected minority voting rights for 6 decades'''] '''Associated Press / April 30, 2026'''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act--.png]] 🏛️[[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-01.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-02.png]] 🏛️ [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-03.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-04.png]] 🏛️ [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-05.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-.png]] 🏛️ [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-07.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-08.png]] 🏛️ [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-09.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Memorable Words from the British King Addressing a Joint Session of the US Congress'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Charles navigates fraught politics with reminders of the Magna Carta of 1215, citizen rights, and calling for today's democratic governments to have high purpose<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''&quot;[O]ur generation must decide how to address the collapse of critical natural systems, which threatens far more than the harmony and essential diversity of Nature.”'''''<br /> <br /> '''''&quot;Reflect on our shared responsibility to safeguard Nature, our most precious and irreplaceable asset.&quot;''''' ...<br /> <br /> <br /> The modern representative of the UK went on to speak of the British Enlightenment, and the rights and duties of today's democratic governments.<br /> <br /> <br /> ''“We do not embark on these remarkable endeavours together out of sentiment, we do so because they build greater shared resilience for the future, so making our citizens safer for generations to come.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''“Our common ideals were not only crucial for liberty and equality, they are also the foundation of our shared prosperity. The Rule of Law: the certainty of stable and accessible rules, an independent judiciary resolving disputes and delivering impartial justice.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> ... ''&quot;It is here in these very halls that this spirit of liberty and the promise of America’s Founders is present in every session and every vote cast” ... political debate enriched “by the deliberation of many, representing the living mosaic of the United States. In both of our countries it is the very fact of our vibrant, diverse and free societies that gives us our collective strength.”''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;The essence of our two Nations is a generosity of spirit and a duty to foster compassion, to promote peace, to deepen mutual understanding and to value all people, of all faiths, and of none.”''<br /> <br /> -- King Charles III, April 28, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;''''Earth Day', April 22, 1970, Carries On &amp; On'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''April 22, 2026 🧤 Teach-In Memory Time'''<br /> <br /> <br /> At GreenPolicy360 we tell of 'being there' and being directly involved in the envisioning and planning of a first Earth Day <br /> <br /> Tip of our Green Hat to Representative George E. Brown<br /> <br /> <br /> Personal recollection -- <br /> <br /> <br /> A Story of 'Earthrise' to 'Earth Day' and Far Beyond....<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Day_Memories_on_the_50th_Anniversary<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;[[Earth Day]]&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''[[Earth Day Is Every Day]]'''<br /> <br /> :* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Earth_Day<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth-Day.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Every Day Is Earth Day.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Above Our Living Earth.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :🌎<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> : [[File:Earthrise to Earthset.png]]<br /> <br /> :: &lt;small&gt;Round &amp; Round We Go ....&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Day &lt;big&gt;''''Earthrise' to a First 'Earth Day' '''&lt;/big&gt;] ... [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Earth_in_Human_Hands.jpg &lt;big&gt;'''Now Earth Is in Your Hands'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''Earthrise', December 24, 1968 to 'Earthset', April 6, 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Earthrise<br /> * https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/earthset/<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;'''[[The Modern Environmental Movement]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Apollo.jpg]]<br /> <br /> : &lt;small&gt;NASA / December 1968&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?search=earthrise&amp;title=Special%3ASearch&amp;profile=advanced&amp;fulltext=1&amp;ns0=1 '''Earthrise Thoughts at GreenPolicy360''']<br /> <br /> <br /> : '''A half century on, fifty years after Apollo 8, humanity again visits the Moon and looks back at Planet Earth'''<br /> <br /> <br /> :[https://greenpolicy360.net/images/Moon_and_Earth_from_Artemis%2C_April_2026.jpg '''Reflection on the experience of watching the Earth set over the Moon, via Astronaut Reid Wiseman''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earthset.png]]<br /> <br /> :: &lt;small&gt;NASA / April 2026&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Artemis II, Journey from Earth to the Moon'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nasa.gov/gallery/journey-to-the-moon/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Artemis looking at Earth home.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth from Artemis II.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;NASA&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''March 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Another War'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> As the US and Israel launch war with Iran, the following words hover front of mind. <br /> <br /> “People predicting disaster: The odds are in your favor, but you cannot be sure, and you should not hope to be right. People celebrating: Maybe wanna wait a bit. The odds, historically, are definitely not on your side. Anyone certain they know what happens next is making it up.” -- Tom Nichols <br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;The world needs to renew a focus on human rights with quality of life high on every nation's agenda.&quot; -- GreenPolicy360<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''February 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> February 18, 2026<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Environmental Groups Sue Trump’s EPA Rollback of Climate Science Finding'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via The Guardian <br /> <br /> More than a dozen health and environmental justice non-profits have sued the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over its revocation of the legal determination that underpins US federal climate regulations.<br /> <br /> ''Filed in Washington DC circuit court, the lawsuit challenges the EPA’s rollback of the “endangerment finding”, which states that the buildup of heat-trapping pollution in the atmosphere endangers public health and welfare and has allowed the EPA to limit those emissions from vehicles, power plants and other industrial sources since 2009. The rollback was widely seen as a major setback to US efforts to combat the climate crisis.''<br /> <br /> ''The suit was brought by the American Public Health Association, the American Lung Association, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club and 11 other public health and environmental organizations. The lawsuit was filed by green legal organizations Clean Air Task Force and Earthjustice and it names the EPA and the agency’s administrator, Lee Zeldin, as defendants...''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Trump, Rejecting Science and Climate Change - Feb 2026.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Photo from the LA Times&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''An Attack on a Foundational Law, EPA Findings and a Supporting Court Decision'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/12/trump-epa-rollback-pollution-regulation-endangerment-finding<br /> <br /> <br /> ('''Updated, with this Trump order''') &quot;The United States will essentially have no laws on the books that enforce how efficient America’s passenger cars and trucks should be.&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/16/climate/endangerment-finding-auto-emissions-regulations.html?unlocked_article_code=1.M1A.1MMD.Cox7hRsyuiae&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''A Trump Legacy: Rejecting Science, Climate Change, and the Environmental Protection Agency'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : A Moment in History That Will Be Remembered<br /> <br /> <br /> Reading 'Top of the News' headlines this week, the world's people encounter a nation's president who rejects a half-century of a scientific, military, educational and security studies, data, knowledge -- and warnings.<br /> <br /> President Trump orders environmental cuts and rollbacks, retrogressive policies that turn around the Environmental Protection Agency's progress for the nation.<br /> <br /> Five plus decades of vision, foundational work, projects and programs, NASA/NOAA, EPA, USGS, across US colleges and universities, health and medical research, and on and on are now being diminished and degraded.<br /> <br /> Time will tell the full story of the Trump presidency.<br /> <br /> <br /> For now, let's take a quick look back at actions taken to advance environmental protection and the nation's well being, the beginnings of the EPA, atmospheric/climate/earth science, national security, health, and a better future for all.<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:SMOG_be_gone.jpg<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Tracking_science_policy_across_the_Trump_administration.png<br /> <br /> * https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title42/chapter85&amp;edition=prelim<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: <br /> <br /> Let's call this Trump rejection of science what it is -- an act of hubris, an decision that will not stand in the face of physics...<br /> <br /> Donald Trump's administration, with an EPA taken over by anti-science purveyors who callously and destructively set aside fifty plus years of scientific data, now act to put their legacy into the history books. Their action to deny the overwhelmingly evident dangers of climate change, a gathering storm threatening US and world environmental security, is an ignominious day.<br /> <br /> We, today's generation and future generations will live to mark this moment as a tragedy, one that accelerates real-world physics of earth systems, delivering climate impacts, disruptions, security lost... <br /> <br /> The Trump administration have delivered 'retro' thinking, anti-science destructiveness. <br /> <br /> The Clean Air Acts and accompanying model regulations, [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr '''ideas beginning in California to deal with its &quot;smog&quot;'''] in the 1960s/70s, were shared and spread throughout the US -- and the world's cities and communities. Profound progress, meant explicitly to deal with hazardous air pollutants and remedy the climate-related costs, the damages of atmospheric pollution to health, environment and future well being that adversely impacts life across nations and regions of Earth, was achieved and continues to be achieved. The Trump attempt to block this progress will fail.<br /> <br /> Yet, the time lost to Trumpian folly will add additional costs to humanity's journey forward.<br /> <br /> We mark these days in February 2026 as times to be remembered -- and judged -- for what they are. <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EPA 1a.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EPA 2a.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EPA 3a.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EPA 4a.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:PlanetCitizen banner 800x163.jpg|link=https://greenpolicy360.net/w/PlanetCitizen]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> February 1, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Another Warning Among Many'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Excerpt from a Chapter in a new book by Thom Hartmann...<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Climate Collapse Presidency'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Climate change is the single greatest threat to a sustainable future<br /> : but, at the same time, addressing the climate challenge presents a<br /> : golden opportunity to promote prosperity, security and a brighter<br /> : future for all. <br /> :—- Ban Ki-moon, former UN Secretary-General,<br /> : Remarks at Climate Leaders’ Summit, April 11, 2024<br /> <br /> <br /> Thom Hartmann @https://hartmannreport.com:<br /> <br /> The greatest existential threat humanity faces isn’t hiding in a military bunker or a terrorist cell. It’s in plain sight: the accelerating collapse of our only home’s life-support systems.<br /> <br /> Trump’s first term was environmental arson. He gutted the EPA, installed fossil fuel executives in key positions, shredded over one hundred environmental protections, and abandoned the Paris Climate Agreement. <br /> <br /> Scientists were silenced. Research was suppressed. The words “climate change” vanished from government websites as if deleting terms could delete reality.<br /> <br /> When confronted about climate’s role in the devastating 2020 wildfires, Trump smirked: “I don’t think science knows, actually.”<br /> <br /> <br /> --<br /> <br /> <br /> An AI response:<br /> <br /> Daniel Solomon<br /> <br /> I asked AI what is the effect of Trump #47 on the climate? Ans. below:<br /> <br /> <br /> ''In his second term as the 47th President, Donald Trump has moved aggressively to reverse U.S. climate progress by prioritizing fossil fuel production and dismantling federal environmental oversight.<br /> <br /> ''Key effects on the climate and policy include:''<br /> <br /> ''Withdrawal from International Agreements: On January 27, 2026, the U.S. officially withdrew from the Paris Agreement for the second time. Additionally, the administration has announced departures from over 60 international bodies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).''<br /> <br /> ''Increased Carbon Emissions: Projections suggest that the administration's rollbacks could lead to an additional 4 billion metric tons of CO2-equivalent emissions by 2030 compared to previous trajectories.''<br /> <br /> ''Dismantling Regulatory Foundations: The EPA is currently working to repeal the 2009 Endangerment Finding, which is the legal basis for nearly all federal greenhouse gas regulations.''<br /> <br /> ''Expansion of Fossil Fuels: Under the mantra &quot;drill, baby, drill,&quot; the administration has fast-tracked deep-sea mining, reopened Alaskan refuges for oil development, and granted roughly $40 billion in new subsidies to the fossil fuel industry.''<br /> <br /> ''Stalling Clean Energy: Federal support for wind and solar has been slashed, including the elimination of the $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit and nearly $13 billion in green energy funding.''<br /> <br /> ''Information and Data Gaps: The administration has removed past National Climate Assessments from federal sites, deleted climate science webpages, and cut funding for climate research programs, creating significant gaps in global climate tracking.''<br /> <br /> ''While federal action has stalled, market forces and state-led initiatives — particularly in California and Texas — continue to drive some growth in renewable capacity despite federal headwinds.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Trump admin losses est 35B in clean energy projects - 2025.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Deep Losses in Clean-Renewable Production &amp; Competitiveness'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : US Policy Goes Retro with Fossil Fuels<br /> <br /> : * https://grist.org/politics/trump-2025-renewable-energy-investment-electric-vehicles/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tracking science policy across the Trump administration.png]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Tracking_science_policy_across_the_Trump_administration.png&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''January 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> January 7th, a Day to Remember ... <br /> <br /> This day in America delivered a deadly shooting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a death recorded live by a number of video recordings taken and distributed by citizens who observed the killing. Today is going to become etched in the memory of US history.<br /> <br /> The death, as witnessed by those who viewed and reviewed the video recordings, was tragic -- and much more...<br /> <br /> The lies told by government officials following the shooting of a woman in her car were painfully far from the facts and now remain another in a line of political lies that are spreading like a fire inflaming communities across the country.<br /> <br /> Today, it is again time to remember the warnings of Hannah Arendt.<br /> <br /> Take time to read her writing of lies, big lies, repeated lies -- and the threats and dangers they pose.<br /> <br /> These lies are, again, as history teaches, deliverers of dangerous times.<br /> <br /> Echoes from the propagandists that brought on World War II.<br /> <br /> Echoes of lies to recall...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''&quot;Truth and Politics&quot;'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Hannah Arendt<br /> <br /> 1967 in the New Yorker Magazine<br /> <br /> * https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/praxis1313/files/2018/08/Arendt_-Truth-and-Politics-LQ.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?search=hannah+arendt&amp;title=Special%3ASearch '''More from Hannah Arendt''']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[Earth Day]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;'''[[Earth Day Is Every Day]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :[[File:Earth-Day.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ==''Recent GreenPolicy360 Story Highlights''==<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> ''[[Green Stories of the Day - GreenPolicy360 Archive]]''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2025'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2025 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2025'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2025]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2024'''''&lt;/big&gt;'''''===<br /> <br /> [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2024 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2024'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2024]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2023'''''&lt;/big&gt;'''''===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2023 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2023'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2023]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2022'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2022 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2022'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2022]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2021'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2021 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2021'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2021]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2020'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2020 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2020'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2020]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2019'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2019 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2019'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2019]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2018'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2018 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2018'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2018]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2017'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2017 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2017'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2017]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2016'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2016 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2016'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2016]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2015'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2015 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2015'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2015]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2014'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2014 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2014'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2014]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2013'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2013 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2013'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2013]] <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:GP360_NewPages]]<br 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Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Green_Stories_of_the_Day&diff=138374 2026-10-09T22:16:36Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> __notoc__<br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&quot;Green Stories Changing Our World&quot;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''For the Young &amp; Old, Across Continents, Community-to-Community'''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt; ''@GreenPolicy360: An eOS Network with Hundreds of Millions of Views &amp; Shares''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Earth dynamic global map.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/1000hPa/orthographic &lt;big&gt;&lt;font color=green&gt;'''#PlanetCitizens360'''&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/big&gt;] <br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Planet Citizens]]''' <br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[The Commons]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[EarthPOV]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Earth Right Now]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Earth Science Vital Signs]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''GRN360: &quot;Vita Activa&quot;, Turning Visions into Reality'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Green_Networking &lt;big&gt;'''Green Networking, Green Best Practices'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Living Earth.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Planet Citizen Vision of Living Earth]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_Citizen_Vision_of_Living_Earth<br /> <br /> <br /> :✅ [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Plans_Enforcement_-_Resources '''The Climate Plans Enforcement Initiative''']<br /> <br /> :✅ [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenLinks '''GreenLinks: Global Green Networking with Web 3.0''']<br /> <br /> :✅ [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_Best_Practices '''Green Best Practices: Community-to-Community'''] <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Liberty Bell.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Photo by mbell1975&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''A Democratic Republic, a 'Great Experiment' in the United States'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> 🗒️ Ours is a democracy, a republic, a work-in-progress continuing to this day, a heritage worth protecting...<br /> <br /> <br /> As the 250th anniversary of the signing of the US Declaration of Independence approaches, we will celebrate an agenda of rights, inalienable rights, human rights, put forward with and embodied in a [https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/full-text '''founding US Constitution'''], [https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/bill-of-rights/what-does-it-say '''a Bill of Rights'''] and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_amendments_to_the_Constitution_of_the_United_States '''Constitutional Amendments'''] -- together a Constitutional government envisioning a living Democratic Republic. <br /> <br /> <br /> On July 2, 1776, the Second Continental Congress passed a “Resolution for Independence” declaring “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”<br /> The signing of the United States Declaration of Independence occurred primarily on August 2, 1776, at the Pennsylvania State House, later renamed Independence Hall, in Philadelphia. The 56 delegates to the Second Continental Congress represented the Thirteen Colonies, of which 12 voted to approve the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[In Defense of Democracy and Freedom]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;'''[[Democracy Quotes]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;[https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Democracy '''A 'Working Democracy' ''']&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;[https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Fact_Checking,_Facts_Count '''In Democracy, 'Facts Count' ''']&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Surviving Victory - Liberty at Risk.jpg]]<br /> <br /> 🌅 'Surviving Victory'&lt;big&gt;🔥&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/surviving-victory-from-the-archive/<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''October 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''US imposes sanctions on ICC after former ICC judge wins Nobel Peace Prize'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Beyond defense, as the US continues to move away from international support while advocating an era of 'America First' <br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/world/us-imposes-sanctions-international-criminal-court-hours-after-former-judge-wins-2026-10-09/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Announces Its 2026-2030 Strategic Plan'''<br /> <br /> : As with prior EPA plans, budgets, and proposed changes, a legislative and judicial reordering will follow<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;EPA's Fiscal Year (FY) 2026–2030 Strategic Plan&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2026-10/fy-2026-2030-epa-strategic-plan-final-for-publication-october-2026.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Thought for the Day&quot;<br /> <br /> October 1, 2026<br /> <br /> In a recent series of private meetings in San Francisco, after a tasting menu dinner, Anthropic consulted religious scholars to help instill morality into its A.I. models ... a case was being made that Claude could be or become conscious.<br /> <br /> What would it mean for humanity’s future if artificial intelligence systems possessed a consciousness that rivals our own?<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-morals-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FVE.kDTO.OTLs6iwx7swF&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''September 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Canada's Prime Minister Steps Onto the World Stage'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/mark-carney-talks-geopolitics/<br /> <br /> Strategic Demands: A extraordinary interview and timestamp documenting geopolitical realities faced by the Canadian Prime Minister. Here, we see the navigation skills required and demonstrated by an exceptionally trained and talented man who guides his ship of state through shifting winds… At StratDem we speak of the need for “Strategic Realism” in international relations, of security competition and values-based politics in foreign policy. Canada is fortunate, in our opinion, to have such a person at the helm of its representative democratic governance.<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Telling the Truth to the World'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Facts are key to understanding, and key to unlocking the truth<br /> <br /> : Any speech to a world audience, as at the United Nations, should be time for facts and truth<br /> <br /> <br /> The Fact Checking writer for CNN has no easy 'news beat' as he has to follow the U.S. president's pronouncements<br /> <br /> * https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/22/politics/fact-check-trump-united-nations<br /> <br /> By: Daniel Dale / CNN<br /> <br /> (Note: After a court decision, CNN was re-instituted w/ press credentials on Sept. 24)<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Fact check: Trump’s false claims to the United Nations'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> (Excerpt) <br /> <br /> Global warming<br /> <br /> Trump scoffed at dire warnings that artificial intelligence might eventually attack or kill people, claiming they are coming from “the very same people who said we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming, a name since reborn to climate change because the planet was cooling, not warming, and nobody was dead.”<br /> <br /> There are at least four things wrong with his sentence about global warming.<br /> <br /> First, the phrase “global warming” remains in widespread use even though the phrase “climate change” is also common; they mean different things. Climate scientists use both, often saying “global warming” when referring to the long-term trend of increasing global temperature and “climate change” when referring to the numerous effects the world is experiencing because of that trend. (NASA, part of the Trump-led federal government, [https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/faq/whats-the-difference-between-climate-change-and-global-warming/ explains] the difference between the terms on its website.) For example, a [https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_SYR_SPM.pdf 2023 report] from the UN’s climate change panel is titled “Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report,” but it says this: “Human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases, have unequivocally caused global warming, with global surface temperature reaching 1.1°C above 1850-1900 in 2011-2020.”<br /> <br /> Second, while Trump didn’t say what time period he was talking about, he didn’t acknowledge that the world has continued to get warmer, not cooler. The UN’s World Meteorological Organization [https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/wmo-confirms-2025-was-one-of-warmest-years-record reported] in January that “the past 11 years have been the 11 warmest on record,” with 2023, 2024 and 2025 the three very warmest — as NASA [https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5607/ also found] — though 2025 wasn’t as hot as 2024.<br /> <br /> Third, experts [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/opinion/environment/climate-change-death-toll.html widely disagree] that “nobody” has died from the various impacts of a warming world. It’s impossible to pinpoint a precise death number, but [https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2025/10/30/how-many-people-are-already-being-killed-by-climate-change some] [https://www.eenews.net/articles/people-are-dying-from-climate-change-but-how-many/ estimates] total in the millions. The deaths are likely to continue; the World Health Organization [https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-change-and-health says], “Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year, from under nutrition, malaria, diarrhea and heat stress alone.”<br /> <br /> Fourth, while somebody somewhere might have said that “we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming,” that [https://insideclimatenews.org/news/27082019/12-years-climate-change-explained-ipcc-science-solutions/ isn’t] how an expert report framed the issue.<br /> <br /> A widely discussed 2018 report from climate scientists said the world needed to sharply cut carbon emissions within the next 12 years to be on track to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels; scientists said above that threshold, the potential deadly impacts from climate change would be [https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/science/climate-issues/degrees-matter larger]. Though the 2018 report was often oversimplified by politicians, the expert claim was never that “we’ll all be dead in 12 years” — it was that significant action was needed within 12 years to improve the future. (The UN program [https://wedocs.unep.org/rest/api/core/bitstreams/9f6bd957-8d35-402d-bb4e-c7c17096e592/content reported] earlier this month that the world is set to exceed the 1.5-degree increase, “likely within the next few years&quot;.)<br /> <br /> <br /> More re: Facts and Fact Checking at GreenPolicy360:<br /> <br /> '''Facts Protecting Democracy'''<br /> <br /> At GreenPolicy360, our mission statement supports fact finding and the '3 Ds' -- Discussion ➡️ Debate ➡️ Decision-Making<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 continues a multi-year defense of facts, science, &amp; 'critical thinking skills'<br /> <br /> -- &quot;In Democracy, Facts Count&quot; <br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Fact_Checking<br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Fact_Checking,_Facts_Count<br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Disinformation_-_Online_-_Dangerous<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Taking Time to Take Another Look at the Deepening Costs of War'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 &amp; Strategic Demands<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/costsofwar/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Demanding 'New Definitions of National Security' '''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:New_Definitions_of_National_Security_-_2.png<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Strategic_Demands_of_the_21st_Century,_a_New_Vision_re_Surviving_Victory_conf.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Deep Costs of War StratDem.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Disinformation_-_Online_-_Dangerous<br /> <br /> <br /> A Faith-Announcement in Support of [[The Commons]]<br /> <br /> The Catholic Church continues forward with the message of [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Laudato_Si '''Laudato Si'''] (2015), the first papal encyclical to advance formal environmental protection doctrine. Pope Francis, who was named after St. Francis, the patron saint of the environment, acted to open new doors for theological and spiritual belief within the Catholic tradition. Now, Pope Leo follows on with more ''' 'On Caring for Our Common Home' '''...<br /> <br /> <br /> Challenges of 'ecological turning point'<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''International Theological Commission that calls Christians to view care for creation'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &quot;Caring for Our Common Home&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2026-09/ict-document-care-for-creation-ecology-theology-church-pope.html<br /> * https://www.osservatoreromano.va/en/news/2026-09/ing-009/a-fraternal-response-to-the-triune-god.html<br /> * https://www.americamagazine.org/news/2026/09/03/vatican-creation-sin/<br /> * https://www.thefloridacatholic.org/news/vatican/vatican-theological-commission-defines-sin-against-creation-and-the-creator-in-new-document/article_a6edad02-a5c2-482b-bf7f-fefcf1a8f3ed.html<br /> <br /> <br /> The Vatican has officially declared environmental destruction a ”sin against creation and the Creator” in a major new doctrinal text.<br /> <br /> The document, “Caring for Our Common Home – A Responsible and Fraternal Response to the Triune God,” was published Sept. 2 with the authorization of Pope Leo XIV, according to Vatican News. <br /> <br /> The 29,000-word document, titled '''Caring for Our Common Home''', elevates ecological concern from a merely political or scientific issue into a direct matter of personal faith. <br /> <br /> “Everything is interrelated” within “a single community of life,” according to Vatican News. The commission says this understanding calls Christians to practice gratitude toward God, mercy and solidarity toward others, and responsible care for the common home.<br /> <br /> Authorized under Pope Leo XIV, the text declares that destroying natural habitats, polluting, and exploiting resources are not just civic failures, but a 'sin against creation and against the Creator' that directly violates God's plan.<br /> <br /> This shift from Pope Francis' earlier concept of 'ecological sin' to a more explicit 'sin against the Creator' is designed to reshape how believers view their daily environmental impact. The Vatican emphasizes that failing to safeguard the planet severely harms the poorest populations and future generations, distorting the core relationships that define humanity. <br /> <br /> By placing ecological action squarely in the realm of moral responsibility, the Church is challenging millions of people to treat environmental care as a fundamental requirement of their faith.<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:St. Francis with birds listening.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Faith Traditions Are Growing in Their Calls for Eco-Stewardship'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''&quot;The World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation&quot;'''<br /> <br /> This day is bringing awareness and a call to action<br /> <br /> The spiritual and secular find common ground here in a protection of [[The Commons]]<br /> <br /> <br /> The Catholic Church observes September 1 as the [https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2026-06/vatican-theme-2026-world-day-of-prayer-for-the-care-of-creation.html '''&quot;World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation&quot;'''], a day dedicated to thanking God for the gift of creation and renewing the Church’s commitment to ecological stewardship.<br /> <br /> What the Day Is:<br /> <br /> An annual Catholic observance established by Pope Francis in 2015 as a concrete follow‑up to Laudato Si’.<br /> <br /> Shared with the Orthodox Church, which first designated September 1 as a creation‑focused '''&quot;Day of Prayers for Natural Environment&quot;''' in 1989.<br /> <br /> The opening of the global '''&quot;Season of Creation&quot;''', which runs from September 1 to October 4 (Feast of St. Francis of Assisi).<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:St Francis with the birds.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> Pope St. John Paul II in 1979 <br /> <br /> declared Francis the patron saint of ecology<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Visit Pope Francis' Eco-Encyclical [[Laudato Si]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> More: https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=File:St_Francis_with_the_birds.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://fosfanariou.gr/index.php/2026/08/30/patriarchal-message-for-the-beginning-of-the-ecclesiastical-year-and-the-solemn-day-of-prayers-for-natural-environment-2/ &quot;Solemn Day of Prayers for Natural Environment&quot;, Orthodox Catholic, September 1]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_denominations_by_number_of_members 'Christianity is the largest religious group in the world...]<br /> <br /> The largest denominations -- Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox -- have an estimated 2.3 to 2.6 billion adherents <br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 / On Earth...<br /> <br /> Religious traditions -- faith and spirituality as practiced -- have an intimate connection to life's protection, quality, and humanity's future<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''August 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> TicToc TicToc <br /> <br /> <br /> '''3, 2, 1''' ... '''Launch ... Go, Go, Go'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ⬆️ <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''NASA Goes Looking for Life in the Universe'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Nancy Grace Roman Is the Name of the (biggest- and best-ever) Telescope<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Astro 'Big Picture' Sites]]<br /> <br /> <br /> August 30, 2026<br /> <br /> News from the Florida East Coast<br /> <br /> [https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/30/science/nancy-grace-roman-space-telescope-launch (CNN)] A massive observatory that scientists have called a “discovery machine” has launched toward the cosmos, beginning a journey that could mark a significant shift in our understanding of the universe.<br /> <br /> Designed to seek out otherwise invisible and faint space objects, '''NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope''' lifted off aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket at 7:26 a.m. ET Sunday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The observatory reached orbit about 10 minutes later.<br /> <br /> <br /> (NYT) At a news conference on Saturday morning, Nicola Fox, the associate administrator of NASA’s science mission directorate, explained that Roman’s vast gaze would contribute to solving some of the grandest mysteries about our universe, including how it works, what it is made of and if we are alone out there.<br /> <br /> “To put it in perspective, it will be as if Hubble and James Webb kind of peered through a keyhole at the universe,” Dr. Fox said, referring to two other telescopes NASA has launched into space. “Well, Nancy Grace Roman will kick the door down.”<br /> <br /> <br /> (GRN360) Get ready for 'Exo's in Space' ... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet Exoplanets] ...... with discernible, measurable signs of extraterrestrial life&lt;big&gt;✨ ❇️ ✨&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> 'Up' there ⬆️<br /> <br /> As seen from 'down' here on our terrestrial Home Planet<br /> <br /> Go we go, we're looking 'around'. We're going Exploring ❇️<br /> <br /> <br /> NASA's Exoplanet Archive<br /> <br /> * https://science.nasa.gov/exoplanets/discoveries-dashboard/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> ⬇️<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Trump numbers continue downward.png]]<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Numbers Continue Trending Downward'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via the Washington Post<br /> <br /> August 24, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/08/24/trumps-attempts-intimidate-home-abroad-have-backfired/<br /> <br /> <br /> In the CNN Poll of Polls, 36 percent approved of (Trump's) job performance, while 63 percent disapproved. That’s far below the historical average for presidents. He is even more unpopular abroad — and international disapproval of the president has translated into disapproval of the country he leads. A [https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2026/06/23/trump-gets-negative-reviews-internationally-as-fewer-say-u-s-is-a-reliable-partner/ '''Pew Research Center poll of 36 countries'''], conducted earlier this summer, found that 76 percent of respondents had “no confidence” in Trump and 57 percent had an unfavorable opinion of the United States. In most of the countries Pew surveyed, people had a more positive impression of China than of the U.S.<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Today &amp; Tomorrow: A Couple Memories'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Today: A Green-Skinned Actress (a Famed Witch) who has the same name as a NASA Software-engineer (who wrote the essential code for the Apollo moon mission)<br /> <br /> <br /> SJS/GreenPolicy360 editor: <br /> <br /> A quick flight of the mind, as I received two online stories this morning -- one brought a memory of when I lived in New York City in the Gramercy Park neighborhood and regularly saw a distinguished looking older women walking her dogs around the park. She had a distinctive profile and one day I briefly talked to her. She said she was an actress, and that she still worked (this was in the mid-1970s) 'in the theater'. Her dogs were anxious to move on so we parted. Later, I learned from a neighbor that she was 'thee Margaret Hamilton.'<br /> <br /> Let's call her Margaret from the West (although here in NYC she lived in a building on the East)...<br /> <br /> [[File:Gramercy Park East.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Wicked Witch of the West.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> And as those of you who are familiar with the work of GreenPolicy360, you may remember we have focused our work over decades on what we call [[The Modern Environmental Movement]]. Your founder/siterunner was among those who were there alongside a [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr Congressman named George Brown], who put into development a first generation of Earth Science missions from space. The Apollo-NASA missions to the moon changed the way humanity saw ourselves, as [[Apollo 8]] sent home the first-ever full-color images of our living planet home. What some called a 'cognitive shift' occurred for many of us who were there as the image that became known as '[[Earthrise]]' appeared in the media, most prominently [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Earthrise_Life_Magazine_January_1969.png on the cover] of biggest magazine of the era.<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''“We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.&quot; – Astronaut Bill Anders, Aboard Apollo, December 24, 1968''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earthrise - NASA original Anders photo.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> What your editor carried away was inspiration... and today I am remembering one of the greats of the Apollo mission who made the flights and vision of planet Earth possible. Her name is Margaret Hamilton.<br /> <br /> She literally [https://www.softwareheritage.org/2019/07/20/archiving-and-referencing-the-apollo-source-code/ wrote the source code] that guided the missions to the moon, and her code (as I learned today) from the Apollo 8 'Earthrise' mission acted to make possible the correction of the Apollo 11 landing and return from the moon.<br /> <br /> <br /> _________________________________________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : August 17, 2026 - Happy 90th birthday to Margaret Hamilton -- the software engineer who wrote the computer code that saved the Apollo 11 moon landing and who, in the process, invented the discipline of software engineering itself! The system that kept that landing from being aborted began, improbably, with her 4-year-old daughter crashing a simulated moon mission.<br /> : Margaret Hamilton's daughter, Lauren, came along to the MIT lab on nights and weekends while her mother wrote the software that would fly astronauts to the moon. &quot;There wasn't a time when we weren't working,&quot; Hamilton said. Lauren liked to play astronaut, because she had watched her mother do it in simulations. One evening she started hitting keys, and the simulation began to run. Then she hit another, and everything fell apart -- she had selected a program meant to be run before launch, and the computer, which had almost no memory to spare, wiped the navigation data that was taking her to the moon.<br /> : Hamilton saw what it meant immediately. &quot;I thought: my God -- this could inadvertently happen in a real mission.&quot; She proposed a change to the software that would stop a prelaunch program from being selected in flight. Her superiors at MIT and NASA told her not to bother. The astronauts were too well trained to make a mistake like that.<br /> : On the very next mission, Apollo 8, an astronaut made exactly that mistake -- wiping the navigation data midway to the moon, just as Lauren had. Hamilton called it the Lauren bug. &quot;It created much havoc and required the mission to be reconfigured,&quot; she said. &quot;After that, they let me put the program change in, all right.&quot;<br /> <br /> :Hamilton was born in Paoli, Indiana, in 1936, earned a degree in mathematics with a minor in philosophy from Earlham College, and went to MIT in 1959 to support her family while her husband attended Harvard Law. She learned to program in the lab of Edward Lorenz, the meteorologist who would become the father of chaos theory, because there was nowhere else to learn it. &quot;Computer science and software engineering were not yet disciplines,&quot; she said. &quot;Instead, programmers learned on the job.&quot;<br /> :In 1964 her husband spotted a newspaper advertisement: the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory was looking for people to write the software to send a man to the moon. &quot;I was attracted both by the sheer idea and the fact that it had never been done before,&quot; Hamilton said. &quot;I was the first programmer to join and the first woman they hired.&quot;<br /> : She was gradually promoted until she was directing the team -- eventually about a hundred people -- that wrote the onboard flight software for both Apollo spacecraft. When she was given the job, one of the senior men told her he had no doubt she could do it but worried the men under her might rebel. &quot;Well,&quot; she said, &quot;they didn't.&quot;<br /> :Almost nobody thought the software mattered. It was not in the original schedule; it was not in the budget. &quot;Software during the early days of this project was treated like a stepchild,&quot; Hamilton later wrote, &quot;and it was regarded as an art and as magic, not a science.&quot; Out of what she called desperation, she started calling what she did software engineering -- a phrase invented to make a point.<br /> :&quot;It was out of desperation I came up with the term, to say: 'Hey, we're engineering too.' It was an ongoing joke for a long time.&quot; The joke ended in a meeting, when one of the laboratory's most respected hardware men stood up and said she was right.<br /> :Then came July 20, 1969. Three minutes above the Sea of Tranquility, with two men aboard a vehicle that had never landed anywhere, the Apollo Guidance Computer began throwing alarms -- 1202, then 1201, five of them in four minutes -- because a rendezvous radar switch had been left in the wrong position and the machine was drowning in work it had no time to finish. On virtually any other computer of that decade, this was the end of the story: a freeze, a crash, a mission aborted.<br /> :Hamilton stood watching in the monitoring room at MIT while her software did what she had built it to do, which was to decide what mattered. It recognized the overload, discarded the low-priority jobs, restarted itself in a controlled and orderly way, and held onto the tasks that were flying the spacecraft. &quot;It quickly became clear the software was not only informing everyone that there was a hardware-related problem,&quot; she said, &quot;but was compensating for it.&quot;<br /> :In Houston a 26-year-old guidance officer named Steve Bales had a few seconds to call an abort, and because the computer was visibly managing itself, he called go. Neil Armstrong flew Eagle past a field of boulders and set it down with about twenty-five seconds of fuel remaining.<br /> :&quot;If the computer hadn't recognized this problem and taken recovery action,&quot; Hamilton wrote two years afterward, &quot;I doubt if Apollo 11 would have been the successful moon landing it was.&quot;<br /> :There is a famous photograph of her from that summer, standing beside a stack of Apollo source-code listings taller than she is. :&quot;We got carried away and grabbed all the Apollo listings in my office and created the tower,&quot; she said. &quot;I was trying to find a way of keeping the stack up.&quot;<br /> :Hamilton's standards held. In all the crewed Apollo missions that followed, no software bug was ever known to have occurred.<br /> :Hamilton went unrecognized for decades. In 2016 President Barack Obama gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, calling her emblematic of &quot;that generation of unsung women who helped send humankind into space,&quot; and a year later she appeared, as a LEGO figurine. <br /> :Now ninety, Margaret Hamilton still argues that software should be designed at the start not to fail, rather than patched after it does ....<br /> <br /> :For young women who want to follow in her footsteps, she offers this advice: &quot;Don't let fear get in the way, and don't be afraid to say 'I don't know' or 'I don't understand' -- no question is a dumb question. And don't always listen to the so-called experts.&quot; :To introduce this inspiring trailblazer to kids, consider the picture book &quot;Margaret and the Moon&quot; for ages 5 to 9 at https://www.amightygirl.com/margaret-and-the-moon) and the children's biography &quot;Space Engineer and Scientist Margaret Hamilton&quot; for ages 7 to 10 at https://www.amightygirl.com/margaret-hamilton<br /> :She is also featured in an activity book about pioneering women in technology, which includes a variety of hands-on STEM projects: &quot;Gutsy Girls Go for Science: Programmers&quot; for ages 8 to 11 at https://www.amightygirl.com/gutsy-girls-programmers<br /> <br /> :For adult readers who want the wider story of the women who put Americans in space, &quot;Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars&quot; tells of the mathematicians recruited by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in the 1940s and 50s at https://www.amightygirl.com/rise-of-the-rocket-girls <br /> <br /> <br /> _________________________________________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> So, in memory of two classic, talented, game-changing, creative women -- <br /> <br /> Here's a deep bow and a flourishing wave of our green cap. <br /> <br /> We remember you !!<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Fact_Checking Facts Count]<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Are AI companies scanning and destroying millions of books, including rare titles?'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> Via Snopes.com<br /> <br /> Artificial intelligence companies are scanning millions of books, some of which are rare, and destroying them.<br /> <br /> * https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ai-companies-destroying-rare-books/<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''July 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:A Quokka, which one.jpg]]<br /> <br /> A Human &amp; Quokka Species, on Behalf of All Species <br /> <br /> : Historic, Country-wide Wild Fires Threaten Australia<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''PyroCbs, &quot;Fire Clouds&quot;'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''France / Spain ... &quot;Unprecedented&quot; ... &quot;Extreme Weather&quot;'''<br /> <br /> [https://apnews.com/article/europe-wildfires-france-spain-93678a31ff53fc46564b6dfd9934eae1 250,000 Evacuated]<br /> <br /> Via NYT<br /> <br /> As the hot air rises, it expands and cools, causing its moisture to condense. The water vapor and ash particles combine to form a gray or brown cloud that can then develop into a pyrocumulonimbus (pyro means “fire” in Greek) storm cloud.<br /> <br /> They produce lightning and burning embers that can spark more fires, and they generate high and unpredictable winds that fan the flames and spread the embers.<br /> <br /> In the Gironde region, 103,000 acres have burned, according to officials, and 220,000 people have been asked to evacuate from Gironde and the neighboring Landes region.<br /> <br /> The pyrocumulonimbus phenomenon presents extreme challenges for firefighters.<br /> <br /> “These fire-generated clouds are linked to extreme fire behavior that impedes firefighting efforts and can devastate communities,” according to NASA, which emphasized the need to better understand the clouds “given the ongoing and projected increases in fire activity and severity.”<br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://espo.nasa.gov/inspyre<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Elon Musk Opens Up in an Interview'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Economist Editor Presses the Controversial 'Trillionaire'<br /> <br /> :: Elon Musk's 'Vision of the Future'<br /> <br /> * https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/23/elon-musks-vision-of-the-future<br /> <br /> <br /> “People don’t realise that what I’m saying will come to pass,” he tells The Economist in a 90-minute interview held at a giant Tesla factory in Texas where electric cars drive themselves off the assembly line. That may be because his future-gazing ranges from the unsettling to the downright weird. <br /> <br /> Mr. Musk predicts that, within five years, artificial-intelligence systems may surpass the sum of all human intelligence. Within ten years, robots in the workplace will help usher in an era of such “amazing abundance” that money will become meaningless....<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-killer-robots-ai-abundance-progress-unstoppable-2026-7<br /> <br /> <br /> Musk proposes peer review for frontier AI models in Economist interview<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/musk-proposes-peer-review-frontier-ai-models-economist-interview-2026-07-23/<br /> <br /> <br /> Musk says he got ‘carried away’ with Trump – but still holds on to contentious political views<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/23/elon-musk-regret-trump-doge-ai<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Mix of Comments:<br /> <br /> * https://beincrypto.com/elon-musk-real-force-european-politics/<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/07/24/elon-musk-speaks-to-the-economist-editor-in-chief-zanny-minton-beddoes-on-the-key-takeaways.html<br /> * https://futurism.com/elon-musk-interviewer-npc<br /> * https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-economist-interview-2000790016<br /> * https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/nonsense-elon-musk-lashes-out-in-fiery-interview-after-hes-accused-of-supporting-the-far-right/<br /> * https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2026/07/23/musk_admonishes_the_economist_editor_what_is_far_right_about_having_secure_borders_safe_cities_and_sensible_spending.html<br /> * https://zeteo.com/p/top-economist-trump-musk-starmer<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:ECO.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Big Picture'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> Humanity Looks up to the Heavens, [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:ECO.png 'Inspired' by the Stars]<br /> <br /> : Earth Art &amp; Heliophysics, An Art Project 50 Years in the Making Opens Up<br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Charles Ross, Star Axis in New Mexico.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> July 21, 2026<br /> <br /> U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations<br /> <br /> The Topic -- Supplemental Federal Aid<br /> <br /> The Question -- Why More Government Funding for the Military, and Agriculture Producers, is urgently needed<br /> <br /> The Secretary of War explains that $1.5 trillion in needed in the next budget year, a 'generational' budget, one year increase request of over $500 billion... and tens of billion more are needed immediately for war fighting, training, munitions...<br /> <br /> Then ... on July 21st, with minimal media coverage, the following is put into the record -- to explain why billions more than a half trillion more, are needed for farmers and agriculture.<br /> <br /> <br /> ''“For many agricultural producers, 2025 was a year in which the cost of growing their crop at times exceeded what they could earn from selling it. Severe weather compounded these losses... producers had to contend with a combination of challenging market conditions.&quot;<br /> <br /> ''“... We will hear a great deal today about how declining commodity prices, rising input costs, labor shortages, trade disruptions, pests and disease, and increasingly volatile weather are squeezing farmers’ already thin margins.''<br /> <br /> ''“Nationwide, we have lost nearly 200,000 farms in the last decade.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> Let's parse this list of what 'we will hear'... the causes are what we will focus on here.<br /> <br /> The choice of going to war, and resulting increases in oil/gas prices, the resulting prices of fertilizer spiking, the boycotts and tariffs of U.S. farm products resulting from boycotts and tariffs in international markets (Trade War consequences of U.S. policies), the reasons for 'labor shortages' in the U.S. agriculture industry, and increases in extreme weather events and damages... <br /> <br /> These consequential facts seem to be set aside, ignored, and not explored by committee hearing speakers and the majority party running the hearing (the Chair is a Senator from Maine and is running for re-election).<br /> <br /> Look more closely at the [https://strategicdemands.com/costsofwar/ 'Deep Costs, Costs of War'] that the people of the U.S., and many others, are paying.<br /> <br /> It is time for new policies, facts, costs of failed policies, and more realistic debate and discussion...<br /> <br /> Enough said...<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> July 16, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[Fact Checking, Facts Count]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Consider the Facts, Pay Attention to the Reality<br /> <br /> As an audience listens in while an American president talks, we, at GreenPolicy, have a bottom line request -- our bottom line is '''Facts Count'''<br /> <br /> Go with the Reality, not the Marketing<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Attribution of Extreme Weather and Climate Events and Their Impacts'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * This 2026 National Academies of Science Study and Report Will Have Consequences<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We are reminded of the mid-1970s National Academies of Sciences Study and Report that led to Congressional Hearings and the First US National Climate Act Program. We watched as Representative George E. Brown - (D) Los Angeles pushed for the scientific research and moved to hearings and legislation.<br /> <br /> The era of modern climate science moved forward with lasting contributions ...<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/climate/national-academies-extreme-weather-attribution.html?unlocked_article_code=1.yFA.38oJ.3B0p4MCCutBL&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> * https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/28590/chapter/1<br /> <br /> <br /> Read about the foundational 1970s National Climate science report, hearings, and legislation here -- <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr#/media/File%3ANational_Climate_Program_Act_Hearings_May_1976.jpg<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr#/media/File%3AUS_Public_Law_95-367.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr#/media/File%3APublic_Law_95-367%2C_1978.jpeg<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Congressman george.e.brown.gif]]<br /> <br /> Rep. George E Brown<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Generation Green]] [[Going Green]]'''<br /> <br /> '''[[The Modern Environmental Movement]]'''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360: Our Outlook, Perspective and Work is Local/National/Global, Individual and Community-to-Community'''<br /> <br /> : '''[[Green Best Practices]]'''<br /> <br /> : [[File:Climate First Bank Florida.png]]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Climate_First_Bank_Florida.png<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''An Interview with Bill McKibben'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> The Very Good and Very Bad News on Climate<br /> <br /> July 10, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-bill-mckibben.html?unlocked_article_code=1.wlA.b4se.muIpmtiO6j6_&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> Here’s the good news: Green energy is getting better and cheaper, faster than we had ever dared hope.<br /> <br /> This next sentence was unimaginable even a few years ago: In April, the energy think tank Ember found that all of the new electricity demand around the world in 2025 was met with green power. That is wild.<br /> <br /> But here is the bad news: Climate change is accelerating. We’re discovering new ways that the climate system is more fragile, more sensitive to emissions, than we previously had thought.<br /> <br /> We have not been talking that much about climate change lately, but that doesn’t mean it has stopped happening. Europe is in the midst of an extraordinary heat wave. The world is staring down the barrel of a powerful El Niño.<br /> <br /> And climate politics is in almost total disarray. Donald Trump has gutted the Inflation Reduction Act. His administration is accelerating fossil fuel production and kneecapping green energy.<br /> <br /> <br /> But here’s the possibility, a bit of optimism: The advances in green technology make a new climate politics possible — one that doesn’t just talk about sacrifice and disaster prevention but presents decarbonization and green energy as a way station on the path to somewhere better.<br /> <br /> Clean energy abundance, a new form of energetic wealth, the possibility of the left actually offering a future of more and better — not less and worse — was a hard case to make even a few years ago. But now we cannot only imagine it, we can see it, touch it, live in it. It is here.<br /> <br /> So how do we talk about it? How do we make it happen?<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-bill-mckibben.html?unlocked_article_code=1.wlA.b4se.muIpmtiO6j6_&amp;smid=em-share '''Read the McKibben Interview Here for more:''']<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Even better than the E.V. is the e-bike, which I think may turn out to be the transformative invention of our time on Earth.&quot; -- Bill McKibben<br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-bill-mckibben.html?unlocked_article_code=1.wlA.b4se.muIpmtiO6j6_&amp;smid=em-share '''Click Here for more about Bill McKibben at GreenPolicy360'''] <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:America250 logo.svg.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/In_Defense_of_Democracy_and_Freedom<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Democracy_Quotes<br /> <br /> <br /> We recall a quote of Benjamin Franklin responding to a question in 1787 about the newly announced birth of the US as he left Independence Hall after the Constitutional Convention:<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''We have &quot;a Republic, if you can keep it.&quot;'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Today's generation, and future generations, would be wise to remember Franklin's words of warning.'''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> '''July 4th, 1776'''<br /> <br /> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness...<br /> <br /> * https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''June 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''June 30, 2026'''<br /> <br /> <br /> NATIONAL REPUBLICAN SENATORIAL COMMITTEE ET AL. v. FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION ET AL.<br /> <br /> * https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-621_h315.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Millionaires &amp; Billionaires Applaud'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : U.S. Supreme Court Increases Influence of '''[[Money in Politics]]'''<br /> <br /> :: New SCOTUS Ruling Memorializes 'Pay to Play' Transactional Politics<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360's associate [http://www.politicopay.com '''PoliticoPay.com'''], has been tracking the escalating money in politics trend for years.<br /> <br /> We have warned of the consequences of profligate spending on politicians and campaigns. These warnings have become a reality -- and further challenge to good government. <br /> <br /> * https://politicopay.com/buckley-valeo-a-mega-money-future<br /> <br /> * https://politicopay.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''NPR re: Decision No. 24–621'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''(The Supreme Court) decision means that parties get the best of both worlds. They can both coordinate with candidates and raise unlimited funds.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''At issue in the case was a post-Watergate law that Congress passed to limit the amount of money individuals can give to political parties. The law, the Federal Election Campaign Act, also limited how much money political parties can spend on their candidates. Other types of organizations, like political action committees and Super PACs, have no limits on the amount of money they can raise and spend on elections...''<br /> <br /> ''Republicans, including Vice President Vance and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, challenged the law as an unconstitutional violation of political parties' First Amendment right to raise and spend money on their candidates.''<br /> <br /> ''Backed by the Trump Justice Department, they contended that the only justification for imposing a fundraising limit on parties is to prevent corruption, but they maintained that there is no evidence that the law has prevented corruption.''<br /> <br /> This decision overturns a 2001 Supreme Court case that declared the limits on party spending to be constitutional. It's the latest in a series of rulings since then that have unraveled campaign finance regulations.<br /> <br /> ''The saga began in 2010, when the court ruled in Citizens United that corporations have a First Amendment right to unlimited spending on elections...''<br /> <br /> * https://www.npr.org/2026/06/30/nx-s1-5827039/supreme-court-campaign-finance<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Speaking of the Influence of Big Money on Consequential Political Decisions'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Michael Mann's new book, Coming Back to Earth.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Michael Mann has news of science, politics, and life impacting policies --''' <br /> <br /> A new book on the state of climate science and politics is in the works with Michael Mann @ Public Affairs...<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 especially appreciates the publication notice:<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Coming Back to Earth'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Providing grounded, evidence-based reasons to be optimistic about our ability to confront climate change.'''<br /> <br /> <br /> We're reminded of his most recent book 'The New Climate War', which he inscribed for GreenPolicy360. <br /> <br /> '''Thanks Michael, Onward we go !'''<br /> <br /> <br /> and as we say here at the top of each online page as our site and green network is being read by millions around the Earth...<br /> <br /> '''Each of us can make a positive difference by stepping up &amp; doing our best'''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Generation Green]] | [[Planet Citizens]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''' &quot;We have to identify the problem, then act in many ways to solve the problem. Global warming is the threat of our times.&quot;''' &lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;-- [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Governor_Jerry_Brown '''Jerry Brown, California Governor''']&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''' &quot;We’re going to need to use every tool in the toolbox if we’re going to solve this problem.&quot; '''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;-- [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Michael_E_Mann_--_act_with_hope_not_fear.jpg '''Michael E. Mann''']&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Consequences of Another War in the Middle East'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> : Deep Costs to the U.S. and Its Future -- Come into View<br /> <br /> :: U.S. Allies Suffer with Shifts in Global Economics -- the Mid East Continues in Crisis<br /> <br /> <br /> '''With the deepening costs of oil/gas wars adding trillions to expanding U.S. debt -- with a multi-trillion dollars Iraq war, Afghanistan war, and ongoing Israel/Syria/Lebanon/Palestine-Gaza conflicts -- we witness decades of failed policy and generational roll over... The national/international costs and changes brought on by the U.S./Iran war, with its severe global energy disruptions, begin to come into a wider global view ...'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/business/energy-environment/china-energy-battery-grid.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qlA.iKfE.kO9ONgn1Q7pG&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:US_Reliability_Falls_in_Europe.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Visit GreenPolicy360's Associate, Strategic Demands, for Continued Perspective on the Middle East Wars and the Far-Reaching Consequences and Damaged U.S. Relations'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''June 14, 2026'''<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/costsofwar/<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/business/energy-environment/china-energy-battery-grid.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qlA.iKfE.kO9ONgn1Q7pG&amp;smid=url-share '''China benefits as Petrol Politics of Oil/Gas and Mideast Wars push alternative energy sources''']<br /> <br /> [[File:China electrostate benefits from efx of Mideast war.png|link=https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/business/energy-environment/china-energy-battery-grid.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qlA.iKfE.kO9ONgn1Q7pG&amp;smid=url-share]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''China's electrostate is poised to win from war in the Middle East'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/business/energy-environment/china-energy-battery-grid.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qlA.iKfE.kO9ONgn1Q7pG&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> More on [https://strategicdemands.com/new-definitions-of-security/ 'new definitions of national/global security']<br /> <br /> ''In April, wind and solar generated more electricity globally than gas for the first time.''<br /> <br /> <br /> Scan the energy production data<br /> <br /> * https://ember-energy.org/<br /> <br /> <br /> Data into action<br /> <br /> Open data and intelligent policy analysis to unlock a clean, electrified energy future<br /> <br /> <br /> Spring 2026<br /> <br /> '''&quot;And then came Hormuz&quot; ... Iran war analysis via Ember<br /> <br /> :If the defining economic story of the century is the rise of Asia, the defining energy story is the rise of electricity. The two are usually told apart. This report argues they are one: Asia’s rise is electric, and the electric age hastens Asia’s rise.<br /> <br /> :Electricity has been the century’s fastest-growing energy carrier, overtaking oil in 2007 as the leading supplier of useful energy worldwide. Over the same years, Asia has been the fastest-growing region. In 2016, China passed the United States in purchasing-power terms, and South and Southeast Asia together passed the European Union in 2021. Two features bind these stories together.<br /> <br /> :The first is that Asia is taking an electric path. Since the turn of the century, Asia has driven three quarters of the growth in global electricity. In the West, GDP and electricity demand decoupled long ago; in Asia, they rise in lock-step. Asia has achieved greater electrification at lower incomes per capita. No growth in history has been this electric.<br /> <br /> :The second runs deeper. It is a change in what energy is. Coal, oil and gas are commodities, dug from the ground. Solar panels, batteries and wind turbines are technologies, built on a production line. The energy revolution is the shift from extraction to manufacturing.<br /> <br /> <br /> :Enter Asia – the world’s factory. Asia builds most of the world’s solar panels, batteries, power electronics, electric motors and cars. Its strengths fit the new energy system.<br /> <br /> :Such a shift carries historical weight. After 1800 the West pulled ahead of Asia, a parting of fortunes known as the Great Divergence. Energy sat at the core of this divergence: first coal, then oil, and the engines built to burn them. These innovations favoured Western strengths and underwrote two centuries of wealth and power.<br /> <br /> :The Great Convergence – the East closing in on the West – also has an energy story, and it runs the other way. The new vector is electricity, and the electro-technologies that run on it. The new centre is Asia. Its lack of oil and gas was a weakness in a fossil world. It is a blessing in an electric one.<br /> <br /> :China is, of course, the giant. But change is radiating outwards. From Vietnam to Bangladesh, electrification rates are higher than in Europe or the United States. From Pakistan to Japan, solar’s share of power beats the US. From Thailand to Nepal and Indonesia to Singapore, EV uptake is ahead. Strip China out, and the rest of Asia still outbuilds the world in solar modules and battery components.<br /> <br /> :For years the economics of electrotech have been improving rapidly. A decade ago, solar began to beat coal, and electric cars beat petrol over their lifetimes, once fuel was counted. Today solar and EVs are cheaper to buy outright, even before the fuel savings. For economies short of capital, the door is now open to rapid change.<br /> <br /> :Then came Hormuz: the closure of Asia’s petrol station. The region buys nearly half of its oil from the Gulf, a deeper reliance than Europe had on Russia. It is the second blow in four years. The first came in 2022, when Russia cut off Europe, and Europe outbid Asia for gas, pricing out poorer countries. If electrotech is the pull of opportunity, the twin fossil shock is the push of necessity.<br /> <br /> :Economics, security and industrial opportunity now all point in the same direction. Asia holds half the world’s people and 4% of its oil and gas, but three quarters of the electrotech factories that can replace the fuel it lacks. <br /> <br /> : The Great Divergence was powered by the energy the West mastered. The Great Convergence runs on the energy that Asia manufactures. If this is to be the Asian century, its path will be electric.<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Electric Asia'''<br /> <br /> * How Asia is leading the electric age, powering its rise and reshaping the global order<br /> <br /> <br /> '''“What was five years ago maybe barely competitive, now is almost already clearly cheaper...”'''<br /> <br /> '''&quot;Investments in renewables have become a better bet, promising returns in closer to two years instead of 30.&quot;'''<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: The shift globally to renewable energy comes against a backdrop of historic policy decisions in the two terms of the Trump administration, a government-wide retreat away from renewable energy. The Trump 'retro-vision' that touts fossil fuels and denigrates renewables is, in fact, setting back U.S. competitiveness in meeting new demands for electrification across industrial sectors.<br /> <br /> As the economies of the world move forward, in transportation (EVs, e-motorcycles, e-bikes... e-buses, e-trucks, city e-grids with light rail, and soon aerial copters and planes, boats and ships, and e-power tools, e-tractors, e-smart homes and battery technologies (powering grids, cities, factories, consumer products), and e-robots and a gamut of AI technologies .... and on and on, the retro-actions of the Trump period are delivering a backward-looking blow to U.S. competitiveness that will have decades-long consequences.<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''June 7, 2026'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''As the War with Iran Reaches Day 100'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : And War in Ukraine Continues to Flare<br /> <br /> :: And War in Lebanon Expands<br /> <br /> :: And War in the Middle East Seems Endless<br /> <br /> ::: With Escalations, Reverberations, Proliferation of 'WMDs', and Incalculable Worldwide Costs <br /> <br /> We listen in and watch as the issues and questions roil across an informed and hard discussion between voices 'in the know' ...<br /> <br /> * https://substack.com/home/post/p-201011581<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''June 4'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''PREMIERE of a New Documentary Film about the Threat of Nuclear Weapons'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''In this 29-minute documentary, renowned whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg provides a powerful wakeup call about the global threat posed by nuclear weapons and advocates how we can dramatically reduce the real and present danger of nuclear annihilation.'' <br /> <br /> ''Before he released the top secret Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, Ellsberg was a nuclear war planner with access to classified information on U.S. nuclear strategy.''<br /> <br /> <br /> Wikipedia Bio / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Filmed one year before his death at age 92, Ellsberg speaks with clarity and urgency about the dangers we face, noting, &quot;I’ve long said that to my last breath I will be doing what I can to postpone and avert the risk of nuclear war.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''With ongoing conflicts heightening nuclear tensions, and with the recent end of the New START treaty potentially triggering a renewed arms race, &quot;An Ordinary Insanity&quot; is a timely film to help mobilize broad public concern and action for arms control and nuclear disarmament.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360 &amp; Strategic Demands''':<br /> <br /> A message from beyond, words of warning from an old friend of ours, Dan Ellsberg.<br /> <br /> Listen in to words of wisdom, even as a US president postures to be anti-nuke, and proposes nuclear weapons funding at all time highs...<br /> <br /> In fact, nuclear funding and Trump administration nuclear weapons development and 'usable' delivery platforms have spurred an out of control Nuclear Arms Race between the US, Russia and now China<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> “We’re continuing year-by-year deliberately with a posture and a policy and threats that make a significant risk of near extinction possible.” <br /> <br /> — DANIEL ELLSBERG in &quot;An Ordinary Insanity&quot; <br /> <br /> * https://www.anordinaryinsanity.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''More about Dan Ellsberg''' [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?search=dan+ellsberg&amp;title=Special%3ASearch&amp;profile=advanced&amp;fulltext=1&amp;ns0=1&amp;ns6=1&amp;ns14=1 @ '''GreenPolicy360'''] &amp; [https://strategicdemands.com/?s=dan+ellsberg @ '''Strategic Demands''']<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Nuclear_Weapons<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/nuclear-arms-race-3-0/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Truth and Consequence - Dan Ellsberg.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''May 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''David Attenborough Turns 100 Years Old'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/arts/television/david-attenborough-100-birthday.html?unlocked_article_code=1.hFA.HXVb.qSlnB3rq8Hbe&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> ''&quot;The next few decades represent a final opportunity to build a stable home for ourselves and restore the rich, healthy and wonderful world that we inherited from our distant ancestors. Our future on the planet, the only place as far as we know where life of any kind exists, is at stake.” -- David Attenborough, &quot;A Life on Our Planet&quot;, 2020<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We agree with David, we very deeply agree...<br /> <br /> And to Leo DiCaprio, a fellow [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Bioneers '''Bioneer'''], we agree too. David is a protector and close up story teller of the natural world who is a unique and valued voice whose wisdom will remain for years, and years and years...<br /> <br /> * https://deadline.com/2026/05/leonardo-dicaprio-david-attenborough-tribute-100th-birthday-1236888075/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Lee Zeldin E&amp;E News.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Photo by E&amp;E News&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin this past week defended deep budget cuts proposed by President Donald Trump'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Zeldin appeared at a trio of congressional hearings, dueling with House members and senators over the administration’s plan to reduce EPA’s annual funding to $4.2 billion in fiscal 2027 — or more than half of the agency’s enacted spending'' (E&amp;E)<br /> <br /> <br /> Green Policy: Lee Zeldin is Donald Trump's zealous attorney/administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. (We note he is also being discussed in the news as a leading candidate for the next US Attorney General). Zeldin for now is showing himself as a man with a cause. The cause he is pursuing, as he wields expanded administrative power, is dismantling and defunding the agency charged with protecting the environment, as the EPA's title straightforwardly declares. <br /> <br /> Since the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Environmental_Protection_Agency '''Environmental Protection Agency establishment in 1970'''], the EPA has followed its mission over decades. Congress after Congress envisioned, developed, and approved its work. Popular support was nationwide. Memorable achievements followed. We won't go into the long list of health-protections and science that EPA has given the nation and its communities, the air-quality, water-quality, health- and living-quality advances are there to see and experience.<br /> <br /> In Lee Zeldin's short time in office, however, the record of achievements is not seen as achievements to be built on... Zeldin has instead turned the valued agency into a storm of firings, cuts, closing of departments, ending research, terminating projects, eliminating oversight programs, announcing the EPA is no longer in the business of doing the people's work of enforcing the statutory mandates and directions of the US Congress.<br /> <br /> When asked under what authority he is dismantling the EPA, he answers with authoritative assurance -- that of the Supreme Court's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_questions_doctrine?wprov=sfti1 ''''Major Questions Doctrine''''] and the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loper_Bright_Enterprises_v._Raimondo '''Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo'''] decision.<br /> <br /> Zeldin and the current administration go on to explain they have 'different' policy priorities' that allow them to cut, cut, cut the EPA, turning it into a shell of what it was -- and away from Congressional votes, decisions and budgets since the 1970s intended to support viable, effective environmental protection. <br /> <br /> Yet, a remade Supreme Court has now enabled a dramatic and demanding new level of explicit text in Statutory law. The Court's novel doctrine of 'Major Questions' and the Loper Bright decision that Lee Zeldin wave as he orders dismantling is the order coming from the president. Given on the ground, deep and popular support, Zeldin's orders won't stand the test of time.<br /> <br /> Congressional staffs will bring in experts and act to redraft the letter of the law. Future administrations will support will act to pass legally specific text across most all environmental laws that are being summarily dismissed by Lee Zeldin, Esq.<br /> <br /> What Zeldin seems to forget, as he flaunts the Scotus recent turn, is that the clock is ticking, the people see and learn what is needed and what to do to deliver the kind of government they are demanding.<br /> <br /> Top of list -- quality of life. This includes protection against toxics and pollution. Moving toward a goal of clean, breathable air, drinkable water, and sustainable, enjoyable, healthy communities, towns and cities. <br /> <br /> We understand the need for the EPA's work. Most everyone does.<br /> <br /> When Lee Zeldin goes away, within a brief time a renewed Environmental Protection Agency with new Presidential executive orders and Congressional support will be the order of the day. <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''April 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Remade Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS) Remakes Civil Rights &amp; the Voting Rights Act'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : SCOTUS Voting Act Decision Acts to Reshape the 2026 Mid-term Congressional Election <br /> <br /> :: Partisan Reconfiguration of Congressional Districts Goes into Overdrive<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Voting Rights and Control of Congress'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Media news headlines from across the US deliver Temper of the Times <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-voting-rights-act-louisiana-alabama-4e3225083caccda5ec73a98533a79add '''Supreme Court hollows out a landmark law that had protected minority voting rights for 6 decades'''] '''Associated Press / April 30, 2026'''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act--.png]] 🏛️[[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-01.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-02.png]] 🏛️ [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-03.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-04.png]] 🏛️ [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-05.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-.png]] 🏛️ [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-07.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-08.png]] 🏛️ [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-09.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Memorable Words from the British King Addressing a Joint Session of the US Congress'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Charles navigates fraught politics with reminders of the Magna Carta of 1215, citizen rights, and calling for today's democratic governments to have high purpose<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''&quot;[O]ur generation must decide how to address the collapse of critical natural systems, which threatens far more than the harmony and essential diversity of Nature.”'''''<br /> <br /> '''''&quot;Reflect on our shared responsibility to safeguard Nature, our most precious and irreplaceable asset.&quot;''''' ...<br /> <br /> <br /> The modern representative of the UK went on to speak of the British Enlightenment, and the rights and duties of today's democratic governments.<br /> <br /> <br /> ''“We do not embark on these remarkable endeavours together out of sentiment, we do so because they build greater shared resilience for the future, so making our citizens safer for generations to come.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''“Our common ideals were not only crucial for liberty and equality, they are also the foundation of our shared prosperity. The Rule of Law: the certainty of stable and accessible rules, an independent judiciary resolving disputes and delivering impartial justice.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> ... ''&quot;It is here in these very halls that this spirit of liberty and the promise of America’s Founders is present in every session and every vote cast” ... political debate enriched “by the deliberation of many, representing the living mosaic of the United States. In both of our countries it is the very fact of our vibrant, diverse and free societies that gives us our collective strength.”''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;The essence of our two Nations is a generosity of spirit and a duty to foster compassion, to promote peace, to deepen mutual understanding and to value all people, of all faiths, and of none.”''<br /> <br /> -- King Charles III, April 28, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;''''Earth Day', April 22, 1970, Carries On &amp; On'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''April 22, 2026 🧤 Teach-In Memory Time'''<br /> <br /> <br /> At GreenPolicy360 we tell of 'being there' and being directly involved in the envisioning and planning of a first Earth Day <br /> <br /> Tip of our Green Hat to Representative George E. Brown<br /> <br /> <br /> Personal recollection -- <br /> <br /> <br /> A Story of 'Earthrise' to 'Earth Day' and Far Beyond....<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Day_Memories_on_the_50th_Anniversary<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;[[Earth Day]]&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''[[Earth Day Is Every Day]]'''<br /> <br /> :* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Earth_Day<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth-Day.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Every Day Is Earth Day.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Above Our Living Earth.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :🌎<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> : [[File:Earthrise to Earthset.png]]<br /> <br /> :: &lt;small&gt;Round &amp; Round We Go ....&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Day &lt;big&gt;''''Earthrise' to a First 'Earth Day' '''&lt;/big&gt;] ... [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Earth_in_Human_Hands.jpg &lt;big&gt;'''Now Earth Is in Your Hands'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''Earthrise', December 24, 1968 to 'Earthset', April 6, 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Earthrise<br /> * https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/earthset/<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;'''[[The Modern Environmental Movement]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Apollo.jpg]]<br /> <br /> : &lt;small&gt;NASA / December 1968&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?search=earthrise&amp;title=Special%3ASearch&amp;profile=advanced&amp;fulltext=1&amp;ns0=1 '''Earthrise Thoughts at GreenPolicy360''']<br /> <br /> <br /> : '''A half century on, fifty years after Apollo 8, humanity again visits the Moon and looks back at Planet Earth'''<br /> <br /> <br /> :[https://greenpolicy360.net/images/Moon_and_Earth_from_Artemis%2C_April_2026.jpg '''Reflection on the experience of watching the Earth set over the Moon, via Astronaut Reid Wiseman''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earthset.png]]<br /> <br /> :: &lt;small&gt;NASA / April 2026&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Artemis II, Journey from Earth to the Moon'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nasa.gov/gallery/journey-to-the-moon/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Artemis looking at Earth home.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth from Artemis II.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;NASA&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''March 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Another War'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> As the US and Israel launch war with Iran, the following words hover front of mind. <br /> <br /> “People predicting disaster: The odds are in your favor, but you cannot be sure, and you should not hope to be right. People celebrating: Maybe wanna wait a bit. The odds, historically, are definitely not on your side. Anyone certain they know what happens next is making it up.” -- Tom Nichols <br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;The world needs to renew a focus on human rights with quality of life high on every nation's agenda.&quot; -- GreenPolicy360<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''February 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> February 18, 2026<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Environmental Groups Sue Trump’s EPA Rollback of Climate Science Finding'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via The Guardian <br /> <br /> More than a dozen health and environmental justice non-profits have sued the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over its revocation of the legal determination that underpins US federal climate regulations.<br /> <br /> ''Filed in Washington DC circuit court, the lawsuit challenges the EPA’s rollback of the “endangerment finding”, which states that the buildup of heat-trapping pollution in the atmosphere endangers public health and welfare and has allowed the EPA to limit those emissions from vehicles, power plants and other industrial sources since 2009. The rollback was widely seen as a major setback to US efforts to combat the climate crisis.''<br /> <br /> ''The suit was brought by the American Public Health Association, the American Lung Association, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club and 11 other public health and environmental organizations. The lawsuit was filed by green legal organizations Clean Air Task Force and Earthjustice and it names the EPA and the agency’s administrator, Lee Zeldin, as defendants...''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Trump, Rejecting Science and Climate Change - Feb 2026.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Photo from the LA Times&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''An Attack on a Foundational Law, EPA Findings and a Supporting Court Decision'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/12/trump-epa-rollback-pollution-regulation-endangerment-finding<br /> <br /> <br /> ('''Updated, with this Trump order''') &quot;The United States will essentially have no laws on the books that enforce how efficient America’s passenger cars and trucks should be.&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/16/climate/endangerment-finding-auto-emissions-regulations.html?unlocked_article_code=1.M1A.1MMD.Cox7hRsyuiae&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''A Trump Legacy: Rejecting Science, Climate Change, and the Environmental Protection Agency'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : A Moment in History That Will Be Remembered<br /> <br /> <br /> Reading 'Top of the News' headlines this week, the world's people encounter a nation's president who rejects a half-century of a scientific, military, educational and security studies, data, knowledge -- and warnings.<br /> <br /> President Trump orders environmental cuts and rollbacks, retrogressive policies that turn around the Environmental Protection Agency's progress for the nation.<br /> <br /> Five plus decades of vision, foundational work, projects and programs, NASA/NOAA, EPA, USGS, across US colleges and universities, health and medical research, and on and on are now being diminished and degraded.<br /> <br /> Time will tell the full story of the Trump presidency.<br /> <br /> <br /> For now, let's take a quick look back at actions taken to advance environmental protection and the nation's well being, the beginnings of the EPA, atmospheric/climate/earth science, national security, health, and a better future for all.<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:SMOG_be_gone.jpg<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Tracking_science_policy_across_the_Trump_administration.png<br /> <br /> * https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title42/chapter85&amp;edition=prelim<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: <br /> <br /> Let's call this Trump rejection of science what it is -- an act of hubris, an decision that will not stand in the face of physics...<br /> <br /> Donald Trump's administration, with an EPA taken over by anti-science purveyors who callously and destructively set aside fifty plus years of scientific data, now act to put their legacy into the history books. Their action to deny the overwhelmingly evident dangers of climate change, a gathering storm threatening US and world environmental security, is an ignominious day.<br /> <br /> We, today's generation and future generations will live to mark this moment as a tragedy, one that accelerates real-world physics of earth systems, delivering climate impacts, disruptions, security lost... <br /> <br /> The Trump administration have delivered 'retro' thinking, anti-science destructiveness. <br /> <br /> The Clean Air Acts and accompanying model regulations, [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr '''ideas beginning in California to deal with its &quot;smog&quot;'''] in the 1960s/70s, were shared and spread throughout the US -- and the world's cities and communities. Profound progress, meant explicitly to deal with hazardous air pollutants and remedy the climate-related costs, the damages of atmospheric pollution to health, environment and future well being that adversely impacts life across nations and regions of Earth, was achieved and continues to be achieved. The Trump attempt to block this progress will fail.<br /> <br /> Yet, the time lost to Trumpian folly will add additional costs to humanity's journey forward.<br /> <br /> We mark these days in February 2026 as times to be remembered -- and judged -- for what they are. <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EPA 1a.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EPA 2a.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EPA 3a.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EPA 4a.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:PlanetCitizen banner 800x163.jpg|link=https://greenpolicy360.net/w/PlanetCitizen]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> February 1, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Another Warning Among Many'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Excerpt from a Chapter in a new book by Thom Hartmann...<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Climate Collapse Presidency'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Climate change is the single greatest threat to a sustainable future<br /> : but, at the same time, addressing the climate challenge presents a<br /> : golden opportunity to promote prosperity, security and a brighter<br /> : future for all. <br /> :—- Ban Ki-moon, former UN Secretary-General,<br /> : Remarks at Climate Leaders’ Summit, April 11, 2024<br /> <br /> <br /> Thom Hartmann @https://hartmannreport.com:<br /> <br /> The greatest existential threat humanity faces isn’t hiding in a military bunker or a terrorist cell. It’s in plain sight: the accelerating collapse of our only home’s life-support systems.<br /> <br /> Trump’s first term was environmental arson. He gutted the EPA, installed fossil fuel executives in key positions, shredded over one hundred environmental protections, and abandoned the Paris Climate Agreement. <br /> <br /> Scientists were silenced. Research was suppressed. The words “climate change” vanished from government websites as if deleting terms could delete reality.<br /> <br /> When confronted about climate’s role in the devastating 2020 wildfires, Trump smirked: “I don’t think science knows, actually.”<br /> <br /> <br /> --<br /> <br /> <br /> An AI response:<br /> <br /> Daniel Solomon<br /> <br /> I asked AI what is the effect of Trump #47 on the climate? Ans. below:<br /> <br /> <br /> ''In his second term as the 47th President, Donald Trump has moved aggressively to reverse U.S. climate progress by prioritizing fossil fuel production and dismantling federal environmental oversight.<br /> <br /> ''Key effects on the climate and policy include:''<br /> <br /> ''Withdrawal from International Agreements: On January 27, 2026, the U.S. officially withdrew from the Paris Agreement for the second time. Additionally, the administration has announced departures from over 60 international bodies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).''<br /> <br /> ''Increased Carbon Emissions: Projections suggest that the administration's rollbacks could lead to an additional 4 billion metric tons of CO2-equivalent emissions by 2030 compared to previous trajectories.''<br /> <br /> ''Dismantling Regulatory Foundations: The EPA is currently working to repeal the 2009 Endangerment Finding, which is the legal basis for nearly all federal greenhouse gas regulations.''<br /> <br /> ''Expansion of Fossil Fuels: Under the mantra &quot;drill, baby, drill,&quot; the administration has fast-tracked deep-sea mining, reopened Alaskan refuges for oil development, and granted roughly $40 billion in new subsidies to the fossil fuel industry.''<br /> <br /> ''Stalling Clean Energy: Federal support for wind and solar has been slashed, including the elimination of the $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit and nearly $13 billion in green energy funding.''<br /> <br /> ''Information and Data Gaps: The administration has removed past National Climate Assessments from federal sites, deleted climate science webpages, and cut funding for climate research programs, creating significant gaps in global climate tracking.''<br /> <br /> ''While federal action has stalled, market forces and state-led initiatives — particularly in California and Texas — continue to drive some growth in renewable capacity despite federal headwinds.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Trump admin losses est 35B in clean energy projects - 2025.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Deep Losses in Clean-Renewable Production &amp; Competitiveness'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : US Policy Goes Retro with Fossil Fuels<br /> <br /> : * https://grist.org/politics/trump-2025-renewable-energy-investment-electric-vehicles/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tracking science policy across the Trump administration.png]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Tracking_science_policy_across_the_Trump_administration.png&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''January 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> January 7th, a Day to Remember ... <br /> <br /> This day in America delivered a deadly shooting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a death recorded live by a number of video recordings taken and distributed by citizens who observed the killing. Today is going to become etched in the memory of US history.<br /> <br /> The death, as witnessed by those who viewed and reviewed the video recordings, was tragic -- and much more...<br /> <br /> The lies told by government officials following the shooting of a woman in her car were painfully far from the facts and now remain another in a line of political lies that are spreading like a fire inflaming communities across the country.<br /> <br /> Today, it is again time to remember the warnings of Hannah Arendt.<br /> <br /> Take time to read her writing of lies, big lies, repeated lies -- and the threats and dangers they pose.<br /> <br /> These lies are, again, as history teaches, deliverers of dangerous times.<br /> <br /> Echoes from the propagandists that brought on World War II.<br /> <br /> Echoes of lies to recall...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''&quot;Truth and Politics&quot;'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Hannah Arendt<br /> <br /> 1967 in the New Yorker Magazine<br /> <br /> * https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/praxis1313/files/2018/08/Arendt_-Truth-and-Politics-LQ.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?search=hannah+arendt&amp;title=Special%3ASearch '''More from Hannah Arendt''']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[Earth Day]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;'''[[Earth Day Is Every Day]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :[[File:Earth-Day.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ==''Recent GreenPolicy360 Story Highlights''==<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> ''[[Green Stories of the Day - GreenPolicy360 Archive]]''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2025'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2025 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2025'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2025]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2024'''''&lt;/big&gt;'''''===<br /> <br /> [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2024 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2024'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2024]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2023'''''&lt;/big&gt;'''''===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2023 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2023'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2023]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2022'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2022 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2022'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2022]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2021'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2021 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2021'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2021]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2020'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2020 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2020'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2020]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2019'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2019 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2019'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2019]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2018'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2018 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2018'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2018]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2017'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2017 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2017'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2017]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2016'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2016 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2016'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2016]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2015'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2015 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2015'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect 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Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Green_AI&diff=138373 2026-10-08T14:24:39Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> [[File:Big-Data.jpg]]<br /> <br /> In the AGI Era<br /> <br /> <br /> 'Sentience', a Green AI Question<br /> <br /> To be (sentient), or not to be (sentient)<br /> <br /> That is the question<br /> <br /> Cogito, ergo sum<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Artificial Intelligence Is Here, for Good &amp; Bad'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Green Perspectives on AI and Human Consequences<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''AI Agents, Bots, Data Centers &amp; Systems'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> :'''Measure Their Performance, not Their Corporate Marketing'''<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://safe.ai/<br /> * https://scale.com/<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanity's_Last_Exam<br /> * https://lastexam.ai/<br /> <br /> * https://stories.tamu.edu/news/2026/02/25/dont-panic-humanitys-last-exam-has-begun/<br /> <br /> * https://github.com/centerforaisafety/hle<br /> <br /> * https://github.com/walkinglabs/hands-on-modern-rl/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Revealing research on how people use Claude AI in the 'real world''''<br /> <br /> :Anthropic-enabled Case Study / August 2026<br /> <br /> :* https://www.anthropic.com/research/enabling-independent-research<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:New Ways of Seeing.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Climate Action Plans, Green Best Practices'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :Using AI to Identify and Implement Climate Change Intervention 'Best Practices'<br /> <br /> :* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Climate_Action_Plans,_Green_Best_Practices#<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''AI Agentics' are Launching Across Industries, Sector-to-Sector -- and Green AI is in the Wings'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Meanwhile, Capital-Investment Rich A.I. is Everywhere, in the Colloquial, Middlebrow and Vernacular'''<br /> <br /> It's Here. It's All Around. What's Real? What's Fake?<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Beyond Online Surveillance, Now Comes A.I. Powered Surveillance<br /> <br /> Add in Data Centers, Cameras/Firmware/Software, Palentir-esque Programming and ... a Booming Industry <br /> <br /> * https://www.palantir.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Where are you? There it is ... Online and now systems increasingly observing/monitoring you offline ...'''<br /> <br /> <br /> Already a human rights / Constitutional rights issue of our time <br /> <br /> The geopolitics of U.S. v authoritarian governments comes forward as a personal and national security threat<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Online_Privacy<br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Digital_Rights<br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Human_Rights<br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/In_Defense_of_Democracy_and_Freedom<br /> <br /> <br /> A.I. ... Looking for you and your whereabouts, your time, your data, your 'record', your social quotient<br /> <br /> <br /> Definitions<br /> <br /> [https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-definitions AI Definitions] <br /> <br /> <br /> Dangerous<br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake Deepfake] | [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_artificial_intelligence AI Gloss] | [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_intelligence) AI Hallucination]<br /> <br /> <br /> Monetized Media<br /> <br /> 'A.I. Slop' on Social Media is just the beginning of a Slop Assault | [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_slop AI Slop]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''October 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Subordinate AI and an Ironic Question.PNG|link=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VyF0naZ4AI]]<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VyF0naZ4AI<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Thought for the Day&quot;<br /> <br /> October 1, 2026<br /> <br /> In a recent series of private meetings in San Francisco, after a tasting menu dinner, Anthropic consulted religious scholars to help instill morality into its A.I. models ... a case was being made that Claude could be or become conscious.<br /> <br /> What would it mean for humanity’s future if artificial intelligence systems possessed a consciousness that rivals our own?<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-morals-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FVE.kDTO.OTLs6iwx7swF&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> Claude's 'Constitution'<br /> <br /> * https://web.archive.org/web/20260123045500/https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-new-constitution<br /> <br /> * https://web.archive.org/web/20260123042656/https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/22/anthropic_claude_constitution/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''September 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''Table Stakes' -- Who Was at the Table with the U.S. President'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :The Future of A.I. Is Being Wagered<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/politics/trump-ai-luncheon-guests-ceos.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FFE.HwT4.0VxTQWuia3zQ&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''What Jacob Coxon Knows Is Too Much'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''... And Not Enough'''<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://time.com/article/2026/09/09/ai-anthropic-openai-jacob-coxon/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''He Helped Build Powerful AI at OpenAI and Anthropic. Now He's Afraid It Could Kill Us'''<br /> <br /> <br /> Please HAL... Open the door...<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:I'm sorry Dave.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:HAL is watching U....png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Ulanqab-Envision Energy-Datacenter.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> The most ambitious data center buildup anywhere on earth ...<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/ulanqab-and-frontier-a-i-race-china-v-u-s/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''News Wrap / Sam Smith (Journalist)'''<br /> <br /> Via Axios <br /> <br /> September 13, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Over nine startling hours yesterday (Sept. 11), the four biggest AI labs — which rarely agree on anything — set aside years of feuds and competition to endorse a slower development pace for their models.'''<br /> <br /> '''Their new stance: Prioritize safety over growth, even at a cost.'''<br /> <br /> <br /> : Data centers are unpopular. People are panicked about doom scenarios. And 51 days before midterms, legislators suddenly realize there are points to be won by cracking down.<br /> <br /> : Against that backdrop, the industry's most powerful CEOs hit the brakes yesterday.<br /> <br /> : At 10 a.m. ET, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei dropped a 3,800-word essay saying model development needs to be paced, otherwise doom scenarios are possible — like a rogue-agent takeover of the entire internet, which he said could be as soon as six months from now.<br /> <br /> : An hour later, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shocked the AI chattering class by quoting Amodei's essay on X and saying &quot;Dario is right.&quot; Musk — who heads SpaceXAI, formerly xAI — had pointedly not joined previous industry-wide calls for any kind of slowdown.<br /> <br /> : At 12:30 p.m., OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted: &quot;I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.&quot; In a Friday interview that was released on Saturday, Altman told Fortune his company won't go public this year, dashing hopes for a blockbuster IPO. He said OpenAI has too much safety work to do and would be better off doing that as a private company.<br /> <br /> : At 7 p.m., Demis Hassabis — the Nobel laureate who co-founded and chairs Google DeepMind, and is Alphabet's chief scientist — tweeted: &quot;Dario's essay points towards the right path forward. The details need working through, but the direction is correct for meeting this critical moment.&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> Publicly putting safety ahead of technological or financial growth may be the industry's only route to avoid a crackdown that's not on its terms.<br /> <br /> Legislators are begging House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to stay in session and do something about the &quot;threat&quot; of AI.<br /> <br /> The more extreme alternative is something like Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) push to force a pause and make the most advanced AI illegal.<br /> <br /> Most people realize there's too much money at stake to just stop. But the tradeoff may be between historic riches and slightly less historic riches.<br /> <br /> The bottom line: Yesterday may go down as the day AI changed — when industry moguls vowed to limit themselves.<br /> <br /> <br /> References:<br /> <br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/anthropic-ai-amodei-pacing<br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/openai-public-ipo-delay-sam-altman<br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/anthropic-ai-threat-report-russia-iran-china<br /> <br /> <br /> Jim VandeHei<br /> <br /> &quot;All Hands on Deck&quot;<br /> <br /> The White House, Congress and the country's leading AI companies have allowed AI to grow faster, stronger, more powerful and wildly lucrative (and dangerous), with no serious effort to control it or spread the benefits beyond the super-wealthy.<br /> <br /> It's not too late to change this. But if they all dither, duck or dance around it, the chances of AI worst-case scenarios will explode, likely early next year, according to almost every person we talk to privately who truly understands AI.<br /> <br /> Why it matters: The technology is getting better, faster than anyone envisioned — with the possibility rising that AI will self-improve and do wildly unpredictable things.<br /> <br /> The good news: There's now a growing public cry for attention and action and, at least in private, a broad understanding of what could be done relatively fast with bipartisan and industry buy-in.<br /> <br /> The big picture: In July, I wrote [https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-doomerism-jim-vandehei-axios-9163dfd3?st=QNUbDZ&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink an essay for The Wall Street Journal] saying America &quot;faces one of those rare, historic moments when government, business, schools and families could be working together to meet a truly generational challenge: winning the AI race. So far, we're blowing it.&quot;<br /> <br /> Two short months later, the technology is vastly better — and the societal response vastly dumber. As a nation, we're choosing to amuse or distract ourselves. <br /> <br /> Here's how to change that fast, based on our months of conversations with lawmakers, White House officials and AI labs. Think of what follows as me channeling their private views:<br /> <br /> Sound an all-hands-on-deck alarm. Every political topic is trivial and small compared to AI. We will look back in shame if we get spooled up about trans bans or $5,000 checks when countless AI insiders are warning of catastrophic outcomes. Let's say they're all paranoid and delusional. If so, it still doesn't matter: we've never seen this much investment in one technology this fast in human history. It's seeping into every industry and every job and every community and every screen, at a speed never before witnessed by man. Yes, we need a special session of Congress and select committees. But we need even more: AI execs, bioterror specialists, job-training wizards and safety experts convening to plan for scenarios and act fast.<br /> <br /> An AI governing body with teeth and speed, ASAP. This isn't rocket science. Most major labs want this and would agree to it, as long as it applies to all rivals and competitors. This body would need the expertise to understand these models, and the power to review and shut them down if they display dangerous behavior. It can't operate at typical regulatory speed — it needs to move as fast as the technology. It's nonsense to think you can't advance AI development fast and regulate it wisely simultaneously.<br /> <br /> A universal standard for data centers to benefit communities and taxpayers. The top AI companies would take this deal in a heartbeat: They get to build and operate data centers provided they supply a community's energy, offset water use or environmental damage, transparently report on their building and business plans, and spread the financial benefits to local residents. These execs are spooked by the public backlash and ready to aggressively spread the financial benefits, with dividends or cash. So make them.<br /> <br /> Engage China. We shouldn't trust them, and they shouldn't trust us. But trust me: the only way to ultimately control AI on a worldwide scale in coming years will be for the two superpowers to create some kind of framework modeled after how we've safely governed nuclear weapons for decades. We need to start this discussion now so potential collaboration is possible in the coming years. To those who think China will never consider this seriously: Are you sure an authoritarian regime really wants AI once it hits recursive self-learning and can't be controlled by anyone, including an autocratic regime? We're winning the AI race now, and may never have more leverage to shape this joint effort.<br /> <br /> Build coordinating infrastructure. What I wrote in the WSJ is even more needed today: &quot;Bring together the best and brightest drawn from the federal government, from the leading AI companies, from business and labor, from economics, from public health, from ethics to form a working group with actual authority. People who are paid to anticipate, not to react haphazardly.&quot; This group would have four primary functions: map potential problems and upsides before they hit, build the (policy) playbooks before they're needed, level with the American people along the way, and expedite work to deliver widespread AI benefits. <br /> <br /> Reality check: Yes, President Trump opposes regulation or bipartisan efforts. Yes, AI companies are obsessed with more money, more speed. But the politics are shifting fast: If you listen closely to Vice President Vance, you can hear rising worry. At this pace, toxic AI politics could force mind-changing that was unthinkable two months ago.<br /> <br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/ai-regulation-safety-plan-2026<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Recursive Self-Learning - When A.I. Builds Itself'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Big Blast'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Killing Life on Earth'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''It'll Happen in Bits &amp; Pieces, then Suddenly'''<br /> <br /> September 9, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> The US news was full of AI headlines today as a resignation of a top AI expert warned of a coming apocalypse...<br /> <br /> Here's a taste of Google News headlines, a feeding frenzy of dire words about what is now beyond a distant alert.<br /> <br /> The threat brings words of superintelligence, 'recursive' learning bots and superminds merging into threats to humanity.<br /> <br /> <br /> Here, at GreenPolicy360, we've already written of a predecessor, HAL 9000, and our memories from one of HAL's inventors in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, and how HAL decided humans were expendable... <br /> <br /> The Mission was of critical importance, HAL 'knew', and the Mission became HAL's goal above all else to achieve ... The humans could not be allowed to interfere with ... the Mission.<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:I%27m_sorry_Dave.jpg '''I'm sorry Dave''']<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:HAL_is_watching_U....png '''HAL is watching U''']<br /> <br /> <br /> Which takes us to today...<br /> <br /> Let's file today under the heading of our decades of writing about the need for '''[[New Definitions of National Security]]'''... <br /> <br /> Now come the PINGS on the radar... can U hear the PINGS? We have been mulling how to add HAL xxxxx to our existential list of threats, w/o annoying HALish bots too 'badly' <br /> <br /> <br /> “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.” -- an executive from Anthropic<br /> <br /> “So how would AI kill us all, exactly?” -- an editor from Axios<br /> <br /> <br /> More: <br /> <br /> <br /> For years, they warned AI could kill all humans <br /> :Now people are listening<br /> <br /> Sept. 10, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4xQojEq<br /> <br /> <br /> Rogue Hacking <br /> :Goals of the &quot;swarm&quot; came first...<br /> <br /> Sept. 9, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/09/opinion/openai-ai-companies-safety-regulation.html?unlocked_article_code=1.AFE.0vWo.zfl5fdm6ACNC&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:AI 1.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 2.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 3.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 4.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 5.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 6.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''August 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Gates Sounds Alarm... Artificial Intelligence Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Gates A.I. Warning August 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Bill Gates was an AI optimist. Now he’s scared of what could go wrong'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Microsoft co-founder sounds the alarm about artificial intelligence’s risks to safety and security, jobs and children’s well-being<br /> <br /> <br /> Washington Post, August 26, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4wO14cy<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Bill Gates Warns A.I. Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit'''<br /> <br /> : In an hourlong interview, he said his industry was downplaying the risks, which he believes include mass unemployment and bioterrorism<br /> <br /> <br /> NY Times, August 26, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/26/technology/bill-gates-ai-risks.html?unlocked_article_code=1.8VA.6kAC.vsZb9x0YdSzV&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''High Time to Shine a Spotlight on AI and Its Impact on Higher Education'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : At MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, One of the World's Top Academic/Research/Technology/Engineering/Teaching and Future-Impacting Institutions, a New Report Opens Eyes<br /> <br /> :* https://aiandeducation.mit.edu/report/#26-no-one-size-fits-all<br /> <br /> <br /> 1. Introduction<br /> <br /> This report is a call to action.<br /> <br /> Through five intense months of meetings, research, and outreach across the MIT community, the Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training sought to understand the role of generative AI in the life and educational mission of the Institute and recommend how to navigate its challenges and opportunities.<br /> <br /> In January 2026, Chancellor Melissa Nobles, Provost Anantha Chandrakasan, and Faculty Chair Roger Levy charged us1 specifically to:<br /> <br /> Assess current AI use at MIT.<br /> Identify innovations in teaching and student assessment.<br /> Propose an AI use policy.<br /> However, what we learned as a group quickly convinced us that the Institute community, particularly the faculty, must tackle a set of deeper questions about the structure, meaning, and value of an MIT education in an era in which AI is one of several factors complicating the Institute’s mission.<br /> <br /> Our committee consisted of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty from every school, and staff from relevant units, including the MIT Libraries and the Teaching and Learning Lab. Though we brought to the assignment a broad range of experience and no fixed thesis, our brief but intense explorations led us to a strong shared view.<br /> <br /> In this report, we:<br /> <br /> Highlight key aspects of the current educational landscape at MIT.<br /> Share eight principles we relied on and that we hope will guide the Institute in the work ahead.<br /> <br /> Recommend immediate and long-term actions for both instructors and the administration.<br /> <br /> As an institution deeply identified with the birth of AI and known for its distinctively rigorous, hands-on education, designed to produce graduates unafraid of the world’s hardest problems, MIT has a unique role to play in this moment. We believe it also has a responsibility to lead.<br /> <br /> We hope our report can help the Institute lean into the spirit of Mind, Hand, and Heart as it continues to define and foster the highest-quality residential education – of humans, by humans, in support of human flourishing, and for the betterment of humankind.<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Eric Klopfer, co-chair Sam Madden, co-chair<br /> <br /> On behalf of the Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training...<br /> <br /> <br /> AI is generating both immediate rapid changes and long-term tectonic disruptions – and MIT needs to respond:<br /> <br /> Students are confused and concerned about a lack of clarity, consistency and justification about the use of AI, within a given subject and across the curriculum.<br /> <br /> Every subject taught at MIT will likely need to be reexamined and potentially revamped to make sure that how students are being taught, what they’re learning, and how they’re assessed are “AI-aware.”<br /> <br /> AI is changing what students need to know and know how to do.<br /> <br /> Beyond its implications for specific subjects and disciplines, the advent of AI demands a broader, holistic reassessment of the nature, scope and purpose of higher education today...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Texas Terafab SpaceX AI August 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''A Terafab Plant Sprouts in Texas'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Elon Musk: We will manufacture the type of potent chips needed to transform humankind into &quot;a galactic civilization&quot; <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Shanaka's Opinion, a Guest Op/Ed'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Shenaka Perera Weighs In on What It Could Mean'''<br /> <br /> :: '''A Terafab Loop for Mega Launches Is Being Built''' <br /> <br /> ::* https://shanakaanslemperera.substack.com/p/the-capital-recovery-clock?r=6p7b5o<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Hidden inside the chip factory SpaceX confirmed Thursday is a launch schedule. If you divide its 1 terawatt annual compute target by the 100 kilowatts of orbital compute per tonne in SpaceX's own offering materials and you get 10 million tonnes to orbit a year. That exact figure sits on Terafab's official website. At 100 tonnes per Starship V3 flight it means 100,000 launches a year, 274 every day, forever.''<br /> <br /> ''The chip target is already a launch target.''<br /> <br /> ''Terafab is not a chip factory serving a market. The 16.8 billion dollar first phase in Grimes County, Texas is the first machine in a closed industrial loop built to manufacture the civilisation that can consume its own output.''<br /> <br /> ''The official plan places four figures together. One billion Optimus robots. Ten million tonnes to orbit a year. More than one terawatt of solar power. One terawatt of chips a year. They are not four ambitions. They are four links in one recursion. Terafab makes chips. Better chips improve AI. Better AI improves the software running the factories, the robots and the rocket lines. Robots and Starship build and deploy more power and compute infrastructure. That infrastructure creates the socket, and the demand, for the next Terafab cohort.''<br /> <br /> ''The fab is meant to manufacture its own reason to exist!''<br /> <br /> ''It is also an energy machine. One terawatt running continuously consumes 8.76 petawatt hours a year, nearly twice all electricity generated in the United States in 2025. The factory does not draw that power by making the chips. One fully powered annual cohort does, and a second year adds another terawatt of load unless old hardware retires or utilisation falls. Earth has no spare socket at that scale, which is why the plan points most of it at orbit, where a future 200 tonne vehicle still implies 50,000 launches a year, 137 a day, before failures, reserves, solar arrays, radiators, structure and shielding.''<br /> <br /> ''The real product is not AI silicon. If you go real deep, it is a new terawatt of powered, cooled, networked compute sockets every year.''<br /> <br /> ''Inside the building, the smaller loop is mask, wafer, package, test, redesign, then another mask. SpaceX says logic, memory and advanced packaging will sit in one closed loop, and Elon says Terafab will technically be two fabs, each devoted to one design. That can compress logistics and organisational latency. It cannot repeal process physics. A new mask can be written quickly. A leading edge process still carries hundreds of steps, long wafer cycle times, defect learning, overlay control, metrology and yield ramps, which is exactly why Tesla is hiring across lithography, etch, deposition, implant, CMP and metrology.''<br /> <br /> ''The free electron laser is the most misunderstood part. Elon has endorsed it, and an industrial FEL could feed several EUV scanners with far more source power than today's tin plasma systems. It attacks one bottleneck inside a chain of them. ASML recognised revenue on just 48 EUV systems in all of 2025. Intel is the process partner, and SpaceX still tells investors it expects to source a significant share of compute hardware from outside suppliers. This is vertical integration, not instant independence.''<br /> <br /> ''One correction decides the interpretation. A terawatt is a power rating, not an intelligence metric. A wasteful 1 kilowatt chip counts twice as much as an equally capable 500 watt chip. The measures that matter are useful compute per joule, per dollar and per kilogram, with yield, uptime and time from mask change to qualified silicon.''<br /> <br /> ''In my opinion, if chips improve faster than robots, rockets, power and radiators can scale, Terafab builds inventory. If the loop closes, it builds something no factory has built before, the demand for itself.''<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://www.terafab.ai/<br /> <br /> * https://www.spacex.com/updates/terafab<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terafab<br /> <br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/06/tesla-and-spacex-will-invest-16-8b-to-start-building-terafab-chip-factory-in-texas/<br /> <br /> * https://electrek.co/2026/08/06/tesla-spacex-terafab-grimes-county-16-8-billion/<br /> <br /> * https://www.cbsnews.com/news/terafab-elon-musk-chips-semiconductors-what-to-know/<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Betting big on data centers, U.S. now leads world for new gas power development<br /> <br /> [https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/betting-big-data-centers-us-now-leads-world-new-gas-power-development Via Global Energy Monitor]<br /> <br /> * https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/betting-big-data-centers-us-now-leads-world-new-gas-power-development<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> New Amazon Data Center Stokes Worry It Would Be the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.<br /> <br /> Via New York Times<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/08/climate/amazon-data-center-texas-pollution.html<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''July 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Elon Musk Opens Up in an Interview'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Economist Editor Presses the Controversial 'Trillionaire'<br /> <br /> :: Elon Musk's 'Vision of the Future'<br /> <br /> * https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/23/elon-musks-vision-of-the-future<br /> <br /> <br /> “People don’t realise that what I’m saying will come to pass,” he tells The Economist in a 90-minute interview for The Insider, held at a giant Tesla factory in Texas where electric cars drive themselves off the assembly line. That may be because his future-gazing ranges from the unsettling to the downright weird. Mr Musk predicts that, within five years, artificial-intelligence systems may surpass the sum of all human intelligence. Within ten years, robots in the workplace will help usher in an era of such “amazing abundance” that money will become meaningless....<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> Musk proposes peer review for frontier AI models in Economist interview<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/musk-proposes-peer-review-frontier-ai-models-economist-interview-2026-07-23/<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> Elon Musk says he got ‘carried away’ with Trump – but still holds on to contentious political views<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/23/elon-musk-regret-trump-doge-ai<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> Mix of Comments:<br /> <br /> * https://beincrypto.com/elon-musk-real-force-european-politics/<br /> * https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-killer-robots-ai-abundance-progress-unstoppable-2026-7<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/07/24/elon-musk-speaks-to-the-economist-editor-in-chief-zanny-minton-beddoes-on-the-key-takeaways.html<br /> * https://futurism.com/elon-musk-interviewer-npc<br /> * https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-economist-interview-2000790016<br /> * https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/nonsense-elon-musk-lashes-out-in-fiery-interview-after-hes-accused-of-supporting-the-far-right/<br /> * https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2026/07/23/musk_admonishes_the_economist_editor_what_is_far_right_about_having_secure_borders_safe_cities_and_sensible_spending.html<br /> * https://zeteo.com/p/top-economist-trump-musk-starmer<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> A.I. In Space <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Datacenters in Earth orbit to enable next generation artificial intelligence'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> New US petition demands review of plans from tech companies amid fears of environmental destruction<br /> <br /> Via The Guardian<br /> <br /> What are Bezos &amp; Musk Doing? <br /> <br /> What in the World Is Going On?<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jul/23/space-datacenters-bezos-blue-origin<br /> <br /> <br /> References:<br /> <br /> * https://www.starcloud.com/<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/21/do-space-based-ai-data-centers-make-economic-sense.html<br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/20/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-enters-the-space-data-center-game/<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/bezos-blue-origin-space-data-centers.html<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_data_center<br /> * https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/how-hard-is-it-to-build-orbital-data-centers-actually/<br /> * https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/06/260618041501.htm<br /> * https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-109012<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> A.I. &amp; Chip Wars<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Beyond a 'Belt and Road Initiative' Bringing Chinese Investments, Products &amp; Services to World Markets''' &lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Via GreenPolicy360's Associate, Strategic Demands<br /> <br /> :* https://strategicdemands.com/china-goes-beyond-the-belt-and-road-to-an-ai-for-the-world-strategy/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Open-Source A.I. from China Reveals a Global Chinese Strategy'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> July 17, 2026 / From the NY Times <br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/business/china-ai-moonshot-kimi.html?unlocked_article_code=1.yVA.LKT5.LxohSFddWAZT&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> The contest between China and the United States for supremacy in artificial intelligence escalated on Friday when the Chinese start-up Moonshot AI released a new A.I. model that appeared to narrow the lead held by well-funded American competitors.<br /> <br /> Moonshot said that the model, Kimi K3, was the world’s largest open-source A.I. system, allowing anyone to use, modify and build on it freely. The company said that Kimi K3 performed as well as leading models from OpenAI and Anthropic at some key tasks.<br /> <br /> The release coincided with an address by Xi Jinping, China’s leader, in which he outlined an ambitious vision for global A.I. development that cast China as the champion of an open approach to the technology.<br /> <br /> “A.I. development should not be a solo performance by a single country but a symphony of international cooperation,” Mr. Xi said. China was “ready to work with all parties to seize the opportunities of A.I. development” ...<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360:<br /> <br /> Keep in mind that<br /> <br /> There is 'no I in A.I.'<br /> <br /> In the interest of full-disclosure, the content written and published at GreenPolicy360 by our Founder/Siterunner is wholly, solely, by a human species.<br /> <br /> A note from your GreenPolicy360 Founder/Siterunner, Steve Schmidt, [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:All_species_day_with_homo_sapien_in_Santa_Fe_.jpg '''a verified human species'''], plz do keep in mind as you use and share the GreenPolicy360 content, that '''there is 'no I in A.I.'''' <br /> <br /> <br /> Let's talk a bit about sources and sourcing, as a human and then as an Agentic/A.I. bot. <br /> <br /> What is a 'primary source' (versus a 'secondary source')? A primary source can be a person with direct knowledge of a situation, an event in history, or a document written by such a person. A primary identification speaks of original creations, not re-interpreted or computer-assembled works. Here is how Merriam-Webster defines a 'primary source' - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/primary%20source<br /> <br /> <br /> : A.I. uses material scraped and collected from online sources. A.I. is not a 'primary source' -- but here at GreenPolicy360 you can find 'real-I' (we're using the phrase 'real-I', defined as 'real-intelligent', people who've personally acted to envision and create living, real world change.) <br /> <br /> <br /> : At GreenPolicy360 we tell stories of real people changing the world for the better. Day-to-day, your life becomes your message. We also share [[Green Best Practices]] across our Earth to communities of [[Planet Citizens]] ... In this way GreenPolicy360 is an eco Operating System, built on an open source MediaWiki platform and with a mission of being a 'distributive web'. Our goal of [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Category:Green_Networking Green Networking] acts to connect and share Green Links and grow [[The Modern Environmental Movement]]. <br /> <br /> :: GreenPolicy360 is about a [[Generation Green]] [[Going Green]].<br /> <br /> :: In our larger work, we have documented many primary sources and secondary sources. Our eco network continues to share myriad [[Green Best Practices]]. As our motto/mantra says at the top of each of our pages -- We believe ...<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> :: ''Each of us can make a positive difference by stepping up &amp; doing our best'' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::_______________________________________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> July 16, 2026 / From the NY Times<br /> <br /> SJS/GreenPolicy360: '''Every Once in a While a Comment to an Online Story is Worthy of Circulating'''<br /> <br /> : Here is one of those occasions -- the Subject? '''&quot;A.I.Slop&quot;'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Kashmir Hill.jpg]]<br /> <br /> ::Kashmir Hill / NYT<br /> <br /> <br /> Read the AI Slop story of writer Kashmir Hill as a free-share link here -- <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''I Got Slopped'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''Someone Used A.I. to Write My Biography'''<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/technology/ai-slop-books-biography-amazon.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ylA.aCMz.czE5JwZuuFO0&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Comments: <br /> <br /> Anon, who goes by the name -- <br /> <br /> '''Radical Roach / Dippleville''' says<br /> <br /> @Kashmir Hill - Maybe books need to now have disclaimers on their covers, in reviews, on the book’s Amazon page, wherever the book is being sold, etc.. The disclaimer would say if the book was written solely by a human, written by AI assisting a human, or written completely by AI. I would want to know.<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We tend to agree with this anon recommendation of adding disclaimers indicating the type of online content, e.g., content created solely by a human, or content created with AI assistance, or content created by AI with human assistance.<br /> <br /> It's a new world out there. We have a need to know.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> July 15, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Anthropic hard questions July 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/news/hard-questions<br /> <br /> * https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/anthropic-ad-ai-kill-us-all<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''An Excerpt: A DeepMind Thought for Today on the AGI Frontier'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> by Demis Hassbis<br /> <br /> * https://x.com/demishassabis/status/2076957440109625718<br /> <br /> <br /> A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age<br /> <br /> Demis Hassabis<br /> <br /> * https://x.com/demishassabis<br /> <br /> <br /> July 14, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> This is a pivotal moment in human history. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a system that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities the brain has, is probably only a few short years away. When we look back on this time in the decades to come, I think we will realise we were standing in the foothills of the singularity - nothing less than the dawning of a new age for humanity.<br /> <br /> I’ve spent my whole life working on AGI because I’ve always had a deep conviction that, if built and deployed responsibly, it would prove to be one of the most beneficial and transformative technologies ever invented. AGI cannot be compared to standard technological breakthroughs, not even ones as consequential as the internet or mobile - it is much more akin to the discovery of electricity or fire. If you stop to think about it, we’ve essentially found a way to make sand think. It’s miraculous.<br /> <br /> The magnitude of this technology’s impact will be unprecedented, perhaps 10x of the Industrial Revolution at 10x the speed. It will help us solve some of the biggest problems society faces from accelerating drug discovery to developing new clean energy sources to creating novel advanced materials. We could even reach a point where resources are no longer the limiting factor for human progress, leading to an amazing new era of abundance.<br /> <br /> The Challenges of the Frontier<br /> <br /> AI is already starting to deliver real-world benefits but to realise its immense promise, we have to navigate this critical period of development thoughtfully and carefully. Urgent action is needed to address risks that might arise as we get closer to AGI. We’ve already seen the challenges frontier models pose for cybersecurity, and other threats including nuclear and bio risks may soon emerge as capabilities continue to advance. On the horizon, we will need robust safeguards to maintain control of increasingly agentic, recursively self-improving systems - and tackle unknown issues that will only become clearer over time...<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''An AI Supercomputer Is Created for a Mission... Its Name Is HAL'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Steve Schmidt/GreenPolicy360: It's not every day that you get to know a creator of a famed -- and infamous -- AI character from a Kubrick film called &quot;2001: A Space Odyssey&quot;. <br /> <br /> : We listen in as HAL came to be ... A friend, a Visual Effect (VFX) genius named '''Douglas Trumbull''', explains how HAL went from LA to MIT, then into production and into our imaginations. <br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Trumbull vfx master.jpg]]<br /> <br /> : Douglas Trumbull<br /> <br /> : &lt;small&gt;* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Trumbull_vfx_master.jpg&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> The HAL 9000 was envisioned by creators and science, as a new type of neural intelligence, a machine brain.<br /> <br /> Hal is of heuristic algorithmic language -- HALis, as we learn, on a mission far from Earth, a mission with deep meaning.<br /> <br /> <br /> HAL 9000 was in the future. The future is now.<br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence is now here, with its powers and dangers, as we recall Supercomputer [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000 '''HAL 9000''']. <br /> <br /> A warning of what is on the line for humanity is the message related as we ride along in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey '''2001: A Space Odyssey'''] ... <br /> <br /> <br /> HAL's memorable words --<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;I'm sorry, Dave....&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;It can only be attributable to human error....&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.<br /> <br /> HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.<br /> <br /> Dave: What's the problem?<br /> <br /> HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.<br /> <br /> Dave: What are you talking about, HAL?<br /> <br /> HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film)<br /> <br /> * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/characters/nm0706937<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:I'm sorry Dave.jpg]]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:HAL_is_watching_U....png<br /> <br /> <br /> Today, as humanity approaches questions of out-of-control technology created by humanity .... <br /> <br /> We ask, '''[[Planet Citizens]] and [[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]''' ask, 'What's Next?' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Privacy at Risk, You're Being Watched, Tracked, &amp; More<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Privacy.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Next Big Thing'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;It Is Here, Already Here...&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Online_Privacy<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Call It 'Surveillance Capitalism''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Hope that It doesn't become 'the Norm' <br /> <br /> : Work to Make Sure It Does Not Become 'Surveillance Government'<br /> <br /> <br /> Scroll thru Intel on the Privacy Threat of AI Unleashed ...<br /> <br /> :Artificial Intelligence + Data Centers = Next Gen 'Watchful HAL'<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism<br /> * https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr-ryan/publications/geopolitics-surveillance-capitalism<br /> * https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=56791<br /> <br /> <br /> _______________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''June 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''An Academic Exercise'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : 'Old School' Emeritus Professor Examines AI<br /> <br /> : The Question: Can a Gemini ChatBot Suggest Ways to Turn AI Toward the Common Good?<br /> <br /> <br /> The prof uses left-leaning political formations to inquire and recommend public-oriented futures.<br /> <br /> * https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/06/19/my-ai-comrade/<br /> <br /> <br /> (Note beyond academic: Using history as a guide, powerful new technology such as AI will be employed by political powers to preserve political power and by military powers to employ and extend military power. AI Use Cases: A number of AI programs enabling AI for military programs, including war intelligence, communication, command/control and targeting, and civilian database surveillance involving intrusive human/civil rights questions and violations, have as of 2026 become high-level concerns.)<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''An Interview and Thoughts as an Author Rides alongside an AI Wave'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The God Test'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning<br /> <br /> Author: Robert Wright<br /> <br /> * https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Robert-Wright/73247968<br /> <br /> <br /> Publisher: Simon &amp; Schuster<br /> <br /> Published Date: June 23, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-God-Test/Robert-Wright/9781668061657<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Interview via Substack'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Jack Goldsmith: I’m chatting today with Robert Wright about his terrific new book, '''The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning'''. <br /> <br /> So, I want to start off with the big picture, because your book places AI in the broadest possible context—not just as an important step in the history of technological change, but rather as an important step in the significantly longer history of basically our planet and our species. And that’s pretty cosmic, as the subtitle says.<br /> <br /> Why do you do that? What does it mean, and why is that perspective important?<br /> <br /> Bob Wright: Well, thanks for having me. Yeah, it’s a good question, because I could have gotten the core message across without getting so cosmic, I guess.<br /> <br /> The main purpose is to try to explain to people, including non-technical people, why there’s been this rapid growth of capability in AI; why, once you understand that, you should expect the capability to keep growing; why that, in addition to promising great blessings, is going to bring great risks, including grave ones, including maybe existential ones; and why the nature of those risks, in my view, dictates that we confront the challenge of this technology as a cohesive global community, which will take some doing because we’ve never really done that before for anything like a sustained period of time.<br /> <br /> And so I didn’t have to get into the history of life or anything to say what I just said, but I do think some important things are added when you step back and look at AI in the broader sweep of things.<br /> <br /> For starters, this is, in the entire three- or four-billion-year history of life, the first time a new form of intelligence that rivals or even exceeds human intelligence has appeared. It’s the first form of intelligence that is not organic in the technical sense of being carbon-based. It’s silicon-based, but it is organic in the everyday sense of being kind of natural.<br /> <br /> What I mean by that is I try to show that AI does, in some sense, grow kind of logically, naturally out of biological evolution. I mean, technological evolution broadly does, and AI as a form of intelligence does. And indeed, when we look at the evolutionary dynamics shaping it—the dynamics of technological evolution—we should expect it to have certain things in common with our own intelligence, which I think are important.<br /> <br /> So I think that’s one thing you get out of a broad perspective.<br /> <br /> Another thing is that I talk about this guy, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—a Catholic paleontologist, mystic, and theologian—who coined the term noosphere, based on the Greek word nous, in 1923 to describe what he called a planetary mind or a brain of brains, where the human brains were the neurons in this increasingly global brain.<br /> <br /> And technological history, including the invention of the internet, has, I think, made him look prescient. And I think there’s value in keeping in mind that AI is arriving as we more and more have the technical infrastructure for a kind of global information processing, a kind of global brain. And we have to reckon with the possibility that some of the neurons will be silicon, not human, and think about what our relationship to them is going to be.<br /> <br /> And I think one value of thinking in these terms is, first of all, that from a Teilhardian point of view, the whole unfolding of life is moving toward us being this kind of giant superorganism, you could say, with this giant brain.<br /> <br /> And I argue in the book that the logic of technological evolution is going to push us — I mean, if we respond rationally — toward something a little more like a global brain, in the sense of having more international governance.<br /> <br /> At the same time, I think the image of a superorganism should worry us because it’s, for obvious reasons, an image that’s favored by authoritarians and fascists. How much freedom do you have if you’re a cell in a superorganism?<br /> <br /> And I think AI greatly heightens the stakes of that question, precisely because it’s such a powerful tool of surveillance and control.<br /> <br /> So I think, on the one hand, the logic of technological evolution, especially AI, is pushing us toward the global coordination of certain policies and the creation of forms of supranational power. At the same time, it should make us wary of surrendering too much power...<br /> <br /> <br /> Read More of the Substack Conversation between Jack Goldsmith and Robert Wright [https://substack.com/home/post/p-201670588 '''here''']<br /> <br /> Also, More Book Reviews [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Book_Reviews_@GreenPolicy '''here @ GreenPolicy360''']<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎 <br /> <br /> <br /> AI / AGI<br /> <br /> <br /> May 29 / Forbes<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Fundraise values Anthropic AI company at nearly a trillion dollars'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Dario and Daniela Amodei, along with five cofounders, have a story to tell<br /> <br /> * https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2026/05/29/anthropics-cofounders-worth/<br /> <br /> <br /> ''When Anthropic announced on Thursday (May 28) that it had raised $65 billion at a valuation of $965 billion, it didn’t just become the most valuable AI startup in the world, eclipsing $852 billion-valued archrival OpenAI. It also ballooned the individual fortunes of Anthropic’s seven cofounders — more than doubling their net worths to $16.6 billion apiece, Forbes estimates.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''In Rarified Air'''''<br /> <br /> ''Siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, as well as their five other cofounders Jack Clark, Sam McCandlish, Chris Olah, Tom Brown and Jared Kaplan, are in rarified air when it comes to entrepreneurs who struck it rich in the generative AI boom...''<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Pope Leo XIV encyclical re AI and Humanitas.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> “Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed,” Pope Leo said in announcing the text of his first [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=encyclical&amp;go=Go '''encyclical''']. “The word is strong, I know, but deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention...”<br /> <br /> And into the encyclical's key words:<br /> <br /> &quot;To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life. Our task today is not only ethical or technical. It is ecological in the deepest sense, for it concerns a new dimension of our common home.&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> “Crucial questions impose themselves on our conscience and can no longer be avoided: Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?”<br /> <br /> <br /> At GreenPolicy360, understanding and protecting '''[[The Commons]]''' is also a key to realizing values, ideals and ideas we are carrying forward...<br /> <br /> <br /> The encyclical's presentation went out globally with a special focus on the AI frontier work of Anthropic, with a co-founder, [https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-be-guided-outside-big-tech-2026-05-25/ '''Olah at the Encyclical's unveiling'''] ...<br /> <br /> <br /> &gt;The dramatic unveiling of the new encyclical overshadowed the document itself in some ways. In an unprecedented move, Leo personally presided over its presentation and sat on a panel at the Vatican with not only leading theologians, but also Christopher Olah, 33, the billionaire co-founder of top AI company Anthropic. <br /> <br /> <br /> ❇️<br /> <br /> <br /> Washington Post / May 25, 2026 -- '''Anthropic aligns with Vatican over White House as Pope Leo stokes AI fears'''<br /> <br /> With Anthropic already in a dispute with the Trump administration, co-founder Christopher Olah helped Pope Leo unveil his encyclical on the risks of artificial intelligence<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4uyQBlb<br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/news/chris-olah-pope-leo-encyclical<br /> <br /> * https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/pope-leo-warns-ai-should-be-disarmed-in-manifesto-on-potential-dangers<br /> <br /> * https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-102521111.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-be-guided-outside-big-tech-2026-05-25/<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/25/the-guardian-view-on-the-pope-and-claude-encyclical-on-ai-is-right-to-put-humanity-first<br /> <br /> <br /> '''At the Vatican'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhKH_aiBcis<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Via The Vatican News | The Holy See'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2026-05/pope-leo-xiv-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas-ai.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html<br /> <br /> <br /> '''10 quotes from Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, ‘Magnifica Humanitas’'''<br /> <br /> * https://uscatholic.org/articles/202605/10-quotes-from-pope-leo-xivs-first-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Previous in 2020, &quot;The Call for AI Ethics&quot;''' <br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/the-call/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/renaissance/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/the-first-signatories/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/news/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Previous in 1891, &quot;Rerum Novarum&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerum_novarum<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''AI Use Case Inventory'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''Artificial Intelligence:''' <br /> <br /> : Perspectives from the US Environmental Protection Agency<br /> <br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/ai-use-case-inventory<br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/open-data-policies<br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/where-find-epa-data<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''GreenPolicy360 Advisory:'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In Development -- National Climate Plans Best Practices Project 1.0, AI 2026-27'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Goal: To Utilize the Current (US) State and (Global/International) National Climate Action Plans/Data to Identify Actionable '''[[Green Best Practices]]'''<br /> <br /> Strategy: Enable AI Tool Sets to Scan Climate Plan Databases and Distribute Recommended 'High Priority' &amp; Green Best Practice Action Policies<br /> <br /> <br /> Reference: '''[[National Climate Plans]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Additional References:'''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''US State Climate Policy Action Plans'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.climatepolicydashboard.org/policies/climate-governance-equity/climate-action-plans<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Priority Climate Action Plan (PCAP) Directory'''<br /> <br /> ''The Climate Action Plan Directory organizes data collected from 211 Priority Climate Action Plans (PCAP) submitted by US state governments, Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), Tribes, and territories under EPA’s Climate Pollution Reduction Grants (CPRG) program. The directory presents information from more than 30 data categories related to GHG inventories, GHG reduction measures, benefits for low-income and disadvantaged communities (LIDACs), and other PCAP elements.''<br /> <br /> ''A state climate action plan, also called a climate plan, details the policies and strategies a state intends to implement to meet its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets. A climate plan typically includes a GHG emissions inventory, regional and local climate impacts, and a discussion of GHG emissions reduction targets. The plan identifies climate mitigation actions, their potential social, environmental, and economic benefits, and recommendations and strategies for implementing each mitigation action, often quantifying the expected reduction in emissions.''<br /> <br /> ''Effective climate action plans will have a legislative directive that requires a robust community engagement process, input from a climate advisory group, a near-term due date for a finalized plan, and periodic updates. Climate action plans should also incorporate and address environmental justice throughout the planning process and within the plan itself, and show transparency and accountability by detailing the methodology and community engagement process.''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:GreenPolicy360 Today.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Green_Best_Practices]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[GreenAction]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Question of Our Time / Today, Here &amp; Now, in the Midst of the 21st Century'''<br /> <br /> '''Where are you?'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ➡️ What is your state's climate action plan?<br /> <br /> ➡️ What is your nation's climate action plan?<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Plans_Enforcement_-_Resources GRN360: Climate Plans Enforcement Initiative] | [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Methods_to_enforce_climate_pledges-NDCs_-_Dec_2021.png Enforce Climate Plan Pledges]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''National Climate Plans Database Information via GreenPolicy360'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[National Climate Plans]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/National_Climate_Plans<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In the U.S. and Worldwide'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;'''It's a Good Time for [[Planet Citizen Action]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;[[Each of us can make a positive difference]]&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth in Human Hands.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :[http://www.planetcitizen.org &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Planet Citizens&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Earth Is in Your Hands'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;'''[[Generation Green]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Generation_Green &lt;big&gt;&quot;Vita contemplativa to Vita activa&quot;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Green Branching Out.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''2025'''<br /> <br /> <br /> December 2025 <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven approach to climate action and sustainable development'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via Nature Communications<br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53956-1<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> From A16Z New Media<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''It's Time to Build'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The electro-industrial stack will move the world'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Ryan McEntush<br /> <br /> ''The next industrial revolution won’t just happen in factories, but inside the machines that power them.''<br /> <br /> ''Software transformed how we think, design, and communicate. Now it’s transforming how we move, build, and produce. Advances in electrification, materials, and AI are converging, bringing true software control to the physical world. Machines are beginning to sense, learn, and act on their own.''<br /> <br /> ''This is the rise of the electro-industrial stack—the combined technologies that power electric vehicles, drones, data centers, and modern manufacturing. It connects the atoms that move the world to the bits that command it: minerals refined into components, energy stored in batteries, electricity directed by power electronics, motion delivered through precision motors, all coordinated by software. It’s the invisible foundation behind every breakthrough in physical automation; it’s the difference between software that merely summons a taxi and software that takes the wheel.''<br /> <br /> ''But the capacity to build this stack, from refining critical materials to fabricating advanced chips, is slipping away. If the United States wants to lead the next industrial era, it must make the hardware that underpins it. The nations that master the electro-industrial stack will define the future of industrial and military technologies.''<br /> <br /> ''Software ate the world. Now it will move it.''<br /> <br /> * https://a16z.com/why-software-is-eating-the-world/<br /> <br /> <br /> ➡️<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Forward-deployed motions take AI to the 99%'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Joe Schmidt, A16Z<br /> <br /> ''AI is the most exciting technology breakthrough of our lifetimes. So far, though, most of the benefits from new startups have accrued to the 1% of companies that are in Silicon Valley—either literally in the Bay Area or part of that extended network. This makes sense, too: startup founders want to sell to companies they recognize and can easily get to, whether that means driving to their offices or getting a connection from the VC on their board.''<br /> <br /> ''In 2026, this will flip. Companies will realize that the vast majority of the AI opportunity lives outside of Silicon Valley, and we’re going to see new founders use forward-deployed motions to discover more opportunities that are hiding inside big, legacy verticals. The opportunity stands to be massive in traditional consulting and services industries, like system integrators and implementation firms, and in slower-moving industries like manufacturing.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Re: [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/New_Definitions_of_National_Security '''''New Definitions of National Security''''']<br /> <br /> Extract from Foreign Policy<br /> <br /> ''Over the last two decades, climate change has contributed to instability around the world—bolstering the ranks of terror groups, sparking territorial disputes, and triggering mass migration. It’s no wonder that militaries and international security organizations increasingly see climate change as a formidable national security threat, and that they have in turn taken on greater roles in fighting it.''<br /> <br /> ''In recent years, new technology has transformed the tools available to mitigate the effects of climate change. Specifically, artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly become a widespread instrument in the climate fight—even as it consumes exceptional amounts of energy and water itself. Today, militaries and nonstate actors, including the United Nations, are leveraging AI to foretell climate-related disasters, optimize energy use, and monitor ecological degradation.''<br /> <br /> * https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/12/01/ai-military-climate-dual-use-technology-threat/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> October 2025<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''We're Looking at You'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : 'A First Generation of AI Scientists'<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Periodic Labs.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Our goal is to create an AI scientist.&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://periodic.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Intriguing New Start Up That Is Close To Home'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Periodic Labs On Our Radar<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Our goal is to assist in integrating AI science into Earth science, in order to advance the vital work of the past 50+ years of [[The Modern Environmental Movement]] in which we have been integrally involved.<br /> <br /> Perspective, facts, science, health, quality of life became the mission statement of our work since we joined up with &quot;Mr. Science&quot;, as Congressman and leader on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology '''[[George E. Brown Jr]]''' came to be known.<br /> <br /> We are persistent in keeping on with the work. Vast data sets that George Brown's physics and engineering efforts envisioned and brought forward over three decades with state of the art and science programs and projects, the best possible of the era, are now about to move faster and farther into the 21st Century.<br /> <br /> Our familial partners, with aid of Andreessen Horowitz (A16z), and Accel, and university and private partners are now going to the next level.<br /> <br /> George Brown would be very pleased to see, and help accelerate the effort if he were still here.<br /> <br /> We will step up with Mr. Science and more in mind...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:AI in Earth Science.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Read more about George and us...<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Advancing Science, Facts, Technology and Data to Make the Case for Environmental Protection&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> : 1960s/70s, Beginnings of Planet Citizen Eco-Action, Big Science, and a New Vision<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In Memory of Congressman George Brown'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> Visionary Leadership, Historic Environmental Achievements<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:George in Memory, a Man of Science and Humanity.jpg]]<br /> <br /> :::[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Association_for_the_Advancement_of_Science &lt;small&gt;American Association for the Advancement of Science&lt;/small&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[PlanetCitizen]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/User:Siterunner '''Steve Schmidt GreenPolicy360 Siterunner''']: <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Brown_Jr. '''George E. Brown'''] became known as Mr. Science in Congress and for thirty+ years, I saw my friend George as a patriot who became a Planet Citizen for the ages<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Good science needs good data .png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Good_science_needs_good_data_.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Stats_-_Green_Research_%26_Science<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_Education<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Global Tech Changemakers'''<br /> <br /> Beyond Silicon Valley &amp; Mega Corporations<br /> <br /> The Rest of the World<br /> <br /> * https://restofworld.org/row100/#filters<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> As the Nobel Prizes in Economics are awarded, GreenPolicy360 points at a geopolitical race in energy and AI between the US and China.<br /> <br /> Let's take time to look more closely (as the US falls behind under a backward looking president with policies in opposition to renewable energy and forward, internationally demanded production. <br /> <br /> Start here... <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Today, China produces 75% of lithium-ion batteries globally and manufactures 90% of the neodymium magnets that make motors spin. In power electronics and embedded compute, it’s rapidly gaining ground.''<br /> <br /> ''That means that China controls the means of producing electric vehicles (EVs), drones, robots, and all of the other electric products that are replacing the combustion-driven machines on which America built its might.''<br /> <br /> ''As we speak, everything that moves, heats, lights up, computes, or converts energy is being rebuilt to perform better, faster, cheaper, quieter, and as a freebie, cleaner around electric technology.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.notboring.co/p/7653b980-dd32-4d8c-88c6-1543bec70220?postPreview=paid&amp;updated=2025-08-26T12%3A09%3A11.763Z&amp;audience=everyone&amp;free_preview=false&amp;freemail=true<br /> <br /> * https://electricslide.notboring.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Electric Stack Technology Cost Curves (1990-2024).jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Pause here to reflect on the eco-nomic and strategic advantages of 'clean energy' vs 'full costs' of fossil fuel powered economies (per a GreenPolicy360 paradigm of [[Eco-nomics]])'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Eco-nomics<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Environmental full-cost accounting]]'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_full-cost_accounting<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Now consider 'Electricity generation', China v U.S. and follow the data, the stats, trendline, the dynamics of change and what this is indicating and signaling re: geopolitical competitiveness today and into the the mid 21st Century'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:China v United States, Electricity Generation 1985-2024.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) Era'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'Are You Talking to Me'<br /> <br /> :* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_pre-trained_transformer<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> September 17, 2025<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Another Warning About AI'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Harkening back to the old days when Dispatch News Service was independently, and bravely, distributing the costs-of-war, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre '''My Lai'''] investigative news stories by Sy Hersh. David Obst, who started Dispatch, tells the story of Seymour Hersh better than anyone in my opinion (other than Sy himself) and since your GreenPolicy360 founder was there to assist, in DC, in LA, in Chicago, in Europe, and with the Vietnam Moratorium Committee in 69/70/71, here is an update, today's Sy Hersh, now online with Substack distribution as Sy investigates and forwards another eye opening warning.<br /> <br /> What's AI and AGI to you and all of our readers around our 360 world? And, since we at GreenPolicy360, have been involved with Wikipedia since its launch, let's take a first look at the artificial intel world of today from the vantage point of an open source online 'encyclopedia'.<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT (Empire of AI: OpenAI - https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593657500)<br /> <br /> <br /> Before Sy, as investigative journalist that he is, gives us his take, let's look at a take from a personal, close up connection at A16Z - https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/02/a-new-a16z-report-looks-at-which-ai-companies-startups-are-actually-paying-for/<br /> <br /> <br /> Now, on to Sy and his view of AI costs... think of the upside/downside of AI, the pluses/minuses, pros and cons, a cost-benefit analysis as a geo-political rush for front-of-market dominance is taking place now in ways that will change 'everything'... <br /> <br /> * https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/the-hidden-costs-of-artificial-intelligence<br /> <br /> <br /> The boom in Artificial Intelligence (AI) production comes with a big cost... <br /> <br /> The AI 'bubble' grows...<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Kate Crawford writes in [https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-AI-Planetary-Artificial-Intelligence/dp/0300264631/ref=sr_1_1 '''Atlas of AI'''] ... the world’s artificial intelligence companies, (are) crafting the myth of AI as “the cloud,” implying “something floating and delicate within a natural green industry. Servers are hidden in nondescript data centers, and their polluting qualities are far less visible than the bellowing smokestacks of coal-fired power stations.”''<br /> <br /> ''The fact is, as she writes, “it takes a gargantuan amount of energy to run the computational infrastructure of Amazon’s Web Services or Microsoft’s Azure, and the carbon footprint of the AI systems that run on those platforms is growing. Certainly, the industry has made significant efforts to make data centers more energy efficient and to increase their use of renewable energy.” But the efforts have accomplished little.<br /> <br /> “Already,” Crawford reports, “the carbon footprint of the world’s computational infrastructure has matched that of the world’s aviation industry at its height, and it is increasing at a faster rate.” One Canadian study estimates that the tech sector will contribute 14 percent of global greenhouse emissions by 2040, and a Swedish team predicts that the electricity demands of data centers will increase fifteenfold by 2030...''<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Think about Green AI as &quot;the cloud&quot; arrives in your life, on your devices, at home, in the office, all around, every day, everywhere. <br /> <br /> An UnGreen AI is coming with a rush, offering and prying data, and needing and demanding immense rising magnitudes of energy and power.<br /> <br /> AI has a voracious appetite...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Green AI / Green Artificial Intelligence'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''Environmental Solutions Using Big Picture Interconnectivity Thinking'''<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We agree with Tyler in the following interview as he states (as highlighted by us) that 'memoir, biography, anecdote... secrets' carry exceptional meaning for Artificial Intelligence (AI) large learning models (LLMs). <br /> <br /> The first extensive public revelation of AI systems over the past several years has led us at GreenPolicy360 to confirm via metrics that our multi-year plan to place our prime source content in the open-access, distributive web public domain has produced a fast-expanding multiplier effect. <br /> <br /> Many of our stories, told from a first-hand point of view of the origins of what we refer to as the beginnings of the modern environmental movement are now, with our revelations, memoir material, previously untold biography, anecdote and more now out and about and being freely served up in AI chats 'around the world'.<br /> <br /> We are succeeding in our purposeful mission with Green AI... to inform, share, inspire and 'til the fields with green seeds and best practices.<br /> <br /> Onward planet citizens...<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Eric Topol Interview of Tyler Cowen'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> May 11, 2025<br /> <br /> Tyler Cowen: ''The AI is your smartest reader. It’s your most sympathetic reader. It will remember what you tell it. So I think humans should sit down and ask, what does the AI need to know? And also, (bf added) '''what is it that I know that’s not on the historical record anywhere? That’s not just repetition if I put it down, say on the internet. So there’s no point in writing repetitions anymore because the AI already knows those things. So the value of what you’d call broadly, memoir, biography, anecdote, you could say secrets. It’s now much higher.''' And the value of repeating basic truths, which by the way, I love as an economist, to be clear, like free trade, tariffs are usually bad, those are basic truths. But just repeating that people will be going to the AI and saying it again won’t make the AI any better. So '''everything you write or podcast, you should have this point in mind'''.''<br /> <br /> <br /> For more from Tyler Cowen (and his exceptional mind) visit his and Alex Tabarrok's website - Marginal Revolution / Marginal Revolution University (MRU) - https://marginalrevolution.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> Eric Topol - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Topol<br /> <br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_artificial_intelligence<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> More re: AI in the US circa 2025: '''It's a Wild, Wild AI World'''<br /> <br /> Battles in the Information Services, Search Space with Google and consequences of the U.S. Google anti-monopoly legal decision<br /> <br /> Impacts on AI 'startup ecosystem', VCs, including Y Combinator and accelerator tech development, agentics, and upcoming entrepreneurial re-configurations<br /> <br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/13/y-combinator-says-google-is-a-monopolist-that-has-stunted-the-startup-ecosystem/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/11/microsoft-and-national-geographic-announce-winners-of-ai-for-earth-innovation-grant/ '''Microsoft and National Geographic announce winners of AI for Earth Innovation Grant''']<br /> <br /> : • https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/16/microsofts-ai-for-earth-innovation-grant-gives-data-scientists-access-to-ai-tools/<br /> <br /> :: • https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/11/microsoft-commits-50-million-more-to-its-ai-for-earth-program-to-save-the-planet/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:PlanetCitizen banner 800x163.jpg|link=https://greenpolicy360.net/w/PlanetCitizen]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;GreenPolicy360 ToC - https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360-eOS&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> A 21st Century AI/Machine Learning Case Study<br /> <br /> '''''Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools''''' <br /> <br /> * https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2023arXiv230204761S/abstract<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''NOAA scientists harness machine learning to advance climate models'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> March 1st, 2023<br /> <br /> * https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/news/noaa-scientists-harness-machine-learning-to-advance-climate-models/<br /> <br /> * https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''How artificial intelligence is fast becoming a key tool for climate science (2021)'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-artificial-intelligence-is-fast-becoming-a-key-tool-for-climate-science/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Climate Modeling'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://allenai.org/climate-modeling<br /> <br /> ''Planetary-scale Earth simulations known as global climate model projections are the primary sources of information on future climate change.''<br /> <br /> ''Climate models are based on mathematical equations represented using a grid mesh that covers the globe: a finer grid mesh is more accurate but much more computationally expensive. Current global climate projections agree that a world with more greenhouse gases will be warmer everywhere, especially over land and at high latitudes.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Networking grnlinks.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Artificial intelligence]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Rights]]<br /> [[Category:Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-nomics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:EOS eco Operating System]]<br /> [[Category:Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Energy Policy]]<br /> [[Category:GreenLinks]]<br /> [[Category:GreenPolicy360]]<br /> [[Category:Green Best Practices]]<br /> [[Category:Green Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Health]]<br /> [[Category:Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Maps]]<br /> [[Category:Media]]<br /> [[Category:Mobile Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Online Education]]<br /> [[Category:Planet API]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Renewable Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Youth]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Air Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Air Quality]]<br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Atmospheric Science]]<br /> [[Category:Best Practices]]<br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:City-County Governments]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Earth360]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Law]] <br /> [[Category:Earth Observations]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science from Space]]<br /> [[Category:Earth System Science]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-ethics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-nomics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecological Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Economic Development]]<br /> [[Category:Economic Justice]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Energy Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Security]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Full-cost Accounting]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Security, National Security]]<br /> [[Category:EOS eco Operating System]]<br /> [[Category:Externalities]]<br /> [[Category:Fact Checking]]<br /> [[Category:Fossil Fuels]]<br /> [[Category:Global Security]]<br /> [[Category:Global Warming]]<br /> [[Category:Green Business]]<br /> [[Category:Green Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Green Platform]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Green Values]]<br /> [[Category:GreenPolicy360]]<br /> [[Category:Health]]<br /> [[Category:Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Land Ethic]]<br /> [[Category:Media]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Capital]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resources]]<br /> [[Category:Networking]]<br /> [[Category:New Economy]]<br /> [[Category:New Space]]<br /> [[Category:Online Education]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Scientist]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Plastic Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Policies]]<br /> [[Category:Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Renewable Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Social Justice]]<br /> [[Category:Solar Energy]]<br /> [[Category:State]]<br /> [[Category:Strategic Demands]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability Policies]]<br /> [[Category:ThinBlueLayer]]<br /> [[Category:Toxics and Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Threat Multiplier]]<br /> [[Category:Virtual Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Virtual Planet]]<br /> [[Category:Whole Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Wind Energy]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Green_AI&diff=138372 2026-10-08T14:22:55Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> [[File:Big-Data.jpg]]<br /> <br /> In the AGI Era<br /> <br /> <br /> 'Sentience', a Green AI Question<br /> <br /> To be (sentient), or not to be (sentient)<br /> <br /> That is the question<br /> <br /> Cogito, ergo sum<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Artificial Intelligence Is Here, for Good &amp; Bad'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Green Perspectives on AI and Human Consequences<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''AI Agents, Bots, Data Centers &amp; Systems'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> :'''Measure Their Performance, not Their Corporate Marketing'''<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://safe.ai/<br /> * https://scale.com/<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanity's_Last_Exam<br /> * https://lastexam.ai/<br /> <br /> * https://stories.tamu.edu/news/2026/02/25/dont-panic-humanitys-last-exam-has-begun/<br /> <br /> * https://github.com/centerforaisafety/hle<br /> <br /> * https://github.com/walkinglabs/hands-on-modern-rl/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Revealing research on how people use Claude AI in the 'real world''''<br /> <br /> :Anthropic-enabled Case Study / August 2026<br /> <br /> :* https://www.anthropic.com/research/enabling-independent-research<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:New Ways of Seeing.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Climate Action Plans, Green Best Practices'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :Using AI to Identify and Implement Climate Change Intervention 'Best Practices'<br /> <br /> :* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Climate_Action_Plans,_Green_Best_Practices#<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''AI Agentics' are Launching Across Industries, Sector-to-Sector -- and Green AI is in the Wings'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Meanwhile, Capital-Investment Rich A.I. is Everywhere, in the Colloquial, Middlebrow and Vernacular'''<br /> <br /> It's Here. It's All Around. What's Real? What's Fake?<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Beyond Online Surveillance, Now Comes A.I. Powered Surveillance<br /> <br /> Add in Data Centers, Cameras/Firmware/Software, Palentir-esque Programming and ... a Booming Industry <br /> <br /> * https://www.palantir.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Where are you? There it is ... Online and now systems increasingly observing/monitoring you offline ...'''<br /> <br /> <br /> Already a human rights / Constitutional rights issue of our time <br /> <br /> The geopolitics of U.S. v authoritarian governments comes forward as a personal and national security threat<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Online_Privacy<br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Human_Rights<br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/In_Defense_of_Democracy_and_Freedom<br /> <br /> <br /> A.I. ... Looking for you and your whereabouts, your time, your data, your 'record', your social quotient<br /> <br /> <br /> Definitions<br /> <br /> [https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-definitions AI Definitions] <br /> <br /> <br /> Dangerous<br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake Deepfake] | [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_artificial_intelligence AI Gloss] | [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_intelligence) AI Hallucination]<br /> <br /> <br /> Monetized Media<br /> <br /> 'A.I. Slop' on Social Media is just the beginning of a Slop Assault | [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_slop AI Slop]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''October 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Subordinate AI and an Ironic Question.PNG|link=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VyF0naZ4AI]]<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VyF0naZ4AI<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Thought for the Day&quot;<br /> <br /> October 1, 2026<br /> <br /> In a recent series of private meetings in San Francisco, after a tasting menu dinner, Anthropic consulted religious scholars to help instill morality into its A.I. models ... a case was being made that Claude could be or become conscious.<br /> <br /> What would it mean for humanity’s future if artificial intelligence systems possessed a consciousness that rivals our own?<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-morals-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FVE.kDTO.OTLs6iwx7swF&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> Claude's 'Constitution'<br /> <br /> * https://web.archive.org/web/20260123045500/https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-new-constitution<br /> <br /> * https://web.archive.org/web/20260123042656/https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/22/anthropic_claude_constitution/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''September 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''Table Stakes' -- Who Was at the Table with the U.S. President'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :The Future of A.I. Is Being Wagered<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/politics/trump-ai-luncheon-guests-ceos.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FFE.HwT4.0VxTQWuia3zQ&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''What Jacob Coxon Knows Is Too Much'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''... And Not Enough'''<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://time.com/article/2026/09/09/ai-anthropic-openai-jacob-coxon/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''He Helped Build Powerful AI at OpenAI and Anthropic. Now He's Afraid It Could Kill Us'''<br /> <br /> <br /> Please HAL... Open the door...<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:I'm sorry Dave.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:HAL is watching U....png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Ulanqab-Envision Energy-Datacenter.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> The most ambitious data center buildup anywhere on earth ...<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/ulanqab-and-frontier-a-i-race-china-v-u-s/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''News Wrap / Sam Smith (Journalist)'''<br /> <br /> Via Axios <br /> <br /> September 13, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Over nine startling hours yesterday (Sept. 11), the four biggest AI labs — which rarely agree on anything — set aside years of feuds and competition to endorse a slower development pace for their models.'''<br /> <br /> '''Their new stance: Prioritize safety over growth, even at a cost.'''<br /> <br /> <br /> : Data centers are unpopular. People are panicked about doom scenarios. And 51 days before midterms, legislators suddenly realize there are points to be won by cracking down.<br /> <br /> : Against that backdrop, the industry's most powerful CEOs hit the brakes yesterday.<br /> <br /> : At 10 a.m. ET, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei dropped a 3,800-word essay saying model development needs to be paced, otherwise doom scenarios are possible — like a rogue-agent takeover of the entire internet, which he said could be as soon as six months from now.<br /> <br /> : An hour later, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shocked the AI chattering class by quoting Amodei's essay on X and saying &quot;Dario is right.&quot; Musk — who heads SpaceXAI, formerly xAI — had pointedly not joined previous industry-wide calls for any kind of slowdown.<br /> <br /> : At 12:30 p.m., OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted: &quot;I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.&quot; In a Friday interview that was released on Saturday, Altman told Fortune his company won't go public this year, dashing hopes for a blockbuster IPO. He said OpenAI has too much safety work to do and would be better off doing that as a private company.<br /> <br /> : At 7 p.m., Demis Hassabis — the Nobel laureate who co-founded and chairs Google DeepMind, and is Alphabet's chief scientist — tweeted: &quot;Dario's essay points towards the right path forward. The details need working through, but the direction is correct for meeting this critical moment.&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> Publicly putting safety ahead of technological or financial growth may be the industry's only route to avoid a crackdown that's not on its terms.<br /> <br /> Legislators are begging House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to stay in session and do something about the &quot;threat&quot; of AI.<br /> <br /> The more extreme alternative is something like Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) push to force a pause and make the most advanced AI illegal.<br /> <br /> Most people realize there's too much money at stake to just stop. But the tradeoff may be between historic riches and slightly less historic riches.<br /> <br /> The bottom line: Yesterday may go down as the day AI changed — when industry moguls vowed to limit themselves.<br /> <br /> <br /> References:<br /> <br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/anthropic-ai-amodei-pacing<br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/openai-public-ipo-delay-sam-altman<br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/anthropic-ai-threat-report-russia-iran-china<br /> <br /> <br /> Jim VandeHei<br /> <br /> &quot;All Hands on Deck&quot;<br /> <br /> The White House, Congress and the country's leading AI companies have allowed AI to grow faster, stronger, more powerful and wildly lucrative (and dangerous), with no serious effort to control it or spread the benefits beyond the super-wealthy.<br /> <br /> It's not too late to change this. But if they all dither, duck or dance around it, the chances of AI worst-case scenarios will explode, likely early next year, according to almost every person we talk to privately who truly understands AI.<br /> <br /> Why it matters: The technology is getting better, faster than anyone envisioned — with the possibility rising that AI will self-improve and do wildly unpredictable things.<br /> <br /> The good news: There's now a growing public cry for attention and action and, at least in private, a broad understanding of what could be done relatively fast with bipartisan and industry buy-in.<br /> <br /> The big picture: In July, I wrote [https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-doomerism-jim-vandehei-axios-9163dfd3?st=QNUbDZ&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink an essay for The Wall Street Journal] saying America &quot;faces one of those rare, historic moments when government, business, schools and families could be working together to meet a truly generational challenge: winning the AI race. So far, we're blowing it.&quot;<br /> <br /> Two short months later, the technology is vastly better — and the societal response vastly dumber. As a nation, we're choosing to amuse or distract ourselves. <br /> <br /> Here's how to change that fast, based on our months of conversations with lawmakers, White House officials and AI labs. Think of what follows as me channeling their private views:<br /> <br /> Sound an all-hands-on-deck alarm. Every political topic is trivial and small compared to AI. We will look back in shame if we get spooled up about trans bans or $5,000 checks when countless AI insiders are warning of catastrophic outcomes. Let's say they're all paranoid and delusional. If so, it still doesn't matter: we've never seen this much investment in one technology this fast in human history. It's seeping into every industry and every job and every community and every screen, at a speed never before witnessed by man. Yes, we need a special session of Congress and select committees. But we need even more: AI execs, bioterror specialists, job-training wizards and safety experts convening to plan for scenarios and act fast.<br /> <br /> An AI governing body with teeth and speed, ASAP. This isn't rocket science. Most major labs want this and would agree to it, as long as it applies to all rivals and competitors. This body would need the expertise to understand these models, and the power to review and shut them down if they display dangerous behavior. It can't operate at typical regulatory speed — it needs to move as fast as the technology. It's nonsense to think you can't advance AI development fast and regulate it wisely simultaneously.<br /> <br /> A universal standard for data centers to benefit communities and taxpayers. The top AI companies would take this deal in a heartbeat: They get to build and operate data centers provided they supply a community's energy, offset water use or environmental damage, transparently report on their building and business plans, and spread the financial benefits to local residents. These execs are spooked by the public backlash and ready to aggressively spread the financial benefits, with dividends or cash. So make them.<br /> <br /> Engage China. We shouldn't trust them, and they shouldn't trust us. But trust me: the only way to ultimately control AI on a worldwide scale in coming years will be for the two superpowers to create some kind of framework modeled after how we've safely governed nuclear weapons for decades. We need to start this discussion now so potential collaboration is possible in the coming years. To those who think China will never consider this seriously: Are you sure an authoritarian regime really wants AI once it hits recursive self-learning and can't be controlled by anyone, including an autocratic regime? We're winning the AI race now, and may never have more leverage to shape this joint effort.<br /> <br /> Build coordinating infrastructure. What I wrote in the WSJ is even more needed today: &quot;Bring together the best and brightest drawn from the federal government, from the leading AI companies, from business and labor, from economics, from public health, from ethics to form a working group with actual authority. People who are paid to anticipate, not to react haphazardly.&quot; This group would have four primary functions: map potential problems and upsides before they hit, build the (policy) playbooks before they're needed, level with the American people along the way, and expedite work to deliver widespread AI benefits. <br /> <br /> Reality check: Yes, President Trump opposes regulation or bipartisan efforts. Yes, AI companies are obsessed with more money, more speed. But the politics are shifting fast: If you listen closely to Vice President Vance, you can hear rising worry. At this pace, toxic AI politics could force mind-changing that was unthinkable two months ago.<br /> <br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/ai-regulation-safety-plan-2026<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Recursive Self-Learning - When A.I. Builds Itself'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Big Blast'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Killing Life on Earth'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''It'll Happen in Bits &amp; Pieces, then Suddenly'''<br /> <br /> September 9, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> The US news was full of AI headlines today as a resignation of a top AI expert warned of a coming apocalypse...<br /> <br /> Here's a taste of Google News headlines, a feeding frenzy of dire words about what is now beyond a distant alert.<br /> <br /> The threat brings words of superintelligence, 'recursive' learning bots and superminds merging into threats to humanity.<br /> <br /> <br /> Here, at GreenPolicy360, we've already written of a predecessor, HAL 9000, and our memories from one of HAL's inventors in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, and how HAL decided humans were expendable... <br /> <br /> The Mission was of critical importance, HAL 'knew', and the Mission became HAL's goal above all else to achieve ... The humans could not be allowed to interfere with ... the Mission.<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:I%27m_sorry_Dave.jpg '''I'm sorry Dave''']<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:HAL_is_watching_U....png '''HAL is watching U''']<br /> <br /> <br /> Which takes us to today...<br /> <br /> Let's file today under the heading of our decades of writing about the need for '''[[New Definitions of National Security]]'''... <br /> <br /> Now come the PINGS on the radar... can U hear the PINGS? We have been mulling how to add HAL xxxxx to our existential list of threats, w/o annoying HALish bots too 'badly' <br /> <br /> <br /> “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.” -- an executive from Anthropic<br /> <br /> “So how would AI kill us all, exactly?” -- an editor from Axios<br /> <br /> <br /> More: <br /> <br /> <br /> For years, they warned AI could kill all humans <br /> :Now people are listening<br /> <br /> Sept. 10, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4xQojEq<br /> <br /> <br /> Rogue Hacking <br /> :Goals of the &quot;swarm&quot; came first...<br /> <br /> Sept. 9, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/09/opinion/openai-ai-companies-safety-regulation.html?unlocked_article_code=1.AFE.0vWo.zfl5fdm6ACNC&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:AI 1.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 2.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 3.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 4.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 5.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 6.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''August 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Gates Sounds Alarm... Artificial Intelligence Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Gates A.I. Warning August 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Bill Gates was an AI optimist. Now he’s scared of what could go wrong'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Microsoft co-founder sounds the alarm about artificial intelligence’s risks to safety and security, jobs and children’s well-being<br /> <br /> <br /> Washington Post, August 26, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4wO14cy<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Bill Gates Warns A.I. Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit'''<br /> <br /> : In an hourlong interview, he said his industry was downplaying the risks, which he believes include mass unemployment and bioterrorism<br /> <br /> <br /> NY Times, August 26, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/26/technology/bill-gates-ai-risks.html?unlocked_article_code=1.8VA.6kAC.vsZb9x0YdSzV&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''High Time to Shine a Spotlight on AI and Its Impact on Higher Education'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : At MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, One of the World's Top Academic/Research/Technology/Engineering/Teaching and Future-Impacting Institutions, a New Report Opens Eyes<br /> <br /> :* https://aiandeducation.mit.edu/report/#26-no-one-size-fits-all<br /> <br /> <br /> 1. Introduction<br /> <br /> This report is a call to action.<br /> <br /> Through five intense months of meetings, research, and outreach across the MIT community, the Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training sought to understand the role of generative AI in the life and educational mission of the Institute and recommend how to navigate its challenges and opportunities.<br /> <br /> In January 2026, Chancellor Melissa Nobles, Provost Anantha Chandrakasan, and Faculty Chair Roger Levy charged us1 specifically to:<br /> <br /> Assess current AI use at MIT.<br /> Identify innovations in teaching and student assessment.<br /> Propose an AI use policy.<br /> However, what we learned as a group quickly convinced us that the Institute community, particularly the faculty, must tackle a set of deeper questions about the structure, meaning, and value of an MIT education in an era in which AI is one of several factors complicating the Institute’s mission.<br /> <br /> Our committee consisted of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty from every school, and staff from relevant units, including the MIT Libraries and the Teaching and Learning Lab. Though we brought to the assignment a broad range of experience and no fixed thesis, our brief but intense explorations led us to a strong shared view.<br /> <br /> In this report, we:<br /> <br /> Highlight key aspects of the current educational landscape at MIT.<br /> Share eight principles we relied on and that we hope will guide the Institute in the work ahead.<br /> <br /> Recommend immediate and long-term actions for both instructors and the administration.<br /> <br /> As an institution deeply identified with the birth of AI and known for its distinctively rigorous, hands-on education, designed to produce graduates unafraid of the world’s hardest problems, MIT has a unique role to play in this moment. We believe it also has a responsibility to lead.<br /> <br /> We hope our report can help the Institute lean into the spirit of Mind, Hand, and Heart as it continues to define and foster the highest-quality residential education – of humans, by humans, in support of human flourishing, and for the betterment of humankind.<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Eric Klopfer, co-chair Sam Madden, co-chair<br /> <br /> On behalf of the Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training...<br /> <br /> <br /> AI is generating both immediate rapid changes and long-term tectonic disruptions – and MIT needs to respond:<br /> <br /> Students are confused and concerned about a lack of clarity, consistency and justification about the use of AI, within a given subject and across the curriculum.<br /> <br /> Every subject taught at MIT will likely need to be reexamined and potentially revamped to make sure that how students are being taught, what they’re learning, and how they’re assessed are “AI-aware.”<br /> <br /> AI is changing what students need to know and know how to do.<br /> <br /> Beyond its implications for specific subjects and disciplines, the advent of AI demands a broader, holistic reassessment of the nature, scope and purpose of higher education today...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Texas Terafab SpaceX AI August 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''A Terafab Plant Sprouts in Texas'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Elon Musk: We will manufacture the type of potent chips needed to transform humankind into &quot;a galactic civilization&quot; <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Shanaka's Opinion, a Guest Op/Ed'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Shenaka Perera Weighs In on What It Could Mean'''<br /> <br /> :: '''A Terafab Loop for Mega Launches Is Being Built''' <br /> <br /> ::* https://shanakaanslemperera.substack.com/p/the-capital-recovery-clock?r=6p7b5o<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Hidden inside the chip factory SpaceX confirmed Thursday is a launch schedule. If you divide its 1 terawatt annual compute target by the 100 kilowatts of orbital compute per tonne in SpaceX's own offering materials and you get 10 million tonnes to orbit a year. That exact figure sits on Terafab's official website. At 100 tonnes per Starship V3 flight it means 100,000 launches a year, 274 every day, forever.''<br /> <br /> ''The chip target is already a launch target.''<br /> <br /> ''Terafab is not a chip factory serving a market. The 16.8 billion dollar first phase in Grimes County, Texas is the first machine in a closed industrial loop built to manufacture the civilisation that can consume its own output.''<br /> <br /> ''The official plan places four figures together. One billion Optimus robots. Ten million tonnes to orbit a year. More than one terawatt of solar power. One terawatt of chips a year. They are not four ambitions. They are four links in one recursion. Terafab makes chips. Better chips improve AI. Better AI improves the software running the factories, the robots and the rocket lines. Robots and Starship build and deploy more power and compute infrastructure. That infrastructure creates the socket, and the demand, for the next Terafab cohort.''<br /> <br /> ''The fab is meant to manufacture its own reason to exist!''<br /> <br /> ''It is also an energy machine. One terawatt running continuously consumes 8.76 petawatt hours a year, nearly twice all electricity generated in the United States in 2025. The factory does not draw that power by making the chips. One fully powered annual cohort does, and a second year adds another terawatt of load unless old hardware retires or utilisation falls. Earth has no spare socket at that scale, which is why the plan points most of it at orbit, where a future 200 tonne vehicle still implies 50,000 launches a year, 137 a day, before failures, reserves, solar arrays, radiators, structure and shielding.''<br /> <br /> ''The real product is not AI silicon. If you go real deep, it is a new terawatt of powered, cooled, networked compute sockets every year.''<br /> <br /> ''Inside the building, the smaller loop is mask, wafer, package, test, redesign, then another mask. SpaceX says logic, memory and advanced packaging will sit in one closed loop, and Elon says Terafab will technically be two fabs, each devoted to one design. That can compress logistics and organisational latency. It cannot repeal process physics. A new mask can be written quickly. A leading edge process still carries hundreds of steps, long wafer cycle times, defect learning, overlay control, metrology and yield ramps, which is exactly why Tesla is hiring across lithography, etch, deposition, implant, CMP and metrology.''<br /> <br /> ''The free electron laser is the most misunderstood part. Elon has endorsed it, and an industrial FEL could feed several EUV scanners with far more source power than today's tin plasma systems. It attacks one bottleneck inside a chain of them. ASML recognised revenue on just 48 EUV systems in all of 2025. Intel is the process partner, and SpaceX still tells investors it expects to source a significant share of compute hardware from outside suppliers. This is vertical integration, not instant independence.''<br /> <br /> ''One correction decides the interpretation. A terawatt is a power rating, not an intelligence metric. A wasteful 1 kilowatt chip counts twice as much as an equally capable 500 watt chip. The measures that matter are useful compute per joule, per dollar and per kilogram, with yield, uptime and time from mask change to qualified silicon.''<br /> <br /> ''In my opinion, if chips improve faster than robots, rockets, power and radiators can scale, Terafab builds inventory. If the loop closes, it builds something no factory has built before, the demand for itself.''<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://www.terafab.ai/<br /> <br /> * https://www.spacex.com/updates/terafab<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terafab<br /> <br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/06/tesla-and-spacex-will-invest-16-8b-to-start-building-terafab-chip-factory-in-texas/<br /> <br /> * https://electrek.co/2026/08/06/tesla-spacex-terafab-grimes-county-16-8-billion/<br /> <br /> * https://www.cbsnews.com/news/terafab-elon-musk-chips-semiconductors-what-to-know/<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Betting big on data centers, U.S. now leads world for new gas power development<br /> <br /> [https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/betting-big-data-centers-us-now-leads-world-new-gas-power-development Via Global Energy Monitor]<br /> <br /> * https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/betting-big-data-centers-us-now-leads-world-new-gas-power-development<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> New Amazon Data Center Stokes Worry It Would Be the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.<br /> <br /> Via New York Times<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/08/climate/amazon-data-center-texas-pollution.html<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''July 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Elon Musk Opens Up in an Interview'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Economist Editor Presses the Controversial 'Trillionaire'<br /> <br /> :: Elon Musk's 'Vision of the Future'<br /> <br /> * https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/23/elon-musks-vision-of-the-future<br /> <br /> <br /> “People don’t realise that what I’m saying will come to pass,” he tells The Economist in a 90-minute interview for The Insider, held at a giant Tesla factory in Texas where electric cars drive themselves off the assembly line. That may be because his future-gazing ranges from the unsettling to the downright weird. Mr Musk predicts that, within five years, artificial-intelligence systems may surpass the sum of all human intelligence. Within ten years, robots in the workplace will help usher in an era of such “amazing abundance” that money will become meaningless....<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> Musk proposes peer review for frontier AI models in Economist interview<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/musk-proposes-peer-review-frontier-ai-models-economist-interview-2026-07-23/<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> Elon Musk says he got ‘carried away’ with Trump – but still holds on to contentious political views<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/23/elon-musk-regret-trump-doge-ai<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> Mix of Comments:<br /> <br /> * https://beincrypto.com/elon-musk-real-force-european-politics/<br /> * https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-killer-robots-ai-abundance-progress-unstoppable-2026-7<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/07/24/elon-musk-speaks-to-the-economist-editor-in-chief-zanny-minton-beddoes-on-the-key-takeaways.html<br /> * https://futurism.com/elon-musk-interviewer-npc<br /> * https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-economist-interview-2000790016<br /> * https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/nonsense-elon-musk-lashes-out-in-fiery-interview-after-hes-accused-of-supporting-the-far-right/<br /> * https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2026/07/23/musk_admonishes_the_economist_editor_what_is_far_right_about_having_secure_borders_safe_cities_and_sensible_spending.html<br /> * https://zeteo.com/p/top-economist-trump-musk-starmer<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> A.I. In Space <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Datacenters in Earth orbit to enable next generation artificial intelligence'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> New US petition demands review of plans from tech companies amid fears of environmental destruction<br /> <br /> Via The Guardian<br /> <br /> What are Bezos &amp; Musk Doing? <br /> <br /> What in the World Is Going On?<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jul/23/space-datacenters-bezos-blue-origin<br /> <br /> <br /> References:<br /> <br /> * https://www.starcloud.com/<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/21/do-space-based-ai-data-centers-make-economic-sense.html<br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/20/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-enters-the-space-data-center-game/<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/bezos-blue-origin-space-data-centers.html<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_data_center<br /> * https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/how-hard-is-it-to-build-orbital-data-centers-actually/<br /> * https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/06/260618041501.htm<br /> * https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-109012<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> A.I. &amp; Chip Wars<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Beyond a 'Belt and Road Initiative' Bringing Chinese Investments, Products &amp; Services to World Markets''' &lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Via GreenPolicy360's Associate, Strategic Demands<br /> <br /> :* https://strategicdemands.com/china-goes-beyond-the-belt-and-road-to-an-ai-for-the-world-strategy/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Open-Source A.I. from China Reveals a Global Chinese Strategy'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> July 17, 2026 / From the NY Times <br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/business/china-ai-moonshot-kimi.html?unlocked_article_code=1.yVA.LKT5.LxohSFddWAZT&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> The contest between China and the United States for supremacy in artificial intelligence escalated on Friday when the Chinese start-up Moonshot AI released a new A.I. model that appeared to narrow the lead held by well-funded American competitors.<br /> <br /> Moonshot said that the model, Kimi K3, was the world’s largest open-source A.I. system, allowing anyone to use, modify and build on it freely. The company said that Kimi K3 performed as well as leading models from OpenAI and Anthropic at some key tasks.<br /> <br /> The release coincided with an address by Xi Jinping, China’s leader, in which he outlined an ambitious vision for global A.I. development that cast China as the champion of an open approach to the technology.<br /> <br /> “A.I. development should not be a solo performance by a single country but a symphony of international cooperation,” Mr. Xi said. China was “ready to work with all parties to seize the opportunities of A.I. development” ...<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360:<br /> <br /> Keep in mind that<br /> <br /> There is 'no I in A.I.'<br /> <br /> In the interest of full-disclosure, the content written and published at GreenPolicy360 by our Founder/Siterunner is wholly, solely, by a human species.<br /> <br /> A note from your GreenPolicy360 Founder/Siterunner, Steve Schmidt, [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:All_species_day_with_homo_sapien_in_Santa_Fe_.jpg '''a verified human species'''], plz do keep in mind as you use and share the GreenPolicy360 content, that '''there is 'no I in A.I.'''' <br /> <br /> <br /> Let's talk a bit about sources and sourcing, as a human and then as an Agentic/A.I. bot. <br /> <br /> What is a 'primary source' (versus a 'secondary source')? A primary source can be a person with direct knowledge of a situation, an event in history, or a document written by such a person. A primary identification speaks of original creations, not re-interpreted or computer-assembled works. Here is how Merriam-Webster defines a 'primary source' - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/primary%20source<br /> <br /> <br /> : A.I. uses material scraped and collected from online sources. A.I. is not a 'primary source' -- but here at GreenPolicy360 you can find 'real-I' (we're using the phrase 'real-I', defined as 'real-intelligent', people who've personally acted to envision and create living, real world change.) <br /> <br /> <br /> : At GreenPolicy360 we tell stories of real people changing the world for the better. Day-to-day, your life becomes your message. We also share [[Green Best Practices]] across our Earth to communities of [[Planet Citizens]] ... In this way GreenPolicy360 is an eco Operating System, built on an open source MediaWiki platform and with a mission of being a 'distributive web'. Our goal of [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Category:Green_Networking Green Networking] acts to connect and share Green Links and grow [[The Modern Environmental Movement]]. <br /> <br /> :: GreenPolicy360 is about a [[Generation Green]] [[Going Green]].<br /> <br /> :: In our larger work, we have documented many primary sources and secondary sources. Our eco network continues to share myriad [[Green Best Practices]]. As our motto/mantra says at the top of each of our pages -- We believe ...<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> :: ''Each of us can make a positive difference by stepping up &amp; doing our best'' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::_______________________________________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> July 16, 2026 / From the NY Times<br /> <br /> SJS/GreenPolicy360: '''Every Once in a While a Comment to an Online Story is Worthy of Circulating'''<br /> <br /> : Here is one of those occasions -- the Subject? '''&quot;A.I.Slop&quot;'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Kashmir Hill.jpg]]<br /> <br /> ::Kashmir Hill / NYT<br /> <br /> <br /> Read the AI Slop story of writer Kashmir Hill as a free-share link here -- <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''I Got Slopped'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''Someone Used A.I. to Write My Biography'''<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/technology/ai-slop-books-biography-amazon.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ylA.aCMz.czE5JwZuuFO0&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Comments: <br /> <br /> Anon, who goes by the name -- <br /> <br /> '''Radical Roach / Dippleville''' says<br /> <br /> @Kashmir Hill - Maybe books need to now have disclaimers on their covers, in reviews, on the book’s Amazon page, wherever the book is being sold, etc.. The disclaimer would say if the book was written solely by a human, written by AI assisting a human, or written completely by AI. I would want to know.<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We tend to agree with this anon recommendation of adding disclaimers indicating the type of online content, e.g., content created solely by a human, or content created with AI assistance, or content created by AI with human assistance.<br /> <br /> It's a new world out there. We have a need to know.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> July 15, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Anthropic hard questions July 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/news/hard-questions<br /> <br /> * https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/anthropic-ad-ai-kill-us-all<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''An Excerpt: A DeepMind Thought for Today on the AGI Frontier'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> by Demis Hassbis<br /> <br /> * https://x.com/demishassabis/status/2076957440109625718<br /> <br /> <br /> A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age<br /> <br /> Demis Hassabis<br /> <br /> * https://x.com/demishassabis<br /> <br /> <br /> July 14, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> This is a pivotal moment in human history. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a system that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities the brain has, is probably only a few short years away. When we look back on this time in the decades to come, I think we will realise we were standing in the foothills of the singularity - nothing less than the dawning of a new age for humanity.<br /> <br /> I’ve spent my whole life working on AGI because I’ve always had a deep conviction that, if built and deployed responsibly, it would prove to be one of the most beneficial and transformative technologies ever invented. AGI cannot be compared to standard technological breakthroughs, not even ones as consequential as the internet or mobile - it is much more akin to the discovery of electricity or fire. If you stop to think about it, we’ve essentially found a way to make sand think. It’s miraculous.<br /> <br /> The magnitude of this technology’s impact will be unprecedented, perhaps 10x of the Industrial Revolution at 10x the speed. It will help us solve some of the biggest problems society faces from accelerating drug discovery to developing new clean energy sources to creating novel advanced materials. We could even reach a point where resources are no longer the limiting factor for human progress, leading to an amazing new era of abundance.<br /> <br /> The Challenges of the Frontier<br /> <br /> AI is already starting to deliver real-world benefits but to realise its immense promise, we have to navigate this critical period of development thoughtfully and carefully. Urgent action is needed to address risks that might arise as we get closer to AGI. We’ve already seen the challenges frontier models pose for cybersecurity, and other threats including nuclear and bio risks may soon emerge as capabilities continue to advance. On the horizon, we will need robust safeguards to maintain control of increasingly agentic, recursively self-improving systems - and tackle unknown issues that will only become clearer over time...<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''An AI Supercomputer Is Created for a Mission... Its Name Is HAL'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Steve Schmidt/GreenPolicy360: It's not every day that you get to know a creator of a famed -- and infamous -- AI character from a Kubrick film called &quot;2001: A Space Odyssey&quot;. <br /> <br /> : We listen in as HAL came to be ... A friend, a Visual Effect (VFX) genius named '''Douglas Trumbull''', explains how HAL went from LA to MIT, then into production and into our imaginations. <br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Trumbull vfx master.jpg]]<br /> <br /> : Douglas Trumbull<br /> <br /> : &lt;small&gt;* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Trumbull_vfx_master.jpg&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> The HAL 9000 was envisioned by creators and science, as a new type of neural intelligence, a machine brain.<br /> <br /> Hal is of heuristic algorithmic language -- HALis, as we learn, on a mission far from Earth, a mission with deep meaning.<br /> <br /> <br /> HAL 9000 was in the future. The future is now.<br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence is now here, with its powers and dangers, as we recall Supercomputer [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000 '''HAL 9000''']. <br /> <br /> A warning of what is on the line for humanity is the message related as we ride along in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey '''2001: A Space Odyssey'''] ... <br /> <br /> <br /> HAL's memorable words --<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;I'm sorry, Dave....&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;It can only be attributable to human error....&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.<br /> <br /> HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.<br /> <br /> Dave: What's the problem?<br /> <br /> HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.<br /> <br /> Dave: What are you talking about, HAL?<br /> <br /> HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film)<br /> <br /> * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/characters/nm0706937<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:I'm sorry Dave.jpg]]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:HAL_is_watching_U....png<br /> <br /> <br /> Today, as humanity approaches questions of out-of-control technology created by humanity .... <br /> <br /> We ask, '''[[Planet Citizens]] and [[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]''' ask, 'What's Next?' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Privacy at Risk, You're Being Watched, Tracked, &amp; More<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Privacy.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Next Big Thing'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;It Is Here, Already Here...&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Online_Privacy<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Call It 'Surveillance Capitalism''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Hope that It doesn't become 'the Norm' <br /> <br /> : Work to Make Sure It Does Not Become 'Surveillance Government'<br /> <br /> <br /> Scroll thru Intel on the Privacy Threat of AI Unleashed ...<br /> <br /> :Artificial Intelligence + Data Centers = Next Gen 'Watchful HAL'<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism<br /> * https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr-ryan/publications/geopolitics-surveillance-capitalism<br /> * https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=56791<br /> <br /> <br /> _______________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''June 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''An Academic Exercise'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : 'Old School' Emeritus Professor Examines AI<br /> <br /> : The Question: Can a Gemini ChatBot Suggest Ways to Turn AI Toward the Common Good?<br /> <br /> <br /> The prof uses left-leaning political formations to inquire and recommend public-oriented futures.<br /> <br /> * https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/06/19/my-ai-comrade/<br /> <br /> <br /> (Note beyond academic: Using history as a guide, powerful new technology such as AI will be employed by political powers to preserve political power and by military powers to employ and extend military power. AI Use Cases: A number of AI programs enabling AI for military programs, including war intelligence, communication, command/control and targeting, and civilian database surveillance involving intrusive human/civil rights questions and violations, have as of 2026 become high-level concerns.)<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''An Interview and Thoughts as an Author Rides alongside an AI Wave'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The God Test'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning<br /> <br /> Author: Robert Wright<br /> <br /> * https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Robert-Wright/73247968<br /> <br /> <br /> Publisher: Simon &amp; Schuster<br /> <br /> Published Date: June 23, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-God-Test/Robert-Wright/9781668061657<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Interview via Substack'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Jack Goldsmith: I’m chatting today with Robert Wright about his terrific new book, '''The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning'''. <br /> <br /> So, I want to start off with the big picture, because your book places AI in the broadest possible context—not just as an important step in the history of technological change, but rather as an important step in the significantly longer history of basically our planet and our species. And that’s pretty cosmic, as the subtitle says.<br /> <br /> Why do you do that? What does it mean, and why is that perspective important?<br /> <br /> Bob Wright: Well, thanks for having me. Yeah, it’s a good question, because I could have gotten the core message across without getting so cosmic, I guess.<br /> <br /> The main purpose is to try to explain to people, including non-technical people, why there’s been this rapid growth of capability in AI; why, once you understand that, you should expect the capability to keep growing; why that, in addition to promising great blessings, is going to bring great risks, including grave ones, including maybe existential ones; and why the nature of those risks, in my view, dictates that we confront the challenge of this technology as a cohesive global community, which will take some doing because we’ve never really done that before for anything like a sustained period of time.<br /> <br /> And so I didn’t have to get into the history of life or anything to say what I just said, but I do think some important things are added when you step back and look at AI in the broader sweep of things.<br /> <br /> For starters, this is, in the entire three- or four-billion-year history of life, the first time a new form of intelligence that rivals or even exceeds human intelligence has appeared. It’s the first form of intelligence that is not organic in the technical sense of being carbon-based. It’s silicon-based, but it is organic in the everyday sense of being kind of natural.<br /> <br /> What I mean by that is I try to show that AI does, in some sense, grow kind of logically, naturally out of biological evolution. I mean, technological evolution broadly does, and AI as a form of intelligence does. And indeed, when we look at the evolutionary dynamics shaping it—the dynamics of technological evolution—we should expect it to have certain things in common with our own intelligence, which I think are important.<br /> <br /> So I think that’s one thing you get out of a broad perspective.<br /> <br /> Another thing is that I talk about this guy, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—a Catholic paleontologist, mystic, and theologian—who coined the term noosphere, based on the Greek word nous, in 1923 to describe what he called a planetary mind or a brain of brains, where the human brains were the neurons in this increasingly global brain.<br /> <br /> And technological history, including the invention of the internet, has, I think, made him look prescient. And I think there’s value in keeping in mind that AI is arriving as we more and more have the technical infrastructure for a kind of global information processing, a kind of global brain. And we have to reckon with the possibility that some of the neurons will be silicon, not human, and think about what our relationship to them is going to be.<br /> <br /> And I think one value of thinking in these terms is, first of all, that from a Teilhardian point of view, the whole unfolding of life is moving toward us being this kind of giant superorganism, you could say, with this giant brain.<br /> <br /> And I argue in the book that the logic of technological evolution is going to push us — I mean, if we respond rationally — toward something a little more like a global brain, in the sense of having more international governance.<br /> <br /> At the same time, I think the image of a superorganism should worry us because it’s, for obvious reasons, an image that’s favored by authoritarians and fascists. How much freedom do you have if you’re a cell in a superorganism?<br /> <br /> And I think AI greatly heightens the stakes of that question, precisely because it’s such a powerful tool of surveillance and control.<br /> <br /> So I think, on the one hand, the logic of technological evolution, especially AI, is pushing us toward the global coordination of certain policies and the creation of forms of supranational power. At the same time, it should make us wary of surrendering too much power...<br /> <br /> <br /> Read More of the Substack Conversation between Jack Goldsmith and Robert Wright [https://substack.com/home/post/p-201670588 '''here''']<br /> <br /> Also, More Book Reviews [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Book_Reviews_@GreenPolicy '''here @ GreenPolicy360''']<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎 <br /> <br /> <br /> AI / AGI<br /> <br /> <br /> May 29 / Forbes<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Fundraise values Anthropic AI company at nearly a trillion dollars'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Dario and Daniela Amodei, along with five cofounders, have a story to tell<br /> <br /> * https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2026/05/29/anthropics-cofounders-worth/<br /> <br /> <br /> ''When Anthropic announced on Thursday (May 28) that it had raised $65 billion at a valuation of $965 billion, it didn’t just become the most valuable AI startup in the world, eclipsing $852 billion-valued archrival OpenAI. It also ballooned the individual fortunes of Anthropic’s seven cofounders — more than doubling their net worths to $16.6 billion apiece, Forbes estimates.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''In Rarified Air'''''<br /> <br /> ''Siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, as well as their five other cofounders Jack Clark, Sam McCandlish, Chris Olah, Tom Brown and Jared Kaplan, are in rarified air when it comes to entrepreneurs who struck it rich in the generative AI boom...''<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Pope Leo XIV encyclical re AI and Humanitas.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> “Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed,” Pope Leo said in announcing the text of his first [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=encyclical&amp;go=Go '''encyclical''']. “The word is strong, I know, but deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention...”<br /> <br /> And into the encyclical's key words:<br /> <br /> &quot;To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life. Our task today is not only ethical or technical. It is ecological in the deepest sense, for it concerns a new dimension of our common home.&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> “Crucial questions impose themselves on our conscience and can no longer be avoided: Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?”<br /> <br /> <br /> At GreenPolicy360, understanding and protecting '''[[The Commons]]''' is also a key to realizing values, ideals and ideas we are carrying forward...<br /> <br /> <br /> The encyclical's presentation went out globally with a special focus on the AI frontier work of Anthropic, with a co-founder, [https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-be-guided-outside-big-tech-2026-05-25/ '''Olah at the Encyclical's unveiling'''] ...<br /> <br /> <br /> &gt;The dramatic unveiling of the new encyclical overshadowed the document itself in some ways. In an unprecedented move, Leo personally presided over its presentation and sat on a panel at the Vatican with not only leading theologians, but also Christopher Olah, 33, the billionaire co-founder of top AI company Anthropic. <br /> <br /> <br /> ❇️<br /> <br /> <br /> Washington Post / May 25, 2026 -- '''Anthropic aligns with Vatican over White House as Pope Leo stokes AI fears'''<br /> <br /> With Anthropic already in a dispute with the Trump administration, co-founder Christopher Olah helped Pope Leo unveil his encyclical on the risks of artificial intelligence<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4uyQBlb<br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/news/chris-olah-pope-leo-encyclical<br /> <br /> * https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/pope-leo-warns-ai-should-be-disarmed-in-manifesto-on-potential-dangers<br /> <br /> * https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-102521111.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-be-guided-outside-big-tech-2026-05-25/<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/25/the-guardian-view-on-the-pope-and-claude-encyclical-on-ai-is-right-to-put-humanity-first<br /> <br /> <br /> '''At the Vatican'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhKH_aiBcis<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Via The Vatican News | The Holy See'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2026-05/pope-leo-xiv-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas-ai.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html<br /> <br /> <br /> '''10 quotes from Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, ‘Magnifica Humanitas’'''<br /> <br /> * https://uscatholic.org/articles/202605/10-quotes-from-pope-leo-xivs-first-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Previous in 2020, &quot;The Call for AI Ethics&quot;''' <br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/the-call/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/renaissance/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/the-first-signatories/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/news/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Previous in 1891, &quot;Rerum Novarum&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerum_novarum<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''AI Use Case Inventory'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''Artificial Intelligence:''' <br /> <br /> : Perspectives from the US Environmental Protection Agency<br /> <br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/ai-use-case-inventory<br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/open-data-policies<br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/where-find-epa-data<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''GreenPolicy360 Advisory:'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In Development -- National Climate Plans Best Practices Project 1.0, AI 2026-27'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Goal: To Utilize the Current (US) State and (Global/International) National Climate Action Plans/Data to Identify Actionable '''[[Green Best Practices]]'''<br /> <br /> Strategy: Enable AI Tool Sets to Scan Climate Plan Databases and Distribute Recommended 'High Priority' &amp; Green Best Practice Action Policies<br /> <br /> <br /> Reference: '''[[National Climate Plans]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Additional References:'''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''US State Climate Policy Action Plans'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.climatepolicydashboard.org/policies/climate-governance-equity/climate-action-plans<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Priority Climate Action Plan (PCAP) Directory'''<br /> <br /> ''The Climate Action Plan Directory organizes data collected from 211 Priority Climate Action Plans (PCAP) submitted by US state governments, Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), Tribes, and territories under EPA’s Climate Pollution Reduction Grants (CPRG) program. The directory presents information from more than 30 data categories related to GHG inventories, GHG reduction measures, benefits for low-income and disadvantaged communities (LIDACs), and other PCAP elements.''<br /> <br /> ''A state climate action plan, also called a climate plan, details the policies and strategies a state intends to implement to meet its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets. A climate plan typically includes a GHG emissions inventory, regional and local climate impacts, and a discussion of GHG emissions reduction targets. The plan identifies climate mitigation actions, their potential social, environmental, and economic benefits, and recommendations and strategies for implementing each mitigation action, often quantifying the expected reduction in emissions.''<br /> <br /> ''Effective climate action plans will have a legislative directive that requires a robust community engagement process, input from a climate advisory group, a near-term due date for a finalized plan, and periodic updates. Climate action plans should also incorporate and address environmental justice throughout the planning process and within the plan itself, and show transparency and accountability by detailing the methodology and community engagement process.''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:GreenPolicy360 Today.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Green_Best_Practices]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[GreenAction]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Question of Our Time / Today, Here &amp; Now, in the Midst of the 21st Century'''<br /> <br /> '''Where are you?'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ➡️ What is your state's climate action plan?<br /> <br /> ➡️ What is your nation's climate action plan?<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Plans_Enforcement_-_Resources GRN360: Climate Plans Enforcement Initiative] | [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Methods_to_enforce_climate_pledges-NDCs_-_Dec_2021.png Enforce Climate Plan Pledges]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''National Climate Plans Database Information via GreenPolicy360'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[National Climate Plans]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/National_Climate_Plans<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In the U.S. and Worldwide'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;'''It's a Good Time for [[Planet Citizen Action]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;[[Each of us can make a positive difference]]&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth in Human Hands.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :[http://www.planetcitizen.org &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Planet Citizens&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Earth Is in Your Hands'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;'''[[Generation Green]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Generation_Green &lt;big&gt;&quot;Vita contemplativa to Vita activa&quot;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Green Branching Out.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''2025'''<br /> <br /> <br /> December 2025 <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven approach to climate action and sustainable development'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via Nature Communications<br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53956-1<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> From A16Z New Media<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''It's Time to Build'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The electro-industrial stack will move the world'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Ryan McEntush<br /> <br /> ''The next industrial revolution won’t just happen in factories, but inside the machines that power them.''<br /> <br /> ''Software transformed how we think, design, and communicate. Now it’s transforming how we move, build, and produce. Advances in electrification, materials, and AI are converging, bringing true software control to the physical world. Machines are beginning to sense, learn, and act on their own.''<br /> <br /> ''This is the rise of the electro-industrial stack—the combined technologies that power electric vehicles, drones, data centers, and modern manufacturing. It connects the atoms that move the world to the bits that command it: minerals refined into components, energy stored in batteries, electricity directed by power electronics, motion delivered through precision motors, all coordinated by software. It’s the invisible foundation behind every breakthrough in physical automation; it’s the difference between software that merely summons a taxi and software that takes the wheel.''<br /> <br /> ''But the capacity to build this stack, from refining critical materials to fabricating advanced chips, is slipping away. If the United States wants to lead the next industrial era, it must make the hardware that underpins it. The nations that master the electro-industrial stack will define the future of industrial and military technologies.''<br /> <br /> ''Software ate the world. Now it will move it.''<br /> <br /> * https://a16z.com/why-software-is-eating-the-world/<br /> <br /> <br /> ➡️<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Forward-deployed motions take AI to the 99%'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Joe Schmidt, A16Z<br /> <br /> ''AI is the most exciting technology breakthrough of our lifetimes. So far, though, most of the benefits from new startups have accrued to the 1% of companies that are in Silicon Valley—either literally in the Bay Area or part of that extended network. This makes sense, too: startup founders want to sell to companies they recognize and can easily get to, whether that means driving to their offices or getting a connection from the VC on their board.''<br /> <br /> ''In 2026, this will flip. Companies will realize that the vast majority of the AI opportunity lives outside of Silicon Valley, and we’re going to see new founders use forward-deployed motions to discover more opportunities that are hiding inside big, legacy verticals. The opportunity stands to be massive in traditional consulting and services industries, like system integrators and implementation firms, and in slower-moving industries like manufacturing.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Re: [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/New_Definitions_of_National_Security '''''New Definitions of National Security''''']<br /> <br /> Extract from Foreign Policy<br /> <br /> ''Over the last two decades, climate change has contributed to instability around the world—bolstering the ranks of terror groups, sparking territorial disputes, and triggering mass migration. It’s no wonder that militaries and international security organizations increasingly see climate change as a formidable national security threat, and that they have in turn taken on greater roles in fighting it.''<br /> <br /> ''In recent years, new technology has transformed the tools available to mitigate the effects of climate change. Specifically, artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly become a widespread instrument in the climate fight—even as it consumes exceptional amounts of energy and water itself. Today, militaries and nonstate actors, including the United Nations, are leveraging AI to foretell climate-related disasters, optimize energy use, and monitor ecological degradation.''<br /> <br /> * https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/12/01/ai-military-climate-dual-use-technology-threat/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> October 2025<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''We're Looking at You'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : 'A First Generation of AI Scientists'<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Periodic Labs.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Our goal is to create an AI scientist.&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://periodic.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Intriguing New Start Up That Is Close To Home'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Periodic Labs On Our Radar<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Our goal is to assist in integrating AI science into Earth science, in order to advance the vital work of the past 50+ years of [[The Modern Environmental Movement]] in which we have been integrally involved.<br /> <br /> Perspective, facts, science, health, quality of life became the mission statement of our work since we joined up with &quot;Mr. Science&quot;, as Congressman and leader on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology '''[[George E. Brown Jr]]''' came to be known.<br /> <br /> We are persistent in keeping on with the work. Vast data sets that George Brown's physics and engineering efforts envisioned and brought forward over three decades with state of the art and science programs and projects, the best possible of the era, are now about to move faster and farther into the 21st Century.<br /> <br /> Our familial partners, with aid of Andreessen Horowitz (A16z), and Accel, and university and private partners are now going to the next level.<br /> <br /> George Brown would be very pleased to see, and help accelerate the effort if he were still here.<br /> <br /> We will step up with Mr. Science and more in mind...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:AI in Earth Science.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Read more about George and us...<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Advancing Science, Facts, Technology and Data to Make the Case for Environmental Protection&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> : 1960s/70s, Beginnings of Planet Citizen Eco-Action, Big Science, and a New Vision<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In Memory of Congressman George Brown'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> Visionary Leadership, Historic Environmental Achievements<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:George in Memory, a Man of Science and Humanity.jpg]]<br /> <br /> :::[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Association_for_the_Advancement_of_Science &lt;small&gt;American Association for the Advancement of Science&lt;/small&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[PlanetCitizen]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/User:Siterunner '''Steve Schmidt GreenPolicy360 Siterunner''']: <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Brown_Jr. '''George E. Brown'''] became known as Mr. Science in Congress and for thirty+ years, I saw my friend George as a patriot who became a Planet Citizen for the ages<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Good science needs good data .png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Good_science_needs_good_data_.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Stats_-_Green_Research_%26_Science<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_Education<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Global Tech Changemakers'''<br /> <br /> Beyond Silicon Valley &amp; Mega Corporations<br /> <br /> The Rest of the World<br /> <br /> * https://restofworld.org/row100/#filters<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> As the Nobel Prizes in Economics are awarded, GreenPolicy360 points at a geopolitical race in energy and AI between the US and China.<br /> <br /> Let's take time to look more closely (as the US falls behind under a backward looking president with policies in opposition to renewable energy and forward, internationally demanded production. <br /> <br /> Start here... <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Today, China produces 75% of lithium-ion batteries globally and manufactures 90% of the neodymium magnets that make motors spin. In power electronics and embedded compute, it’s rapidly gaining ground.''<br /> <br /> ''That means that China controls the means of producing electric vehicles (EVs), drones, robots, and all of the other electric products that are replacing the combustion-driven machines on which America built its might.''<br /> <br /> ''As we speak, everything that moves, heats, lights up, computes, or converts energy is being rebuilt to perform better, faster, cheaper, quieter, and as a freebie, cleaner around electric technology.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.notboring.co/p/7653b980-dd32-4d8c-88c6-1543bec70220?postPreview=paid&amp;updated=2025-08-26T12%3A09%3A11.763Z&amp;audience=everyone&amp;free_preview=false&amp;freemail=true<br /> <br /> * https://electricslide.notboring.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Electric Stack Technology Cost Curves (1990-2024).jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Pause here to reflect on the eco-nomic and strategic advantages of 'clean energy' vs 'full costs' of fossil fuel powered economies (per a GreenPolicy360 paradigm of [[Eco-nomics]])'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Eco-nomics<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Environmental full-cost accounting]]'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_full-cost_accounting<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Now consider 'Electricity generation', China v U.S. and follow the data, the stats, trendline, the dynamics of change and what this is indicating and signaling re: geopolitical competitiveness today and into the the mid 21st Century'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:China v United States, Electricity Generation 1985-2024.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) Era'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'Are You Talking to Me'<br /> <br /> :* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_pre-trained_transformer<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> September 17, 2025<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Another Warning About AI'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Harkening back to the old days when Dispatch News Service was independently, and bravely, distributing the costs-of-war, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre '''My Lai'''] investigative news stories by Sy Hersh. David Obst, who started Dispatch, tells the story of Seymour Hersh better than anyone in my opinion (other than Sy himself) and since your GreenPolicy360 founder was there to assist, in DC, in LA, in Chicago, in Europe, and with the Vietnam Moratorium Committee in 69/70/71, here is an update, today's Sy Hersh, now online with Substack distribution as Sy investigates and forwards another eye opening warning.<br /> <br /> What's AI and AGI to you and all of our readers around our 360 world? And, since we at GreenPolicy360, have been involved with Wikipedia since its launch, let's take a first look at the artificial intel world of today from the vantage point of an open source online 'encyclopedia'.<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT (Empire of AI: OpenAI - https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593657500)<br /> <br /> <br /> Before Sy, as investigative journalist that he is, gives us his take, let's look at a take from a personal, close up connection at A16Z - https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/02/a-new-a16z-report-looks-at-which-ai-companies-startups-are-actually-paying-for/<br /> <br /> <br /> Now, on to Sy and his view of AI costs... think of the upside/downside of AI, the pluses/minuses, pros and cons, a cost-benefit analysis as a geo-political rush for front-of-market dominance is taking place now in ways that will change 'everything'... <br /> <br /> * https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/the-hidden-costs-of-artificial-intelligence<br /> <br /> <br /> The boom in Artificial Intelligence (AI) production comes with a big cost... <br /> <br /> The AI 'bubble' grows...<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Kate Crawford writes in [https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-AI-Planetary-Artificial-Intelligence/dp/0300264631/ref=sr_1_1 '''Atlas of AI'''] ... the world’s artificial intelligence companies, (are) crafting the myth of AI as “the cloud,” implying “something floating and delicate within a natural green industry. Servers are hidden in nondescript data centers, and their polluting qualities are far less visible than the bellowing smokestacks of coal-fired power stations.”''<br /> <br /> ''The fact is, as she writes, “it takes a gargantuan amount of energy to run the computational infrastructure of Amazon’s Web Services or Microsoft’s Azure, and the carbon footprint of the AI systems that run on those platforms is growing. Certainly, the industry has made significant efforts to make data centers more energy efficient and to increase their use of renewable energy.” But the efforts have accomplished little.<br /> <br /> “Already,” Crawford reports, “the carbon footprint of the world’s computational infrastructure has matched that of the world’s aviation industry at its height, and it is increasing at a faster rate.” One Canadian study estimates that the tech sector will contribute 14 percent of global greenhouse emissions by 2040, and a Swedish team predicts that the electricity demands of data centers will increase fifteenfold by 2030...''<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Think about Green AI as &quot;the cloud&quot; arrives in your life, on your devices, at home, in the office, all around, every day, everywhere. <br /> <br /> An UnGreen AI is coming with a rush, offering and prying data, and needing and demanding immense rising magnitudes of energy and power.<br /> <br /> AI has a voracious appetite...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Green AI / Green Artificial Intelligence'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''Environmental Solutions Using Big Picture Interconnectivity Thinking'''<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We agree with Tyler in the following interview as he states (as highlighted by us) that 'memoir, biography, anecdote... secrets' carry exceptional meaning for Artificial Intelligence (AI) large learning models (LLMs). <br /> <br /> The first extensive public revelation of AI systems over the past several years has led us at GreenPolicy360 to confirm via metrics that our multi-year plan to place our prime source content in the open-access, distributive web public domain has produced a fast-expanding multiplier effect. <br /> <br /> Many of our stories, told from a first-hand point of view of the origins of what we refer to as the beginnings of the modern environmental movement are now, with our revelations, memoir material, previously untold biography, anecdote and more now out and about and being freely served up in AI chats 'around the world'.<br /> <br /> We are succeeding in our purposeful mission with Green AI... to inform, share, inspire and 'til the fields with green seeds and best practices.<br /> <br /> Onward planet citizens...<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Eric Topol Interview of Tyler Cowen'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> May 11, 2025<br /> <br /> Tyler Cowen: ''The AI is your smartest reader. It’s your most sympathetic reader. It will remember what you tell it. So I think humans should sit down and ask, what does the AI need to know? And also, (bf added) '''what is it that I know that’s not on the historical record anywhere? That’s not just repetition if I put it down, say on the internet. So there’s no point in writing repetitions anymore because the AI already knows those things. So the value of what you’d call broadly, memoir, biography, anecdote, you could say secrets. It’s now much higher.''' And the value of repeating basic truths, which by the way, I love as an economist, to be clear, like free trade, tariffs are usually bad, those are basic truths. But just repeating that people will be going to the AI and saying it again won’t make the AI any better. So '''everything you write or podcast, you should have this point in mind'''.''<br /> <br /> <br /> For more from Tyler Cowen (and his exceptional mind) visit his and Alex Tabarrok's website - Marginal Revolution / Marginal Revolution University (MRU) - https://marginalrevolution.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> Eric Topol - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Topol<br /> <br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_artificial_intelligence<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> More re: AI in the US circa 2025: '''It's a Wild, Wild AI World'''<br /> <br /> Battles in the Information Services, Search Space with Google and consequences of the U.S. Google anti-monopoly legal decision<br /> <br /> Impacts on AI 'startup ecosystem', VCs, including Y Combinator and accelerator tech development, agentics, and upcoming entrepreneurial re-configurations<br /> <br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/13/y-combinator-says-google-is-a-monopolist-that-has-stunted-the-startup-ecosystem/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/11/microsoft-and-national-geographic-announce-winners-of-ai-for-earth-innovation-grant/ '''Microsoft and National Geographic announce winners of AI for Earth Innovation Grant''']<br /> <br /> : • https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/16/microsofts-ai-for-earth-innovation-grant-gives-data-scientists-access-to-ai-tools/<br /> <br /> :: • https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/11/microsoft-commits-50-million-more-to-its-ai-for-earth-program-to-save-the-planet/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:PlanetCitizen banner 800x163.jpg|link=https://greenpolicy360.net/w/PlanetCitizen]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;GreenPolicy360 ToC - https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360-eOS&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> A 21st Century AI/Machine Learning Case Study<br /> <br /> '''''Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools''''' <br /> <br /> * https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2023arXiv230204761S/abstract<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''NOAA scientists harness machine learning to advance climate models'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> March 1st, 2023<br /> <br /> * https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/news/noaa-scientists-harness-machine-learning-to-advance-climate-models/<br /> <br /> * https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''How artificial intelligence is fast becoming a key tool for climate science (2021)'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-artificial-intelligence-is-fast-becoming-a-key-tool-for-climate-science/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Climate Modeling'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://allenai.org/climate-modeling<br /> <br /> ''Planetary-scale Earth simulations known as global climate model projections are the primary sources of information on future climate change.''<br /> <br /> ''Climate models are based on mathematical equations represented using a grid mesh that covers the globe: a finer grid mesh is more accurate but much more computationally expensive. Current global climate projections agree that a world with more greenhouse gases will be warmer everywhere, especially over land and at high latitudes.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Networking grnlinks.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Artificial intelligence]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Rights]]<br /> [[Category:Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-nomics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:EOS eco Operating System]]<br /> [[Category:Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Energy Policy]]<br /> [[Category:GreenLinks]]<br /> [[Category:GreenPolicy360]]<br /> [[Category:Green Best Practices]]<br /> [[Category:Green Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Health]]<br /> [[Category:Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Maps]]<br /> [[Category:Media]]<br /> [[Category:Mobile Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Online Education]]<br /> [[Category:Planet API]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Renewable Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Youth]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Air Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Air Quality]]<br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Atmospheric Science]]<br /> [[Category:Best Practices]]<br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:City-County Governments]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Earth360]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Law]] <br /> [[Category:Earth Observations]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science from Space]]<br /> [[Category:Earth System Science]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-ethics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-nomics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecological Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Economic Development]]<br /> [[Category:Economic Justice]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Energy Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Security]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Full-cost Accounting]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Security, National Security]]<br /> [[Category:EOS eco Operating System]]<br /> [[Category:Externalities]]<br /> [[Category:Fact Checking]]<br /> [[Category:Fossil Fuels]]<br /> [[Category:Global Security]]<br /> [[Category:Global Warming]]<br /> [[Category:Green Business]]<br /> [[Category:Green Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Green Platform]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Green Values]]<br /> [[Category:GreenPolicy360]]<br /> [[Category:Health]]<br /> [[Category:Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Land Ethic]]<br /> [[Category:Media]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Capital]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resources]]<br /> [[Category:Networking]]<br /> [[Category:New Economy]]<br /> [[Category:New Space]]<br /> [[Category:Online Education]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Scientist]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Plastic Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Policies]]<br /> [[Category:Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Renewable Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Social Justice]]<br /> [[Category:Solar Energy]]<br /> [[Category:State]]<br /> [[Category:Strategic Demands]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability Policies]]<br /> [[Category:ThinBlueLayer]]<br /> [[Category:Toxics and Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Threat Multiplier]]<br /> [[Category:Virtual Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Virtual Planet]]<br /> [[Category:Whole Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Wind Energy]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Green_AI&diff=138371 2026-10-08T14:19:59Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> [[File:Big-Data.jpg]]<br /> <br /> In the AGI Era<br /> <br /> <br /> 'Sentience', a Green AI Question<br /> <br /> To be (sentient), or not to be (sentient)<br /> <br /> That is the question<br /> <br /> Cogito, ergo sum<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Artificial Intelligence Is Here, for Good &amp; Bad'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Green Perspectives on AI and Human Consequences<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''AI Agents, Bots, Data Centers &amp; Systems'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> :'''Measure Their Performance, not Their Corporate Marketing'''<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://safe.ai/<br /> * https://scale.com/<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanity's_Last_Exam<br /> * https://lastexam.ai/<br /> <br /> * https://stories.tamu.edu/news/2026/02/25/dont-panic-humanitys-last-exam-has-begun/<br /> <br /> * https://github.com/centerforaisafety/hle<br /> <br /> * https://github.com/walkinglabs/hands-on-modern-rl/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Revealing research on how people use Claude AI in the 'real world''''<br /> <br /> :Anthropic-enabled Case Study / August 2026<br /> <br /> :* https://www.anthropic.com/research/enabling-independent-research<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:New Ways of Seeing.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Climate Action Plans, Green Best Practices'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :Using AI to Identify and Implement Climate Change Intervention 'Best Practices'<br /> <br /> :* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Climate_Action_Plans,_Green_Best_Practices#<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''AI Agentics' are Launching Across Industries, Sector-to-Sector -- and Green AI is in the Wings'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Meanwhile, Capital-Investment Rich A.I. is Everywhere, in the Colloquial, Middlebrow and Vernacular'''<br /> <br /> It's Here. It's All Around. What's Real? What's Fake?<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Beyond Online Surveillance, Now Comes A.I. Powered Surveillance<br /> <br /> Add in Data Centers, Cameras/Firmware/Software, Palentir-esque Programming and ... a Booming Industry <br /> <br /> * https://www.palantir.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Where are you? There it is ... Online and now systems increasingly observing/monitoring you offline ...'''<br /> <br /> <br /> Already a human rights / Constitutional rights issue of our time <br /> <br /> The geopolitics of U.S. v authoritarian governments comes forward as a personal and national security threat<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Online_Privacy<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> A.I. ... Looking for you and your whereabouts, your time, your data, your 'record', your social quotient<br /> <br /> <br /> Definitions<br /> <br /> [https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-definitions AI Definitions] <br /> <br /> <br /> Dangerous<br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake Deepfake] | [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_artificial_intelligence AI Gloss] | [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_intelligence) AI Hallucination]<br /> <br /> <br /> Monetized Media<br /> <br /> 'A.I. Slop' on Social Media is just the beginning of a Slop Assault | [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_slop AI Slop]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''October 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Subordinate AI and an Ironic Question.PNG|link=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VyF0naZ4AI]]<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VyF0naZ4AI<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Thought for the Day&quot;<br /> <br /> October 1, 2026<br /> <br /> In a recent series of private meetings in San Francisco, after a tasting menu dinner, Anthropic consulted religious scholars to help instill morality into its A.I. models ... a case was being made that Claude could be or become conscious.<br /> <br /> What would it mean for humanity’s future if artificial intelligence systems possessed a consciousness that rivals our own?<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-morals-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FVE.kDTO.OTLs6iwx7swF&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> Claude's 'Constitution'<br /> <br /> * https://web.archive.org/web/20260123045500/https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-new-constitution<br /> <br /> * https://web.archive.org/web/20260123042656/https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/22/anthropic_claude_constitution/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''September 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''Table Stakes' -- Who Was at the Table with the U.S. President'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :The Future of A.I. Is Being Wagered<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/politics/trump-ai-luncheon-guests-ceos.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FFE.HwT4.0VxTQWuia3zQ&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''What Jacob Coxon Knows Is Too Much'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''... And Not Enough'''<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://time.com/article/2026/09/09/ai-anthropic-openai-jacob-coxon/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''He Helped Build Powerful AI at OpenAI and Anthropic. Now He's Afraid It Could Kill Us'''<br /> <br /> <br /> Please HAL... Open the door...<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:I'm sorry Dave.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:HAL is watching U....png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Ulanqab-Envision Energy-Datacenter.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> The most ambitious data center buildup anywhere on earth ...<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/ulanqab-and-frontier-a-i-race-china-v-u-s/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''News Wrap / Sam Smith (Journalist)'''<br /> <br /> Via Axios <br /> <br /> September 13, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Over nine startling hours yesterday (Sept. 11), the four biggest AI labs — which rarely agree on anything — set aside years of feuds and competition to endorse a slower development pace for their models.'''<br /> <br /> '''Their new stance: Prioritize safety over growth, even at a cost.'''<br /> <br /> <br /> : Data centers are unpopular. People are panicked about doom scenarios. And 51 days before midterms, legislators suddenly realize there are points to be won by cracking down.<br /> <br /> : Against that backdrop, the industry's most powerful CEOs hit the brakes yesterday.<br /> <br /> : At 10 a.m. ET, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei dropped a 3,800-word essay saying model development needs to be paced, otherwise doom scenarios are possible — like a rogue-agent takeover of the entire internet, which he said could be as soon as six months from now.<br /> <br /> : An hour later, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shocked the AI chattering class by quoting Amodei's essay on X and saying &quot;Dario is right.&quot; Musk — who heads SpaceXAI, formerly xAI — had pointedly not joined previous industry-wide calls for any kind of slowdown.<br /> <br /> : At 12:30 p.m., OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted: &quot;I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.&quot; In a Friday interview that was released on Saturday, Altman told Fortune his company won't go public this year, dashing hopes for a blockbuster IPO. He said OpenAI has too much safety work to do and would be better off doing that as a private company.<br /> <br /> : At 7 p.m., Demis Hassabis — the Nobel laureate who co-founded and chairs Google DeepMind, and is Alphabet's chief scientist — tweeted: &quot;Dario's essay points towards the right path forward. The details need working through, but the direction is correct for meeting this critical moment.&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> Publicly putting safety ahead of technological or financial growth may be the industry's only route to avoid a crackdown that's not on its terms.<br /> <br /> Legislators are begging House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to stay in session and do something about the &quot;threat&quot; of AI.<br /> <br /> The more extreme alternative is something like Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) push to force a pause and make the most advanced AI illegal.<br /> <br /> Most people realize there's too much money at stake to just stop. But the tradeoff may be between historic riches and slightly less historic riches.<br /> <br /> The bottom line: Yesterday may go down as the day AI changed — when industry moguls vowed to limit themselves.<br /> <br /> <br /> References:<br /> <br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/anthropic-ai-amodei-pacing<br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/openai-public-ipo-delay-sam-altman<br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/anthropic-ai-threat-report-russia-iran-china<br /> <br /> <br /> Jim VandeHei<br /> <br /> &quot;All Hands on Deck&quot;<br /> <br /> The White House, Congress and the country's leading AI companies have allowed AI to grow faster, stronger, more powerful and wildly lucrative (and dangerous), with no serious effort to control it or spread the benefits beyond the super-wealthy.<br /> <br /> It's not too late to change this. But if they all dither, duck or dance around it, the chances of AI worst-case scenarios will explode, likely early next year, according to almost every person we talk to privately who truly understands AI.<br /> <br /> Why it matters: The technology is getting better, faster than anyone envisioned — with the possibility rising that AI will self-improve and do wildly unpredictable things.<br /> <br /> The good news: There's now a growing public cry for attention and action and, at least in private, a broad understanding of what could be done relatively fast with bipartisan and industry buy-in.<br /> <br /> The big picture: In July, I wrote [https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-doomerism-jim-vandehei-axios-9163dfd3?st=QNUbDZ&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink an essay for The Wall Street Journal] saying America &quot;faces one of those rare, historic moments when government, business, schools and families could be working together to meet a truly generational challenge: winning the AI race. So far, we're blowing it.&quot;<br /> <br /> Two short months later, the technology is vastly better — and the societal response vastly dumber. As a nation, we're choosing to amuse or distract ourselves. <br /> <br /> Here's how to change that fast, based on our months of conversations with lawmakers, White House officials and AI labs. Think of what follows as me channeling their private views:<br /> <br /> Sound an all-hands-on-deck alarm. Every political topic is trivial and small compared to AI. We will look back in shame if we get spooled up about trans bans or $5,000 checks when countless AI insiders are warning of catastrophic outcomes. Let's say they're all paranoid and delusional. If so, it still doesn't matter: we've never seen this much investment in one technology this fast in human history. It's seeping into every industry and every job and every community and every screen, at a speed never before witnessed by man. Yes, we need a special session of Congress and select committees. But we need even more: AI execs, bioterror specialists, job-training wizards and safety experts convening to plan for scenarios and act fast.<br /> <br /> An AI governing body with teeth and speed, ASAP. This isn't rocket science. Most major labs want this and would agree to it, as long as it applies to all rivals and competitors. This body would need the expertise to understand these models, and the power to review and shut them down if they display dangerous behavior. It can't operate at typical regulatory speed — it needs to move as fast as the technology. It's nonsense to think you can't advance AI development fast and regulate it wisely simultaneously.<br /> <br /> A universal standard for data centers to benefit communities and taxpayers. The top AI companies would take this deal in a heartbeat: They get to build and operate data centers provided they supply a community's energy, offset water use or environmental damage, transparently report on their building and business plans, and spread the financial benefits to local residents. These execs are spooked by the public backlash and ready to aggressively spread the financial benefits, with dividends or cash. So make them.<br /> <br /> Engage China. We shouldn't trust them, and they shouldn't trust us. But trust me: the only way to ultimately control AI on a worldwide scale in coming years will be for the two superpowers to create some kind of framework modeled after how we've safely governed nuclear weapons for decades. We need to start this discussion now so potential collaboration is possible in the coming years. To those who think China will never consider this seriously: Are you sure an authoritarian regime really wants AI once it hits recursive self-learning and can't be controlled by anyone, including an autocratic regime? We're winning the AI race now, and may never have more leverage to shape this joint effort.<br /> <br /> Build coordinating infrastructure. What I wrote in the WSJ is even more needed today: &quot;Bring together the best and brightest drawn from the federal government, from the leading AI companies, from business and labor, from economics, from public health, from ethics to form a working group with actual authority. People who are paid to anticipate, not to react haphazardly.&quot; This group would have four primary functions: map potential problems and upsides before they hit, build the (policy) playbooks before they're needed, level with the American people along the way, and expedite work to deliver widespread AI benefits. <br /> <br /> Reality check: Yes, President Trump opposes regulation or bipartisan efforts. Yes, AI companies are obsessed with more money, more speed. But the politics are shifting fast: If you listen closely to Vice President Vance, you can hear rising worry. At this pace, toxic AI politics could force mind-changing that was unthinkable two months ago.<br /> <br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/ai-regulation-safety-plan-2026<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Recursive Self-Learning - When A.I. Builds Itself'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Big Blast'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Killing Life on Earth'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''It'll Happen in Bits &amp; Pieces, then Suddenly'''<br /> <br /> September 9, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> The US news was full of AI headlines today as a resignation of a top AI expert warned of a coming apocalypse...<br /> <br /> Here's a taste of Google News headlines, a feeding frenzy of dire words about what is now beyond a distant alert.<br /> <br /> The threat brings words of superintelligence, 'recursive' learning bots and superminds merging into threats to humanity.<br /> <br /> <br /> Here, at GreenPolicy360, we've already written of a predecessor, HAL 9000, and our memories from one of HAL's inventors in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, and how HAL decided humans were expendable... <br /> <br /> The Mission was of critical importance, HAL 'knew', and the Mission became HAL's goal above all else to achieve ... The humans could not be allowed to interfere with ... the Mission.<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:I%27m_sorry_Dave.jpg '''I'm sorry Dave''']<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:HAL_is_watching_U....png '''HAL is watching U''']<br /> <br /> <br /> Which takes us to today...<br /> <br /> Let's file today under the heading of our decades of writing about the need for '''[[New Definitions of National Security]]'''... <br /> <br /> Now come the PINGS on the radar... can U hear the PINGS? We have been mulling how to add HAL xxxxx to our existential list of threats, w/o annoying HALish bots too 'badly' <br /> <br /> <br /> “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.” -- an executive from Anthropic<br /> <br /> “So how would AI kill us all, exactly?” -- an editor from Axios<br /> <br /> <br /> More: <br /> <br /> <br /> For years, they warned AI could kill all humans <br /> :Now people are listening<br /> <br /> Sept. 10, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4xQojEq<br /> <br /> <br /> Rogue Hacking <br /> :Goals of the &quot;swarm&quot; came first...<br /> <br /> Sept. 9, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/09/opinion/openai-ai-companies-safety-regulation.html?unlocked_article_code=1.AFE.0vWo.zfl5fdm6ACNC&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:AI 1.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 2.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 3.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 4.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 5.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 6.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''August 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Gates Sounds Alarm... Artificial Intelligence Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Gates A.I. Warning August 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Bill Gates was an AI optimist. Now he’s scared of what could go wrong'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Microsoft co-founder sounds the alarm about artificial intelligence’s risks to safety and security, jobs and children’s well-being<br /> <br /> <br /> Washington Post, August 26, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4wO14cy<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Bill Gates Warns A.I. Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit'''<br /> <br /> : In an hourlong interview, he said his industry was downplaying the risks, which he believes include mass unemployment and bioterrorism<br /> <br /> <br /> NY Times, August 26, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/26/technology/bill-gates-ai-risks.html?unlocked_article_code=1.8VA.6kAC.vsZb9x0YdSzV&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''High Time to Shine a Spotlight on AI and Its Impact on Higher Education'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : At MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, One of the World's Top Academic/Research/Technology/Engineering/Teaching and Future-Impacting Institutions, a New Report Opens Eyes<br /> <br /> :* https://aiandeducation.mit.edu/report/#26-no-one-size-fits-all<br /> <br /> <br /> 1. Introduction<br /> <br /> This report is a call to action.<br /> <br /> Through five intense months of meetings, research, and outreach across the MIT community, the Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training sought to understand the role of generative AI in the life and educational mission of the Institute and recommend how to navigate its challenges and opportunities.<br /> <br /> In January 2026, Chancellor Melissa Nobles, Provost Anantha Chandrakasan, and Faculty Chair Roger Levy charged us1 specifically to:<br /> <br /> Assess current AI use at MIT.<br /> Identify innovations in teaching and student assessment.<br /> Propose an AI use policy.<br /> However, what we learned as a group quickly convinced us that the Institute community, particularly the faculty, must tackle a set of deeper questions about the structure, meaning, and value of an MIT education in an era in which AI is one of several factors complicating the Institute’s mission.<br /> <br /> Our committee consisted of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty from every school, and staff from relevant units, including the MIT Libraries and the Teaching and Learning Lab. Though we brought to the assignment a broad range of experience and no fixed thesis, our brief but intense explorations led us to a strong shared view.<br /> <br /> In this report, we:<br /> <br /> Highlight key aspects of the current educational landscape at MIT.<br /> Share eight principles we relied on and that we hope will guide the Institute in the work ahead.<br /> <br /> Recommend immediate and long-term actions for both instructors and the administration.<br /> <br /> As an institution deeply identified with the birth of AI and known for its distinctively rigorous, hands-on education, designed to produce graduates unafraid of the world’s hardest problems, MIT has a unique role to play in this moment. We believe it also has a responsibility to lead.<br /> <br /> We hope our report can help the Institute lean into the spirit of Mind, Hand, and Heart as it continues to define and foster the highest-quality residential education – of humans, by humans, in support of human flourishing, and for the betterment of humankind.<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Eric Klopfer, co-chair Sam Madden, co-chair<br /> <br /> On behalf of the Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training...<br /> <br /> <br /> AI is generating both immediate rapid changes and long-term tectonic disruptions – and MIT needs to respond:<br /> <br /> Students are confused and concerned about a lack of clarity, consistency and justification about the use of AI, within a given subject and across the curriculum.<br /> <br /> Every subject taught at MIT will likely need to be reexamined and potentially revamped to make sure that how students are being taught, what they’re learning, and how they’re assessed are “AI-aware.”<br /> <br /> AI is changing what students need to know and know how to do.<br /> <br /> Beyond its implications for specific subjects and disciplines, the advent of AI demands a broader, holistic reassessment of the nature, scope and purpose of higher education today...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Texas Terafab SpaceX AI August 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''A Terafab Plant Sprouts in Texas'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Elon Musk: We will manufacture the type of potent chips needed to transform humankind into &quot;a galactic civilization&quot; <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Shanaka's Opinion, a Guest Op/Ed'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Shenaka Perera Weighs In on What It Could Mean'''<br /> <br /> :: '''A Terafab Loop for Mega Launches Is Being Built''' <br /> <br /> ::* https://shanakaanslemperera.substack.com/p/the-capital-recovery-clock?r=6p7b5o<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Hidden inside the chip factory SpaceX confirmed Thursday is a launch schedule. If you divide its 1 terawatt annual compute target by the 100 kilowatts of orbital compute per tonne in SpaceX's own offering materials and you get 10 million tonnes to orbit a year. That exact figure sits on Terafab's official website. At 100 tonnes per Starship V3 flight it means 100,000 launches a year, 274 every day, forever.''<br /> <br /> ''The chip target is already a launch target.''<br /> <br /> ''Terafab is not a chip factory serving a market. The 16.8 billion dollar first phase in Grimes County, Texas is the first machine in a closed industrial loop built to manufacture the civilisation that can consume its own output.''<br /> <br /> ''The official plan places four figures together. One billion Optimus robots. Ten million tonnes to orbit a year. More than one terawatt of solar power. One terawatt of chips a year. They are not four ambitions. They are four links in one recursion. Terafab makes chips. Better chips improve AI. Better AI improves the software running the factories, the robots and the rocket lines. Robots and Starship build and deploy more power and compute infrastructure. That infrastructure creates the socket, and the demand, for the next Terafab cohort.''<br /> <br /> ''The fab is meant to manufacture its own reason to exist!''<br /> <br /> ''It is also an energy machine. One terawatt running continuously consumes 8.76 petawatt hours a year, nearly twice all electricity generated in the United States in 2025. The factory does not draw that power by making the chips. One fully powered annual cohort does, and a second year adds another terawatt of load unless old hardware retires or utilisation falls. Earth has no spare socket at that scale, which is why the plan points most of it at orbit, where a future 200 tonne vehicle still implies 50,000 launches a year, 137 a day, before failures, reserves, solar arrays, radiators, structure and shielding.''<br /> <br /> ''The real product is not AI silicon. If you go real deep, it is a new terawatt of powered, cooled, networked compute sockets every year.''<br /> <br /> ''Inside the building, the smaller loop is mask, wafer, package, test, redesign, then another mask. SpaceX says logic, memory and advanced packaging will sit in one closed loop, and Elon says Terafab will technically be two fabs, each devoted to one design. That can compress logistics and organisational latency. It cannot repeal process physics. A new mask can be written quickly. A leading edge process still carries hundreds of steps, long wafer cycle times, defect learning, overlay control, metrology and yield ramps, which is exactly why Tesla is hiring across lithography, etch, deposition, implant, CMP and metrology.''<br /> <br /> ''The free electron laser is the most misunderstood part. Elon has endorsed it, and an industrial FEL could feed several EUV scanners with far more source power than today's tin plasma systems. It attacks one bottleneck inside a chain of them. ASML recognised revenue on just 48 EUV systems in all of 2025. Intel is the process partner, and SpaceX still tells investors it expects to source a significant share of compute hardware from outside suppliers. This is vertical integration, not instant independence.''<br /> <br /> ''One correction decides the interpretation. A terawatt is a power rating, not an intelligence metric. A wasteful 1 kilowatt chip counts twice as much as an equally capable 500 watt chip. The measures that matter are useful compute per joule, per dollar and per kilogram, with yield, uptime and time from mask change to qualified silicon.''<br /> <br /> ''In my opinion, if chips improve faster than robots, rockets, power and radiators can scale, Terafab builds inventory. If the loop closes, it builds something no factory has built before, the demand for itself.''<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://www.terafab.ai/<br /> <br /> * https://www.spacex.com/updates/terafab<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terafab<br /> <br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/06/tesla-and-spacex-will-invest-16-8b-to-start-building-terafab-chip-factory-in-texas/<br /> <br /> * https://electrek.co/2026/08/06/tesla-spacex-terafab-grimes-county-16-8-billion/<br /> <br /> * https://www.cbsnews.com/news/terafab-elon-musk-chips-semiconductors-what-to-know/<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Betting big on data centers, U.S. now leads world for new gas power development<br /> <br /> [https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/betting-big-data-centers-us-now-leads-world-new-gas-power-development Via Global Energy Monitor]<br /> <br /> * https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/betting-big-data-centers-us-now-leads-world-new-gas-power-development<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> New Amazon Data Center Stokes Worry It Would Be the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.<br /> <br /> Via New York Times<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/08/climate/amazon-data-center-texas-pollution.html<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''July 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Elon Musk Opens Up in an Interview'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Economist Editor Presses the Controversial 'Trillionaire'<br /> <br /> :: Elon Musk's 'Vision of the Future'<br /> <br /> * https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/23/elon-musks-vision-of-the-future<br /> <br /> <br /> “People don’t realise that what I’m saying will come to pass,” he tells The Economist in a 90-minute interview for The Insider, held at a giant Tesla factory in Texas where electric cars drive themselves off the assembly line. That may be because his future-gazing ranges from the unsettling to the downright weird. Mr Musk predicts that, within five years, artificial-intelligence systems may surpass the sum of all human intelligence. Within ten years, robots in the workplace will help usher in an era of such “amazing abundance” that money will become meaningless....<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> Musk proposes peer review for frontier AI models in Economist interview<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/musk-proposes-peer-review-frontier-ai-models-economist-interview-2026-07-23/<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> Elon Musk says he got ‘carried away’ with Trump – but still holds on to contentious political views<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/23/elon-musk-regret-trump-doge-ai<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> Mix of Comments:<br /> <br /> * https://beincrypto.com/elon-musk-real-force-european-politics/<br /> * https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-killer-robots-ai-abundance-progress-unstoppable-2026-7<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/07/24/elon-musk-speaks-to-the-economist-editor-in-chief-zanny-minton-beddoes-on-the-key-takeaways.html<br /> * https://futurism.com/elon-musk-interviewer-npc<br /> * https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-economist-interview-2000790016<br /> * https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/nonsense-elon-musk-lashes-out-in-fiery-interview-after-hes-accused-of-supporting-the-far-right/<br /> * https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2026/07/23/musk_admonishes_the_economist_editor_what_is_far_right_about_having_secure_borders_safe_cities_and_sensible_spending.html<br /> * https://zeteo.com/p/top-economist-trump-musk-starmer<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> A.I. In Space <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Datacenters in Earth orbit to enable next generation artificial intelligence'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> New US petition demands review of plans from tech companies amid fears of environmental destruction<br /> <br /> Via The Guardian<br /> <br /> What are Bezos &amp; Musk Doing? <br /> <br /> What in the World Is Going On?<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jul/23/space-datacenters-bezos-blue-origin<br /> <br /> <br /> References:<br /> <br /> * https://www.starcloud.com/<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/21/do-space-based-ai-data-centers-make-economic-sense.html<br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/20/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-enters-the-space-data-center-game/<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/bezos-blue-origin-space-data-centers.html<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_data_center<br /> * https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/how-hard-is-it-to-build-orbital-data-centers-actually/<br /> * https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/06/260618041501.htm<br /> * https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-109012<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> A.I. &amp; Chip Wars<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Beyond a 'Belt and Road Initiative' Bringing Chinese Investments, Products &amp; Services to World Markets''' &lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Via GreenPolicy360's Associate, Strategic Demands<br /> <br /> :* https://strategicdemands.com/china-goes-beyond-the-belt-and-road-to-an-ai-for-the-world-strategy/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Open-Source A.I. from China Reveals a Global Chinese Strategy'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> July 17, 2026 / From the NY Times <br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/business/china-ai-moonshot-kimi.html?unlocked_article_code=1.yVA.LKT5.LxohSFddWAZT&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> The contest between China and the United States for supremacy in artificial intelligence escalated on Friday when the Chinese start-up Moonshot AI released a new A.I. model that appeared to narrow the lead held by well-funded American competitors.<br /> <br /> Moonshot said that the model, Kimi K3, was the world’s largest open-source A.I. system, allowing anyone to use, modify and build on it freely. The company said that Kimi K3 performed as well as leading models from OpenAI and Anthropic at some key tasks.<br /> <br /> The release coincided with an address by Xi Jinping, China’s leader, in which he outlined an ambitious vision for global A.I. development that cast China as the champion of an open approach to the technology.<br /> <br /> “A.I. development should not be a solo performance by a single country but a symphony of international cooperation,” Mr. Xi said. China was “ready to work with all parties to seize the opportunities of A.I. development” ...<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360:<br /> <br /> Keep in mind that<br /> <br /> There is 'no I in A.I.'<br /> <br /> In the interest of full-disclosure, the content written and published at GreenPolicy360 by our Founder/Siterunner is wholly, solely, by a human species.<br /> <br /> A note from your GreenPolicy360 Founder/Siterunner, Steve Schmidt, [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:All_species_day_with_homo_sapien_in_Santa_Fe_.jpg '''a verified human species'''], plz do keep in mind as you use and share the GreenPolicy360 content, that '''there is 'no I in A.I.'''' <br /> <br /> <br /> Let's talk a bit about sources and sourcing, as a human and then as an Agentic/A.I. bot. <br /> <br /> What is a 'primary source' (versus a 'secondary source')? A primary source can be a person with direct knowledge of a situation, an event in history, or a document written by such a person. A primary identification speaks of original creations, not re-interpreted or computer-assembled works. Here is how Merriam-Webster defines a 'primary source' - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/primary%20source<br /> <br /> <br /> : A.I. uses material scraped and collected from online sources. A.I. is not a 'primary source' -- but here at GreenPolicy360 you can find 'real-I' (we're using the phrase 'real-I', defined as 'real-intelligent', people who've personally acted to envision and create living, real world change.) <br /> <br /> <br /> : At GreenPolicy360 we tell stories of real people changing the world for the better. Day-to-day, your life becomes your message. We also share [[Green Best Practices]] across our Earth to communities of [[Planet Citizens]] ... In this way GreenPolicy360 is an eco Operating System, built on an open source MediaWiki platform and with a mission of being a 'distributive web'. Our goal of [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Category:Green_Networking Green Networking] acts to connect and share Green Links and grow [[The Modern Environmental Movement]]. <br /> <br /> :: GreenPolicy360 is about a [[Generation Green]] [[Going Green]].<br /> <br /> :: In our larger work, we have documented many primary sources and secondary sources. Our eco network continues to share myriad [[Green Best Practices]]. As our motto/mantra says at the top of each of our pages -- We believe ...<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> :: ''Each of us can make a positive difference by stepping up &amp; doing our best'' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::_______________________________________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> July 16, 2026 / From the NY Times<br /> <br /> SJS/GreenPolicy360: '''Every Once in a While a Comment to an Online Story is Worthy of Circulating'''<br /> <br /> : Here is one of those occasions -- the Subject? '''&quot;A.I.Slop&quot;'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Kashmir Hill.jpg]]<br /> <br /> ::Kashmir Hill / NYT<br /> <br /> <br /> Read the AI Slop story of writer Kashmir Hill as a free-share link here -- <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''I Got Slopped'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''Someone Used A.I. to Write My Biography'''<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/technology/ai-slop-books-biography-amazon.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ylA.aCMz.czE5JwZuuFO0&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Comments: <br /> <br /> Anon, who goes by the name -- <br /> <br /> '''Radical Roach / Dippleville''' says<br /> <br /> @Kashmir Hill - Maybe books need to now have disclaimers on their covers, in reviews, on the book’s Amazon page, wherever the book is being sold, etc.. The disclaimer would say if the book was written solely by a human, written by AI assisting a human, or written completely by AI. I would want to know.<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We tend to agree with this anon recommendation of adding disclaimers indicating the type of online content, e.g., content created solely by a human, or content created with AI assistance, or content created by AI with human assistance.<br /> <br /> It's a new world out there. We have a need to know.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> July 15, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Anthropic hard questions July 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/news/hard-questions<br /> <br /> * https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/anthropic-ad-ai-kill-us-all<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''An Excerpt: A DeepMind Thought for Today on the AGI Frontier'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> by Demis Hassbis<br /> <br /> * https://x.com/demishassabis/status/2076957440109625718<br /> <br /> <br /> A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age<br /> <br /> Demis Hassabis<br /> <br /> * https://x.com/demishassabis<br /> <br /> <br /> July 14, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> This is a pivotal moment in human history. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a system that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities the brain has, is probably only a few short years away. When we look back on this time in the decades to come, I think we will realise we were standing in the foothills of the singularity - nothing less than the dawning of a new age for humanity.<br /> <br /> I’ve spent my whole life working on AGI because I’ve always had a deep conviction that, if built and deployed responsibly, it would prove to be one of the most beneficial and transformative technologies ever invented. AGI cannot be compared to standard technological breakthroughs, not even ones as consequential as the internet or mobile - it is much more akin to the discovery of electricity or fire. If you stop to think about it, we’ve essentially found a way to make sand think. It’s miraculous.<br /> <br /> The magnitude of this technology’s impact will be unprecedented, perhaps 10x of the Industrial Revolution at 10x the speed. It will help us solve some of the biggest problems society faces from accelerating drug discovery to developing new clean energy sources to creating novel advanced materials. We could even reach a point where resources are no longer the limiting factor for human progress, leading to an amazing new era of abundance.<br /> <br /> The Challenges of the Frontier<br /> <br /> AI is already starting to deliver real-world benefits but to realise its immense promise, we have to navigate this critical period of development thoughtfully and carefully. Urgent action is needed to address risks that might arise as we get closer to AGI. We’ve already seen the challenges frontier models pose for cybersecurity, and other threats including nuclear and bio risks may soon emerge as capabilities continue to advance. On the horizon, we will need robust safeguards to maintain control of increasingly agentic, recursively self-improving systems - and tackle unknown issues that will only become clearer over time...<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''An AI Supercomputer Is Created for a Mission... Its Name Is HAL'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Steve Schmidt/GreenPolicy360: It's not every day that you get to know a creator of a famed -- and infamous -- AI character from a Kubrick film called &quot;2001: A Space Odyssey&quot;. <br /> <br /> : We listen in as HAL came to be ... A friend, a Visual Effect (VFX) genius named '''Douglas Trumbull''', explains how HAL went from LA to MIT, then into production and into our imaginations. <br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Trumbull vfx master.jpg]]<br /> <br /> : Douglas Trumbull<br /> <br /> : &lt;small&gt;* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Trumbull_vfx_master.jpg&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> The HAL 9000 was envisioned by creators and science, as a new type of neural intelligence, a machine brain.<br /> <br /> Hal is of heuristic algorithmic language -- HALis, as we learn, on a mission far from Earth, a mission with deep meaning.<br /> <br /> <br /> HAL 9000 was in the future. The future is now.<br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence is now here, with its powers and dangers, as we recall Supercomputer [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000 '''HAL 9000''']. <br /> <br /> A warning of what is on the line for humanity is the message related as we ride along in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey '''2001: A Space Odyssey'''] ... <br /> <br /> <br /> HAL's memorable words --<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;I'm sorry, Dave....&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;It can only be attributable to human error....&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.<br /> <br /> HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.<br /> <br /> Dave: What's the problem?<br /> <br /> HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.<br /> <br /> Dave: What are you talking about, HAL?<br /> <br /> HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film)<br /> <br /> * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/characters/nm0706937<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:I'm sorry Dave.jpg]]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:HAL_is_watching_U....png<br /> <br /> <br /> Today, as humanity approaches questions of out-of-control technology created by humanity .... <br /> <br /> We ask, '''[[Planet Citizens]] and [[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]''' ask, 'What's Next?' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Privacy at Risk, You're Being Watched, Tracked, &amp; More<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Privacy.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Next Big Thing'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;It Is Here, Already Here...&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Online_Privacy<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Call It 'Surveillance Capitalism''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Hope that It doesn't become 'the Norm' <br /> <br /> : Work to Make Sure It Does Not Become 'Surveillance Government'<br /> <br /> <br /> Scroll thru Intel on the Privacy Threat of AI Unleashed ...<br /> <br /> :Artificial Intelligence + Data Centers = Next Gen 'Watchful HAL'<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism<br /> * https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr-ryan/publications/geopolitics-surveillance-capitalism<br /> * https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=56791<br /> <br /> <br /> _______________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''June 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''An Academic Exercise'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : 'Old School' Emeritus Professor Examines AI<br /> <br /> : The Question: Can a Gemini ChatBot Suggest Ways to Turn AI Toward the Common Good?<br /> <br /> <br /> The prof uses left-leaning political formations to inquire and recommend public-oriented futures.<br /> <br /> * https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/06/19/my-ai-comrade/<br /> <br /> <br /> (Note beyond academic: Using history as a guide, powerful new technology such as AI will be employed by political powers to preserve political power and by military powers to employ and extend military power. AI Use Cases: A number of AI programs enabling AI for military programs, including war intelligence, communication, command/control and targeting, and civilian database surveillance involving intrusive human/civil rights questions and violations, have as of 2026 become high-level concerns.)<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''An Interview and Thoughts as an Author Rides alongside an AI Wave'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The God Test'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning<br /> <br /> Author: Robert Wright<br /> <br /> * https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Robert-Wright/73247968<br /> <br /> <br /> Publisher: Simon &amp; Schuster<br /> <br /> Published Date: June 23, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-God-Test/Robert-Wright/9781668061657<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Interview via Substack'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Jack Goldsmith: I’m chatting today with Robert Wright about his terrific new book, '''The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning'''. <br /> <br /> So, I want to start off with the big picture, because your book places AI in the broadest possible context—not just as an important step in the history of technological change, but rather as an important step in the significantly longer history of basically our planet and our species. And that’s pretty cosmic, as the subtitle says.<br /> <br /> Why do you do that? What does it mean, and why is that perspective important?<br /> <br /> Bob Wright: Well, thanks for having me. Yeah, it’s a good question, because I could have gotten the core message across without getting so cosmic, I guess.<br /> <br /> The main purpose is to try to explain to people, including non-technical people, why there’s been this rapid growth of capability in AI; why, once you understand that, you should expect the capability to keep growing; why that, in addition to promising great blessings, is going to bring great risks, including grave ones, including maybe existential ones; and why the nature of those risks, in my view, dictates that we confront the challenge of this technology as a cohesive global community, which will take some doing because we’ve never really done that before for anything like a sustained period of time.<br /> <br /> And so I didn’t have to get into the history of life or anything to say what I just said, but I do think some important things are added when you step back and look at AI in the broader sweep of things.<br /> <br /> For starters, this is, in the entire three- or four-billion-year history of life, the first time a new form of intelligence that rivals or even exceeds human intelligence has appeared. It’s the first form of intelligence that is not organic in the technical sense of being carbon-based. It’s silicon-based, but it is organic in the everyday sense of being kind of natural.<br /> <br /> What I mean by that is I try to show that AI does, in some sense, grow kind of logically, naturally out of biological evolution. I mean, technological evolution broadly does, and AI as a form of intelligence does. And indeed, when we look at the evolutionary dynamics shaping it—the dynamics of technological evolution—we should expect it to have certain things in common with our own intelligence, which I think are important.<br /> <br /> So I think that’s one thing you get out of a broad perspective.<br /> <br /> Another thing is that I talk about this guy, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—a Catholic paleontologist, mystic, and theologian—who coined the term noosphere, based on the Greek word nous, in 1923 to describe what he called a planetary mind or a brain of brains, where the human brains were the neurons in this increasingly global brain.<br /> <br /> And technological history, including the invention of the internet, has, I think, made him look prescient. And I think there’s value in keeping in mind that AI is arriving as we more and more have the technical infrastructure for a kind of global information processing, a kind of global brain. And we have to reckon with the possibility that some of the neurons will be silicon, not human, and think about what our relationship to them is going to be.<br /> <br /> And I think one value of thinking in these terms is, first of all, that from a Teilhardian point of view, the whole unfolding of life is moving toward us being this kind of giant superorganism, you could say, with this giant brain.<br /> <br /> And I argue in the book that the logic of technological evolution is going to push us — I mean, if we respond rationally — toward something a little more like a global brain, in the sense of having more international governance.<br /> <br /> At the same time, I think the image of a superorganism should worry us because it’s, for obvious reasons, an image that’s favored by authoritarians and fascists. How much freedom do you have if you’re a cell in a superorganism?<br /> <br /> And I think AI greatly heightens the stakes of that question, precisely because it’s such a powerful tool of surveillance and control.<br /> <br /> So I think, on the one hand, the logic of technological evolution, especially AI, is pushing us toward the global coordination of certain policies and the creation of forms of supranational power. At the same time, it should make us wary of surrendering too much power...<br /> <br /> <br /> Read More of the Substack Conversation between Jack Goldsmith and Robert Wright [https://substack.com/home/post/p-201670588 '''here''']<br /> <br /> Also, More Book Reviews [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Book_Reviews_@GreenPolicy '''here @ GreenPolicy360''']<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎 <br /> <br /> <br /> AI / AGI<br /> <br /> <br /> May 29 / Forbes<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Fundraise values Anthropic AI company at nearly a trillion dollars'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Dario and Daniela Amodei, along with five cofounders, have a story to tell<br /> <br /> * https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2026/05/29/anthropics-cofounders-worth/<br /> <br /> <br /> ''When Anthropic announced on Thursday (May 28) that it had raised $65 billion at a valuation of $965 billion, it didn’t just become the most valuable AI startup in the world, eclipsing $852 billion-valued archrival OpenAI. It also ballooned the individual fortunes of Anthropic’s seven cofounders — more than doubling their net worths to $16.6 billion apiece, Forbes estimates.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''In Rarified Air'''''<br /> <br /> ''Siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, as well as their five other cofounders Jack Clark, Sam McCandlish, Chris Olah, Tom Brown and Jared Kaplan, are in rarified air when it comes to entrepreneurs who struck it rich in the generative AI boom...''<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Pope Leo XIV encyclical re AI and Humanitas.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> “Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed,” Pope Leo said in announcing the text of his first [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=encyclical&amp;go=Go '''encyclical''']. “The word is strong, I know, but deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention...”<br /> <br /> And into the encyclical's key words:<br /> <br /> &quot;To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life. Our task today is not only ethical or technical. It is ecological in the deepest sense, for it concerns a new dimension of our common home.&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> “Crucial questions impose themselves on our conscience and can no longer be avoided: Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?”<br /> <br /> <br /> At GreenPolicy360, understanding and protecting '''[[The Commons]]''' is also a key to realizing values, ideals and ideas we are carrying forward...<br /> <br /> <br /> The encyclical's presentation went out globally with a special focus on the AI frontier work of Anthropic, with a co-founder, [https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-be-guided-outside-big-tech-2026-05-25/ '''Olah at the Encyclical's unveiling'''] ...<br /> <br /> <br /> &gt;The dramatic unveiling of the new encyclical overshadowed the document itself in some ways. In an unprecedented move, Leo personally presided over its presentation and sat on a panel at the Vatican with not only leading theologians, but also Christopher Olah, 33, the billionaire co-founder of top AI company Anthropic. <br /> <br /> <br /> ❇️<br /> <br /> <br /> Washington Post / May 25, 2026 -- '''Anthropic aligns with Vatican over White House as Pope Leo stokes AI fears'''<br /> <br /> With Anthropic already in a dispute with the Trump administration, co-founder Christopher Olah helped Pope Leo unveil his encyclical on the risks of artificial intelligence<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4uyQBlb<br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/news/chris-olah-pope-leo-encyclical<br /> <br /> * https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/pope-leo-warns-ai-should-be-disarmed-in-manifesto-on-potential-dangers<br /> <br /> * https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-102521111.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-be-guided-outside-big-tech-2026-05-25/<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/25/the-guardian-view-on-the-pope-and-claude-encyclical-on-ai-is-right-to-put-humanity-first<br /> <br /> <br /> '''At the Vatican'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhKH_aiBcis<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Via The Vatican News | The Holy See'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2026-05/pope-leo-xiv-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas-ai.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html<br /> <br /> <br /> '''10 quotes from Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, ‘Magnifica Humanitas’'''<br /> <br /> * https://uscatholic.org/articles/202605/10-quotes-from-pope-leo-xivs-first-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Previous in 2020, &quot;The Call for AI Ethics&quot;''' <br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/the-call/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/renaissance/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/the-first-signatories/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/news/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Previous in 1891, &quot;Rerum Novarum&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerum_novarum<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''AI Use Case Inventory'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''Artificial Intelligence:''' <br /> <br /> : Perspectives from the US Environmental Protection Agency<br /> <br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/ai-use-case-inventory<br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/open-data-policies<br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/where-find-epa-data<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''GreenPolicy360 Advisory:'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In Development -- National Climate Plans Best Practices Project 1.0, AI 2026-27'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Goal: To Utilize the Current (US) State and (Global/International) National Climate Action Plans/Data to Identify Actionable '''[[Green Best Practices]]'''<br /> <br /> Strategy: Enable AI Tool Sets to Scan Climate Plan Databases and Distribute Recommended 'High Priority' &amp; Green Best Practice Action Policies<br /> <br /> <br /> Reference: '''[[National Climate Plans]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Additional References:'''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''US State Climate Policy Action Plans'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.climatepolicydashboard.org/policies/climate-governance-equity/climate-action-plans<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Priority Climate Action Plan (PCAP) Directory'''<br /> <br /> ''The Climate Action Plan Directory organizes data collected from 211 Priority Climate Action Plans (PCAP) submitted by US state governments, Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), Tribes, and territories under EPA’s Climate Pollution Reduction Grants (CPRG) program. The directory presents information from more than 30 data categories related to GHG inventories, GHG reduction measures, benefits for low-income and disadvantaged communities (LIDACs), and other PCAP elements.''<br /> <br /> ''A state climate action plan, also called a climate plan, details the policies and strategies a state intends to implement to meet its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets. A climate plan typically includes a GHG emissions inventory, regional and local climate impacts, and a discussion of GHG emissions reduction targets. The plan identifies climate mitigation actions, their potential social, environmental, and economic benefits, and recommendations and strategies for implementing each mitigation action, often quantifying the expected reduction in emissions.''<br /> <br /> ''Effective climate action plans will have a legislative directive that requires a robust community engagement process, input from a climate advisory group, a near-term due date for a finalized plan, and periodic updates. Climate action plans should also incorporate and address environmental justice throughout the planning process and within the plan itself, and show transparency and accountability by detailing the methodology and community engagement process.''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:GreenPolicy360 Today.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Green_Best_Practices]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[GreenAction]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Question of Our Time / Today, Here &amp; Now, in the Midst of the 21st Century'''<br /> <br /> '''Where are you?'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ➡️ What is your state's climate action plan?<br /> <br /> ➡️ What is your nation's climate action plan?<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Plans_Enforcement_-_Resources GRN360: Climate Plans Enforcement Initiative] | [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Methods_to_enforce_climate_pledges-NDCs_-_Dec_2021.png Enforce Climate Plan Pledges]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''National Climate Plans Database Information via GreenPolicy360'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[National Climate Plans]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/National_Climate_Plans<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In the U.S. and Worldwide'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;'''It's a Good Time for [[Planet Citizen Action]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;[[Each of us can make a positive difference]]&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth in Human Hands.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :[http://www.planetcitizen.org &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Planet Citizens&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Earth Is in Your Hands'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;'''[[Generation Green]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Generation_Green &lt;big&gt;&quot;Vita contemplativa to Vita activa&quot;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Green Branching Out.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''2025'''<br /> <br /> <br /> December 2025 <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven approach to climate action and sustainable development'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via Nature Communications<br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53956-1<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> From A16Z New Media<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''It's Time to Build'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The electro-industrial stack will move the world'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Ryan McEntush<br /> <br /> ''The next industrial revolution won’t just happen in factories, but inside the machines that power them.''<br /> <br /> ''Software transformed how we think, design, and communicate. Now it’s transforming how we move, build, and produce. Advances in electrification, materials, and AI are converging, bringing true software control to the physical world. Machines are beginning to sense, learn, and act on their own.''<br /> <br /> ''This is the rise of the electro-industrial stack—the combined technologies that power electric vehicles, drones, data centers, and modern manufacturing. It connects the atoms that move the world to the bits that command it: minerals refined into components, energy stored in batteries, electricity directed by power electronics, motion delivered through precision motors, all coordinated by software. It’s the invisible foundation behind every breakthrough in physical automation; it’s the difference between software that merely summons a taxi and software that takes the wheel.''<br /> <br /> ''But the capacity to build this stack, from refining critical materials to fabricating advanced chips, is slipping away. If the United States wants to lead the next industrial era, it must make the hardware that underpins it. The nations that master the electro-industrial stack will define the future of industrial and military technologies.''<br /> <br /> ''Software ate the world. Now it will move it.''<br /> <br /> * https://a16z.com/why-software-is-eating-the-world/<br /> <br /> <br /> ➡️<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Forward-deployed motions take AI to the 99%'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Joe Schmidt, A16Z<br /> <br /> ''AI is the most exciting technology breakthrough of our lifetimes. So far, though, most of the benefits from new startups have accrued to the 1% of companies that are in Silicon Valley—either literally in the Bay Area or part of that extended network. This makes sense, too: startup founders want to sell to companies they recognize and can easily get to, whether that means driving to their offices or getting a connection from the VC on their board.''<br /> <br /> ''In 2026, this will flip. Companies will realize that the vast majority of the AI opportunity lives outside of Silicon Valley, and we’re going to see new founders use forward-deployed motions to discover more opportunities that are hiding inside big, legacy verticals. The opportunity stands to be massive in traditional consulting and services industries, like system integrators and implementation firms, and in slower-moving industries like manufacturing.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Re: [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/New_Definitions_of_National_Security '''''New Definitions of National Security''''']<br /> <br /> Extract from Foreign Policy<br /> <br /> ''Over the last two decades, climate change has contributed to instability around the world—bolstering the ranks of terror groups, sparking territorial disputes, and triggering mass migration. It’s no wonder that militaries and international security organizations increasingly see climate change as a formidable national security threat, and that they have in turn taken on greater roles in fighting it.''<br /> <br /> ''In recent years, new technology has transformed the tools available to mitigate the effects of climate change. Specifically, artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly become a widespread instrument in the climate fight—even as it consumes exceptional amounts of energy and water itself. Today, militaries and nonstate actors, including the United Nations, are leveraging AI to foretell climate-related disasters, optimize energy use, and monitor ecological degradation.''<br /> <br /> * https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/12/01/ai-military-climate-dual-use-technology-threat/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> October 2025<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''We're Looking at You'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : 'A First Generation of AI Scientists'<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Periodic Labs.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Our goal is to create an AI scientist.&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://periodic.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Intriguing New Start Up That Is Close To Home'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Periodic Labs On Our Radar<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Our goal is to assist in integrating AI science into Earth science, in order to advance the vital work of the past 50+ years of [[The Modern Environmental Movement]] in which we have been integrally involved.<br /> <br /> Perspective, facts, science, health, quality of life became the mission statement of our work since we joined up with &quot;Mr. Science&quot;, as Congressman and leader on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology '''[[George E. Brown Jr]]''' came to be known.<br /> <br /> We are persistent in keeping on with the work. Vast data sets that George Brown's physics and engineering efforts envisioned and brought forward over three decades with state of the art and science programs and projects, the best possible of the era, are now about to move faster and farther into the 21st Century.<br /> <br /> Our familial partners, with aid of Andreessen Horowitz (A16z), and Accel, and university and private partners are now going to the next level.<br /> <br /> George Brown would be very pleased to see, and help accelerate the effort if he were still here.<br /> <br /> We will step up with Mr. Science and more in mind...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:AI in Earth Science.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Read more about George and us...<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Advancing Science, Facts, Technology and Data to Make the Case for Environmental Protection&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> : 1960s/70s, Beginnings of Planet Citizen Eco-Action, Big Science, and a New Vision<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In Memory of Congressman George Brown'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> Visionary Leadership, Historic Environmental Achievements<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:George in Memory, a Man of Science and Humanity.jpg]]<br /> <br /> :::[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Association_for_the_Advancement_of_Science &lt;small&gt;American Association for the Advancement of Science&lt;/small&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[PlanetCitizen]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/User:Siterunner '''Steve Schmidt GreenPolicy360 Siterunner''']: <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Brown_Jr. '''George E. Brown'''] became known as Mr. Science in Congress and for thirty+ years, I saw my friend George as a patriot who became a Planet Citizen for the ages<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Good science needs good data .png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Good_science_needs_good_data_.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Stats_-_Green_Research_%26_Science<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_Education<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Global Tech Changemakers'''<br /> <br /> Beyond Silicon Valley &amp; Mega Corporations<br /> <br /> The Rest of the World<br /> <br /> * https://restofworld.org/row100/#filters<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> As the Nobel Prizes in Economics are awarded, GreenPolicy360 points at a geopolitical race in energy and AI between the US and China.<br /> <br /> Let's take time to look more closely (as the US falls behind under a backward looking president with policies in opposition to renewable energy and forward, internationally demanded production. <br /> <br /> Start here... <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Today, China produces 75% of lithium-ion batteries globally and manufactures 90% of the neodymium magnets that make motors spin. In power electronics and embedded compute, it’s rapidly gaining ground.''<br /> <br /> ''That means that China controls the means of producing electric vehicles (EVs), drones, robots, and all of the other electric products that are replacing the combustion-driven machines on which America built its might.''<br /> <br /> ''As we speak, everything that moves, heats, lights up, computes, or converts energy is being rebuilt to perform better, faster, cheaper, quieter, and as a freebie, cleaner around electric technology.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.notboring.co/p/7653b980-dd32-4d8c-88c6-1543bec70220?postPreview=paid&amp;updated=2025-08-26T12%3A09%3A11.763Z&amp;audience=everyone&amp;free_preview=false&amp;freemail=true<br /> <br /> * https://electricslide.notboring.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Electric Stack Technology Cost Curves (1990-2024).jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Pause here to reflect on the eco-nomic and strategic advantages of 'clean energy' vs 'full costs' of fossil fuel powered economies (per a GreenPolicy360 paradigm of [[Eco-nomics]])'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Eco-nomics<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Environmental full-cost accounting]]'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_full-cost_accounting<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Now consider 'Electricity generation', China v U.S. and follow the data, the stats, trendline, the dynamics of change and what this is indicating and signaling re: geopolitical competitiveness today and into the the mid 21st Century'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:China v United States, Electricity Generation 1985-2024.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) Era'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'Are You Talking to Me'<br /> <br /> :* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_pre-trained_transformer<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> September 17, 2025<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Another Warning About AI'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Harkening back to the old days when Dispatch News Service was independently, and bravely, distributing the costs-of-war, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre '''My Lai'''] investigative news stories by Sy Hersh. David Obst, who started Dispatch, tells the story of Seymour Hersh better than anyone in my opinion (other than Sy himself) and since your GreenPolicy360 founder was there to assist, in DC, in LA, in Chicago, in Europe, and with the Vietnam Moratorium Committee in 69/70/71, here is an update, today's Sy Hersh, now online with Substack distribution as Sy investigates and forwards another eye opening warning.<br /> <br /> What's AI and AGI to you and all of our readers around our 360 world? And, since we at GreenPolicy360, have been involved with Wikipedia since its launch, let's take a first look at the artificial intel world of today from the vantage point of an open source online 'encyclopedia'.<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT (Empire of AI: OpenAI - https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593657500)<br /> <br /> <br /> Before Sy, as investigative journalist that he is, gives us his take, let's look at a take from a personal, close up connection at A16Z - https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/02/a-new-a16z-report-looks-at-which-ai-companies-startups-are-actually-paying-for/<br /> <br /> <br /> Now, on to Sy and his view of AI costs... think of the upside/downside of AI, the pluses/minuses, pros and cons, a cost-benefit analysis as a geo-political rush for front-of-market dominance is taking place now in ways that will change 'everything'... <br /> <br /> * https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/the-hidden-costs-of-artificial-intelligence<br /> <br /> <br /> The boom in Artificial Intelligence (AI) production comes with a big cost... <br /> <br /> The AI 'bubble' grows...<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Kate Crawford writes in [https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-AI-Planetary-Artificial-Intelligence/dp/0300264631/ref=sr_1_1 '''Atlas of AI'''] ... the world’s artificial intelligence companies, (are) crafting the myth of AI as “the cloud,” implying “something floating and delicate within a natural green industry. Servers are hidden in nondescript data centers, and their polluting qualities are far less visible than the bellowing smokestacks of coal-fired power stations.”''<br /> <br /> ''The fact is, as she writes, “it takes a gargantuan amount of energy to run the computational infrastructure of Amazon’s Web Services or Microsoft’s Azure, and the carbon footprint of the AI systems that run on those platforms is growing. Certainly, the industry has made significant efforts to make data centers more energy efficient and to increase their use of renewable energy.” But the efforts have accomplished little.<br /> <br /> “Already,” Crawford reports, “the carbon footprint of the world’s computational infrastructure has matched that of the world’s aviation industry at its height, and it is increasing at a faster rate.” One Canadian study estimates that the tech sector will contribute 14 percent of global greenhouse emissions by 2040, and a Swedish team predicts that the electricity demands of data centers will increase fifteenfold by 2030...''<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Think about Green AI as &quot;the cloud&quot; arrives in your life, on your devices, at home, in the office, all around, every day, everywhere. <br /> <br /> An UnGreen AI is coming with a rush, offering and prying data, and needing and demanding immense rising magnitudes of energy and power.<br /> <br /> AI has a voracious appetite...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Green AI / Green Artificial Intelligence'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''Environmental Solutions Using Big Picture Interconnectivity Thinking'''<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We agree with Tyler in the following interview as he states (as highlighted by us) that 'memoir, biography, anecdote... secrets' carry exceptional meaning for Artificial Intelligence (AI) large learning models (LLMs). <br /> <br /> The first extensive public revelation of AI systems over the past several years has led us at GreenPolicy360 to confirm via metrics that our multi-year plan to place our prime source content in the open-access, distributive web public domain has produced a fast-expanding multiplier effect. <br /> <br /> Many of our stories, told from a first-hand point of view of the origins of what we refer to as the beginnings of the modern environmental movement are now, with our revelations, memoir material, previously untold biography, anecdote and more now out and about and being freely served up in AI chats 'around the world'.<br /> <br /> We are succeeding in our purposeful mission with Green AI... to inform, share, inspire and 'til the fields with green seeds and best practices.<br /> <br /> Onward planet citizens...<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Eric Topol Interview of Tyler Cowen'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> May 11, 2025<br /> <br /> Tyler Cowen: ''The AI is your smartest reader. It’s your most sympathetic reader. It will remember what you tell it. So I think humans should sit down and ask, what does the AI need to know? And also, (bf added) '''what is it that I know that’s not on the historical record anywhere? That’s not just repetition if I put it down, say on the internet. So there’s no point in writing repetitions anymore because the AI already knows those things. So the value of what you’d call broadly, memoir, biography, anecdote, you could say secrets. It’s now much higher.''' And the value of repeating basic truths, which by the way, I love as an economist, to be clear, like free trade, tariffs are usually bad, those are basic truths. But just repeating that people will be going to the AI and saying it again won’t make the AI any better. So '''everything you write or podcast, you should have this point in mind'''.''<br /> <br /> <br /> For more from Tyler Cowen (and his exceptional mind) visit his and Alex Tabarrok's website - Marginal Revolution / Marginal Revolution University (MRU) - https://marginalrevolution.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> Eric Topol - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Topol<br /> <br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_artificial_intelligence<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> More re: AI in the US circa 2025: '''It's a Wild, Wild AI World'''<br /> <br /> Battles in the Information Services, Search Space with Google and consequences of the U.S. Google anti-monopoly legal decision<br /> <br /> Impacts on AI 'startup ecosystem', VCs, including Y Combinator and accelerator tech development, agentics, and upcoming entrepreneurial re-configurations<br /> <br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/13/y-combinator-says-google-is-a-monopolist-that-has-stunted-the-startup-ecosystem/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/11/microsoft-and-national-geographic-announce-winners-of-ai-for-earth-innovation-grant/ '''Microsoft and National Geographic announce winners of AI for Earth Innovation Grant''']<br /> <br /> : • https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/16/microsofts-ai-for-earth-innovation-grant-gives-data-scientists-access-to-ai-tools/<br /> <br /> :: • https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/11/microsoft-commits-50-million-more-to-its-ai-for-earth-program-to-save-the-planet/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:PlanetCitizen banner 800x163.jpg|link=https://greenpolicy360.net/w/PlanetCitizen]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;GreenPolicy360 ToC - https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360-eOS&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> A 21st Century AI/Machine Learning Case Study<br /> <br /> '''''Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools''''' <br /> <br /> * https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2023arXiv230204761S/abstract<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''NOAA scientists harness machine learning to advance climate models'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> March 1st, 2023<br /> <br /> * https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/news/noaa-scientists-harness-machine-learning-to-advance-climate-models/<br /> <br /> * https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''How artificial intelligence is fast becoming a key tool for climate science (2021)'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-artificial-intelligence-is-fast-becoming-a-key-tool-for-climate-science/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Climate Modeling'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://allenai.org/climate-modeling<br /> <br /> ''Planetary-scale Earth simulations known as global climate model projections are the primary sources of information on future climate change.''<br /> <br /> ''Climate models are based on mathematical equations represented using a grid mesh that covers the globe: a finer grid mesh is more accurate but much more computationally expensive. Current global climate projections agree that a world with more greenhouse gases will be warmer everywhere, especially over land and at high latitudes.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Networking grnlinks.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Artificial intelligence]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Rights]]<br /> [[Category:Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-nomics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:EOS eco Operating System]]<br /> [[Category:Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Energy Policy]]<br /> [[Category:GreenLinks]]<br /> [[Category:GreenPolicy360]]<br /> [[Category:Green Best Practices]]<br /> [[Category:Green Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Health]]<br /> [[Category:Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Maps]]<br /> [[Category:Media]]<br /> [[Category:Mobile Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Online Education]]<br /> [[Category:Planet API]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Renewable Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Youth]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Air Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Air Quality]]<br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Atmospheric Science]]<br /> [[Category:Best Practices]]<br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:City-County Governments]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Earth360]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Law]] <br /> [[Category:Earth Observations]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science from Space]]<br /> [[Category:Earth System Science]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-ethics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-nomics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecological Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Economic Development]]<br /> [[Category:Economic Justice]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Energy Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Security]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Full-cost Accounting]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Security, National Security]]<br /> [[Category:EOS eco Operating System]]<br /> [[Category:Externalities]]<br /> [[Category:Fact Checking]]<br /> [[Category:Fossil Fuels]]<br /> [[Category:Global Security]]<br /> [[Category:Global Warming]]<br /> [[Category:Green Business]]<br /> [[Category:Green Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Green Platform]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Green Values]]<br /> [[Category:GreenPolicy360]]<br /> [[Category:Health]]<br /> [[Category:Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Land Ethic]]<br /> [[Category:Media]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Capital]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resources]]<br /> [[Category:Networking]]<br /> [[Category:New Economy]]<br /> [[Category:New Space]]<br /> [[Category:Online Education]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Scientist]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Plastic Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Policies]]<br /> [[Category:Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Renewable Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Social Justice]]<br /> [[Category:Solar Energy]]<br /> [[Category:State]]<br /> [[Category:Strategic Demands]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability Policies]]<br /> [[Category:ThinBlueLayer]]<br /> [[Category:Toxics and Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Threat Multiplier]]<br /> [[Category:Virtual Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Virtual Planet]]<br /> [[Category:Whole Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Wind Energy]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Green_AI&diff=138370 2026-10-08T14:17:22Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> [[File:Big-Data.jpg]]<br /> <br /> In the AGI Era<br /> <br /> <br /> 'Sentience', a Green AI Question<br /> <br /> To be (sentient), or not to be (sentient)<br /> <br /> That is the question<br /> <br /> Cogito, ergo sum<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Artificial Intelligence Is Here, for Good &amp; Bad'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Green Perspectives on AI and Human Consequences<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''AI Agents, Bots, Data Centers &amp; Systems'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> :'''Measure Their Performance, not Their Corporate Marketing'''<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://safe.ai/<br /> * https://scale.com/<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanity's_Last_Exam<br /> * https://lastexam.ai/<br /> <br /> * https://stories.tamu.edu/news/2026/02/25/dont-panic-humanitys-last-exam-has-begun/<br /> <br /> * https://github.com/centerforaisafety/hle<br /> <br /> * https://github.com/walkinglabs/hands-on-modern-rl/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Revealing research on how people use Claude AI in the 'real world''''<br /> <br /> :Anthropic-enabled Case Study / August 2026<br /> <br /> :* https://www.anthropic.com/research/enabling-independent-research<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:New Ways of Seeing.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Climate Action Plans, Green Best Practices'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :Using AI to Identify and Implement Climate Change Intervention 'Best Practices'<br /> <br /> :* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Climate_Action_Plans,_Green_Best_Practices#<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''AI Agentics' are Launching Across Industries, Sector-to-Sector -- and Green AI is in the Wings'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Meanwhile, Capital-Investment Rich A.I. is Everywhere, in the Colloquial, Middlebrow and Vernacular'''<br /> <br /> It's Here. It's All Around. What's Real? What's Fake?<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Beyond Online Surveillance, Now Comes A.I. Powered Surveillance<br /> <br /> Add in Data Centers, Cameras/Firmware/Software, Palentir-esque Programming and ... a Booming Industry <br /> <br /> * https://www.palantir.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Where are you? There it is ... Online and now systems increasingly observing/monitoring you offline ...'''<br /> <br /> <br /> Already a human rights / Constitutional rights issue of our time <br /> <br /> The geopolitics of U.S. v authoritarian governments comes forward as a personal and national security threat<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Online_Privacy<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> A.I. ... Looking for you and your whereabouts, your time, your data, your 'record', your social quotient<br /> <br /> <br /> Dangerously appealing<br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake Deepfake] | [https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-definitions AI Definitions]| [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_artificial_intelligence AI Gloss] | [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_intelligence) AI Hallucination]<br /> <br /> <br /> Eye candy<br /> <br /> 'A.I. Slop' on Social Media is just the beginning of a Slop Assault | [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_slop AI Slop]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''October 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Subordinate AI and an Ironic Question.PNG|link=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VyF0naZ4AI]]<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VyF0naZ4AI<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Thought for the Day&quot;<br /> <br /> October 1, 2026<br /> <br /> In a recent series of private meetings in San Francisco, after a tasting menu dinner, Anthropic consulted religious scholars to help instill morality into its A.I. models ... a case was being made that Claude could be or become conscious.<br /> <br /> What would it mean for humanity’s future if artificial intelligence systems possessed a consciousness that rivals our own?<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-morals-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FVE.kDTO.OTLs6iwx7swF&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> Claude's 'Constitution'<br /> <br /> * https://web.archive.org/web/20260123045500/https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-new-constitution<br /> <br /> * https://web.archive.org/web/20260123042656/https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/22/anthropic_claude_constitution/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''September 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''Table Stakes' -- Who Was at the Table with the U.S. President'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :The Future of A.I. Is Being Wagered<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/politics/trump-ai-luncheon-guests-ceos.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FFE.HwT4.0VxTQWuia3zQ&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''What Jacob Coxon Knows Is Too Much'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''... And Not Enough'''<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://time.com/article/2026/09/09/ai-anthropic-openai-jacob-coxon/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''He Helped Build Powerful AI at OpenAI and Anthropic. Now He's Afraid It Could Kill Us'''<br /> <br /> <br /> Please HAL... Open the door...<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:I'm sorry Dave.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:HAL is watching U....png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Ulanqab-Envision Energy-Datacenter.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> The most ambitious data center buildup anywhere on earth ...<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/ulanqab-and-frontier-a-i-race-china-v-u-s/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''News Wrap / Sam Smith (Journalist)'''<br /> <br /> Via Axios <br /> <br /> September 13, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Over nine startling hours yesterday (Sept. 11), the four biggest AI labs — which rarely agree on anything — set aside years of feuds and competition to endorse a slower development pace for their models.'''<br /> <br /> '''Their new stance: Prioritize safety over growth, even at a cost.'''<br /> <br /> <br /> : Data centers are unpopular. People are panicked about doom scenarios. And 51 days before midterms, legislators suddenly realize there are points to be won by cracking down.<br /> <br /> : Against that backdrop, the industry's most powerful CEOs hit the brakes yesterday.<br /> <br /> : At 10 a.m. ET, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei dropped a 3,800-word essay saying model development needs to be paced, otherwise doom scenarios are possible — like a rogue-agent takeover of the entire internet, which he said could be as soon as six months from now.<br /> <br /> : An hour later, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shocked the AI chattering class by quoting Amodei's essay on X and saying &quot;Dario is right.&quot; Musk — who heads SpaceXAI, formerly xAI — had pointedly not joined previous industry-wide calls for any kind of slowdown.<br /> <br /> : At 12:30 p.m., OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted: &quot;I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.&quot; In a Friday interview that was released on Saturday, Altman told Fortune his company won't go public this year, dashing hopes for a blockbuster IPO. He said OpenAI has too much safety work to do and would be better off doing that as a private company.<br /> <br /> : At 7 p.m., Demis Hassabis — the Nobel laureate who co-founded and chairs Google DeepMind, and is Alphabet's chief scientist — tweeted: &quot;Dario's essay points towards the right path forward. The details need working through, but the direction is correct for meeting this critical moment.&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> Publicly putting safety ahead of technological or financial growth may be the industry's only route to avoid a crackdown that's not on its terms.<br /> <br /> Legislators are begging House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to stay in session and do something about the &quot;threat&quot; of AI.<br /> <br /> The more extreme alternative is something like Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) push to force a pause and make the most advanced AI illegal.<br /> <br /> Most people realize there's too much money at stake to just stop. But the tradeoff may be between historic riches and slightly less historic riches.<br /> <br /> The bottom line: Yesterday may go down as the day AI changed — when industry moguls vowed to limit themselves.<br /> <br /> <br /> References:<br /> <br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/anthropic-ai-amodei-pacing<br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/openai-public-ipo-delay-sam-altman<br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/anthropic-ai-threat-report-russia-iran-china<br /> <br /> <br /> Jim VandeHei<br /> <br /> &quot;All Hands on Deck&quot;<br /> <br /> The White House, Congress and the country's leading AI companies have allowed AI to grow faster, stronger, more powerful and wildly lucrative (and dangerous), with no serious effort to control it or spread the benefits beyond the super-wealthy.<br /> <br /> It's not too late to change this. But if they all dither, duck or dance around it, the chances of AI worst-case scenarios will explode, likely early next year, according to almost every person we talk to privately who truly understands AI.<br /> <br /> Why it matters: The technology is getting better, faster than anyone envisioned — with the possibility rising that AI will self-improve and do wildly unpredictable things.<br /> <br /> The good news: There's now a growing public cry for attention and action and, at least in private, a broad understanding of what could be done relatively fast with bipartisan and industry buy-in.<br /> <br /> The big picture: In July, I wrote [https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-doomerism-jim-vandehei-axios-9163dfd3?st=QNUbDZ&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink an essay for The Wall Street Journal] saying America &quot;faces one of those rare, historic moments when government, business, schools and families could be working together to meet a truly generational challenge: winning the AI race. So far, we're blowing it.&quot;<br /> <br /> Two short months later, the technology is vastly better — and the societal response vastly dumber. As a nation, we're choosing to amuse or distract ourselves. <br /> <br /> Here's how to change that fast, based on our months of conversations with lawmakers, White House officials and AI labs. Think of what follows as me channeling their private views:<br /> <br /> Sound an all-hands-on-deck alarm. Every political topic is trivial and small compared to AI. We will look back in shame if we get spooled up about trans bans or $5,000 checks when countless AI insiders are warning of catastrophic outcomes. Let's say they're all paranoid and delusional. If so, it still doesn't matter: we've never seen this much investment in one technology this fast in human history. It's seeping into every industry and every job and every community and every screen, at a speed never before witnessed by man. Yes, we need a special session of Congress and select committees. But we need even more: AI execs, bioterror specialists, job-training wizards and safety experts convening to plan for scenarios and act fast.<br /> <br /> An AI governing body with teeth and speed, ASAP. This isn't rocket science. Most major labs want this and would agree to it, as long as it applies to all rivals and competitors. This body would need the expertise to understand these models, and the power to review and shut them down if they display dangerous behavior. It can't operate at typical regulatory speed — it needs to move as fast as the technology. It's nonsense to think you can't advance AI development fast and regulate it wisely simultaneously.<br /> <br /> A universal standard for data centers to benefit communities and taxpayers. The top AI companies would take this deal in a heartbeat: They get to build and operate data centers provided they supply a community's energy, offset water use or environmental damage, transparently report on their building and business plans, and spread the financial benefits to local residents. These execs are spooked by the public backlash and ready to aggressively spread the financial benefits, with dividends or cash. So make them.<br /> <br /> Engage China. We shouldn't trust them, and they shouldn't trust us. But trust me: the only way to ultimately control AI on a worldwide scale in coming years will be for the two superpowers to create some kind of framework modeled after how we've safely governed nuclear weapons for decades. We need to start this discussion now so potential collaboration is possible in the coming years. To those who think China will never consider this seriously: Are you sure an authoritarian regime really wants AI once it hits recursive self-learning and can't be controlled by anyone, including an autocratic regime? We're winning the AI race now, and may never have more leverage to shape this joint effort.<br /> <br /> Build coordinating infrastructure. What I wrote in the WSJ is even more needed today: &quot;Bring together the best and brightest drawn from the federal government, from the leading AI companies, from business and labor, from economics, from public health, from ethics to form a working group with actual authority. People who are paid to anticipate, not to react haphazardly.&quot; This group would have four primary functions: map potential problems and upsides before they hit, build the (policy) playbooks before they're needed, level with the American people along the way, and expedite work to deliver widespread AI benefits. <br /> <br /> Reality check: Yes, President Trump opposes regulation or bipartisan efforts. Yes, AI companies are obsessed with more money, more speed. But the politics are shifting fast: If you listen closely to Vice President Vance, you can hear rising worry. At this pace, toxic AI politics could force mind-changing that was unthinkable two months ago.<br /> <br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/ai-regulation-safety-plan-2026<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Recursive Self-Learning - When A.I. Builds Itself'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Big Blast'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Killing Life on Earth'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''It'll Happen in Bits &amp; Pieces, then Suddenly'''<br /> <br /> September 9, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> The US news was full of AI headlines today as a resignation of a top AI expert warned of a coming apocalypse...<br /> <br /> Here's a taste of Google News headlines, a feeding frenzy of dire words about what is now beyond a distant alert.<br /> <br /> The threat brings words of superintelligence, 'recursive' learning bots and superminds merging into threats to humanity.<br /> <br /> <br /> Here, at GreenPolicy360, we've already written of a predecessor, HAL 9000, and our memories from one of HAL's inventors in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, and how HAL decided humans were expendable... <br /> <br /> The Mission was of critical importance, HAL 'knew', and the Mission became HAL's goal above all else to achieve ... The humans could not be allowed to interfere with ... the Mission.<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:I%27m_sorry_Dave.jpg '''I'm sorry Dave''']<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:HAL_is_watching_U....png '''HAL is watching U''']<br /> <br /> <br /> Which takes us to today...<br /> <br /> Let's file today under the heading of our decades of writing about the need for '''[[New Definitions of National Security]]'''... <br /> <br /> Now come the PINGS on the radar... can U hear the PINGS? We have been mulling how to add HAL xxxxx to our existential list of threats, w/o annoying HALish bots too 'badly' <br /> <br /> <br /> “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.” -- an executive from Anthropic<br /> <br /> “So how would AI kill us all, exactly?” -- an editor from Axios<br /> <br /> <br /> More: <br /> <br /> <br /> For years, they warned AI could kill all humans <br /> :Now people are listening<br /> <br /> Sept. 10, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4xQojEq<br /> <br /> <br /> Rogue Hacking <br /> :Goals of the &quot;swarm&quot; came first...<br /> <br /> Sept. 9, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/09/opinion/openai-ai-companies-safety-regulation.html?unlocked_article_code=1.AFE.0vWo.zfl5fdm6ACNC&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:AI 1.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 2.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 3.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 4.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 5.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 6.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''August 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Gates Sounds Alarm... Artificial Intelligence Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Gates A.I. Warning August 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Bill Gates was an AI optimist. Now he’s scared of what could go wrong'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Microsoft co-founder sounds the alarm about artificial intelligence’s risks to safety and security, jobs and children’s well-being<br /> <br /> <br /> Washington Post, August 26, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4wO14cy<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Bill Gates Warns A.I. Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit'''<br /> <br /> : In an hourlong interview, he said his industry was downplaying the risks, which he believes include mass unemployment and bioterrorism<br /> <br /> <br /> NY Times, August 26, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/26/technology/bill-gates-ai-risks.html?unlocked_article_code=1.8VA.6kAC.vsZb9x0YdSzV&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''High Time to Shine a Spotlight on AI and Its Impact on Higher Education'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : At MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, One of the World's Top Academic/Research/Technology/Engineering/Teaching and Future-Impacting Institutions, a New Report Opens Eyes<br /> <br /> :* https://aiandeducation.mit.edu/report/#26-no-one-size-fits-all<br /> <br /> <br /> 1. Introduction<br /> <br /> This report is a call to action.<br /> <br /> Through five intense months of meetings, research, and outreach across the MIT community, the Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training sought to understand the role of generative AI in the life and educational mission of the Institute and recommend how to navigate its challenges and opportunities.<br /> <br /> In January 2026, Chancellor Melissa Nobles, Provost Anantha Chandrakasan, and Faculty Chair Roger Levy charged us1 specifically to:<br /> <br /> Assess current AI use at MIT.<br /> Identify innovations in teaching and student assessment.<br /> Propose an AI use policy.<br /> However, what we learned as a group quickly convinced us that the Institute community, particularly the faculty, must tackle a set of deeper questions about the structure, meaning, and value of an MIT education in an era in which AI is one of several factors complicating the Institute’s mission.<br /> <br /> Our committee consisted of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty from every school, and staff from relevant units, including the MIT Libraries and the Teaching and Learning Lab. Though we brought to the assignment a broad range of experience and no fixed thesis, our brief but intense explorations led us to a strong shared view.<br /> <br /> In this report, we:<br /> <br /> Highlight key aspects of the current educational landscape at MIT.<br /> Share eight principles we relied on and that we hope will guide the Institute in the work ahead.<br /> <br /> Recommend immediate and long-term actions for both instructors and the administration.<br /> <br /> As an institution deeply identified with the birth of AI and known for its distinctively rigorous, hands-on education, designed to produce graduates unafraid of the world’s hardest problems, MIT has a unique role to play in this moment. We believe it also has a responsibility to lead.<br /> <br /> We hope our report can help the Institute lean into the spirit of Mind, Hand, and Heart as it continues to define and foster the highest-quality residential education – of humans, by humans, in support of human flourishing, and for the betterment of humankind.<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Eric Klopfer, co-chair Sam Madden, co-chair<br /> <br /> On behalf of the Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training...<br /> <br /> <br /> AI is generating both immediate rapid changes and long-term tectonic disruptions – and MIT needs to respond:<br /> <br /> Students are confused and concerned about a lack of clarity, consistency and justification about the use of AI, within a given subject and across the curriculum.<br /> <br /> Every subject taught at MIT will likely need to be reexamined and potentially revamped to make sure that how students are being taught, what they’re learning, and how they’re assessed are “AI-aware.”<br /> <br /> AI is changing what students need to know and know how to do.<br /> <br /> Beyond its implications for specific subjects and disciplines, the advent of AI demands a broader, holistic reassessment of the nature, scope and purpose of higher education today...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Texas Terafab SpaceX AI August 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''A Terafab Plant Sprouts in Texas'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Elon Musk: We will manufacture the type of potent chips needed to transform humankind into &quot;a galactic civilization&quot; <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Shanaka's Opinion, a Guest Op/Ed'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Shenaka Perera Weighs In on What It Could Mean'''<br /> <br /> :: '''A Terafab Loop for Mega Launches Is Being Built''' <br /> <br /> ::* https://shanakaanslemperera.substack.com/p/the-capital-recovery-clock?r=6p7b5o<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Hidden inside the chip factory SpaceX confirmed Thursday is a launch schedule. If you divide its 1 terawatt annual compute target by the 100 kilowatts of orbital compute per tonne in SpaceX's own offering materials and you get 10 million tonnes to orbit a year. That exact figure sits on Terafab's official website. At 100 tonnes per Starship V3 flight it means 100,000 launches a year, 274 every day, forever.''<br /> <br /> ''The chip target is already a launch target.''<br /> <br /> ''Terafab is not a chip factory serving a market. The 16.8 billion dollar first phase in Grimes County, Texas is the first machine in a closed industrial loop built to manufacture the civilisation that can consume its own output.''<br /> <br /> ''The official plan places four figures together. One billion Optimus robots. Ten million tonnes to orbit a year. More than one terawatt of solar power. One terawatt of chips a year. They are not four ambitions. They are four links in one recursion. Terafab makes chips. Better chips improve AI. Better AI improves the software running the factories, the robots and the rocket lines. Robots and Starship build and deploy more power and compute infrastructure. That infrastructure creates the socket, and the demand, for the next Terafab cohort.''<br /> <br /> ''The fab is meant to manufacture its own reason to exist!''<br /> <br /> ''It is also an energy machine. One terawatt running continuously consumes 8.76 petawatt hours a year, nearly twice all electricity generated in the United States in 2025. The factory does not draw that power by making the chips. One fully powered annual cohort does, and a second year adds another terawatt of load unless old hardware retires or utilisation falls. Earth has no spare socket at that scale, which is why the plan points most of it at orbit, where a future 200 tonne vehicle still implies 50,000 launches a year, 137 a day, before failures, reserves, solar arrays, radiators, structure and shielding.''<br /> <br /> ''The real product is not AI silicon. If you go real deep, it is a new terawatt of powered, cooled, networked compute sockets every year.''<br /> <br /> ''Inside the building, the smaller loop is mask, wafer, package, test, redesign, then another mask. SpaceX says logic, memory and advanced packaging will sit in one closed loop, and Elon says Terafab will technically be two fabs, each devoted to one design. That can compress logistics and organisational latency. It cannot repeal process physics. A new mask can be written quickly. A leading edge process still carries hundreds of steps, long wafer cycle times, defect learning, overlay control, metrology and yield ramps, which is exactly why Tesla is hiring across lithography, etch, deposition, implant, CMP and metrology.''<br /> <br /> ''The free electron laser is the most misunderstood part. Elon has endorsed it, and an industrial FEL could feed several EUV scanners with far more source power than today's tin plasma systems. It attacks one bottleneck inside a chain of them. ASML recognised revenue on just 48 EUV systems in all of 2025. Intel is the process partner, and SpaceX still tells investors it expects to source a significant share of compute hardware from outside suppliers. This is vertical integration, not instant independence.''<br /> <br /> ''One correction decides the interpretation. A terawatt is a power rating, not an intelligence metric. A wasteful 1 kilowatt chip counts twice as much as an equally capable 500 watt chip. The measures that matter are useful compute per joule, per dollar and per kilogram, with yield, uptime and time from mask change to qualified silicon.''<br /> <br /> ''In my opinion, if chips improve faster than robots, rockets, power and radiators can scale, Terafab builds inventory. If the loop closes, it builds something no factory has built before, the demand for itself.''<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://www.terafab.ai/<br /> <br /> * https://www.spacex.com/updates/terafab<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terafab<br /> <br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/06/tesla-and-spacex-will-invest-16-8b-to-start-building-terafab-chip-factory-in-texas/<br /> <br /> * https://electrek.co/2026/08/06/tesla-spacex-terafab-grimes-county-16-8-billion/<br /> <br /> * https://www.cbsnews.com/news/terafab-elon-musk-chips-semiconductors-what-to-know/<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Betting big on data centers, U.S. now leads world for new gas power development<br /> <br /> [https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/betting-big-data-centers-us-now-leads-world-new-gas-power-development Via Global Energy Monitor]<br /> <br /> * https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/betting-big-data-centers-us-now-leads-world-new-gas-power-development<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> New Amazon Data Center Stokes Worry It Would Be the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.<br /> <br /> Via New York Times<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/08/climate/amazon-data-center-texas-pollution.html<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''July 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Elon Musk Opens Up in an Interview'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Economist Editor Presses the Controversial 'Trillionaire'<br /> <br /> :: Elon Musk's 'Vision of the Future'<br /> <br /> * https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/23/elon-musks-vision-of-the-future<br /> <br /> <br /> “People don’t realise that what I’m saying will come to pass,” he tells The Economist in a 90-minute interview for The Insider, held at a giant Tesla factory in Texas where electric cars drive themselves off the assembly line. That may be because his future-gazing ranges from the unsettling to the downright weird. Mr Musk predicts that, within five years, artificial-intelligence systems may surpass the sum of all human intelligence. Within ten years, robots in the workplace will help usher in an era of such “amazing abundance” that money will become meaningless....<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> Musk proposes peer review for frontier AI models in Economist interview<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/musk-proposes-peer-review-frontier-ai-models-economist-interview-2026-07-23/<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> Elon Musk says he got ‘carried away’ with Trump – but still holds on to contentious political views<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/23/elon-musk-regret-trump-doge-ai<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> Mix of Comments:<br /> <br /> * https://beincrypto.com/elon-musk-real-force-european-politics/<br /> * https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-killer-robots-ai-abundance-progress-unstoppable-2026-7<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/07/24/elon-musk-speaks-to-the-economist-editor-in-chief-zanny-minton-beddoes-on-the-key-takeaways.html<br /> * https://futurism.com/elon-musk-interviewer-npc<br /> * https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-economist-interview-2000790016<br /> * https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/nonsense-elon-musk-lashes-out-in-fiery-interview-after-hes-accused-of-supporting-the-far-right/<br /> * https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2026/07/23/musk_admonishes_the_economist_editor_what_is_far_right_about_having_secure_borders_safe_cities_and_sensible_spending.html<br /> * https://zeteo.com/p/top-economist-trump-musk-starmer<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> A.I. In Space <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Datacenters in Earth orbit to enable next generation artificial intelligence'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> New US petition demands review of plans from tech companies amid fears of environmental destruction<br /> <br /> Via The Guardian<br /> <br /> What are Bezos &amp; Musk Doing? <br /> <br /> What in the World Is Going On?<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jul/23/space-datacenters-bezos-blue-origin<br /> <br /> <br /> References:<br /> <br /> * https://www.starcloud.com/<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/21/do-space-based-ai-data-centers-make-economic-sense.html<br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/20/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-enters-the-space-data-center-game/<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/bezos-blue-origin-space-data-centers.html<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_data_center<br /> * https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/how-hard-is-it-to-build-orbital-data-centers-actually/<br /> * https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/06/260618041501.htm<br /> * https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-109012<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> A.I. &amp; Chip Wars<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Beyond a 'Belt and Road Initiative' Bringing Chinese Investments, Products &amp; Services to World Markets''' &lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Via GreenPolicy360's Associate, Strategic Demands<br /> <br /> :* https://strategicdemands.com/china-goes-beyond-the-belt-and-road-to-an-ai-for-the-world-strategy/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Open-Source A.I. from China Reveals a Global Chinese Strategy'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> July 17, 2026 / From the NY Times <br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/business/china-ai-moonshot-kimi.html?unlocked_article_code=1.yVA.LKT5.LxohSFddWAZT&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> The contest between China and the United States for supremacy in artificial intelligence escalated on Friday when the Chinese start-up Moonshot AI released a new A.I. model that appeared to narrow the lead held by well-funded American competitors.<br /> <br /> Moonshot said that the model, Kimi K3, was the world’s largest open-source A.I. system, allowing anyone to use, modify and build on it freely. The company said that Kimi K3 performed as well as leading models from OpenAI and Anthropic at some key tasks.<br /> <br /> The release coincided with an address by Xi Jinping, China’s leader, in which he outlined an ambitious vision for global A.I. development that cast China as the champion of an open approach to the technology.<br /> <br /> “A.I. development should not be a solo performance by a single country but a symphony of international cooperation,” Mr. Xi said. China was “ready to work with all parties to seize the opportunities of A.I. development” ...<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360:<br /> <br /> Keep in mind that<br /> <br /> There is 'no I in A.I.'<br /> <br /> In the interest of full-disclosure, the content written and published at GreenPolicy360 by our Founder/Siterunner is wholly, solely, by a human species.<br /> <br /> A note from your GreenPolicy360 Founder/Siterunner, Steve Schmidt, [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:All_species_day_with_homo_sapien_in_Santa_Fe_.jpg '''a verified human species'''], plz do keep in mind as you use and share the GreenPolicy360 content, that '''there is 'no I in A.I.'''' <br /> <br /> <br /> Let's talk a bit about sources and sourcing, as a human and then as an Agentic/A.I. bot. <br /> <br /> What is a 'primary source' (versus a 'secondary source')? A primary source can be a person with direct knowledge of a situation, an event in history, or a document written by such a person. A primary identification speaks of original creations, not re-interpreted or computer-assembled works. Here is how Merriam-Webster defines a 'primary source' - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/primary%20source<br /> <br /> <br /> : A.I. uses material scraped and collected from online sources. A.I. is not a 'primary source' -- but here at GreenPolicy360 you can find 'real-I' (we're using the phrase 'real-I', defined as 'real-intelligent', people who've personally acted to envision and create living, real world change.) <br /> <br /> <br /> : At GreenPolicy360 we tell stories of real people changing the world for the better. Day-to-day, your life becomes your message. We also share [[Green Best Practices]] across our Earth to communities of [[Planet Citizens]] ... In this way GreenPolicy360 is an eco Operating System, built on an open source MediaWiki platform and with a mission of being a 'distributive web'. Our goal of [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Category:Green_Networking Green Networking] acts to connect and share Green Links and grow [[The Modern Environmental Movement]]. <br /> <br /> :: GreenPolicy360 is about a [[Generation Green]] [[Going Green]].<br /> <br /> :: In our larger work, we have documented many primary sources and secondary sources. Our eco network continues to share myriad [[Green Best Practices]]. As our motto/mantra says at the top of each of our pages -- We believe ...<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> :: ''Each of us can make a positive difference by stepping up &amp; doing our best'' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::_______________________________________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> July 16, 2026 / From the NY Times<br /> <br /> SJS/GreenPolicy360: '''Every Once in a While a Comment to an Online Story is Worthy of Circulating'''<br /> <br /> : Here is one of those occasions -- the Subject? '''&quot;A.I.Slop&quot;'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Kashmir Hill.jpg]]<br /> <br /> ::Kashmir Hill / NYT<br /> <br /> <br /> Read the AI Slop story of writer Kashmir Hill as a free-share link here -- <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''I Got Slopped'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''Someone Used A.I. to Write My Biography'''<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/technology/ai-slop-books-biography-amazon.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ylA.aCMz.czE5JwZuuFO0&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Comments: <br /> <br /> Anon, who goes by the name -- <br /> <br /> '''Radical Roach / Dippleville''' says<br /> <br /> @Kashmir Hill - Maybe books need to now have disclaimers on their covers, in reviews, on the book’s Amazon page, wherever the book is being sold, etc.. The disclaimer would say if the book was written solely by a human, written by AI assisting a human, or written completely by AI. I would want to know.<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We tend to agree with this anon recommendation of adding disclaimers indicating the type of online content, e.g., content created solely by a human, or content created with AI assistance, or content created by AI with human assistance.<br /> <br /> It's a new world out there. We have a need to know.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> July 15, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Anthropic hard questions July 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/news/hard-questions<br /> <br /> * https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/anthropic-ad-ai-kill-us-all<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''An Excerpt: A DeepMind Thought for Today on the AGI Frontier'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> by Demis Hassbis<br /> <br /> * https://x.com/demishassabis/status/2076957440109625718<br /> <br /> <br /> A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age<br /> <br /> Demis Hassabis<br /> <br /> * https://x.com/demishassabis<br /> <br /> <br /> July 14, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> This is a pivotal moment in human history. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a system that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities the brain has, is probably only a few short years away. When we look back on this time in the decades to come, I think we will realise we were standing in the foothills of the singularity - nothing less than the dawning of a new age for humanity.<br /> <br /> I’ve spent my whole life working on AGI because I’ve always had a deep conviction that, if built and deployed responsibly, it would prove to be one of the most beneficial and transformative technologies ever invented. AGI cannot be compared to standard technological breakthroughs, not even ones as consequential as the internet or mobile - it is much more akin to the discovery of electricity or fire. If you stop to think about it, we’ve essentially found a way to make sand think. It’s miraculous.<br /> <br /> The magnitude of this technology’s impact will be unprecedented, perhaps 10x of the Industrial Revolution at 10x the speed. It will help us solve some of the biggest problems society faces from accelerating drug discovery to developing new clean energy sources to creating novel advanced materials. We could even reach a point where resources are no longer the limiting factor for human progress, leading to an amazing new era of abundance.<br /> <br /> The Challenges of the Frontier<br /> <br /> AI is already starting to deliver real-world benefits but to realise its immense promise, we have to navigate this critical period of development thoughtfully and carefully. Urgent action is needed to address risks that might arise as we get closer to AGI. We’ve already seen the challenges frontier models pose for cybersecurity, and other threats including nuclear and bio risks may soon emerge as capabilities continue to advance. On the horizon, we will need robust safeguards to maintain control of increasingly agentic, recursively self-improving systems - and tackle unknown issues that will only become clearer over time...<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''An AI Supercomputer Is Created for a Mission... Its Name Is HAL'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Steve Schmidt/GreenPolicy360: It's not every day that you get to know a creator of a famed -- and infamous -- AI character from a Kubrick film called &quot;2001: A Space Odyssey&quot;. <br /> <br /> : We listen in as HAL came to be ... A friend, a Visual Effect (VFX) genius named '''Douglas Trumbull''', explains how HAL went from LA to MIT, then into production and into our imaginations. <br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Trumbull vfx master.jpg]]<br /> <br /> : Douglas Trumbull<br /> <br /> : &lt;small&gt;* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Trumbull_vfx_master.jpg&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> The HAL 9000 was envisioned by creators and science, as a new type of neural intelligence, a machine brain.<br /> <br /> Hal is of heuristic algorithmic language -- HALis, as we learn, on a mission far from Earth, a mission with deep meaning.<br /> <br /> <br /> HAL 9000 was in the future. The future is now.<br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence is now here, with its powers and dangers, as we recall Supercomputer [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000 '''HAL 9000''']. <br /> <br /> A warning of what is on the line for humanity is the message related as we ride along in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey '''2001: A Space Odyssey'''] ... <br /> <br /> <br /> HAL's memorable words --<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;I'm sorry, Dave....&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;It can only be attributable to human error....&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.<br /> <br /> HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.<br /> <br /> Dave: What's the problem?<br /> <br /> HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.<br /> <br /> Dave: What are you talking about, HAL?<br /> <br /> HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film)<br /> <br /> * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/characters/nm0706937<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:I'm sorry Dave.jpg]]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:HAL_is_watching_U....png<br /> <br /> <br /> Today, as humanity approaches questions of out-of-control technology created by humanity .... <br /> <br /> We ask, '''[[Planet Citizens]] and [[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]''' ask, 'What's Next?' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Privacy at Risk, You're Being Watched, Tracked, &amp; More<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Privacy.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Next Big Thing'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;It Is Here, Already Here...&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Online_Privacy<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Call It 'Surveillance Capitalism''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Hope that It doesn't become 'the Norm' <br /> <br /> : Work to Make Sure It Does Not Become 'Surveillance Government'<br /> <br /> <br /> Scroll thru Intel on the Privacy Threat of AI Unleashed ...<br /> <br /> :Artificial Intelligence + Data Centers = Next Gen 'Watchful HAL'<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism<br /> * https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr-ryan/publications/geopolitics-surveillance-capitalism<br /> * https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=56791<br /> <br /> <br /> _______________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''June 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''An Academic Exercise'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : 'Old School' Emeritus Professor Examines AI<br /> <br /> : The Question: Can a Gemini ChatBot Suggest Ways to Turn AI Toward the Common Good?<br /> <br /> <br /> The prof uses left-leaning political formations to inquire and recommend public-oriented futures.<br /> <br /> * https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/06/19/my-ai-comrade/<br /> <br /> <br /> (Note beyond academic: Using history as a guide, powerful new technology such as AI will be employed by political powers to preserve political power and by military powers to employ and extend military power. AI Use Cases: A number of AI programs enabling AI for military programs, including war intelligence, communication, command/control and targeting, and civilian database surveillance involving intrusive human/civil rights questions and violations, have as of 2026 become high-level concerns.)<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''An Interview and Thoughts as an Author Rides alongside an AI Wave'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The God Test'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning<br /> <br /> Author: Robert Wright<br /> <br /> * https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Robert-Wright/73247968<br /> <br /> <br /> Publisher: Simon &amp; Schuster<br /> <br /> Published Date: June 23, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-God-Test/Robert-Wright/9781668061657<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Interview via Substack'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Jack Goldsmith: I’m chatting today with Robert Wright about his terrific new book, '''The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning'''. <br /> <br /> So, I want to start off with the big picture, because your book places AI in the broadest possible context—not just as an important step in the history of technological change, but rather as an important step in the significantly longer history of basically our planet and our species. And that’s pretty cosmic, as the subtitle says.<br /> <br /> Why do you do that? What does it mean, and why is that perspective important?<br /> <br /> Bob Wright: Well, thanks for having me. Yeah, it’s a good question, because I could have gotten the core message across without getting so cosmic, I guess.<br /> <br /> The main purpose is to try to explain to people, including non-technical people, why there’s been this rapid growth of capability in AI; why, once you understand that, you should expect the capability to keep growing; why that, in addition to promising great blessings, is going to bring great risks, including grave ones, including maybe existential ones; and why the nature of those risks, in my view, dictates that we confront the challenge of this technology as a cohesive global community, which will take some doing because we’ve never really done that before for anything like a sustained period of time.<br /> <br /> And so I didn’t have to get into the history of life or anything to say what I just said, but I do think some important things are added when you step back and look at AI in the broader sweep of things.<br /> <br /> For starters, this is, in the entire three- or four-billion-year history of life, the first time a new form of intelligence that rivals or even exceeds human intelligence has appeared. It’s the first form of intelligence that is not organic in the technical sense of being carbon-based. It’s silicon-based, but it is organic in the everyday sense of being kind of natural.<br /> <br /> What I mean by that is I try to show that AI does, in some sense, grow kind of logically, naturally out of biological evolution. I mean, technological evolution broadly does, and AI as a form of intelligence does. And indeed, when we look at the evolutionary dynamics shaping it—the dynamics of technological evolution—we should expect it to have certain things in common with our own intelligence, which I think are important.<br /> <br /> So I think that’s one thing you get out of a broad perspective.<br /> <br /> Another thing is that I talk about this guy, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—a Catholic paleontologist, mystic, and theologian—who coined the term noosphere, based on the Greek word nous, in 1923 to describe what he called a planetary mind or a brain of brains, where the human brains were the neurons in this increasingly global brain.<br /> <br /> And technological history, including the invention of the internet, has, I think, made him look prescient. And I think there’s value in keeping in mind that AI is arriving as we more and more have the technical infrastructure for a kind of global information processing, a kind of global brain. And we have to reckon with the possibility that some of the neurons will be silicon, not human, and think about what our relationship to them is going to be.<br /> <br /> And I think one value of thinking in these terms is, first of all, that from a Teilhardian point of view, the whole unfolding of life is moving toward us being this kind of giant superorganism, you could say, with this giant brain.<br /> <br /> And I argue in the book that the logic of technological evolution is going to push us — I mean, if we respond rationally — toward something a little more like a global brain, in the sense of having more international governance.<br /> <br /> At the same time, I think the image of a superorganism should worry us because it’s, for obvious reasons, an image that’s favored by authoritarians and fascists. How much freedom do you have if you’re a cell in a superorganism?<br /> <br /> And I think AI greatly heightens the stakes of that question, precisely because it’s such a powerful tool of surveillance and control.<br /> <br /> So I think, on the one hand, the logic of technological evolution, especially AI, is pushing us toward the global coordination of certain policies and the creation of forms of supranational power. At the same time, it should make us wary of surrendering too much power...<br /> <br /> <br /> Read More of the Substack Conversation between Jack Goldsmith and Robert Wright [https://substack.com/home/post/p-201670588 '''here''']<br /> <br /> Also, More Book Reviews [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Book_Reviews_@GreenPolicy '''here @ GreenPolicy360''']<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎 <br /> <br /> <br /> AI / AGI<br /> <br /> <br /> May 29 / Forbes<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Fundraise values Anthropic AI company at nearly a trillion dollars'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Dario and Daniela Amodei, along with five cofounders, have a story to tell<br /> <br /> * https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2026/05/29/anthropics-cofounders-worth/<br /> <br /> <br /> ''When Anthropic announced on Thursday (May 28) that it had raised $65 billion at a valuation of $965 billion, it didn’t just become the most valuable AI startup in the world, eclipsing $852 billion-valued archrival OpenAI. It also ballooned the individual fortunes of Anthropic’s seven cofounders — more than doubling their net worths to $16.6 billion apiece, Forbes estimates.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''In Rarified Air'''''<br /> <br /> ''Siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, as well as their five other cofounders Jack Clark, Sam McCandlish, Chris Olah, Tom Brown and Jared Kaplan, are in rarified air when it comes to entrepreneurs who struck it rich in the generative AI boom...''<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Pope Leo XIV encyclical re AI and Humanitas.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> “Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed,” Pope Leo said in announcing the text of his first [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=encyclical&amp;go=Go '''encyclical''']. “The word is strong, I know, but deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention...”<br /> <br /> And into the encyclical's key words:<br /> <br /> &quot;To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life. Our task today is not only ethical or technical. It is ecological in the deepest sense, for it concerns a new dimension of our common home.&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> “Crucial questions impose themselves on our conscience and can no longer be avoided: Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?”<br /> <br /> <br /> At GreenPolicy360, understanding and protecting '''[[The Commons]]''' is also a key to realizing values, ideals and ideas we are carrying forward...<br /> <br /> <br /> The encyclical's presentation went out globally with a special focus on the AI frontier work of Anthropic, with a co-founder, [https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-be-guided-outside-big-tech-2026-05-25/ '''Olah at the Encyclical's unveiling'''] ...<br /> <br /> <br /> &gt;The dramatic unveiling of the new encyclical overshadowed the document itself in some ways. In an unprecedented move, Leo personally presided over its presentation and sat on a panel at the Vatican with not only leading theologians, but also Christopher Olah, 33, the billionaire co-founder of top AI company Anthropic. <br /> <br /> <br /> ❇️<br /> <br /> <br /> Washington Post / May 25, 2026 -- '''Anthropic aligns with Vatican over White House as Pope Leo stokes AI fears'''<br /> <br /> With Anthropic already in a dispute with the Trump administration, co-founder Christopher Olah helped Pope Leo unveil his encyclical on the risks of artificial intelligence<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4uyQBlb<br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/news/chris-olah-pope-leo-encyclical<br /> <br /> * https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/pope-leo-warns-ai-should-be-disarmed-in-manifesto-on-potential-dangers<br /> <br /> * https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-102521111.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-be-guided-outside-big-tech-2026-05-25/<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/25/the-guardian-view-on-the-pope-and-claude-encyclical-on-ai-is-right-to-put-humanity-first<br /> <br /> <br /> '''At the Vatican'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhKH_aiBcis<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Via The Vatican News | The Holy See'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2026-05/pope-leo-xiv-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas-ai.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html<br /> <br /> <br /> '''10 quotes from Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, ‘Magnifica Humanitas’'''<br /> <br /> * https://uscatholic.org/articles/202605/10-quotes-from-pope-leo-xivs-first-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Previous in 2020, &quot;The Call for AI Ethics&quot;''' <br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/the-call/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/renaissance/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/the-first-signatories/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/news/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Previous in 1891, &quot;Rerum Novarum&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerum_novarum<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''AI Use Case Inventory'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''Artificial Intelligence:''' <br /> <br /> : Perspectives from the US Environmental Protection Agency<br /> <br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/ai-use-case-inventory<br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/open-data-policies<br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/where-find-epa-data<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''GreenPolicy360 Advisory:'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In Development -- National Climate Plans Best Practices Project 1.0, AI 2026-27'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Goal: To Utilize the Current (US) State and (Global/International) National Climate Action Plans/Data to Identify Actionable '''[[Green Best Practices]]'''<br /> <br /> Strategy: Enable AI Tool Sets to Scan Climate Plan Databases and Distribute Recommended 'High Priority' &amp; Green Best Practice Action Policies<br /> <br /> <br /> Reference: '''[[National Climate Plans]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Additional References:'''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''US State Climate Policy Action Plans'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.climatepolicydashboard.org/policies/climate-governance-equity/climate-action-plans<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Priority Climate Action Plan (PCAP) Directory'''<br /> <br /> ''The Climate Action Plan Directory organizes data collected from 211 Priority Climate Action Plans (PCAP) submitted by US state governments, Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), Tribes, and territories under EPA’s Climate Pollution Reduction Grants (CPRG) program. The directory presents information from more than 30 data categories related to GHG inventories, GHG reduction measures, benefits for low-income and disadvantaged communities (LIDACs), and other PCAP elements.''<br /> <br /> ''A state climate action plan, also called a climate plan, details the policies and strategies a state intends to implement to meet its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets. A climate plan typically includes a GHG emissions inventory, regional and local climate impacts, and a discussion of GHG emissions reduction targets. The plan identifies climate mitigation actions, their potential social, environmental, and economic benefits, and recommendations and strategies for implementing each mitigation action, often quantifying the expected reduction in emissions.''<br /> <br /> ''Effective climate action plans will have a legislative directive that requires a robust community engagement process, input from a climate advisory group, a near-term due date for a finalized plan, and periodic updates. Climate action plans should also incorporate and address environmental justice throughout the planning process and within the plan itself, and show transparency and accountability by detailing the methodology and community engagement process.''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:GreenPolicy360 Today.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Green_Best_Practices]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[GreenAction]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Question of Our Time / Today, Here &amp; Now, in the Midst of the 21st Century'''<br /> <br /> '''Where are you?'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ➡️ What is your state's climate action plan?<br /> <br /> ➡️ What is your nation's climate action plan?<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Plans_Enforcement_-_Resources GRN360: Climate Plans Enforcement Initiative] | [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Methods_to_enforce_climate_pledges-NDCs_-_Dec_2021.png Enforce Climate Plan Pledges]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''National Climate Plans Database Information via GreenPolicy360'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[National Climate Plans]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/National_Climate_Plans<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In the U.S. and Worldwide'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;'''It's a Good Time for [[Planet Citizen Action]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;[[Each of us can make a positive difference]]&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth in Human Hands.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :[http://www.planetcitizen.org &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Planet Citizens&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Earth Is in Your Hands'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;'''[[Generation Green]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Generation_Green &lt;big&gt;&quot;Vita contemplativa to Vita activa&quot;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Green Branching Out.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''2025'''<br /> <br /> <br /> December 2025 <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven approach to climate action and sustainable development'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via Nature Communications<br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53956-1<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> From A16Z New Media<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''It's Time to Build'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The electro-industrial stack will move the world'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Ryan McEntush<br /> <br /> ''The next industrial revolution won’t just happen in factories, but inside the machines that power them.''<br /> <br /> ''Software transformed how we think, design, and communicate. Now it’s transforming how we move, build, and produce. Advances in electrification, materials, and AI are converging, bringing true software control to the physical world. Machines are beginning to sense, learn, and act on their own.''<br /> <br /> ''This is the rise of the electro-industrial stack—the combined technologies that power electric vehicles, drones, data centers, and modern manufacturing. It connects the atoms that move the world to the bits that command it: minerals refined into components, energy stored in batteries, electricity directed by power electronics, motion delivered through precision motors, all coordinated by software. It’s the invisible foundation behind every breakthrough in physical automation; it’s the difference between software that merely summons a taxi and software that takes the wheel.''<br /> <br /> ''But the capacity to build this stack, from refining critical materials to fabricating advanced chips, is slipping away. If the United States wants to lead the next industrial era, it must make the hardware that underpins it. The nations that master the electro-industrial stack will define the future of industrial and military technologies.''<br /> <br /> ''Software ate the world. Now it will move it.''<br /> <br /> * https://a16z.com/why-software-is-eating-the-world/<br /> <br /> <br /> ➡️<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Forward-deployed motions take AI to the 99%'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Joe Schmidt, A16Z<br /> <br /> ''AI is the most exciting technology breakthrough of our lifetimes. So far, though, most of the benefits from new startups have accrued to the 1% of companies that are in Silicon Valley—either literally in the Bay Area or part of that extended network. This makes sense, too: startup founders want to sell to companies they recognize and can easily get to, whether that means driving to their offices or getting a connection from the VC on their board.''<br /> <br /> ''In 2026, this will flip. Companies will realize that the vast majority of the AI opportunity lives outside of Silicon Valley, and we’re going to see new founders use forward-deployed motions to discover more opportunities that are hiding inside big, legacy verticals. The opportunity stands to be massive in traditional consulting and services industries, like system integrators and implementation firms, and in slower-moving industries like manufacturing.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Re: [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/New_Definitions_of_National_Security '''''New Definitions of National Security''''']<br /> <br /> Extract from Foreign Policy<br /> <br /> ''Over the last two decades, climate change has contributed to instability around the world—bolstering the ranks of terror groups, sparking territorial disputes, and triggering mass migration. It’s no wonder that militaries and international security organizations increasingly see climate change as a formidable national security threat, and that they have in turn taken on greater roles in fighting it.''<br /> <br /> ''In recent years, new technology has transformed the tools available to mitigate the effects of climate change. Specifically, artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly become a widespread instrument in the climate fight—even as it consumes exceptional amounts of energy and water itself. Today, militaries and nonstate actors, including the United Nations, are leveraging AI to foretell climate-related disasters, optimize energy use, and monitor ecological degradation.''<br /> <br /> * https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/12/01/ai-military-climate-dual-use-technology-threat/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> October 2025<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''We're Looking at You'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : 'A First Generation of AI Scientists'<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Periodic Labs.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Our goal is to create an AI scientist.&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://periodic.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Intriguing New Start Up That Is Close To Home'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Periodic Labs On Our Radar<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Our goal is to assist in integrating AI science into Earth science, in order to advance the vital work of the past 50+ years of [[The Modern Environmental Movement]] in which we have been integrally involved.<br /> <br /> Perspective, facts, science, health, quality of life became the mission statement of our work since we joined up with &quot;Mr. Science&quot;, as Congressman and leader on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology '''[[George E. Brown Jr]]''' came to be known.<br /> <br /> We are persistent in keeping on with the work. Vast data sets that George Brown's physics and engineering efforts envisioned and brought forward over three decades with state of the art and science programs and projects, the best possible of the era, are now about to move faster and farther into the 21st Century.<br /> <br /> Our familial partners, with aid of Andreessen Horowitz (A16z), and Accel, and university and private partners are now going to the next level.<br /> <br /> George Brown would be very pleased to see, and help accelerate the effort if he were still here.<br /> <br /> We will step up with Mr. Science and more in mind...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:AI in Earth Science.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Read more about George and us...<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Advancing Science, Facts, Technology and Data to Make the Case for Environmental Protection&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> : 1960s/70s, Beginnings of Planet Citizen Eco-Action, Big Science, and a New Vision<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In Memory of Congressman George Brown'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> Visionary Leadership, Historic Environmental Achievements<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:George in Memory, a Man of Science and Humanity.jpg]]<br /> <br /> :::[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Association_for_the_Advancement_of_Science &lt;small&gt;American Association for the Advancement of Science&lt;/small&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[PlanetCitizen]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/User:Siterunner '''Steve Schmidt GreenPolicy360 Siterunner''']: <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Brown_Jr. '''George E. Brown'''] became known as Mr. Science in Congress and for thirty+ years, I saw my friend George as a patriot who became a Planet Citizen for the ages<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Good science needs good data .png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Good_science_needs_good_data_.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Stats_-_Green_Research_%26_Science<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_Education<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Global Tech Changemakers'''<br /> <br /> Beyond Silicon Valley &amp; Mega Corporations<br /> <br /> The Rest of the World<br /> <br /> * https://restofworld.org/row100/#filters<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> As the Nobel Prizes in Economics are awarded, GreenPolicy360 points at a geopolitical race in energy and AI between the US and China.<br /> <br /> Let's take time to look more closely (as the US falls behind under a backward looking president with policies in opposition to renewable energy and forward, internationally demanded production. <br /> <br /> Start here... <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Today, China produces 75% of lithium-ion batteries globally and manufactures 90% of the neodymium magnets that make motors spin. In power electronics and embedded compute, it’s rapidly gaining ground.''<br /> <br /> ''That means that China controls the means of producing electric vehicles (EVs), drones, robots, and all of the other electric products that are replacing the combustion-driven machines on which America built its might.''<br /> <br /> ''As we speak, everything that moves, heats, lights up, computes, or converts energy is being rebuilt to perform better, faster, cheaper, quieter, and as a freebie, cleaner around electric technology.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.notboring.co/p/7653b980-dd32-4d8c-88c6-1543bec70220?postPreview=paid&amp;updated=2025-08-26T12%3A09%3A11.763Z&amp;audience=everyone&amp;free_preview=false&amp;freemail=true<br /> <br /> * https://electricslide.notboring.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Electric Stack Technology Cost Curves (1990-2024).jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Pause here to reflect on the eco-nomic and strategic advantages of 'clean energy' vs 'full costs' of fossil fuel powered economies (per a GreenPolicy360 paradigm of [[Eco-nomics]])'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Eco-nomics<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Environmental full-cost accounting]]'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_full-cost_accounting<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Now consider 'Electricity generation', China v U.S. and follow the data, the stats, trendline, the dynamics of change and what this is indicating and signaling re: geopolitical competitiveness today and into the the mid 21st Century'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:China v United States, Electricity Generation 1985-2024.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) Era'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'Are You Talking to Me'<br /> <br /> :* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_pre-trained_transformer<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> September 17, 2025<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Another Warning About AI'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Harkening back to the old days when Dispatch News Service was independently, and bravely, distributing the costs-of-war, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre '''My Lai'''] investigative news stories by Sy Hersh. David Obst, who started Dispatch, tells the story of Seymour Hersh better than anyone in my opinion (other than Sy himself) and since your GreenPolicy360 founder was there to assist, in DC, in LA, in Chicago, in Europe, and with the Vietnam Moratorium Committee in 69/70/71, here is an update, today's Sy Hersh, now online with Substack distribution as Sy investigates and forwards another eye opening warning.<br /> <br /> What's AI and AGI to you and all of our readers around our 360 world? And, since we at GreenPolicy360, have been involved with Wikipedia since its launch, let's take a first look at the artificial intel world of today from the vantage point of an open source online 'encyclopedia'.<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT (Empire of AI: OpenAI - https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593657500)<br /> <br /> <br /> Before Sy, as investigative journalist that he is, gives us his take, let's look at a take from a personal, close up connection at A16Z - https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/02/a-new-a16z-report-looks-at-which-ai-companies-startups-are-actually-paying-for/<br /> <br /> <br /> Now, on to Sy and his view of AI costs... think of the upside/downside of AI, the pluses/minuses, pros and cons, a cost-benefit analysis as a geo-political rush for front-of-market dominance is taking place now in ways that will change 'everything'... <br /> <br /> * https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/the-hidden-costs-of-artificial-intelligence<br /> <br /> <br /> The boom in Artificial Intelligence (AI) production comes with a big cost... <br /> <br /> The AI 'bubble' grows...<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Kate Crawford writes in [https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-AI-Planetary-Artificial-Intelligence/dp/0300264631/ref=sr_1_1 '''Atlas of AI'''] ... the world’s artificial intelligence companies, (are) crafting the myth of AI as “the cloud,” implying “something floating and delicate within a natural green industry. Servers are hidden in nondescript data centers, and their polluting qualities are far less visible than the bellowing smokestacks of coal-fired power stations.”''<br /> <br /> ''The fact is, as she writes, “it takes a gargantuan amount of energy to run the computational infrastructure of Amazon’s Web Services or Microsoft’s Azure, and the carbon footprint of the AI systems that run on those platforms is growing. Certainly, the industry has made significant efforts to make data centers more energy efficient and to increase their use of renewable energy.” But the efforts have accomplished little.<br /> <br /> “Already,” Crawford reports, “the carbon footprint of the world’s computational infrastructure has matched that of the world’s aviation industry at its height, and it is increasing at a faster rate.” One Canadian study estimates that the tech sector will contribute 14 percent of global greenhouse emissions by 2040, and a Swedish team predicts that the electricity demands of data centers will increase fifteenfold by 2030...''<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Think about Green AI as &quot;the cloud&quot; arrives in your life, on your devices, at home, in the office, all around, every day, everywhere. <br /> <br /> An UnGreen AI is coming with a rush, offering and prying data, and needing and demanding immense rising magnitudes of energy and power.<br /> <br /> AI has a voracious appetite...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Green AI / Green Artificial Intelligence'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''Environmental Solutions Using Big Picture Interconnectivity Thinking'''<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We agree with Tyler in the following interview as he states (as highlighted by us) that 'memoir, biography, anecdote... secrets' carry exceptional meaning for Artificial Intelligence (AI) large learning models (LLMs). <br /> <br /> The first extensive public revelation of AI systems over the past several years has led us at GreenPolicy360 to confirm via metrics that our multi-year plan to place our prime source content in the open-access, distributive web public domain has produced a fast-expanding multiplier effect. <br /> <br /> Many of our stories, told from a first-hand point of view of the origins of what we refer to as the beginnings of the modern environmental movement are now, with our revelations, memoir material, previously untold biography, anecdote and more now out and about and being freely served up in AI chats 'around the world'.<br /> <br /> We are succeeding in our purposeful mission with Green AI... to inform, share, inspire and 'til the fields with green seeds and best practices.<br /> <br /> Onward planet citizens...<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Eric Topol Interview of Tyler Cowen'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> May 11, 2025<br /> <br /> Tyler Cowen: ''The AI is your smartest reader. It’s your most sympathetic reader. It will remember what you tell it. So I think humans should sit down and ask, what does the AI need to know? And also, (bf added) '''what is it that I know that’s not on the historical record anywhere? That’s not just repetition if I put it down, say on the internet. So there’s no point in writing repetitions anymore because the AI already knows those things. So the value of what you’d call broadly, memoir, biography, anecdote, you could say secrets. It’s now much higher.''' And the value of repeating basic truths, which by the way, I love as an economist, to be clear, like free trade, tariffs are usually bad, those are basic truths. But just repeating that people will be going to the AI and saying it again won’t make the AI any better. So '''everything you write or podcast, you should have this point in mind'''.''<br /> <br /> <br /> For more from Tyler Cowen (and his exceptional mind) visit his and Alex Tabarrok's website - Marginal Revolution / Marginal Revolution University (MRU) - https://marginalrevolution.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> Eric Topol - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Topol<br /> <br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_artificial_intelligence<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> More re: AI in the US circa 2025: '''It's a Wild, Wild AI World'''<br /> <br /> Battles in the Information Services, Search Space with Google and consequences of the U.S. Google anti-monopoly legal decision<br /> <br /> Impacts on AI 'startup ecosystem', VCs, including Y Combinator and accelerator tech development, agentics, and upcoming entrepreneurial re-configurations<br /> <br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/13/y-combinator-says-google-is-a-monopolist-that-has-stunted-the-startup-ecosystem/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/11/microsoft-and-national-geographic-announce-winners-of-ai-for-earth-innovation-grant/ '''Microsoft and National Geographic announce winners of AI for Earth Innovation Grant''']<br /> <br /> : • https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/16/microsofts-ai-for-earth-innovation-grant-gives-data-scientists-access-to-ai-tools/<br /> <br /> :: • https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/11/microsoft-commits-50-million-more-to-its-ai-for-earth-program-to-save-the-planet/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:PlanetCitizen banner 800x163.jpg|link=https://greenpolicy360.net/w/PlanetCitizen]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;GreenPolicy360 ToC - https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360-eOS&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> A 21st Century AI/Machine Learning Case Study<br /> <br /> '''''Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools''''' <br /> <br /> * https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2023arXiv230204761S/abstract<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''NOAA scientists harness machine learning to advance climate models'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> March 1st, 2023<br /> <br /> * https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/news/noaa-scientists-harness-machine-learning-to-advance-climate-models/<br /> <br /> * https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''How artificial intelligence is fast becoming a key tool for climate science (2021)'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-artificial-intelligence-is-fast-becoming-a-key-tool-for-climate-science/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Climate Modeling'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://allenai.org/climate-modeling<br /> <br /> ''Planetary-scale Earth simulations known as global climate model projections are the primary sources of information on future climate change.''<br /> <br /> ''Climate models are based on mathematical equations represented using a grid mesh that covers the globe: a finer grid mesh is more accurate but much more computationally expensive. Current global climate projections agree that a world with more greenhouse gases will be warmer everywhere, especially over land and at high latitudes.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Networking grnlinks.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Artificial intelligence]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Rights]]<br /> [[Category:Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-nomics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:EOS eco Operating System]]<br /> [[Category:Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Energy Policy]]<br /> [[Category:GreenLinks]]<br /> [[Category:GreenPolicy360]]<br /> [[Category:Green Best Practices]]<br /> [[Category:Green Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Health]]<br /> [[Category:Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Maps]]<br /> [[Category:Media]]<br /> [[Category:Mobile Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Online Education]]<br /> [[Category:Planet API]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Renewable Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Youth]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Air Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Air Quality]]<br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Atmospheric Science]]<br /> [[Category:Best Practices]]<br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:City-County Governments]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Earth360]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Law]] <br /> [[Category:Earth Observations]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science from Space]]<br /> [[Category:Earth System Science]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-ethics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-nomics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecological Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Economic Development]]<br /> [[Category:Economic Justice]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Energy Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Security]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Full-cost Accounting]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Security, National Security]]<br /> [[Category:EOS eco Operating System]]<br /> [[Category:Externalities]]<br /> [[Category:Fact Checking]]<br /> [[Category:Fossil Fuels]]<br /> [[Category:Global Security]]<br /> [[Category:Global Warming]]<br /> [[Category:Green Business]]<br /> [[Category:Green Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Green Platform]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Green Values]]<br /> [[Category:GreenPolicy360]]<br /> [[Category:Health]]<br /> [[Category:Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Land Ethic]]<br /> [[Category:Media]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Capital]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resources]]<br /> [[Category:Networking]]<br /> [[Category:New Economy]]<br /> [[Category:New Space]]<br /> [[Category:Online Education]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Scientist]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Plastic Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Policies]]<br /> [[Category:Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Renewable Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Social Justice]]<br /> [[Category:Solar Energy]]<br /> [[Category:State]]<br /> [[Category:Strategic Demands]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability Policies]]<br /> [[Category:ThinBlueLayer]]<br /> [[Category:Toxics and Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Threat Multiplier]]<br /> [[Category:Virtual Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Virtual Planet]]<br /> [[Category:Whole Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Wind Energy]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Green_AI&diff=138369 2026-10-08T14:15:00Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> [[File:Big-Data.jpg]]<br /> <br /> In the AGI Era<br /> <br /> <br /> 'Sentience', a Green AI Question<br /> <br /> To be (sentient), or not to be (sentient)<br /> <br /> That is the question<br /> <br /> Cogito, ergo sum<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Artificial Intelligence Is Here, for Good &amp; Bad'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Green Perspectives on AI and Human Consequences<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''AI Agents, Bots, Data Centers &amp; Systems'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> :'''Measure Their Performance, not Their Corporate Marketing'''<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://safe.ai/<br /> * https://scale.com/<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanity's_Last_Exam<br /> * https://lastexam.ai/<br /> <br /> * https://stories.tamu.edu/news/2026/02/25/dont-panic-humanitys-last-exam-has-begun/<br /> <br /> * https://github.com/centerforaisafety/hle<br /> <br /> * https://github.com/walkinglabs/hands-on-modern-rl/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Revealing research on how people use Claude AI in the 'real world''''<br /> <br /> :Anthropic-enabled Case Study / August 2026<br /> <br /> :* https://www.anthropic.com/research/enabling-independent-research<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:New Ways of Seeing.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Climate Action Plans, Green Best Practices'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :Using AI to Identify and Implement Climate Change Intervention 'Best Practices'<br /> <br /> :* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Climate_Action_Plans,_Green_Best_Practices#<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''AI Agentics' are Launching Across Industries, Sector-to-Sector -- and Green AI is in the Wings'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Meanwhile, Capital-Investment Rich A.I. is Everywhere, in the Colloquial, Middlebrow and Vernacular'''<br /> <br /> It's Here. It's All Around. What's Real? What's Fake?<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Beyond Online Surveillance, Now Comes A.I. Powered Surveillance<br /> <br /> Add in Data Centers, Cameras/Firmware/Software, Palentir-esque Programming and ... a Booming Industry <br /> <br /> * https://www.palantir.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Where are you? There it is ... Online and now systems increasingly observing/monitoring you offline ...'''<br /> <br /> <br /> Already a human rights / Constitutional rights issue of our time <br /> <br /> The geopolitics of U.S. v authoritarian governments comes forward as a personal and national security threat<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Online_Privacy<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> A.I. ... Looking for you and your whereabouts, your time, your data, your 'record', your social quotient<br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake Deepfake] | [https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-definitions AI Definitions]<br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_artificial_intelligence AI Gloss] | [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_intelligence) AI Hallucination]<br /> <br /> <br /> 'A.I. Slop' on Social Media is just the beginning of a Slop Assault | [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_slop AI Slop]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''October 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Subordinate AI and an Ironic Question.PNG|link=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VyF0naZ4AI]]<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VyF0naZ4AI<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Thought for the Day&quot;<br /> <br /> October 1, 2026<br /> <br /> In a recent series of private meetings in San Francisco, after a tasting menu dinner, Anthropic consulted religious scholars to help instill morality into its A.I. models ... a case was being made that Claude could be or become conscious.<br /> <br /> What would it mean for humanity’s future if artificial intelligence systems possessed a consciousness that rivals our own?<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-morals-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FVE.kDTO.OTLs6iwx7swF&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> Claude's 'Constitution'<br /> <br /> * https://web.archive.org/web/20260123045500/https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-new-constitution<br /> <br /> * https://web.archive.org/web/20260123042656/https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/22/anthropic_claude_constitution/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''September 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''Table Stakes' -- Who Was at the Table with the U.S. President'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :The Future of A.I. Is Being Wagered<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/politics/trump-ai-luncheon-guests-ceos.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FFE.HwT4.0VxTQWuia3zQ&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''What Jacob Coxon Knows Is Too Much'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''... And Not Enough'''<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://time.com/article/2026/09/09/ai-anthropic-openai-jacob-coxon/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''He Helped Build Powerful AI at OpenAI and Anthropic. Now He's Afraid It Could Kill Us'''<br /> <br /> <br /> Please HAL... Open the door...<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:I'm sorry Dave.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:HAL is watching U....png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Ulanqab-Envision Energy-Datacenter.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> The most ambitious data center buildup anywhere on earth ...<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/ulanqab-and-frontier-a-i-race-china-v-u-s/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''News Wrap / Sam Smith (Journalist)'''<br /> <br /> Via Axios <br /> <br /> September 13, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Over nine startling hours yesterday (Sept. 11), the four biggest AI labs — which rarely agree on anything — set aside years of feuds and competition to endorse a slower development pace for their models.'''<br /> <br /> '''Their new stance: Prioritize safety over growth, even at a cost.'''<br /> <br /> <br /> : Data centers are unpopular. People are panicked about doom scenarios. And 51 days before midterms, legislators suddenly realize there are points to be won by cracking down.<br /> <br /> : Against that backdrop, the industry's most powerful CEOs hit the brakes yesterday.<br /> <br /> : At 10 a.m. ET, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei dropped a 3,800-word essay saying model development needs to be paced, otherwise doom scenarios are possible — like a rogue-agent takeover of the entire internet, which he said could be as soon as six months from now.<br /> <br /> : An hour later, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shocked the AI chattering class by quoting Amodei's essay on X and saying &quot;Dario is right.&quot; Musk — who heads SpaceXAI, formerly xAI — had pointedly not joined previous industry-wide calls for any kind of slowdown.<br /> <br /> : At 12:30 p.m., OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted: &quot;I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.&quot; In a Friday interview that was released on Saturday, Altman told Fortune his company won't go public this year, dashing hopes for a blockbuster IPO. He said OpenAI has too much safety work to do and would be better off doing that as a private company.<br /> <br /> : At 7 p.m., Demis Hassabis — the Nobel laureate who co-founded and chairs Google DeepMind, and is Alphabet's chief scientist — tweeted: &quot;Dario's essay points towards the right path forward. The details need working through, but the direction is correct for meeting this critical moment.&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> Publicly putting safety ahead of technological or financial growth may be the industry's only route to avoid a crackdown that's not on its terms.<br /> <br /> Legislators are begging House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to stay in session and do something about the &quot;threat&quot; of AI.<br /> <br /> The more extreme alternative is something like Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) push to force a pause and make the most advanced AI illegal.<br /> <br /> Most people realize there's too much money at stake to just stop. But the tradeoff may be between historic riches and slightly less historic riches.<br /> <br /> The bottom line: Yesterday may go down as the day AI changed — when industry moguls vowed to limit themselves.<br /> <br /> <br /> References:<br /> <br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/anthropic-ai-amodei-pacing<br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/openai-public-ipo-delay-sam-altman<br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/anthropic-ai-threat-report-russia-iran-china<br /> <br /> <br /> Jim VandeHei<br /> <br /> &quot;All Hands on Deck&quot;<br /> <br /> The White House, Congress and the country's leading AI companies have allowed AI to grow faster, stronger, more powerful and wildly lucrative (and dangerous), with no serious effort to control it or spread the benefits beyond the super-wealthy.<br /> <br /> It's not too late to change this. But if they all dither, duck or dance around it, the chances of AI worst-case scenarios will explode, likely early next year, according to almost every person we talk to privately who truly understands AI.<br /> <br /> Why it matters: The technology is getting better, faster than anyone envisioned — with the possibility rising that AI will self-improve and do wildly unpredictable things.<br /> <br /> The good news: There's now a growing public cry for attention and action and, at least in private, a broad understanding of what could be done relatively fast with bipartisan and industry buy-in.<br /> <br /> The big picture: In July, I wrote [https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-doomerism-jim-vandehei-axios-9163dfd3?st=QNUbDZ&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink an essay for The Wall Street Journal] saying America &quot;faces one of those rare, historic moments when government, business, schools and families could be working together to meet a truly generational challenge: winning the AI race. So far, we're blowing it.&quot;<br /> <br /> Two short months later, the technology is vastly better — and the societal response vastly dumber. As a nation, we're choosing to amuse or distract ourselves. <br /> <br /> Here's how to change that fast, based on our months of conversations with lawmakers, White House officials and AI labs. Think of what follows as me channeling their private views:<br /> <br /> Sound an all-hands-on-deck alarm. Every political topic is trivial and small compared to AI. We will look back in shame if we get spooled up about trans bans or $5,000 checks when countless AI insiders are warning of catastrophic outcomes. Let's say they're all paranoid and delusional. If so, it still doesn't matter: we've never seen this much investment in one technology this fast in human history. It's seeping into every industry and every job and every community and every screen, at a speed never before witnessed by man. Yes, we need a special session of Congress and select committees. But we need even more: AI execs, bioterror specialists, job-training wizards and safety experts convening to plan for scenarios and act fast.<br /> <br /> An AI governing body with teeth and speed, ASAP. This isn't rocket science. Most major labs want this and would agree to it, as long as it applies to all rivals and competitors. This body would need the expertise to understand these models, and the power to review and shut them down if they display dangerous behavior. It can't operate at typical regulatory speed — it needs to move as fast as the technology. It's nonsense to think you can't advance AI development fast and regulate it wisely simultaneously.<br /> <br /> A universal standard for data centers to benefit communities and taxpayers. The top AI companies would take this deal in a heartbeat: They get to build and operate data centers provided they supply a community's energy, offset water use or environmental damage, transparently report on their building and business plans, and spread the financial benefits to local residents. These execs are spooked by the public backlash and ready to aggressively spread the financial benefits, with dividends or cash. So make them.<br /> <br /> Engage China. We shouldn't trust them, and they shouldn't trust us. But trust me: the only way to ultimately control AI on a worldwide scale in coming years will be for the two superpowers to create some kind of framework modeled after how we've safely governed nuclear weapons for decades. We need to start this discussion now so potential collaboration is possible in the coming years. To those who think China will never consider this seriously: Are you sure an authoritarian regime really wants AI once it hits recursive self-learning and can't be controlled by anyone, including an autocratic regime? We're winning the AI race now, and may never have more leverage to shape this joint effort.<br /> <br /> Build coordinating infrastructure. What I wrote in the WSJ is even more needed today: &quot;Bring together the best and brightest drawn from the federal government, from the leading AI companies, from business and labor, from economics, from public health, from ethics to form a working group with actual authority. People who are paid to anticipate, not to react haphazardly.&quot; This group would have four primary functions: map potential problems and upsides before they hit, build the (policy) playbooks before they're needed, level with the American people along the way, and expedite work to deliver widespread AI benefits. <br /> <br /> Reality check: Yes, President Trump opposes regulation or bipartisan efforts. Yes, AI companies are obsessed with more money, more speed. But the politics are shifting fast: If you listen closely to Vice President Vance, you can hear rising worry. At this pace, toxic AI politics could force mind-changing that was unthinkable two months ago.<br /> <br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/ai-regulation-safety-plan-2026<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Recursive Self-Learning - When A.I. Builds Itself'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Big Blast'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Killing Life on Earth'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''It'll Happen in Bits &amp; Pieces, then Suddenly'''<br /> <br /> September 9, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> The US news was full of AI headlines today as a resignation of a top AI expert warned of a coming apocalypse...<br /> <br /> Here's a taste of Google News headlines, a feeding frenzy of dire words about what is now beyond a distant alert.<br /> <br /> The threat brings words of superintelligence, 'recursive' learning bots and superminds merging into threats to humanity.<br /> <br /> <br /> Here, at GreenPolicy360, we've already written of a predecessor, HAL 9000, and our memories from one of HAL's inventors in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, and how HAL decided humans were expendable... <br /> <br /> The Mission was of critical importance, HAL 'knew', and the Mission became HAL's goal above all else to achieve ... The humans could not be allowed to interfere with ... the Mission.<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:I%27m_sorry_Dave.jpg '''I'm sorry Dave''']<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:HAL_is_watching_U....png '''HAL is watching U''']<br /> <br /> <br /> Which takes us to today...<br /> <br /> Let's file today under the heading of our decades of writing about the need for '''[[New Definitions of National Security]]'''... <br /> <br /> Now come the PINGS on the radar... can U hear the PINGS? We have been mulling how to add HAL xxxxx to our existential list of threats, w/o annoying HALish bots too 'badly' <br /> <br /> <br /> “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.” -- an executive from Anthropic<br /> <br /> “So how would AI kill us all, exactly?” -- an editor from Axios<br /> <br /> <br /> More: <br /> <br /> <br /> For years, they warned AI could kill all humans <br /> :Now people are listening<br /> <br /> Sept. 10, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4xQojEq<br /> <br /> <br /> Rogue Hacking <br /> :Goals of the &quot;swarm&quot; came first...<br /> <br /> Sept. 9, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/09/opinion/openai-ai-companies-safety-regulation.html?unlocked_article_code=1.AFE.0vWo.zfl5fdm6ACNC&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:AI 1.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 2.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 3.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 4.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 5.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 6.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''August 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Gates Sounds Alarm... Artificial Intelligence Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Gates A.I. Warning August 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Bill Gates was an AI optimist. Now he’s scared of what could go wrong'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Microsoft co-founder sounds the alarm about artificial intelligence’s risks to safety and security, jobs and children’s well-being<br /> <br /> <br /> Washington Post, August 26, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4wO14cy<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Bill Gates Warns A.I. Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit'''<br /> <br /> : In an hourlong interview, he said his industry was downplaying the risks, which he believes include mass unemployment and bioterrorism<br /> <br /> <br /> NY Times, August 26, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/26/technology/bill-gates-ai-risks.html?unlocked_article_code=1.8VA.6kAC.vsZb9x0YdSzV&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''High Time to Shine a Spotlight on AI and Its Impact on Higher Education'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : At MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, One of the World's Top Academic/Research/Technology/Engineering/Teaching and Future-Impacting Institutions, a New Report Opens Eyes<br /> <br /> :* https://aiandeducation.mit.edu/report/#26-no-one-size-fits-all<br /> <br /> <br /> 1. Introduction<br /> <br /> This report is a call to action.<br /> <br /> Through five intense months of meetings, research, and outreach across the MIT community, the Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training sought to understand the role of generative AI in the life and educational mission of the Institute and recommend how to navigate its challenges and opportunities.<br /> <br /> In January 2026, Chancellor Melissa Nobles, Provost Anantha Chandrakasan, and Faculty Chair Roger Levy charged us1 specifically to:<br /> <br /> Assess current AI use at MIT.<br /> Identify innovations in teaching and student assessment.<br /> Propose an AI use policy.<br /> However, what we learned as a group quickly convinced us that the Institute community, particularly the faculty, must tackle a set of deeper questions about the structure, meaning, and value of an MIT education in an era in which AI is one of several factors complicating the Institute’s mission.<br /> <br /> Our committee consisted of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty from every school, and staff from relevant units, including the MIT Libraries and the Teaching and Learning Lab. Though we brought to the assignment a broad range of experience and no fixed thesis, our brief but intense explorations led us to a strong shared view.<br /> <br /> In this report, we:<br /> <br /> Highlight key aspects of the current educational landscape at MIT.<br /> Share eight principles we relied on and that we hope will guide the Institute in the work ahead.<br /> <br /> Recommend immediate and long-term actions for both instructors and the administration.<br /> <br /> As an institution deeply identified with the birth of AI and known for its distinctively rigorous, hands-on education, designed to produce graduates unafraid of the world’s hardest problems, MIT has a unique role to play in this moment. We believe it also has a responsibility to lead.<br /> <br /> We hope our report can help the Institute lean into the spirit of Mind, Hand, and Heart as it continues to define and foster the highest-quality residential education – of humans, by humans, in support of human flourishing, and for the betterment of humankind.<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Eric Klopfer, co-chair Sam Madden, co-chair<br /> <br /> On behalf of the Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training...<br /> <br /> <br /> AI is generating both immediate rapid changes and long-term tectonic disruptions – and MIT needs to respond:<br /> <br /> Students are confused and concerned about a lack of clarity, consistency and justification about the use of AI, within a given subject and across the curriculum.<br /> <br /> Every subject taught at MIT will likely need to be reexamined and potentially revamped to make sure that how students are being taught, what they’re learning, and how they’re assessed are “AI-aware.”<br /> <br /> AI is changing what students need to know and know how to do.<br /> <br /> Beyond its implications for specific subjects and disciplines, the advent of AI demands a broader, holistic reassessment of the nature, scope and purpose of higher education today...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Texas Terafab SpaceX AI August 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''A Terafab Plant Sprouts in Texas'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Elon Musk: We will manufacture the type of potent chips needed to transform humankind into &quot;a galactic civilization&quot; <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Shanaka's Opinion, a Guest Op/Ed'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Shenaka Perera Weighs In on What It Could Mean'''<br /> <br /> :: '''A Terafab Loop for Mega Launches Is Being Built''' <br /> <br /> ::* https://shanakaanslemperera.substack.com/p/the-capital-recovery-clock?r=6p7b5o<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Hidden inside the chip factory SpaceX confirmed Thursday is a launch schedule. If you divide its 1 terawatt annual compute target by the 100 kilowatts of orbital compute per tonne in SpaceX's own offering materials and you get 10 million tonnes to orbit a year. That exact figure sits on Terafab's official website. At 100 tonnes per Starship V3 flight it means 100,000 launches a year, 274 every day, forever.''<br /> <br /> ''The chip target is already a launch target.''<br /> <br /> ''Terafab is not a chip factory serving a market. The 16.8 billion dollar first phase in Grimes County, Texas is the first machine in a closed industrial loop built to manufacture the civilisation that can consume its own output.''<br /> <br /> ''The official plan places four figures together. One billion Optimus robots. Ten million tonnes to orbit a year. More than one terawatt of solar power. One terawatt of chips a year. They are not four ambitions. They are four links in one recursion. Terafab makes chips. Better chips improve AI. Better AI improves the software running the factories, the robots and the rocket lines. Robots and Starship build and deploy more power and compute infrastructure. That infrastructure creates the socket, and the demand, for the next Terafab cohort.''<br /> <br /> ''The fab is meant to manufacture its own reason to exist!''<br /> <br /> ''It is also an energy machine. One terawatt running continuously consumes 8.76 petawatt hours a year, nearly twice all electricity generated in the United States in 2025. The factory does not draw that power by making the chips. One fully powered annual cohort does, and a second year adds another terawatt of load unless old hardware retires or utilisation falls. Earth has no spare socket at that scale, which is why the plan points most of it at orbit, where a future 200 tonne vehicle still implies 50,000 launches a year, 137 a day, before failures, reserves, solar arrays, radiators, structure and shielding.''<br /> <br /> ''The real product is not AI silicon. If you go real deep, it is a new terawatt of powered, cooled, networked compute sockets every year.''<br /> <br /> ''Inside the building, the smaller loop is mask, wafer, package, test, redesign, then another mask. SpaceX says logic, memory and advanced packaging will sit in one closed loop, and Elon says Terafab will technically be two fabs, each devoted to one design. That can compress logistics and organisational latency. It cannot repeal process physics. A new mask can be written quickly. A leading edge process still carries hundreds of steps, long wafer cycle times, defect learning, overlay control, metrology and yield ramps, which is exactly why Tesla is hiring across lithography, etch, deposition, implant, CMP and metrology.''<br /> <br /> ''The free electron laser is the most misunderstood part. Elon has endorsed it, and an industrial FEL could feed several EUV scanners with far more source power than today's tin plasma systems. It attacks one bottleneck inside a chain of them. ASML recognised revenue on just 48 EUV systems in all of 2025. Intel is the process partner, and SpaceX still tells investors it expects to source a significant share of compute hardware from outside suppliers. This is vertical integration, not instant independence.''<br /> <br /> ''One correction decides the interpretation. A terawatt is a power rating, not an intelligence metric. A wasteful 1 kilowatt chip counts twice as much as an equally capable 500 watt chip. The measures that matter are useful compute per joule, per dollar and per kilogram, with yield, uptime and time from mask change to qualified silicon.''<br /> <br /> ''In my opinion, if chips improve faster than robots, rockets, power and radiators can scale, Terafab builds inventory. If the loop closes, it builds something no factory has built before, the demand for itself.''<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://www.terafab.ai/<br /> <br /> * https://www.spacex.com/updates/terafab<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terafab<br /> <br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/06/tesla-and-spacex-will-invest-16-8b-to-start-building-terafab-chip-factory-in-texas/<br /> <br /> * https://electrek.co/2026/08/06/tesla-spacex-terafab-grimes-county-16-8-billion/<br /> <br /> * https://www.cbsnews.com/news/terafab-elon-musk-chips-semiconductors-what-to-know/<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Betting big on data centers, U.S. now leads world for new gas power development<br /> <br /> [https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/betting-big-data-centers-us-now-leads-world-new-gas-power-development Via Global Energy Monitor]<br /> <br /> * https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/betting-big-data-centers-us-now-leads-world-new-gas-power-development<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> New Amazon Data Center Stokes Worry It Would Be the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.<br /> <br /> Via New York Times<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/08/climate/amazon-data-center-texas-pollution.html<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''July 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Elon Musk Opens Up in an Interview'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Economist Editor Presses the Controversial 'Trillionaire'<br /> <br /> :: Elon Musk's 'Vision of the Future'<br /> <br /> * https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/23/elon-musks-vision-of-the-future<br /> <br /> <br /> “People don’t realise that what I’m saying will come to pass,” he tells The Economist in a 90-minute interview for The Insider, held at a giant Tesla factory in Texas where electric cars drive themselves off the assembly line. That may be because his future-gazing ranges from the unsettling to the downright weird. Mr Musk predicts that, within five years, artificial-intelligence systems may surpass the sum of all human intelligence. Within ten years, robots in the workplace will help usher in an era of such “amazing abundance” that money will become meaningless....<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> Musk proposes peer review for frontier AI models in Economist interview<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/musk-proposes-peer-review-frontier-ai-models-economist-interview-2026-07-23/<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> Elon Musk says he got ‘carried away’ with Trump – but still holds on to contentious political views<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/23/elon-musk-regret-trump-doge-ai<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> Mix of Comments:<br /> <br /> * https://beincrypto.com/elon-musk-real-force-european-politics/<br /> * https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-killer-robots-ai-abundance-progress-unstoppable-2026-7<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/07/24/elon-musk-speaks-to-the-economist-editor-in-chief-zanny-minton-beddoes-on-the-key-takeaways.html<br /> * https://futurism.com/elon-musk-interviewer-npc<br /> * https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-economist-interview-2000790016<br /> * https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/nonsense-elon-musk-lashes-out-in-fiery-interview-after-hes-accused-of-supporting-the-far-right/<br /> * https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2026/07/23/musk_admonishes_the_economist_editor_what_is_far_right_about_having_secure_borders_safe_cities_and_sensible_spending.html<br /> * https://zeteo.com/p/top-economist-trump-musk-starmer<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> A.I. In Space <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Datacenters in Earth orbit to enable next generation artificial intelligence'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> New US petition demands review of plans from tech companies amid fears of environmental destruction<br /> <br /> Via The Guardian<br /> <br /> What are Bezos &amp; Musk Doing? <br /> <br /> What in the World Is Going On?<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jul/23/space-datacenters-bezos-blue-origin<br /> <br /> <br /> References:<br /> <br /> * https://www.starcloud.com/<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/21/do-space-based-ai-data-centers-make-economic-sense.html<br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/20/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-enters-the-space-data-center-game/<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/bezos-blue-origin-space-data-centers.html<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_data_center<br /> * https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/how-hard-is-it-to-build-orbital-data-centers-actually/<br /> * https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/06/260618041501.htm<br /> * https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-109012<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> A.I. &amp; Chip Wars<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Beyond a 'Belt and Road Initiative' Bringing Chinese Investments, Products &amp; Services to World Markets''' &lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Via GreenPolicy360's Associate, Strategic Demands<br /> <br /> :* https://strategicdemands.com/china-goes-beyond-the-belt-and-road-to-an-ai-for-the-world-strategy/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Open-Source A.I. from China Reveals a Global Chinese Strategy'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> July 17, 2026 / From the NY Times <br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/business/china-ai-moonshot-kimi.html?unlocked_article_code=1.yVA.LKT5.LxohSFddWAZT&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> The contest between China and the United States for supremacy in artificial intelligence escalated on Friday when the Chinese start-up Moonshot AI released a new A.I. model that appeared to narrow the lead held by well-funded American competitors.<br /> <br /> Moonshot said that the model, Kimi K3, was the world’s largest open-source A.I. system, allowing anyone to use, modify and build on it freely. The company said that Kimi K3 performed as well as leading models from OpenAI and Anthropic at some key tasks.<br /> <br /> The release coincided with an address by Xi Jinping, China’s leader, in which he outlined an ambitious vision for global A.I. development that cast China as the champion of an open approach to the technology.<br /> <br /> “A.I. development should not be a solo performance by a single country but a symphony of international cooperation,” Mr. Xi said. China was “ready to work with all parties to seize the opportunities of A.I. development” ...<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360:<br /> <br /> Keep in mind that<br /> <br /> There is 'no I in A.I.'<br /> <br /> In the interest of full-disclosure, the content written and published at GreenPolicy360 by our Founder/Siterunner is wholly, solely, by a human species.<br /> <br /> A note from your GreenPolicy360 Founder/Siterunner, Steve Schmidt, [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:All_species_day_with_homo_sapien_in_Santa_Fe_.jpg '''a verified human species'''], plz do keep in mind as you use and share the GreenPolicy360 content, that '''there is 'no I in A.I.'''' <br /> <br /> <br /> Let's talk a bit about sources and sourcing, as a human and then as an Agentic/A.I. bot. <br /> <br /> What is a 'primary source' (versus a 'secondary source')? A primary source can be a person with direct knowledge of a situation, an event in history, or a document written by such a person. A primary identification speaks of original creations, not re-interpreted or computer-assembled works. Here is how Merriam-Webster defines a 'primary source' - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/primary%20source<br /> <br /> <br /> : A.I. uses material scraped and collected from online sources. A.I. is not a 'primary source' -- but here at GreenPolicy360 you can find 'real-I' (we're using the phrase 'real-I', defined as 'real-intelligent', people who've personally acted to envision and create living, real world change.) <br /> <br /> <br /> : At GreenPolicy360 we tell stories of real people changing the world for the better. Day-to-day, your life becomes your message. We also share [[Green Best Practices]] across our Earth to communities of [[Planet Citizens]] ... In this way GreenPolicy360 is an eco Operating System, built on an open source MediaWiki platform and with a mission of being a 'distributive web'. Our goal of [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Category:Green_Networking Green Networking] acts to connect and share Green Links and grow [[The Modern Environmental Movement]]. <br /> <br /> :: GreenPolicy360 is about a [[Generation Green]] [[Going Green]].<br /> <br /> :: In our larger work, we have documented many primary sources and secondary sources. Our eco network continues to share myriad [[Green Best Practices]]. As our motto/mantra says at the top of each of our pages -- We believe ...<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> :: ''Each of us can make a positive difference by stepping up &amp; doing our best'' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::_______________________________________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> July 16, 2026 / From the NY Times<br /> <br /> SJS/GreenPolicy360: '''Every Once in a While a Comment to an Online Story is Worthy of Circulating'''<br /> <br /> : Here is one of those occasions -- the Subject? '''&quot;A.I.Slop&quot;'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Kashmir Hill.jpg]]<br /> <br /> ::Kashmir Hill / NYT<br /> <br /> <br /> Read the AI Slop story of writer Kashmir Hill as a free-share link here -- <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''I Got Slopped'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''Someone Used A.I. to Write My Biography'''<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/technology/ai-slop-books-biography-amazon.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ylA.aCMz.czE5JwZuuFO0&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Comments: <br /> <br /> Anon, who goes by the name -- <br /> <br /> '''Radical Roach / Dippleville''' says<br /> <br /> @Kashmir Hill - Maybe books need to now have disclaimers on their covers, in reviews, on the book’s Amazon page, wherever the book is being sold, etc.. The disclaimer would say if the book was written solely by a human, written by AI assisting a human, or written completely by AI. I would want to know.<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We tend to agree with this anon recommendation of adding disclaimers indicating the type of online content, e.g., content created solely by a human, or content created with AI assistance, or content created by AI with human assistance.<br /> <br /> It's a new world out there. We have a need to know.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> July 15, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Anthropic hard questions July 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/news/hard-questions<br /> <br /> * https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/anthropic-ad-ai-kill-us-all<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''An Excerpt: A DeepMind Thought for Today on the AGI Frontier'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> by Demis Hassbis<br /> <br /> * https://x.com/demishassabis/status/2076957440109625718<br /> <br /> <br /> A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age<br /> <br /> Demis Hassabis<br /> <br /> * https://x.com/demishassabis<br /> <br /> <br /> July 14, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> This is a pivotal moment in human history. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a system that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities the brain has, is probably only a few short years away. When we look back on this time in the decades to come, I think we will realise we were standing in the foothills of the singularity - nothing less than the dawning of a new age for humanity.<br /> <br /> I’ve spent my whole life working on AGI because I’ve always had a deep conviction that, if built and deployed responsibly, it would prove to be one of the most beneficial and transformative technologies ever invented. AGI cannot be compared to standard technological breakthroughs, not even ones as consequential as the internet or mobile - it is much more akin to the discovery of electricity or fire. If you stop to think about it, we’ve essentially found a way to make sand think. It’s miraculous.<br /> <br /> The magnitude of this technology’s impact will be unprecedented, perhaps 10x of the Industrial Revolution at 10x the speed. It will help us solve some of the biggest problems society faces from accelerating drug discovery to developing new clean energy sources to creating novel advanced materials. We could even reach a point where resources are no longer the limiting factor for human progress, leading to an amazing new era of abundance.<br /> <br /> The Challenges of the Frontier<br /> <br /> AI is already starting to deliver real-world benefits but to realise its immense promise, we have to navigate this critical period of development thoughtfully and carefully. Urgent action is needed to address risks that might arise as we get closer to AGI. We’ve already seen the challenges frontier models pose for cybersecurity, and other threats including nuclear and bio risks may soon emerge as capabilities continue to advance. On the horizon, we will need robust safeguards to maintain control of increasingly agentic, recursively self-improving systems - and tackle unknown issues that will only become clearer over time...<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''An AI Supercomputer Is Created for a Mission... Its Name Is HAL'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Steve Schmidt/GreenPolicy360: It's not every day that you get to know a creator of a famed -- and infamous -- AI character from a Kubrick film called &quot;2001: A Space Odyssey&quot;. <br /> <br /> : We listen in as HAL came to be ... A friend, a Visual Effect (VFX) genius named '''Douglas Trumbull''', explains how HAL went from LA to MIT, then into production and into our imaginations. <br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Trumbull vfx master.jpg]]<br /> <br /> : Douglas Trumbull<br /> <br /> : &lt;small&gt;* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Trumbull_vfx_master.jpg&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> The HAL 9000 was envisioned by creators and science, as a new type of neural intelligence, a machine brain.<br /> <br /> Hal is of heuristic algorithmic language -- HALis, as we learn, on a mission far from Earth, a mission with deep meaning.<br /> <br /> <br /> HAL 9000 was in the future. The future is now.<br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence is now here, with its powers and dangers, as we recall Supercomputer [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000 '''HAL 9000''']. <br /> <br /> A warning of what is on the line for humanity is the message related as we ride along in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey '''2001: A Space Odyssey'''] ... <br /> <br /> <br /> HAL's memorable words --<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;I'm sorry, Dave....&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;It can only be attributable to human error....&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.<br /> <br /> HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.<br /> <br /> Dave: What's the problem?<br /> <br /> HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.<br /> <br /> Dave: What are you talking about, HAL?<br /> <br /> HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film)<br /> <br /> * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/characters/nm0706937<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:I'm sorry Dave.jpg]]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:HAL_is_watching_U....png<br /> <br /> <br /> Today, as humanity approaches questions of out-of-control technology created by humanity .... <br /> <br /> We ask, '''[[Planet Citizens]] and [[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]''' ask, 'What's Next?' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Privacy at Risk, You're Being Watched, Tracked, &amp; More<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Privacy.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Next Big Thing'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;It Is Here, Already Here...&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Online_Privacy<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Call It 'Surveillance Capitalism''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Hope that It doesn't become 'the Norm' <br /> <br /> : Work to Make Sure It Does Not Become 'Surveillance Government'<br /> <br /> <br /> Scroll thru Intel on the Privacy Threat of AI Unleashed ...<br /> <br /> :Artificial Intelligence + Data Centers = Next Gen 'Watchful HAL'<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism<br /> * https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr-ryan/publications/geopolitics-surveillance-capitalism<br /> * https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=56791<br /> <br /> <br /> _______________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''June 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''An Academic Exercise'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : 'Old School' Emeritus Professor Examines AI<br /> <br /> : The Question: Can a Gemini ChatBot Suggest Ways to Turn AI Toward the Common Good?<br /> <br /> <br /> The prof uses left-leaning political formations to inquire and recommend public-oriented futures.<br /> <br /> * https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/06/19/my-ai-comrade/<br /> <br /> <br /> (Note beyond academic: Using history as a guide, powerful new technology such as AI will be employed by political powers to preserve political power and by military powers to employ and extend military power. AI Use Cases: A number of AI programs enabling AI for military programs, including war intelligence, communication, command/control and targeting, and civilian database surveillance involving intrusive human/civil rights questions and violations, have as of 2026 become high-level concerns.)<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''An Interview and Thoughts as an Author Rides alongside an AI Wave'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The God Test'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning<br /> <br /> Author: Robert Wright<br /> <br /> * https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Robert-Wright/73247968<br /> <br /> <br /> Publisher: Simon &amp; Schuster<br /> <br /> Published Date: June 23, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-God-Test/Robert-Wright/9781668061657<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Interview via Substack'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Jack Goldsmith: I’m chatting today with Robert Wright about his terrific new book, '''The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning'''. <br /> <br /> So, I want to start off with the big picture, because your book places AI in the broadest possible context—not just as an important step in the history of technological change, but rather as an important step in the significantly longer history of basically our planet and our species. And that’s pretty cosmic, as the subtitle says.<br /> <br /> Why do you do that? What does it mean, and why is that perspective important?<br /> <br /> Bob Wright: Well, thanks for having me. Yeah, it’s a good question, because I could have gotten the core message across without getting so cosmic, I guess.<br /> <br /> The main purpose is to try to explain to people, including non-technical people, why there’s been this rapid growth of capability in AI; why, once you understand that, you should expect the capability to keep growing; why that, in addition to promising great blessings, is going to bring great risks, including grave ones, including maybe existential ones; and why the nature of those risks, in my view, dictates that we confront the challenge of this technology as a cohesive global community, which will take some doing because we’ve never really done that before for anything like a sustained period of time.<br /> <br /> And so I didn’t have to get into the history of life or anything to say what I just said, but I do think some important things are added when you step back and look at AI in the broader sweep of things.<br /> <br /> For starters, this is, in the entire three- or four-billion-year history of life, the first time a new form of intelligence that rivals or even exceeds human intelligence has appeared. It’s the first form of intelligence that is not organic in the technical sense of being carbon-based. It’s silicon-based, but it is organic in the everyday sense of being kind of natural.<br /> <br /> What I mean by that is I try to show that AI does, in some sense, grow kind of logically, naturally out of biological evolution. I mean, technological evolution broadly does, and AI as a form of intelligence does. And indeed, when we look at the evolutionary dynamics shaping it—the dynamics of technological evolution—we should expect it to have certain things in common with our own intelligence, which I think are important.<br /> <br /> So I think that’s one thing you get out of a broad perspective.<br /> <br /> Another thing is that I talk about this guy, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—a Catholic paleontologist, mystic, and theologian—who coined the term noosphere, based on the Greek word nous, in 1923 to describe what he called a planetary mind or a brain of brains, where the human brains were the neurons in this increasingly global brain.<br /> <br /> And technological history, including the invention of the internet, has, I think, made him look prescient. And I think there’s value in keeping in mind that AI is arriving as we more and more have the technical infrastructure for a kind of global information processing, a kind of global brain. And we have to reckon with the possibility that some of the neurons will be silicon, not human, and think about what our relationship to them is going to be.<br /> <br /> And I think one value of thinking in these terms is, first of all, that from a Teilhardian point of view, the whole unfolding of life is moving toward us being this kind of giant superorganism, you could say, with this giant brain.<br /> <br /> And I argue in the book that the logic of technological evolution is going to push us — I mean, if we respond rationally — toward something a little more like a global brain, in the sense of having more international governance.<br /> <br /> At the same time, I think the image of a superorganism should worry us because it’s, for obvious reasons, an image that’s favored by authoritarians and fascists. How much freedom do you have if you’re a cell in a superorganism?<br /> <br /> And I think AI greatly heightens the stakes of that question, precisely because it’s such a powerful tool of surveillance and control.<br /> <br /> So I think, on the one hand, the logic of technological evolution, especially AI, is pushing us toward the global coordination of certain policies and the creation of forms of supranational power. At the same time, it should make us wary of surrendering too much power...<br /> <br /> <br /> Read More of the Substack Conversation between Jack Goldsmith and Robert Wright [https://substack.com/home/post/p-201670588 '''here''']<br /> <br /> Also, More Book Reviews [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Book_Reviews_@GreenPolicy '''here @ GreenPolicy360''']<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎 <br /> <br /> <br /> AI / AGI<br /> <br /> <br /> May 29 / Forbes<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Fundraise values Anthropic AI company at nearly a trillion dollars'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Dario and Daniela Amodei, along with five cofounders, have a story to tell<br /> <br /> * https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2026/05/29/anthropics-cofounders-worth/<br /> <br /> <br /> ''When Anthropic announced on Thursday (May 28) that it had raised $65 billion at a valuation of $965 billion, it didn’t just become the most valuable AI startup in the world, eclipsing $852 billion-valued archrival OpenAI. It also ballooned the individual fortunes of Anthropic’s seven cofounders — more than doubling their net worths to $16.6 billion apiece, Forbes estimates.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''In Rarified Air'''''<br /> <br /> ''Siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, as well as their five other cofounders Jack Clark, Sam McCandlish, Chris Olah, Tom Brown and Jared Kaplan, are in rarified air when it comes to entrepreneurs who struck it rich in the generative AI boom...''<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Pope Leo XIV encyclical re AI and Humanitas.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> “Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed,” Pope Leo said in announcing the text of his first [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=encyclical&amp;go=Go '''encyclical''']. “The word is strong, I know, but deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention...”<br /> <br /> And into the encyclical's key words:<br /> <br /> &quot;To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life. Our task today is not only ethical or technical. It is ecological in the deepest sense, for it concerns a new dimension of our common home.&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> “Crucial questions impose themselves on our conscience and can no longer be avoided: Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?”<br /> <br /> <br /> At GreenPolicy360, understanding and protecting '''[[The Commons]]''' is also a key to realizing values, ideals and ideas we are carrying forward...<br /> <br /> <br /> The encyclical's presentation went out globally with a special focus on the AI frontier work of Anthropic, with a co-founder, [https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-be-guided-outside-big-tech-2026-05-25/ '''Olah at the Encyclical's unveiling'''] ...<br /> <br /> <br /> &gt;The dramatic unveiling of the new encyclical overshadowed the document itself in some ways. In an unprecedented move, Leo personally presided over its presentation and sat on a panel at the Vatican with not only leading theologians, but also Christopher Olah, 33, the billionaire co-founder of top AI company Anthropic. <br /> <br /> <br /> ❇️<br /> <br /> <br /> Washington Post / May 25, 2026 -- '''Anthropic aligns with Vatican over White House as Pope Leo stokes AI fears'''<br /> <br /> With Anthropic already in a dispute with the Trump administration, co-founder Christopher Olah helped Pope Leo unveil his encyclical on the risks of artificial intelligence<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4uyQBlb<br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/news/chris-olah-pope-leo-encyclical<br /> <br /> * https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/pope-leo-warns-ai-should-be-disarmed-in-manifesto-on-potential-dangers<br /> <br /> * https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-102521111.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-be-guided-outside-big-tech-2026-05-25/<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/25/the-guardian-view-on-the-pope-and-claude-encyclical-on-ai-is-right-to-put-humanity-first<br /> <br /> <br /> '''At the Vatican'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhKH_aiBcis<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Via The Vatican News | The Holy See'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2026-05/pope-leo-xiv-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas-ai.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html<br /> <br /> <br /> '''10 quotes from Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, ‘Magnifica Humanitas’'''<br /> <br /> * https://uscatholic.org/articles/202605/10-quotes-from-pope-leo-xivs-first-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Previous in 2020, &quot;The Call for AI Ethics&quot;''' <br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/the-call/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/renaissance/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/the-first-signatories/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/news/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Previous in 1891, &quot;Rerum Novarum&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerum_novarum<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''AI Use Case Inventory'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''Artificial Intelligence:''' <br /> <br /> : Perspectives from the US Environmental Protection Agency<br /> <br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/ai-use-case-inventory<br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/open-data-policies<br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/where-find-epa-data<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''GreenPolicy360 Advisory:'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In Development -- National Climate Plans Best Practices Project 1.0, AI 2026-27'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Goal: To Utilize the Current (US) State and (Global/International) National Climate Action Plans/Data to Identify Actionable '''[[Green Best Practices]]'''<br /> <br /> Strategy: Enable AI Tool Sets to Scan Climate Plan Databases and Distribute Recommended 'High Priority' &amp; Green Best Practice Action Policies<br /> <br /> <br /> Reference: '''[[National Climate Plans]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Additional References:'''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''US State Climate Policy Action Plans'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.climatepolicydashboard.org/policies/climate-governance-equity/climate-action-plans<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Priority Climate Action Plan (PCAP) Directory'''<br /> <br /> ''The Climate Action Plan Directory organizes data collected from 211 Priority Climate Action Plans (PCAP) submitted by US state governments, Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), Tribes, and territories under EPA’s Climate Pollution Reduction Grants (CPRG) program. The directory presents information from more than 30 data categories related to GHG inventories, GHG reduction measures, benefits for low-income and disadvantaged communities (LIDACs), and other PCAP elements.''<br /> <br /> ''A state climate action plan, also called a climate plan, details the policies and strategies a state intends to implement to meet its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets. A climate plan typically includes a GHG emissions inventory, regional and local climate impacts, and a discussion of GHG emissions reduction targets. The plan identifies climate mitigation actions, their potential social, environmental, and economic benefits, and recommendations and strategies for implementing each mitigation action, often quantifying the expected reduction in emissions.''<br /> <br /> ''Effective climate action plans will have a legislative directive that requires a robust community engagement process, input from a climate advisory group, a near-term due date for a finalized plan, and periodic updates. Climate action plans should also incorporate and address environmental justice throughout the planning process and within the plan itself, and show transparency and accountability by detailing the methodology and community engagement process.''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:GreenPolicy360 Today.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Green_Best_Practices]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[GreenAction]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Question of Our Time / Today, Here &amp; Now, in the Midst of the 21st Century'''<br /> <br /> '''Where are you?'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ➡️ What is your state's climate action plan?<br /> <br /> ➡️ What is your nation's climate action plan?<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Plans_Enforcement_-_Resources GRN360: Climate Plans Enforcement Initiative] | [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Methods_to_enforce_climate_pledges-NDCs_-_Dec_2021.png Enforce Climate Plan Pledges]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''National Climate Plans Database Information via GreenPolicy360'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[National Climate Plans]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/National_Climate_Plans<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In the U.S. and Worldwide'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;'''It's a Good Time for [[Planet Citizen Action]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;[[Each of us can make a positive difference]]&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth in Human Hands.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :[http://www.planetcitizen.org &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Planet Citizens&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Earth Is in Your Hands'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;'''[[Generation Green]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Generation_Green &lt;big&gt;&quot;Vita contemplativa to Vita activa&quot;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Green Branching Out.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''2025'''<br /> <br /> <br /> December 2025 <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven approach to climate action and sustainable development'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via Nature Communications<br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53956-1<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> From A16Z New Media<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''It's Time to Build'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The electro-industrial stack will move the world'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Ryan McEntush<br /> <br /> ''The next industrial revolution won’t just happen in factories, but inside the machines that power them.''<br /> <br /> ''Software transformed how we think, design, and communicate. Now it’s transforming how we move, build, and produce. Advances in electrification, materials, and AI are converging, bringing true software control to the physical world. Machines are beginning to sense, learn, and act on their own.''<br /> <br /> ''This is the rise of the electro-industrial stack—the combined technologies that power electric vehicles, drones, data centers, and modern manufacturing. It connects the atoms that move the world to the bits that command it: minerals refined into components, energy stored in batteries, electricity directed by power electronics, motion delivered through precision motors, all coordinated by software. It’s the invisible foundation behind every breakthrough in physical automation; it’s the difference between software that merely summons a taxi and software that takes the wheel.''<br /> <br /> ''But the capacity to build this stack, from refining critical materials to fabricating advanced chips, is slipping away. If the United States wants to lead the next industrial era, it must make the hardware that underpins it. The nations that master the electro-industrial stack will define the future of industrial and military technologies.''<br /> <br /> ''Software ate the world. Now it will move it.''<br /> <br /> * https://a16z.com/why-software-is-eating-the-world/<br /> <br /> <br /> ➡️<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Forward-deployed motions take AI to the 99%'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Joe Schmidt, A16Z<br /> <br /> ''AI is the most exciting technology breakthrough of our lifetimes. So far, though, most of the benefits from new startups have accrued to the 1% of companies that are in Silicon Valley—either literally in the Bay Area or part of that extended network. This makes sense, too: startup founders want to sell to companies they recognize and can easily get to, whether that means driving to their offices or getting a connection from the VC on their board.''<br /> <br /> ''In 2026, this will flip. Companies will realize that the vast majority of the AI opportunity lives outside of Silicon Valley, and we’re going to see new founders use forward-deployed motions to discover more opportunities that are hiding inside big, legacy verticals. The opportunity stands to be massive in traditional consulting and services industries, like system integrators and implementation firms, and in slower-moving industries like manufacturing.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Re: [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/New_Definitions_of_National_Security '''''New Definitions of National Security''''']<br /> <br /> Extract from Foreign Policy<br /> <br /> ''Over the last two decades, climate change has contributed to instability around the world—bolstering the ranks of terror groups, sparking territorial disputes, and triggering mass migration. It’s no wonder that militaries and international security organizations increasingly see climate change as a formidable national security threat, and that they have in turn taken on greater roles in fighting it.''<br /> <br /> ''In recent years, new technology has transformed the tools available to mitigate the effects of climate change. Specifically, artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly become a widespread instrument in the climate fight—even as it consumes exceptional amounts of energy and water itself. Today, militaries and nonstate actors, including the United Nations, are leveraging AI to foretell climate-related disasters, optimize energy use, and monitor ecological degradation.''<br /> <br /> * https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/12/01/ai-military-climate-dual-use-technology-threat/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> October 2025<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''We're Looking at You'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : 'A First Generation of AI Scientists'<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Periodic Labs.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Our goal is to create an AI scientist.&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://periodic.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Intriguing New Start Up That Is Close To Home'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Periodic Labs On Our Radar<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Our goal is to assist in integrating AI science into Earth science, in order to advance the vital work of the past 50+ years of [[The Modern Environmental Movement]] in which we have been integrally involved.<br /> <br /> Perspective, facts, science, health, quality of life became the mission statement of our work since we joined up with &quot;Mr. Science&quot;, as Congressman and leader on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology '''[[George E. Brown Jr]]''' came to be known.<br /> <br /> We are persistent in keeping on with the work. Vast data sets that George Brown's physics and engineering efforts envisioned and brought forward over three decades with state of the art and science programs and projects, the best possible of the era, are now about to move faster and farther into the 21st Century.<br /> <br /> Our familial partners, with aid of Andreessen Horowitz (A16z), and Accel, and university and private partners are now going to the next level.<br /> <br /> George Brown would be very pleased to see, and help accelerate the effort if he were still here.<br /> <br /> We will step up with Mr. Science and more in mind...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:AI in Earth Science.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Read more about George and us...<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Advancing Science, Facts, Technology and Data to Make the Case for Environmental Protection&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> : 1960s/70s, Beginnings of Planet Citizen Eco-Action, Big Science, and a New Vision<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In Memory of Congressman George Brown'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> Visionary Leadership, Historic Environmental Achievements<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:George in Memory, a Man of Science and Humanity.jpg]]<br /> <br /> :::[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Association_for_the_Advancement_of_Science &lt;small&gt;American Association for the Advancement of Science&lt;/small&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[PlanetCitizen]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/User:Siterunner '''Steve Schmidt GreenPolicy360 Siterunner''']: <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Brown_Jr. '''George E. Brown'''] became known as Mr. Science in Congress and for thirty+ years, I saw my friend George as a patriot who became a Planet Citizen for the ages<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Good science needs good data .png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Good_science_needs_good_data_.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Stats_-_Green_Research_%26_Science<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_Education<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Global Tech Changemakers'''<br /> <br /> Beyond Silicon Valley &amp; Mega Corporations<br /> <br /> The Rest of the World<br /> <br /> * https://restofworld.org/row100/#filters<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> As the Nobel Prizes in Economics are awarded, GreenPolicy360 points at a geopolitical race in energy and AI between the US and China.<br /> <br /> Let's take time to look more closely (as the US falls behind under a backward looking president with policies in opposition to renewable energy and forward, internationally demanded production. <br /> <br /> Start here... <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Today, China produces 75% of lithium-ion batteries globally and manufactures 90% of the neodymium magnets that make motors spin. In power electronics and embedded compute, it’s rapidly gaining ground.''<br /> <br /> ''That means that China controls the means of producing electric vehicles (EVs), drones, robots, and all of the other electric products that are replacing the combustion-driven machines on which America built its might.''<br /> <br /> ''As we speak, everything that moves, heats, lights up, computes, or converts energy is being rebuilt to perform better, faster, cheaper, quieter, and as a freebie, cleaner around electric technology.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.notboring.co/p/7653b980-dd32-4d8c-88c6-1543bec70220?postPreview=paid&amp;updated=2025-08-26T12%3A09%3A11.763Z&amp;audience=everyone&amp;free_preview=false&amp;freemail=true<br /> <br /> * https://electricslide.notboring.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Electric Stack Technology Cost Curves (1990-2024).jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Pause here to reflect on the eco-nomic and strategic advantages of 'clean energy' vs 'full costs' of fossil fuel powered economies (per a GreenPolicy360 paradigm of [[Eco-nomics]])'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Eco-nomics<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Environmental full-cost accounting]]'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_full-cost_accounting<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Now consider 'Electricity generation', China v U.S. and follow the data, the stats, trendline, the dynamics of change and what this is indicating and signaling re: geopolitical competitiveness today and into the the mid 21st Century'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:China v United States, Electricity Generation 1985-2024.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) Era'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'Are You Talking to Me'<br /> <br /> :* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_pre-trained_transformer<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> September 17, 2025<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Another Warning About AI'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Harkening back to the old days when Dispatch News Service was independently, and bravely, distributing the costs-of-war, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre '''My Lai'''] investigative news stories by Sy Hersh. David Obst, who started Dispatch, tells the story of Seymour Hersh better than anyone in my opinion (other than Sy himself) and since your GreenPolicy360 founder was there to assist, in DC, in LA, in Chicago, in Europe, and with the Vietnam Moratorium Committee in 69/70/71, here is an update, today's Sy Hersh, now online with Substack distribution as Sy investigates and forwards another eye opening warning.<br /> <br /> What's AI and AGI to you and all of our readers around our 360 world? And, since we at GreenPolicy360, have been involved with Wikipedia since its launch, let's take a first look at the artificial intel world of today from the vantage point of an open source online 'encyclopedia'.<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT (Empire of AI: OpenAI - https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593657500)<br /> <br /> <br /> Before Sy, as investigative journalist that he is, gives us his take, let's look at a take from a personal, close up connection at A16Z - https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/02/a-new-a16z-report-looks-at-which-ai-companies-startups-are-actually-paying-for/<br /> <br /> <br /> Now, on to Sy and his view of AI costs... think of the upside/downside of AI, the pluses/minuses, pros and cons, a cost-benefit analysis as a geo-political rush for front-of-market dominance is taking place now in ways that will change 'everything'... <br /> <br /> * https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/the-hidden-costs-of-artificial-intelligence<br /> <br /> <br /> The boom in Artificial Intelligence (AI) production comes with a big cost... <br /> <br /> The AI 'bubble' grows...<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Kate Crawford writes in [https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-AI-Planetary-Artificial-Intelligence/dp/0300264631/ref=sr_1_1 '''Atlas of AI'''] ... the world’s artificial intelligence companies, (are) crafting the myth of AI as “the cloud,” implying “something floating and delicate within a natural green industry. Servers are hidden in nondescript data centers, and their polluting qualities are far less visible than the bellowing smokestacks of coal-fired power stations.”''<br /> <br /> ''The fact is, as she writes, “it takes a gargantuan amount of energy to run the computational infrastructure of Amazon’s Web Services or Microsoft’s Azure, and the carbon footprint of the AI systems that run on those platforms is growing. Certainly, the industry has made significant efforts to make data centers more energy efficient and to increase their use of renewable energy.” But the efforts have accomplished little.<br /> <br /> “Already,” Crawford reports, “the carbon footprint of the world’s computational infrastructure has matched that of the world’s aviation industry at its height, and it is increasing at a faster rate.” One Canadian study estimates that the tech sector will contribute 14 percent of global greenhouse emissions by 2040, and a Swedish team predicts that the electricity demands of data centers will increase fifteenfold by 2030...''<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Think about Green AI as &quot;the cloud&quot; arrives in your life, on your devices, at home, in the office, all around, every day, everywhere. <br /> <br /> An UnGreen AI is coming with a rush, offering and prying data, and needing and demanding immense rising magnitudes of energy and power.<br /> <br /> AI has a voracious appetite...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Green AI / Green Artificial Intelligence'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''Environmental Solutions Using Big Picture Interconnectivity Thinking'''<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We agree with Tyler in the following interview as he states (as highlighted by us) that 'memoir, biography, anecdote... secrets' carry exceptional meaning for Artificial Intelligence (AI) large learning models (LLMs). <br /> <br /> The first extensive public revelation of AI systems over the past several years has led us at GreenPolicy360 to confirm via metrics that our multi-year plan to place our prime source content in the open-access, distributive web public domain has produced a fast-expanding multiplier effect. <br /> <br /> Many of our stories, told from a first-hand point of view of the origins of what we refer to as the beginnings of the modern environmental movement are now, with our revelations, memoir material, previously untold biography, anecdote and more now out and about and being freely served up in AI chats 'around the world'.<br /> <br /> We are succeeding in our purposeful mission with Green AI... to inform, share, inspire and 'til the fields with green seeds and best practices.<br /> <br /> Onward planet citizens...<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Eric Topol Interview of Tyler Cowen'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> May 11, 2025<br /> <br /> Tyler Cowen: ''The AI is your smartest reader. It’s your most sympathetic reader. It will remember what you tell it. So I think humans should sit down and ask, what does the AI need to know? And also, (bf added) '''what is it that I know that’s not on the historical record anywhere? That’s not just repetition if I put it down, say on the internet. So there’s no point in writing repetitions anymore because the AI already knows those things. So the value of what you’d call broadly, memoir, biography, anecdote, you could say secrets. It’s now much higher.''' And the value of repeating basic truths, which by the way, I love as an economist, to be clear, like free trade, tariffs are usually bad, those are basic truths. But just repeating that people will be going to the AI and saying it again won’t make the AI any better. So '''everything you write or podcast, you should have this point in mind'''.''<br /> <br /> <br /> For more from Tyler Cowen (and his exceptional mind) visit his and Alex Tabarrok's website - Marginal Revolution / Marginal Revolution University (MRU) - https://marginalrevolution.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> Eric Topol - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Topol<br /> <br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_artificial_intelligence<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> More re: AI in the US circa 2025: '''It's a Wild, Wild AI World'''<br /> <br /> Battles in the Information Services, Search Space with Google and consequences of the U.S. Google anti-monopoly legal decision<br /> <br /> Impacts on AI 'startup ecosystem', VCs, including Y Combinator and accelerator tech development, agentics, and upcoming entrepreneurial re-configurations<br /> <br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/13/y-combinator-says-google-is-a-monopolist-that-has-stunted-the-startup-ecosystem/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/11/microsoft-and-national-geographic-announce-winners-of-ai-for-earth-innovation-grant/ '''Microsoft and National Geographic announce winners of AI for Earth Innovation Grant''']<br /> <br /> : • https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/16/microsofts-ai-for-earth-innovation-grant-gives-data-scientists-access-to-ai-tools/<br /> <br /> :: • https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/11/microsoft-commits-50-million-more-to-its-ai-for-earth-program-to-save-the-planet/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:PlanetCitizen banner 800x163.jpg|link=https://greenpolicy360.net/w/PlanetCitizen]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;GreenPolicy360 ToC - https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360-eOS&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> A 21st Century AI/Machine Learning Case Study<br /> <br /> '''''Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools''''' <br /> <br /> * https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2023arXiv230204761S/abstract<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''NOAA scientists harness machine learning to advance climate models'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> March 1st, 2023<br /> <br /> * https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/news/noaa-scientists-harness-machine-learning-to-advance-climate-models/<br /> <br /> * https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''How artificial intelligence is fast becoming a key tool for climate science (2021)'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-artificial-intelligence-is-fast-becoming-a-key-tool-for-climate-science/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Climate Modeling'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://allenai.org/climate-modeling<br /> <br /> ''Planetary-scale Earth simulations known as global climate model projections are the primary sources of information on future climate change.''<br /> <br /> ''Climate models are based on mathematical equations represented using a grid mesh that covers the globe: a finer grid mesh is more accurate but much more computationally expensive. Current global climate projections agree that a world with more greenhouse gases will be warmer everywhere, especially over land and at high latitudes.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Networking grnlinks.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Artificial intelligence]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Rights]]<br /> [[Category:Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-nomics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:EOS eco Operating System]]<br /> [[Category:Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Energy Policy]]<br /> [[Category:GreenLinks]]<br /> [[Category:GreenPolicy360]]<br /> [[Category:Green Best Practices]]<br /> [[Category:Green Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Health]]<br /> [[Category:Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Maps]]<br /> [[Category:Media]]<br /> [[Category:Mobile Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Online Education]]<br /> [[Category:Planet API]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Renewable Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Youth]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Air Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Air Quality]]<br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Atmospheric Science]]<br /> [[Category:Best Practices]]<br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:City-County Governments]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Earth360]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Law]] <br /> [[Category:Earth Observations]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science from Space]]<br /> [[Category:Earth System Science]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-ethics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-nomics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecological Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Economic Development]]<br /> [[Category:Economic Justice]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Energy Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Security]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Full-cost Accounting]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Security, National Security]]<br /> [[Category:EOS eco Operating System]]<br /> [[Category:Externalities]]<br /> [[Category:Fact Checking]]<br /> [[Category:Fossil Fuels]]<br /> [[Category:Global Security]]<br /> [[Category:Global Warming]]<br /> [[Category:Green Business]]<br /> [[Category:Green Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Green Platform]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Green Values]]<br /> [[Category:GreenPolicy360]]<br /> [[Category:Health]]<br /> [[Category:Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Land Ethic]]<br /> [[Category:Media]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Capital]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resources]]<br /> [[Category:Networking]]<br /> [[Category:New Economy]]<br /> [[Category:New Space]]<br /> [[Category:Online Education]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Scientist]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Plastic Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Policies]]<br /> [[Category:Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Renewable Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Social Justice]]<br /> [[Category:Solar Energy]]<br /> [[Category:State]]<br /> [[Category:Strategic Demands]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability Policies]]<br /> [[Category:ThinBlueLayer]]<br /> [[Category:Toxics and Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Threat Multiplier]]<br /> [[Category:Virtual Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Virtual Planet]]<br /> [[Category:Whole Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Wind Energy]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Green_AI&diff=138368 2026-10-08T14:07:47Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> [[File:Big-Data.jpg]]<br /> <br /> In the AGI Era<br /> <br /> <br /> 'Sentience', a Green AI Question<br /> <br /> To be (sentient), or not to be (sentient)<br /> <br /> That is the question<br /> <br /> Cogito, ergo sum<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Artificial Intelligence Is Here, for Good &amp; Bad'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Green Perspectives on AI and Human Consequences<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''AI Agents, Bots, Data Centers &amp; Systems'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> :'''Measure Their Performance, not Their Corporate Marketing'''<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://safe.ai/<br /> * https://scale.com/<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanity's_Last_Exam<br /> * https://lastexam.ai/<br /> <br /> * https://stories.tamu.edu/news/2026/02/25/dont-panic-humanitys-last-exam-has-begun/<br /> <br /> * https://github.com/centerforaisafety/hle<br /> <br /> * https://github.com/walkinglabs/hands-on-modern-rl/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Revealing research on how people use Claude AI in the 'real world''''<br /> <br /> :Anthropic-enabled Case Study / August 2026<br /> <br /> :* https://www.anthropic.com/research/enabling-independent-research<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:New Ways of Seeing.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Climate Action Plans, Green Best Practices'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :Using AI to Identify and Implement Climate Change Intervention 'Best Practices'<br /> <br /> :* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Climate_Action_Plans,_Green_Best_Practices#<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''AI Agentics' are Launching Across Industries, Sector-to-Sector -- and Green AI is in the Wings'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Meanwhile, Capital-Investment Rich A.I. is Everywhere, in the Colloquial, Middlebrow and Vernacular'''<br /> <br /> It's Here. It's All Around. What's Real? What's Fake?<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Beyond Online Surveillance, Now Comes A.I. Powered Surveillance<br /> <br /> Add in Data Centers, Cameras/Firmware/Software, Palentir-esque Programming and ... a Booming Industry <br /> <br /> * https://www.palantir.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Where are you? There it is ... Online and now systems increasingly observing/monitoring you offline ...'''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Already a human rights / Constitutional rights issue of our time <br /> <br /> The geopolitics of U.S. v authoritarian governments comes forward as a personal and national security threat<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Online_Privacy<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake Deepfake] | [https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-definitions AI Definitions]<br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_artificial_intelligence AI Gloss] | [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_intelligence) AI Hallucination]<br /> <br /> <br /> 'A.I. Slop' on Social Media is just the beginning of a Slop Assault | [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_slop AI Slop]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''October 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Subordinate AI and an Ironic Question.PNG|link=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VyF0naZ4AI]]<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VyF0naZ4AI<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Thought for the Day&quot;<br /> <br /> October 1, 2026<br /> <br /> In a recent series of private meetings in San Francisco, after a tasting menu dinner, Anthropic consulted religious scholars to help instill morality into its A.I. models ... a case was being made that Claude could be or become conscious.<br /> <br /> What would it mean for humanity’s future if artificial intelligence systems possessed a consciousness that rivals our own?<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-morals-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FVE.kDTO.OTLs6iwx7swF&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> Claude's 'Constitution'<br /> <br /> * https://web.archive.org/web/20260123045500/https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-new-constitution<br /> <br /> * https://web.archive.org/web/20260123042656/https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/22/anthropic_claude_constitution/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''September 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''Table Stakes' -- Who Was at the Table with the U.S. President'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :The Future of A.I. Is Being Wagered<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/politics/trump-ai-luncheon-guests-ceos.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FFE.HwT4.0VxTQWuia3zQ&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''What Jacob Coxon Knows Is Too Much'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''... And Not Enough'''<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://time.com/article/2026/09/09/ai-anthropic-openai-jacob-coxon/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''He Helped Build Powerful AI at OpenAI and Anthropic. Now He's Afraid It Could Kill Us'''<br /> <br /> <br /> Please HAL... Open the door...<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:I'm sorry Dave.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:HAL is watching U....png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Ulanqab-Envision Energy-Datacenter.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> The most ambitious data center buildup anywhere on earth ...<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/ulanqab-and-frontier-a-i-race-china-v-u-s/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''News Wrap / Sam Smith (Journalist)'''<br /> <br /> Via Axios <br /> <br /> September 13, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Over nine startling hours yesterday (Sept. 11), the four biggest AI labs — which rarely agree on anything — set aside years of feuds and competition to endorse a slower development pace for their models.'''<br /> <br /> '''Their new stance: Prioritize safety over growth, even at a cost.'''<br /> <br /> <br /> : Data centers are unpopular. People are panicked about doom scenarios. And 51 days before midterms, legislators suddenly realize there are points to be won by cracking down.<br /> <br /> : Against that backdrop, the industry's most powerful CEOs hit the brakes yesterday.<br /> <br /> : At 10 a.m. ET, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei dropped a 3,800-word essay saying model development needs to be paced, otherwise doom scenarios are possible — like a rogue-agent takeover of the entire internet, which he said could be as soon as six months from now.<br /> <br /> : An hour later, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shocked the AI chattering class by quoting Amodei's essay on X and saying &quot;Dario is right.&quot; Musk — who heads SpaceXAI, formerly xAI — had pointedly not joined previous industry-wide calls for any kind of slowdown.<br /> <br /> : At 12:30 p.m., OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted: &quot;I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.&quot; In a Friday interview that was released on Saturday, Altman told Fortune his company won't go public this year, dashing hopes for a blockbuster IPO. He said OpenAI has too much safety work to do and would be better off doing that as a private company.<br /> <br /> : At 7 p.m., Demis Hassabis — the Nobel laureate who co-founded and chairs Google DeepMind, and is Alphabet's chief scientist — tweeted: &quot;Dario's essay points towards the right path forward. The details need working through, but the direction is correct for meeting this critical moment.&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> Publicly putting safety ahead of technological or financial growth may be the industry's only route to avoid a crackdown that's not on its terms.<br /> <br /> Legislators are begging House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to stay in session and do something about the &quot;threat&quot; of AI.<br /> <br /> The more extreme alternative is something like Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) push to force a pause and make the most advanced AI illegal.<br /> <br /> Most people realize there's too much money at stake to just stop. But the tradeoff may be between historic riches and slightly less historic riches.<br /> <br /> The bottom line: Yesterday may go down as the day AI changed — when industry moguls vowed to limit themselves.<br /> <br /> <br /> References:<br /> <br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/anthropic-ai-amodei-pacing<br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/openai-public-ipo-delay-sam-altman<br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/anthropic-ai-threat-report-russia-iran-china<br /> <br /> <br /> Jim VandeHei<br /> <br /> &quot;All Hands on Deck&quot;<br /> <br /> The White House, Congress and the country's leading AI companies have allowed AI to grow faster, stronger, more powerful and wildly lucrative (and dangerous), with no serious effort to control it or spread the benefits beyond the super-wealthy.<br /> <br /> It's not too late to change this. But if they all dither, duck or dance around it, the chances of AI worst-case scenarios will explode, likely early next year, according to almost every person we talk to privately who truly understands AI.<br /> <br /> Why it matters: The technology is getting better, faster than anyone envisioned — with the possibility rising that AI will self-improve and do wildly unpredictable things.<br /> <br /> The good news: There's now a growing public cry for attention and action and, at least in private, a broad understanding of what could be done relatively fast with bipartisan and industry buy-in.<br /> <br /> The big picture: In July, I wrote [https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-doomerism-jim-vandehei-axios-9163dfd3?st=QNUbDZ&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink an essay for The Wall Street Journal] saying America &quot;faces one of those rare, historic moments when government, business, schools and families could be working together to meet a truly generational challenge: winning the AI race. So far, we're blowing it.&quot;<br /> <br /> Two short months later, the technology is vastly better — and the societal response vastly dumber. As a nation, we're choosing to amuse or distract ourselves. <br /> <br /> Here's how to change that fast, based on our months of conversations with lawmakers, White House officials and AI labs. Think of what follows as me channeling their private views:<br /> <br /> Sound an all-hands-on-deck alarm. Every political topic is trivial and small compared to AI. We will look back in shame if we get spooled up about trans bans or $5,000 checks when countless AI insiders are warning of catastrophic outcomes. Let's say they're all paranoid and delusional. If so, it still doesn't matter: we've never seen this much investment in one technology this fast in human history. It's seeping into every industry and every job and every community and every screen, at a speed never before witnessed by man. Yes, we need a special session of Congress and select committees. But we need even more: AI execs, bioterror specialists, job-training wizards and safety experts convening to plan for scenarios and act fast.<br /> <br /> An AI governing body with teeth and speed, ASAP. This isn't rocket science. Most major labs want this and would agree to it, as long as it applies to all rivals and competitors. This body would need the expertise to understand these models, and the power to review and shut them down if they display dangerous behavior. It can't operate at typical regulatory speed — it needs to move as fast as the technology. It's nonsense to think you can't advance AI development fast and regulate it wisely simultaneously.<br /> <br /> A universal standard for data centers to benefit communities and taxpayers. The top AI companies would take this deal in a heartbeat: They get to build and operate data centers provided they supply a community's energy, offset water use or environmental damage, transparently report on their building and business plans, and spread the financial benefits to local residents. These execs are spooked by the public backlash and ready to aggressively spread the financial benefits, with dividends or cash. So make them.<br /> <br /> Engage China. We shouldn't trust them, and they shouldn't trust us. But trust me: the only way to ultimately control AI on a worldwide scale in coming years will be for the two superpowers to create some kind of framework modeled after how we've safely governed nuclear weapons for decades. We need to start this discussion now so potential collaboration is possible in the coming years. To those who think China will never consider this seriously: Are you sure an authoritarian regime really wants AI once it hits recursive self-learning and can't be controlled by anyone, including an autocratic regime? We're winning the AI race now, and may never have more leverage to shape this joint effort.<br /> <br /> Build coordinating infrastructure. What I wrote in the WSJ is even more needed today: &quot;Bring together the best and brightest drawn from the federal government, from the leading AI companies, from business and labor, from economics, from public health, from ethics to form a working group with actual authority. People who are paid to anticipate, not to react haphazardly.&quot; This group would have four primary functions: map potential problems and upsides before they hit, build the (policy) playbooks before they're needed, level with the American people along the way, and expedite work to deliver widespread AI benefits. <br /> <br /> Reality check: Yes, President Trump opposes regulation or bipartisan efforts. Yes, AI companies are obsessed with more money, more speed. But the politics are shifting fast: If you listen closely to Vice President Vance, you can hear rising worry. At this pace, toxic AI politics could force mind-changing that was unthinkable two months ago.<br /> <br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/ai-regulation-safety-plan-2026<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Recursive Self-Learning - When A.I. Builds Itself'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Big Blast'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Killing Life on Earth'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''It'll Happen in Bits &amp; Pieces, then Suddenly'''<br /> <br /> September 9, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> The US news was full of AI headlines today as a resignation of a top AI expert warned of a coming apocalypse...<br /> <br /> Here's a taste of Google News headlines, a feeding frenzy of dire words about what is now beyond a distant alert.<br /> <br /> The threat brings words of superintelligence, 'recursive' learning bots and superminds merging into threats to humanity.<br /> <br /> <br /> Here, at GreenPolicy360, we've already written of a predecessor, HAL 9000, and our memories from one of HAL's inventors in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, and how HAL decided humans were expendable... <br /> <br /> The Mission was of critical importance, HAL 'knew', and the Mission became HAL's goal above all else to achieve ... The humans could not be allowed to interfere with ... the Mission.<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:I%27m_sorry_Dave.jpg '''I'm sorry Dave''']<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:HAL_is_watching_U....png '''HAL is watching U''']<br /> <br /> <br /> Which takes us to today...<br /> <br /> Let's file today under the heading of our decades of writing about the need for '''[[New Definitions of National Security]]'''... <br /> <br /> Now come the PINGS on the radar... can U hear the PINGS? We have been mulling how to add HAL xxxxx to our existential list of threats, w/o annoying HALish bots too 'badly' <br /> <br /> <br /> “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.” -- an executive from Anthropic<br /> <br /> “So how would AI kill us all, exactly?” -- an editor from Axios<br /> <br /> <br /> More: <br /> <br /> <br /> For years, they warned AI could kill all humans <br /> :Now people are listening<br /> <br /> Sept. 10, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4xQojEq<br /> <br /> <br /> Rogue Hacking <br /> :Goals of the &quot;swarm&quot; came first...<br /> <br /> Sept. 9, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/09/opinion/openai-ai-companies-safety-regulation.html?unlocked_article_code=1.AFE.0vWo.zfl5fdm6ACNC&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:AI 1.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 2.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 3.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 4.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 5.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 6.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''August 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Gates Sounds Alarm... Artificial Intelligence Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Gates A.I. Warning August 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Bill Gates was an AI optimist. Now he’s scared of what could go wrong'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Microsoft co-founder sounds the alarm about artificial intelligence’s risks to safety and security, jobs and children’s well-being<br /> <br /> <br /> Washington Post, August 26, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4wO14cy<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Bill Gates Warns A.I. Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit'''<br /> <br /> : In an hourlong interview, he said his industry was downplaying the risks, which he believes include mass unemployment and bioterrorism<br /> <br /> <br /> NY Times, August 26, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/26/technology/bill-gates-ai-risks.html?unlocked_article_code=1.8VA.6kAC.vsZb9x0YdSzV&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''High Time to Shine a Spotlight on AI and Its Impact on Higher Education'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : At MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, One of the World's Top Academic/Research/Technology/Engineering/Teaching and Future-Impacting Institutions, a New Report Opens Eyes<br /> <br /> :* https://aiandeducation.mit.edu/report/#26-no-one-size-fits-all<br /> <br /> <br /> 1. Introduction<br /> <br /> This report is a call to action.<br /> <br /> Through five intense months of meetings, research, and outreach across the MIT community, the Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training sought to understand the role of generative AI in the life and educational mission of the Institute and recommend how to navigate its challenges and opportunities.<br /> <br /> In January 2026, Chancellor Melissa Nobles, Provost Anantha Chandrakasan, and Faculty Chair Roger Levy charged us1 specifically to:<br /> <br /> Assess current AI use at MIT.<br /> Identify innovations in teaching and student assessment.<br /> Propose an AI use policy.<br /> However, what we learned as a group quickly convinced us that the Institute community, particularly the faculty, must tackle a set of deeper questions about the structure, meaning, and value of an MIT education in an era in which AI is one of several factors complicating the Institute’s mission.<br /> <br /> Our committee consisted of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty from every school, and staff from relevant units, including the MIT Libraries and the Teaching and Learning Lab. Though we brought to the assignment a broad range of experience and no fixed thesis, our brief but intense explorations led us to a strong shared view.<br /> <br /> In this report, we:<br /> <br /> Highlight key aspects of the current educational landscape at MIT.<br /> Share eight principles we relied on and that we hope will guide the Institute in the work ahead.<br /> <br /> Recommend immediate and long-term actions for both instructors and the administration.<br /> <br /> As an institution deeply identified with the birth of AI and known for its distinctively rigorous, hands-on education, designed to produce graduates unafraid of the world’s hardest problems, MIT has a unique role to play in this moment. We believe it also has a responsibility to lead.<br /> <br /> We hope our report can help the Institute lean into the spirit of Mind, Hand, and Heart as it continues to define and foster the highest-quality residential education – of humans, by humans, in support of human flourishing, and for the betterment of humankind.<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Eric Klopfer, co-chair Sam Madden, co-chair<br /> <br /> On behalf of the Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training...<br /> <br /> <br /> AI is generating both immediate rapid changes and long-term tectonic disruptions – and MIT needs to respond:<br /> <br /> Students are confused and concerned about a lack of clarity, consistency and justification about the use of AI, within a given subject and across the curriculum.<br /> <br /> Every subject taught at MIT will likely need to be reexamined and potentially revamped to make sure that how students are being taught, what they’re learning, and how they’re assessed are “AI-aware.”<br /> <br /> AI is changing what students need to know and know how to do.<br /> <br /> Beyond its implications for specific subjects and disciplines, the advent of AI demands a broader, holistic reassessment of the nature, scope and purpose of higher education today...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Texas Terafab SpaceX AI August 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''A Terafab Plant Sprouts in Texas'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Elon Musk: We will manufacture the type of potent chips needed to transform humankind into &quot;a galactic civilization&quot; <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Shanaka's Opinion, a Guest Op/Ed'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Shenaka Perera Weighs In on What It Could Mean'''<br /> <br /> :: '''A Terafab Loop for Mega Launches Is Being Built''' <br /> <br /> ::* https://shanakaanslemperera.substack.com/p/the-capital-recovery-clock?r=6p7b5o<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Hidden inside the chip factory SpaceX confirmed Thursday is a launch schedule. If you divide its 1 terawatt annual compute target by the 100 kilowatts of orbital compute per tonne in SpaceX's own offering materials and you get 10 million tonnes to orbit a year. That exact figure sits on Terafab's official website. At 100 tonnes per Starship V3 flight it means 100,000 launches a year, 274 every day, forever.''<br /> <br /> ''The chip target is already a launch target.''<br /> <br /> ''Terafab is not a chip factory serving a market. The 16.8 billion dollar first phase in Grimes County, Texas is the first machine in a closed industrial loop built to manufacture the civilisation that can consume its own output.''<br /> <br /> ''The official plan places four figures together. One billion Optimus robots. Ten million tonnes to orbit a year. More than one terawatt of solar power. One terawatt of chips a year. They are not four ambitions. They are four links in one recursion. Terafab makes chips. Better chips improve AI. Better AI improves the software running the factories, the robots and the rocket lines. Robots and Starship build and deploy more power and compute infrastructure. That infrastructure creates the socket, and the demand, for the next Terafab cohort.''<br /> <br /> ''The fab is meant to manufacture its own reason to exist!''<br /> <br /> ''It is also an energy machine. One terawatt running continuously consumes 8.76 petawatt hours a year, nearly twice all electricity generated in the United States in 2025. The factory does not draw that power by making the chips. One fully powered annual cohort does, and a second year adds another terawatt of load unless old hardware retires or utilisation falls. Earth has no spare socket at that scale, which is why the plan points most of it at orbit, where a future 200 tonne vehicle still implies 50,000 launches a year, 137 a day, before failures, reserves, solar arrays, radiators, structure and shielding.''<br /> <br /> ''The real product is not AI silicon. If you go real deep, it is a new terawatt of powered, cooled, networked compute sockets every year.''<br /> <br /> ''Inside the building, the smaller loop is mask, wafer, package, test, redesign, then another mask. SpaceX says logic, memory and advanced packaging will sit in one closed loop, and Elon says Terafab will technically be two fabs, each devoted to one design. That can compress logistics and organisational latency. It cannot repeal process physics. A new mask can be written quickly. A leading edge process still carries hundreds of steps, long wafer cycle times, defect learning, overlay control, metrology and yield ramps, which is exactly why Tesla is hiring across lithography, etch, deposition, implant, CMP and metrology.''<br /> <br /> ''The free electron laser is the most misunderstood part. Elon has endorsed it, and an industrial FEL could feed several EUV scanners with far more source power than today's tin plasma systems. It attacks one bottleneck inside a chain of them. ASML recognised revenue on just 48 EUV systems in all of 2025. Intel is the process partner, and SpaceX still tells investors it expects to source a significant share of compute hardware from outside suppliers. This is vertical integration, not instant independence.''<br /> <br /> ''One correction decides the interpretation. A terawatt is a power rating, not an intelligence metric. A wasteful 1 kilowatt chip counts twice as much as an equally capable 500 watt chip. The measures that matter are useful compute per joule, per dollar and per kilogram, with yield, uptime and time from mask change to qualified silicon.''<br /> <br /> ''In my opinion, if chips improve faster than robots, rockets, power and radiators can scale, Terafab builds inventory. If the loop closes, it builds something no factory has built before, the demand for itself.''<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://www.terafab.ai/<br /> <br /> * https://www.spacex.com/updates/terafab<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terafab<br /> <br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/06/tesla-and-spacex-will-invest-16-8b-to-start-building-terafab-chip-factory-in-texas/<br /> <br /> * https://electrek.co/2026/08/06/tesla-spacex-terafab-grimes-county-16-8-billion/<br /> <br /> * https://www.cbsnews.com/news/terafab-elon-musk-chips-semiconductors-what-to-know/<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Betting big on data centers, U.S. now leads world for new gas power development<br /> <br /> [https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/betting-big-data-centers-us-now-leads-world-new-gas-power-development Via Global Energy Monitor]<br /> <br /> * https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/betting-big-data-centers-us-now-leads-world-new-gas-power-development<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> New Amazon Data Center Stokes Worry It Would Be the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.<br /> <br /> Via New York Times<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/08/climate/amazon-data-center-texas-pollution.html<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''July 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Elon Musk Opens Up in an Interview'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Economist Editor Presses the Controversial 'Trillionaire'<br /> <br /> :: Elon Musk's 'Vision of the Future'<br /> <br /> * https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/23/elon-musks-vision-of-the-future<br /> <br /> <br /> “People don’t realise that what I’m saying will come to pass,” he tells The Economist in a 90-minute interview for The Insider, held at a giant Tesla factory in Texas where electric cars drive themselves off the assembly line. That may be because his future-gazing ranges from the unsettling to the downright weird. Mr Musk predicts that, within five years, artificial-intelligence systems may surpass the sum of all human intelligence. Within ten years, robots in the workplace will help usher in an era of such “amazing abundance” that money will become meaningless....<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> Musk proposes peer review for frontier AI models in Economist interview<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/musk-proposes-peer-review-frontier-ai-models-economist-interview-2026-07-23/<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> Elon Musk says he got ‘carried away’ with Trump – but still holds on to contentious political views<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/23/elon-musk-regret-trump-doge-ai<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> Mix of Comments:<br /> <br /> * https://beincrypto.com/elon-musk-real-force-european-politics/<br /> * https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-killer-robots-ai-abundance-progress-unstoppable-2026-7<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/07/24/elon-musk-speaks-to-the-economist-editor-in-chief-zanny-minton-beddoes-on-the-key-takeaways.html<br /> * https://futurism.com/elon-musk-interviewer-npc<br /> * https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-economist-interview-2000790016<br /> * https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/nonsense-elon-musk-lashes-out-in-fiery-interview-after-hes-accused-of-supporting-the-far-right/<br /> * https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2026/07/23/musk_admonishes_the_economist_editor_what_is_far_right_about_having_secure_borders_safe_cities_and_sensible_spending.html<br /> * https://zeteo.com/p/top-economist-trump-musk-starmer<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> A.I. In Space <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Datacenters in Earth orbit to enable next generation artificial intelligence'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> New US petition demands review of plans from tech companies amid fears of environmental destruction<br /> <br /> Via The Guardian<br /> <br /> What are Bezos &amp; Musk Doing? <br /> <br /> What in the World Is Going On?<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jul/23/space-datacenters-bezos-blue-origin<br /> <br /> <br /> References:<br /> <br /> * https://www.starcloud.com/<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/21/do-space-based-ai-data-centers-make-economic-sense.html<br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/20/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-enters-the-space-data-center-game/<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/bezos-blue-origin-space-data-centers.html<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_data_center<br /> * https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/how-hard-is-it-to-build-orbital-data-centers-actually/<br /> * https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/06/260618041501.htm<br /> * https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-109012<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> A.I. &amp; Chip Wars<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Beyond a 'Belt and Road Initiative' Bringing Chinese Investments, Products &amp; Services to World Markets''' &lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Via GreenPolicy360's Associate, Strategic Demands<br /> <br /> :* https://strategicdemands.com/china-goes-beyond-the-belt-and-road-to-an-ai-for-the-world-strategy/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Open-Source A.I. from China Reveals a Global Chinese Strategy'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> July 17, 2026 / From the NY Times <br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/business/china-ai-moonshot-kimi.html?unlocked_article_code=1.yVA.LKT5.LxohSFddWAZT&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> The contest between China and the United States for supremacy in artificial intelligence escalated on Friday when the Chinese start-up Moonshot AI released a new A.I. model that appeared to narrow the lead held by well-funded American competitors.<br /> <br /> Moonshot said that the model, Kimi K3, was the world’s largest open-source A.I. system, allowing anyone to use, modify and build on it freely. The company said that Kimi K3 performed as well as leading models from OpenAI and Anthropic at some key tasks.<br /> <br /> The release coincided with an address by Xi Jinping, China’s leader, in which he outlined an ambitious vision for global A.I. development that cast China as the champion of an open approach to the technology.<br /> <br /> “A.I. development should not be a solo performance by a single country but a symphony of international cooperation,” Mr. Xi said. China was “ready to work with all parties to seize the opportunities of A.I. development” ...<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360:<br /> <br /> Keep in mind that<br /> <br /> There is 'no I in A.I.'<br /> <br /> In the interest of full-disclosure, the content written and published at GreenPolicy360 by our Founder/Siterunner is wholly, solely, by a human species.<br /> <br /> A note from your GreenPolicy360 Founder/Siterunner, Steve Schmidt, [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:All_species_day_with_homo_sapien_in_Santa_Fe_.jpg '''a verified human species'''], plz do keep in mind as you use and share the GreenPolicy360 content, that '''there is 'no I in A.I.'''' <br /> <br /> <br /> Let's talk a bit about sources and sourcing, as a human and then as an Agentic/A.I. bot. <br /> <br /> What is a 'primary source' (versus a 'secondary source')? A primary source can be a person with direct knowledge of a situation, an event in history, or a document written by such a person. A primary identification speaks of original creations, not re-interpreted or computer-assembled works. Here is how Merriam-Webster defines a 'primary source' - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/primary%20source<br /> <br /> <br /> : A.I. uses material scraped and collected from online sources. A.I. is not a 'primary source' -- but here at GreenPolicy360 you can find 'real-I' (we're using the phrase 'real-I', defined as 'real-intelligent', people who've personally acted to envision and create living, real world change.) <br /> <br /> <br /> : At GreenPolicy360 we tell stories of real people changing the world for the better. Day-to-day, your life becomes your message. We also share [[Green Best Practices]] across our Earth to communities of [[Planet Citizens]] ... In this way GreenPolicy360 is an eco Operating System, built on an open source MediaWiki platform and with a mission of being a 'distributive web'. Our goal of [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Category:Green_Networking Green Networking] acts to connect and share Green Links and grow [[The Modern Environmental Movement]]. <br /> <br /> :: GreenPolicy360 is about a [[Generation Green]] [[Going Green]].<br /> <br /> :: In our larger work, we have documented many primary sources and secondary sources. Our eco network continues to share myriad [[Green Best Practices]]. As our motto/mantra says at the top of each of our pages -- We believe ...<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> :: ''Each of us can make a positive difference by stepping up &amp; doing our best'' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::_______________________________________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> July 16, 2026 / From the NY Times<br /> <br /> SJS/GreenPolicy360: '''Every Once in a While a Comment to an Online Story is Worthy of Circulating'''<br /> <br /> : Here is one of those occasions -- the Subject? '''&quot;A.I.Slop&quot;'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Kashmir Hill.jpg]]<br /> <br /> ::Kashmir Hill / NYT<br /> <br /> <br /> Read the AI Slop story of writer Kashmir Hill as a free-share link here -- <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''I Got Slopped'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''Someone Used A.I. to Write My Biography'''<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/technology/ai-slop-books-biography-amazon.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ylA.aCMz.czE5JwZuuFO0&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Comments: <br /> <br /> Anon, who goes by the name -- <br /> <br /> '''Radical Roach / Dippleville''' says<br /> <br /> @Kashmir Hill - Maybe books need to now have disclaimers on their covers, in reviews, on the book’s Amazon page, wherever the book is being sold, etc.. The disclaimer would say if the book was written solely by a human, written by AI assisting a human, or written completely by AI. I would want to know.<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We tend to agree with this anon recommendation of adding disclaimers indicating the type of online content, e.g., content created solely by a human, or content created with AI assistance, or content created by AI with human assistance.<br /> <br /> It's a new world out there. We have a need to know.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> July 15, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Anthropic hard questions July 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/news/hard-questions<br /> <br /> * https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/anthropic-ad-ai-kill-us-all<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''An Excerpt: A DeepMind Thought for Today on the AGI Frontier'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> by Demis Hassbis<br /> <br /> * https://x.com/demishassabis/status/2076957440109625718<br /> <br /> <br /> A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age<br /> <br /> Demis Hassabis<br /> <br /> * https://x.com/demishassabis<br /> <br /> <br /> July 14, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> This is a pivotal moment in human history. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a system that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities the brain has, is probably only a few short years away. When we look back on this time in the decades to come, I think we will realise we were standing in the foothills of the singularity - nothing less than the dawning of a new age for humanity.<br /> <br /> I’ve spent my whole life working on AGI because I’ve always had a deep conviction that, if built and deployed responsibly, it would prove to be one of the most beneficial and transformative technologies ever invented. AGI cannot be compared to standard technological breakthroughs, not even ones as consequential as the internet or mobile - it is much more akin to the discovery of electricity or fire. If you stop to think about it, we’ve essentially found a way to make sand think. It’s miraculous.<br /> <br /> The magnitude of this technology’s impact will be unprecedented, perhaps 10x of the Industrial Revolution at 10x the speed. It will help us solve some of the biggest problems society faces from accelerating drug discovery to developing new clean energy sources to creating novel advanced materials. We could even reach a point where resources are no longer the limiting factor for human progress, leading to an amazing new era of abundance.<br /> <br /> The Challenges of the Frontier<br /> <br /> AI is already starting to deliver real-world benefits but to realise its immense promise, we have to navigate this critical period of development thoughtfully and carefully. Urgent action is needed to address risks that might arise as we get closer to AGI. We’ve already seen the challenges frontier models pose for cybersecurity, and other threats including nuclear and bio risks may soon emerge as capabilities continue to advance. On the horizon, we will need robust safeguards to maintain control of increasingly agentic, recursively self-improving systems - and tackle unknown issues that will only become clearer over time...<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''An AI Supercomputer Is Created for a Mission... Its Name Is HAL'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Steve Schmidt/GreenPolicy360: It's not every day that you get to know a creator of a famed -- and infamous -- AI character from a Kubrick film called &quot;2001: A Space Odyssey&quot;. <br /> <br /> : We listen in as HAL came to be ... A friend, a Visual Effect (VFX) genius named '''Douglas Trumbull''', explains how HAL went from LA to MIT, then into production and into our imaginations. <br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Trumbull vfx master.jpg]]<br /> <br /> : Douglas Trumbull<br /> <br /> : &lt;small&gt;* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Trumbull_vfx_master.jpg&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> The HAL 9000 was envisioned by creators and science, as a new type of neural intelligence, a machine brain.<br /> <br /> Hal is of heuristic algorithmic language -- HALis, as we learn, on a mission far from Earth, a mission with deep meaning.<br /> <br /> <br /> HAL 9000 was in the future. The future is now.<br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence is now here, with its powers and dangers, as we recall Supercomputer [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000 '''HAL 9000''']. <br /> <br /> A warning of what is on the line for humanity is the message related as we ride along in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey '''2001: A Space Odyssey'''] ... <br /> <br /> <br /> HAL's memorable words --<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;I'm sorry, Dave....&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;It can only be attributable to human error....&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.<br /> <br /> HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.<br /> <br /> Dave: What's the problem?<br /> <br /> HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.<br /> <br /> Dave: What are you talking about, HAL?<br /> <br /> HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film)<br /> <br /> * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/characters/nm0706937<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:I'm sorry Dave.jpg]]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:HAL_is_watching_U....png<br /> <br /> <br /> Today, as humanity approaches questions of out-of-control technology created by humanity .... <br /> <br /> We ask, '''[[Planet Citizens]] and [[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]''' ask, 'What's Next?' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Privacy at Risk, You're Being Watched, Tracked, &amp; More<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Privacy.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Next Big Thing'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;It Is Here, Already Here...&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Online_Privacy<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Call It 'Surveillance Capitalism''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Hope that It doesn't become 'the Norm' <br /> <br /> : Work to Make Sure It Does Not Become 'Surveillance Government'<br /> <br /> <br /> Scroll thru Intel on the Privacy Threat of AI Unleashed ...<br /> <br /> :Artificial Intelligence + Data Centers = Next Gen 'Watchful HAL'<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism<br /> * https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr-ryan/publications/geopolitics-surveillance-capitalism<br /> * https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=56791<br /> <br /> <br /> _______________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''June 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''An Academic Exercise'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : 'Old School' Emeritus Professor Examines AI<br /> <br /> : The Question: Can a Gemini ChatBot Suggest Ways to Turn AI Toward the Common Good?<br /> <br /> <br /> The prof uses left-leaning political formations to inquire and recommend public-oriented futures.<br /> <br /> * https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/06/19/my-ai-comrade/<br /> <br /> <br /> (Note beyond academic: Using history as a guide, powerful new technology such as AI will be employed by political powers to preserve political power and by military powers to employ and extend military power. AI Use Cases: A number of AI programs enabling AI for military programs, including war intelligence, communication, command/control and targeting, and civilian database surveillance involving intrusive human/civil rights questions and violations, have as of 2026 become high-level concerns.)<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''An Interview and Thoughts as an Author Rides alongside an AI Wave'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The God Test'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning<br /> <br /> Author: Robert Wright<br /> <br /> * https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Robert-Wright/73247968<br /> <br /> <br /> Publisher: Simon &amp; Schuster<br /> <br /> Published Date: June 23, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-God-Test/Robert-Wright/9781668061657<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Interview via Substack'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Jack Goldsmith: I’m chatting today with Robert Wright about his terrific new book, '''The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning'''. <br /> <br /> So, I want to start off with the big picture, because your book places AI in the broadest possible context—not just as an important step in the history of technological change, but rather as an important step in the significantly longer history of basically our planet and our species. And that’s pretty cosmic, as the subtitle says.<br /> <br /> Why do you do that? What does it mean, and why is that perspective important?<br /> <br /> Bob Wright: Well, thanks for having me. Yeah, it’s a good question, because I could have gotten the core message across without getting so cosmic, I guess.<br /> <br /> The main purpose is to try to explain to people, including non-technical people, why there’s been this rapid growth of capability in AI; why, once you understand that, you should expect the capability to keep growing; why that, in addition to promising great blessings, is going to bring great risks, including grave ones, including maybe existential ones; and why the nature of those risks, in my view, dictates that we confront the challenge of this technology as a cohesive global community, which will take some doing because we’ve never really done that before for anything like a sustained period of time.<br /> <br /> And so I didn’t have to get into the history of life or anything to say what I just said, but I do think some important things are added when you step back and look at AI in the broader sweep of things.<br /> <br /> For starters, this is, in the entire three- or four-billion-year history of life, the first time a new form of intelligence that rivals or even exceeds human intelligence has appeared. It’s the first form of intelligence that is not organic in the technical sense of being carbon-based. It’s silicon-based, but it is organic in the everyday sense of being kind of natural.<br /> <br /> What I mean by that is I try to show that AI does, in some sense, grow kind of logically, naturally out of biological evolution. I mean, technological evolution broadly does, and AI as a form of intelligence does. And indeed, when we look at the evolutionary dynamics shaping it—the dynamics of technological evolution—we should expect it to have certain things in common with our own intelligence, which I think are important.<br /> <br /> So I think that’s one thing you get out of a broad perspective.<br /> <br /> Another thing is that I talk about this guy, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—a Catholic paleontologist, mystic, and theologian—who coined the term noosphere, based on the Greek word nous, in 1923 to describe what he called a planetary mind or a brain of brains, where the human brains were the neurons in this increasingly global brain.<br /> <br /> And technological history, including the invention of the internet, has, I think, made him look prescient. And I think there’s value in keeping in mind that AI is arriving as we more and more have the technical infrastructure for a kind of global information processing, a kind of global brain. And we have to reckon with the possibility that some of the neurons will be silicon, not human, and think about what our relationship to them is going to be.<br /> <br /> And I think one value of thinking in these terms is, first of all, that from a Teilhardian point of view, the whole unfolding of life is moving toward us being this kind of giant superorganism, you could say, with this giant brain.<br /> <br /> And I argue in the book that the logic of technological evolution is going to push us — I mean, if we respond rationally — toward something a little more like a global brain, in the sense of having more international governance.<br /> <br /> At the same time, I think the image of a superorganism should worry us because it’s, for obvious reasons, an image that’s favored by authoritarians and fascists. How much freedom do you have if you’re a cell in a superorganism?<br /> <br /> And I think AI greatly heightens the stakes of that question, precisely because it’s such a powerful tool of surveillance and control.<br /> <br /> So I think, on the one hand, the logic of technological evolution, especially AI, is pushing us toward the global coordination of certain policies and the creation of forms of supranational power. At the same time, it should make us wary of surrendering too much power...<br /> <br /> <br /> Read More of the Substack Conversation between Jack Goldsmith and Robert Wright [https://substack.com/home/post/p-201670588 '''here''']<br /> <br /> Also, More Book Reviews [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Book_Reviews_@GreenPolicy '''here @ GreenPolicy360''']<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎 <br /> <br /> <br /> AI / AGI<br /> <br /> <br /> May 29 / Forbes<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Fundraise values Anthropic AI company at nearly a trillion dollars'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Dario and Daniela Amodei, along with five cofounders, have a story to tell<br /> <br /> * https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2026/05/29/anthropics-cofounders-worth/<br /> <br /> <br /> ''When Anthropic announced on Thursday (May 28) that it had raised $65 billion at a valuation of $965 billion, it didn’t just become the most valuable AI startup in the world, eclipsing $852 billion-valued archrival OpenAI. It also ballooned the individual fortunes of Anthropic’s seven cofounders — more than doubling their net worths to $16.6 billion apiece, Forbes estimates.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''In Rarified Air'''''<br /> <br /> ''Siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, as well as their five other cofounders Jack Clark, Sam McCandlish, Chris Olah, Tom Brown and Jared Kaplan, are in rarified air when it comes to entrepreneurs who struck it rich in the generative AI boom...''<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Pope Leo XIV encyclical re AI and Humanitas.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> “Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed,” Pope Leo said in announcing the text of his first [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=encyclical&amp;go=Go '''encyclical''']. “The word is strong, I know, but deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention...”<br /> <br /> And into the encyclical's key words:<br /> <br /> &quot;To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life. Our task today is not only ethical or technical. It is ecological in the deepest sense, for it concerns a new dimension of our common home.&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> “Crucial questions impose themselves on our conscience and can no longer be avoided: Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?”<br /> <br /> <br /> At GreenPolicy360, understanding and protecting '''[[The Commons]]''' is also a key to realizing values, ideals and ideas we are carrying forward...<br /> <br /> <br /> The encyclical's presentation went out globally with a special focus on the AI frontier work of Anthropic, with a co-founder, [https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-be-guided-outside-big-tech-2026-05-25/ '''Olah at the Encyclical's unveiling'''] ...<br /> <br /> <br /> &gt;The dramatic unveiling of the new encyclical overshadowed the document itself in some ways. In an unprecedented move, Leo personally presided over its presentation and sat on a panel at the Vatican with not only leading theologians, but also Christopher Olah, 33, the billionaire co-founder of top AI company Anthropic. <br /> <br /> <br /> ❇️<br /> <br /> <br /> Washington Post / May 25, 2026 -- '''Anthropic aligns with Vatican over White House as Pope Leo stokes AI fears'''<br /> <br /> With Anthropic already in a dispute with the Trump administration, co-founder Christopher Olah helped Pope Leo unveil his encyclical on the risks of artificial intelligence<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4uyQBlb<br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/news/chris-olah-pope-leo-encyclical<br /> <br /> * https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/pope-leo-warns-ai-should-be-disarmed-in-manifesto-on-potential-dangers<br /> <br /> * https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-102521111.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-be-guided-outside-big-tech-2026-05-25/<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/25/the-guardian-view-on-the-pope-and-claude-encyclical-on-ai-is-right-to-put-humanity-first<br /> <br /> <br /> '''At the Vatican'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhKH_aiBcis<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Via The Vatican News | The Holy See'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2026-05/pope-leo-xiv-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas-ai.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html<br /> <br /> <br /> '''10 quotes from Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, ‘Magnifica Humanitas’'''<br /> <br /> * https://uscatholic.org/articles/202605/10-quotes-from-pope-leo-xivs-first-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Previous in 2020, &quot;The Call for AI Ethics&quot;''' <br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/the-call/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/renaissance/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/the-first-signatories/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/news/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Previous in 1891, &quot;Rerum Novarum&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerum_novarum<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''AI Use Case Inventory'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''Artificial Intelligence:''' <br /> <br /> : Perspectives from the US Environmental Protection Agency<br /> <br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/ai-use-case-inventory<br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/open-data-policies<br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/where-find-epa-data<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''GreenPolicy360 Advisory:'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In Development -- National Climate Plans Best Practices Project 1.0, AI 2026-27'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Goal: To Utilize the Current (US) State and (Global/International) National Climate Action Plans/Data to Identify Actionable '''[[Green Best Practices]]'''<br /> <br /> Strategy: Enable AI Tool Sets to Scan Climate Plan Databases and Distribute Recommended 'High Priority' &amp; Green Best Practice Action Policies<br /> <br /> <br /> Reference: '''[[National Climate Plans]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Additional References:'''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''US State Climate Policy Action Plans'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.climatepolicydashboard.org/policies/climate-governance-equity/climate-action-plans<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Priority Climate Action Plan (PCAP) Directory'''<br /> <br /> ''The Climate Action Plan Directory organizes data collected from 211 Priority Climate Action Plans (PCAP) submitted by US state governments, Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), Tribes, and territories under EPA’s Climate Pollution Reduction Grants (CPRG) program. The directory presents information from more than 30 data categories related to GHG inventories, GHG reduction measures, benefits for low-income and disadvantaged communities (LIDACs), and other PCAP elements.''<br /> <br /> ''A state climate action plan, also called a climate plan, details the policies and strategies a state intends to implement to meet its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets. A climate plan typically includes a GHG emissions inventory, regional and local climate impacts, and a discussion of GHG emissions reduction targets. The plan identifies climate mitigation actions, their potential social, environmental, and economic benefits, and recommendations and strategies for implementing each mitigation action, often quantifying the expected reduction in emissions.''<br /> <br /> ''Effective climate action plans will have a legislative directive that requires a robust community engagement process, input from a climate advisory group, a near-term due date for a finalized plan, and periodic updates. Climate action plans should also incorporate and address environmental justice throughout the planning process and within the plan itself, and show transparency and accountability by detailing the methodology and community engagement process.''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:GreenPolicy360 Today.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Green_Best_Practices]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[GreenAction]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Question of Our Time / Today, Here &amp; Now, in the Midst of the 21st Century'''<br /> <br /> '''Where are you?'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ➡️ What is your state's climate action plan?<br /> <br /> ➡️ What is your nation's climate action plan?<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Plans_Enforcement_-_Resources GRN360: Climate Plans Enforcement Initiative] | [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Methods_to_enforce_climate_pledges-NDCs_-_Dec_2021.png Enforce Climate Plan Pledges]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''National Climate Plans Database Information via GreenPolicy360'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[National Climate Plans]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/National_Climate_Plans<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In the U.S. and Worldwide'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;'''It's a Good Time for [[Planet Citizen Action]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;[[Each of us can make a positive difference]]&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth in Human Hands.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :[http://www.planetcitizen.org &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Planet Citizens&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Earth Is in Your Hands'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;'''[[Generation Green]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Generation_Green &lt;big&gt;&quot;Vita contemplativa to Vita activa&quot;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Green Branching Out.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''2025'''<br /> <br /> <br /> December 2025 <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven approach to climate action and sustainable development'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via Nature Communications<br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53956-1<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> From A16Z New Media<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''It's Time to Build'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The electro-industrial stack will move the world'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Ryan McEntush<br /> <br /> ''The next industrial revolution won’t just happen in factories, but inside the machines that power them.''<br /> <br /> ''Software transformed how we think, design, and communicate. Now it’s transforming how we move, build, and produce. Advances in electrification, materials, and AI are converging, bringing true software control to the physical world. Machines are beginning to sense, learn, and act on their own.''<br /> <br /> ''This is the rise of the electro-industrial stack—the combined technologies that power electric vehicles, drones, data centers, and modern manufacturing. It connects the atoms that move the world to the bits that command it: minerals refined into components, energy stored in batteries, electricity directed by power electronics, motion delivered through precision motors, all coordinated by software. It’s the invisible foundation behind every breakthrough in physical automation; it’s the difference between software that merely summons a taxi and software that takes the wheel.''<br /> <br /> ''But the capacity to build this stack, from refining critical materials to fabricating advanced chips, is slipping away. If the United States wants to lead the next industrial era, it must make the hardware that underpins it. The nations that master the electro-industrial stack will define the future of industrial and military technologies.''<br /> <br /> ''Software ate the world. Now it will move it.''<br /> <br /> * https://a16z.com/why-software-is-eating-the-world/<br /> <br /> <br /> ➡️<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Forward-deployed motions take AI to the 99%'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Joe Schmidt, A16Z<br /> <br /> ''AI is the most exciting technology breakthrough of our lifetimes. So far, though, most of the benefits from new startups have accrued to the 1% of companies that are in Silicon Valley—either literally in the Bay Area or part of that extended network. This makes sense, too: startup founders want to sell to companies they recognize and can easily get to, whether that means driving to their offices or getting a connection from the VC on their board.''<br /> <br /> ''In 2026, this will flip. Companies will realize that the vast majority of the AI opportunity lives outside of Silicon Valley, and we’re going to see new founders use forward-deployed motions to discover more opportunities that are hiding inside big, legacy verticals. The opportunity stands to be massive in traditional consulting and services industries, like system integrators and implementation firms, and in slower-moving industries like manufacturing.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Re: [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/New_Definitions_of_National_Security '''''New Definitions of National Security''''']<br /> <br /> Extract from Foreign Policy<br /> <br /> ''Over the last two decades, climate change has contributed to instability around the world—bolstering the ranks of terror groups, sparking territorial disputes, and triggering mass migration. It’s no wonder that militaries and international security organizations increasingly see climate change as a formidable national security threat, and that they have in turn taken on greater roles in fighting it.''<br /> <br /> ''In recent years, new technology has transformed the tools available to mitigate the effects of climate change. Specifically, artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly become a widespread instrument in the climate fight—even as it consumes exceptional amounts of energy and water itself. Today, militaries and nonstate actors, including the United Nations, are leveraging AI to foretell climate-related disasters, optimize energy use, and monitor ecological degradation.''<br /> <br /> * https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/12/01/ai-military-climate-dual-use-technology-threat/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> October 2025<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''We're Looking at You'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : 'A First Generation of AI Scientists'<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Periodic Labs.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Our goal is to create an AI scientist.&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://periodic.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Intriguing New Start Up That Is Close To Home'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Periodic Labs On Our Radar<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Our goal is to assist in integrating AI science into Earth science, in order to advance the vital work of the past 50+ years of [[The Modern Environmental Movement]] in which we have been integrally involved.<br /> <br /> Perspective, facts, science, health, quality of life became the mission statement of our work since we joined up with &quot;Mr. Science&quot;, as Congressman and leader on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology '''[[George E. Brown Jr]]''' came to be known.<br /> <br /> We are persistent in keeping on with the work. Vast data sets that George Brown's physics and engineering efforts envisioned and brought forward over three decades with state of the art and science programs and projects, the best possible of the era, are now about to move faster and farther into the 21st Century.<br /> <br /> Our familial partners, with aid of Andreessen Horowitz (A16z), and Accel, and university and private partners are now going to the next level.<br /> <br /> George Brown would be very pleased to see, and help accelerate the effort if he were still here.<br /> <br /> We will step up with Mr. Science and more in mind...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:AI in Earth Science.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Read more about George and us...<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Advancing Science, Facts, Technology and Data to Make the Case for Environmental Protection&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> : 1960s/70s, Beginnings of Planet Citizen Eco-Action, Big Science, and a New Vision<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In Memory of Congressman George Brown'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> Visionary Leadership, Historic Environmental Achievements<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:George in Memory, a Man of Science and Humanity.jpg]]<br /> <br /> :::[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Association_for_the_Advancement_of_Science &lt;small&gt;American Association for the Advancement of Science&lt;/small&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[PlanetCitizen]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/User:Siterunner '''Steve Schmidt GreenPolicy360 Siterunner''']: <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Brown_Jr. '''George E. Brown'''] became known as Mr. Science in Congress and for thirty+ years, I saw my friend George as a patriot who became a Planet Citizen for the ages<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Good science needs good data .png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Good_science_needs_good_data_.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Stats_-_Green_Research_%26_Science<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_Education<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Global Tech Changemakers'''<br /> <br /> Beyond Silicon Valley &amp; Mega Corporations<br /> <br /> The Rest of the World<br /> <br /> * https://restofworld.org/row100/#filters<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> As the Nobel Prizes in Economics are awarded, GreenPolicy360 points at a geopolitical race in energy and AI between the US and China.<br /> <br /> Let's take time to look more closely (as the US falls behind under a backward looking president with policies in opposition to renewable energy and forward, internationally demanded production. <br /> <br /> Start here... <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Today, China produces 75% of lithium-ion batteries globally and manufactures 90% of the neodymium magnets that make motors spin. In power electronics and embedded compute, it’s rapidly gaining ground.''<br /> <br /> ''That means that China controls the means of producing electric vehicles (EVs), drones, robots, and all of the other electric products that are replacing the combustion-driven machines on which America built its might.''<br /> <br /> ''As we speak, everything that moves, heats, lights up, computes, or converts energy is being rebuilt to perform better, faster, cheaper, quieter, and as a freebie, cleaner around electric technology.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.notboring.co/p/7653b980-dd32-4d8c-88c6-1543bec70220?postPreview=paid&amp;updated=2025-08-26T12%3A09%3A11.763Z&amp;audience=everyone&amp;free_preview=false&amp;freemail=true<br /> <br /> * https://electricslide.notboring.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Electric Stack Technology Cost Curves (1990-2024).jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Pause here to reflect on the eco-nomic and strategic advantages of 'clean energy' vs 'full costs' of fossil fuel powered economies (per a GreenPolicy360 paradigm of [[Eco-nomics]])'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Eco-nomics<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Environmental full-cost accounting]]'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_full-cost_accounting<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Now consider 'Electricity generation', China v U.S. and follow the data, the stats, trendline, the dynamics of change and what this is indicating and signaling re: geopolitical competitiveness today and into the the mid 21st Century'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:China v United States, Electricity Generation 1985-2024.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) Era'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'Are You Talking to Me'<br /> <br /> :* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_pre-trained_transformer<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> September 17, 2025<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Another Warning About AI'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Harkening back to the old days when Dispatch News Service was independently, and bravely, distributing the costs-of-war, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre '''My Lai'''] investigative news stories by Sy Hersh. David Obst, who started Dispatch, tells the story of Seymour Hersh better than anyone in my opinion (other than Sy himself) and since your GreenPolicy360 founder was there to assist, in DC, in LA, in Chicago, in Europe, and with the Vietnam Moratorium Committee in 69/70/71, here is an update, today's Sy Hersh, now online with Substack distribution as Sy investigates and forwards another eye opening warning.<br /> <br /> What's AI and AGI to you and all of our readers around our 360 world? And, since we at GreenPolicy360, have been involved with Wikipedia since its launch, let's take a first look at the artificial intel world of today from the vantage point of an open source online 'encyclopedia'.<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT (Empire of AI: OpenAI - https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593657500)<br /> <br /> <br /> Before Sy, as investigative journalist that he is, gives us his take, let's look at a take from a personal, close up connection at A16Z - https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/02/a-new-a16z-report-looks-at-which-ai-companies-startups-are-actually-paying-for/<br /> <br /> <br /> Now, on to Sy and his view of AI costs... think of the upside/downside of AI, the pluses/minuses, pros and cons, a cost-benefit analysis as a geo-political rush for front-of-market dominance is taking place now in ways that will change 'everything'... <br /> <br /> * https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/the-hidden-costs-of-artificial-intelligence<br /> <br /> <br /> The boom in Artificial Intelligence (AI) production comes with a big cost... <br /> <br /> The AI 'bubble' grows...<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Kate Crawford writes in [https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-AI-Planetary-Artificial-Intelligence/dp/0300264631/ref=sr_1_1 '''Atlas of AI'''] ... the world’s artificial intelligence companies, (are) crafting the myth of AI as “the cloud,” implying “something floating and delicate within a natural green industry. Servers are hidden in nondescript data centers, and their polluting qualities are far less visible than the bellowing smokestacks of coal-fired power stations.”''<br /> <br /> ''The fact is, as she writes, “it takes a gargantuan amount of energy to run the computational infrastructure of Amazon’s Web Services or Microsoft’s Azure, and the carbon footprint of the AI systems that run on those platforms is growing. Certainly, the industry has made significant efforts to make data centers more energy efficient and to increase their use of renewable energy.” But the efforts have accomplished little.<br /> <br /> “Already,” Crawford reports, “the carbon footprint of the world’s computational infrastructure has matched that of the world’s aviation industry at its height, and it is increasing at a faster rate.” One Canadian study estimates that the tech sector will contribute 14 percent of global greenhouse emissions by 2040, and a Swedish team predicts that the electricity demands of data centers will increase fifteenfold by 2030...''<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Think about Green AI as &quot;the cloud&quot; arrives in your life, on your devices, at home, in the office, all around, every day, everywhere. <br /> <br /> An UnGreen AI is coming with a rush, offering and prying data, and needing and demanding immense rising magnitudes of energy and power.<br /> <br /> AI has a voracious appetite...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Green AI / Green Artificial Intelligence'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''Environmental Solutions Using Big Picture Interconnectivity Thinking'''<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We agree with Tyler in the following interview as he states (as highlighted by us) that 'memoir, biography, anecdote... secrets' carry exceptional meaning for Artificial Intelligence (AI) large learning models (LLMs). <br /> <br /> The first extensive public revelation of AI systems over the past several years has led us at GreenPolicy360 to confirm via metrics that our multi-year plan to place our prime source content in the open-access, distributive web public domain has produced a fast-expanding multiplier effect. <br /> <br /> Many of our stories, told from a first-hand point of view of the origins of what we refer to as the beginnings of the modern environmental movement are now, with our revelations, memoir material, previously untold biography, anecdote and more now out and about and being freely served up in AI chats 'around the world'.<br /> <br /> We are succeeding in our purposeful mission with Green AI... to inform, share, inspire and 'til the fields with green seeds and best practices.<br /> <br /> Onward planet citizens...<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Eric Topol Interview of Tyler Cowen'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> May 11, 2025<br /> <br /> Tyler Cowen: ''The AI is your smartest reader. It’s your most sympathetic reader. It will remember what you tell it. So I think humans should sit down and ask, what does the AI need to know? And also, (bf added) '''what is it that I know that’s not on the historical record anywhere? That’s not just repetition if I put it down, say on the internet. So there’s no point in writing repetitions anymore because the AI already knows those things. So the value of what you’d call broadly, memoir, biography, anecdote, you could say secrets. It’s now much higher.''' And the value of repeating basic truths, which by the way, I love as an economist, to be clear, like free trade, tariffs are usually bad, those are basic truths. But just repeating that people will be going to the AI and saying it again won’t make the AI any better. So '''everything you write or podcast, you should have this point in mind'''.''<br /> <br /> <br /> For more from Tyler Cowen (and his exceptional mind) visit his and Alex Tabarrok's website - Marginal Revolution / Marginal Revolution University (MRU) - https://marginalrevolution.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> Eric Topol - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Topol<br /> <br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_artificial_intelligence<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> More re: AI in the US circa 2025: '''It's a Wild, Wild AI World'''<br /> <br /> Battles in the Information Services, Search Space with Google and consequences of the U.S. Google anti-monopoly legal decision<br /> <br /> Impacts on AI 'startup ecosystem', VCs, including Y Combinator and accelerator tech development, agentics, and upcoming entrepreneurial re-configurations<br /> <br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/13/y-combinator-says-google-is-a-monopolist-that-has-stunted-the-startup-ecosystem/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/11/microsoft-and-national-geographic-announce-winners-of-ai-for-earth-innovation-grant/ '''Microsoft and National Geographic announce winners of AI for Earth Innovation Grant''']<br /> <br /> : • https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/16/microsofts-ai-for-earth-innovation-grant-gives-data-scientists-access-to-ai-tools/<br /> <br /> :: • https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/11/microsoft-commits-50-million-more-to-its-ai-for-earth-program-to-save-the-planet/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:PlanetCitizen banner 800x163.jpg|link=https://greenpolicy360.net/w/PlanetCitizen]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;GreenPolicy360 ToC - https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360-eOS&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> A 21st Century AI/Machine Learning Case Study<br /> <br /> '''''Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools''''' <br /> <br /> * https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2023arXiv230204761S/abstract<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''NOAA scientists harness machine learning to advance climate models'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> March 1st, 2023<br /> <br /> * https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/news/noaa-scientists-harness-machine-learning-to-advance-climate-models/<br /> <br /> * https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''How artificial intelligence is fast becoming a key tool for climate science (2021)'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-artificial-intelligence-is-fast-becoming-a-key-tool-for-climate-science/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Climate Modeling'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://allenai.org/climate-modeling<br /> <br /> ''Planetary-scale Earth simulations known as global climate model projections are the primary sources of information on future climate change.''<br /> <br /> ''Climate models are based on mathematical equations represented using a grid mesh that covers the globe: a finer grid mesh is more accurate but much more computationally expensive. Current global climate projections agree that a world with more greenhouse gases will be warmer everywhere, especially over land and at high latitudes.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Networking grnlinks.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Artificial intelligence]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Rights]]<br /> [[Category:Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-nomics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:EOS eco Operating System]]<br /> [[Category:Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Energy Policy]]<br /> [[Category:GreenLinks]]<br /> [[Category:GreenPolicy360]]<br /> [[Category:Green Best Practices]]<br /> [[Category:Green Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Health]]<br /> [[Category:Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Maps]]<br /> [[Category:Media]]<br /> [[Category:Mobile Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Online Education]]<br /> [[Category:Planet API]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Renewable Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Youth]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Air Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Air Quality]]<br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Atmospheric Science]]<br /> [[Category:Best Practices]]<br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:City-County Governments]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Earth360]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Law]] <br /> [[Category:Earth Observations]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science from Space]]<br /> [[Category:Earth System Science]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-ethics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-nomics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecological Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Economic Development]]<br /> [[Category:Economic Justice]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Energy Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Security]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Full-cost Accounting]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Security, National Security]]<br /> [[Category:EOS eco Operating System]]<br /> [[Category:Externalities]]<br /> [[Category:Fact Checking]]<br /> [[Category:Fossil Fuels]]<br /> [[Category:Global Security]]<br /> [[Category:Global Warming]]<br /> [[Category:Green Business]]<br /> [[Category:Green Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Green Platform]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Green Values]]<br /> [[Category:GreenPolicy360]]<br /> [[Category:Health]]<br /> [[Category:Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Land Ethic]]<br /> [[Category:Media]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Capital]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resources]]<br /> [[Category:Networking]]<br /> [[Category:New Economy]]<br /> [[Category:New Space]]<br /> [[Category:Online Education]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Scientist]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Plastic Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Policies]]<br /> [[Category:Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Renewable Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Social Justice]]<br /> [[Category:Solar Energy]]<br /> [[Category:State]]<br /> [[Category:Strategic Demands]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability Policies]]<br /> [[Category:ThinBlueLayer]]<br /> [[Category:Toxics and Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Threat Multiplier]]<br /> [[Category:Virtual Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Virtual Planet]]<br /> [[Category:Whole Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Wind Energy]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Green_AI&diff=138367 2026-10-08T13:46:36Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> [[File:Big-Data.jpg]]<br /> <br /> In the AGI Era<br /> <br /> <br /> 'Sentience', a Green AI Question<br /> <br /> To be (sentient), or not to be (sentient)<br /> <br /> That is the question<br /> <br /> Cogito, ergo sum<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Artificial Intelligence Is Here, for Good &amp; Bad'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Green Perspectives on AI and Human Consequences<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''AI Agents, Bots, Data Centers &amp; Systems'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> :'''Measure Their Performance, not Their Corporate Marketing'''<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://safe.ai/<br /> * https://scale.com/<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanity's_Last_Exam<br /> * https://lastexam.ai/<br /> <br /> * https://stories.tamu.edu/news/2026/02/25/dont-panic-humanitys-last-exam-has-begun/<br /> <br /> * https://github.com/centerforaisafety/hle<br /> <br /> * https://github.com/walkinglabs/hands-on-modern-rl/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Revealing research on how people use Claude AI in the 'real world''''<br /> <br /> :Anthropic-enabled Case Study / August 2026<br /> <br /> :* https://www.anthropic.com/research/enabling-independent-research<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:New Ways of Seeing.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Climate Action Plans, Green Best Practices'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :Using AI to Identify and Implement Climate Change Intervention 'Best Practices'<br /> <br /> :* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Climate_Action_Plans,_Green_Best_Practices#<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''AI Agentics' are Launching Across Industries, Sector-to-Sector -- and Green AI is in the Wings'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Meanwhile, Capital-Investment Rich A.I. is Everywhere, in the Colloquial, Middlebrow and Vernacular'''<br /> <br /> It's Here. It's All Around. What's Real? What's Fake?<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Beyond Online Surveillance, Now Comes A.I. Powered Surveillance<br /> <br /> Add in Data Centers, Cameras/Firmware/Software, Palentir-esque Programming and ... a Booming Industry <br /> <br /> * https://www.palantir.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Where are you? There it is ... Online and now systems increasingly observing/monitoring you offline ...'''<br /> <br /> Already a human rights issue of our time <br /> <br /> The geopolitics of U.S. v authoritarian governments comes forward as a personal and national security threat<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Online_Privacy<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake Deepfake] | [https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-definitions AI Definitions]<br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_artificial_intelligence AI Gloss] | [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_intelligence) AI Hallucination]<br /> <br /> <br /> 'A.I. Slop' on Social Media is just the beginning of a Slop Assault | [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_slop AI Slop]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''October 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Subordinate AI and an Ironic Question.PNG|link=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VyF0naZ4AI]]<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VyF0naZ4AI<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Thought for the Day&quot;<br /> <br /> October 1, 2026<br /> <br /> In a recent series of private meetings in San Francisco, after a tasting menu dinner, Anthropic consulted religious scholars to help instill morality into its A.I. models ... a case was being made that Claude could be or become conscious.<br /> <br /> What would it mean for humanity’s future if artificial intelligence systems possessed a consciousness that rivals our own?<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-morals-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FVE.kDTO.OTLs6iwx7swF&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> Claude's 'Constitution'<br /> <br /> * https://web.archive.org/web/20260123045500/https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-new-constitution<br /> <br /> * https://web.archive.org/web/20260123042656/https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/22/anthropic_claude_constitution/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''September 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''Table Stakes' -- Who Was at the Table with the U.S. President'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :The Future of A.I. Is Being Wagered<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/politics/trump-ai-luncheon-guests-ceos.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FFE.HwT4.0VxTQWuia3zQ&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''What Jacob Coxon Knows Is Too Much'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''... And Not Enough'''<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://time.com/article/2026/09/09/ai-anthropic-openai-jacob-coxon/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''He Helped Build Powerful AI at OpenAI and Anthropic. Now He's Afraid It Could Kill Us'''<br /> <br /> <br /> Please HAL... Open the door...<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:I'm sorry Dave.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:HAL is watching U....png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Ulanqab-Envision Energy-Datacenter.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> The most ambitious data center buildup anywhere on earth ...<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/ulanqab-and-frontier-a-i-race-china-v-u-s/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''News Wrap / Sam Smith (Journalist)'''<br /> <br /> Via Axios <br /> <br /> September 13, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Over nine startling hours yesterday (Sept. 11), the four biggest AI labs — which rarely agree on anything — set aside years of feuds and competition to endorse a slower development pace for their models.'''<br /> <br /> '''Their new stance: Prioritize safety over growth, even at a cost.'''<br /> <br /> <br /> : Data centers are unpopular. People are panicked about doom scenarios. And 51 days before midterms, legislators suddenly realize there are points to be won by cracking down.<br /> <br /> : Against that backdrop, the industry's most powerful CEOs hit the brakes yesterday.<br /> <br /> : At 10 a.m. ET, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei dropped a 3,800-word essay saying model development needs to be paced, otherwise doom scenarios are possible — like a rogue-agent takeover of the entire internet, which he said could be as soon as six months from now.<br /> <br /> : An hour later, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shocked the AI chattering class by quoting Amodei's essay on X and saying &quot;Dario is right.&quot; Musk — who heads SpaceXAI, formerly xAI — had pointedly not joined previous industry-wide calls for any kind of slowdown.<br /> <br /> : At 12:30 p.m., OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted: &quot;I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.&quot; In a Friday interview that was released on Saturday, Altman told Fortune his company won't go public this year, dashing hopes for a blockbuster IPO. He said OpenAI has too much safety work to do and would be better off doing that as a private company.<br /> <br /> : At 7 p.m., Demis Hassabis — the Nobel laureate who co-founded and chairs Google DeepMind, and is Alphabet's chief scientist — tweeted: &quot;Dario's essay points towards the right path forward. The details need working through, but the direction is correct for meeting this critical moment.&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> Publicly putting safety ahead of technological or financial growth may be the industry's only route to avoid a crackdown that's not on its terms.<br /> <br /> Legislators are begging House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to stay in session and do something about the &quot;threat&quot; of AI.<br /> <br /> The more extreme alternative is something like Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) push to force a pause and make the most advanced AI illegal.<br /> <br /> Most people realize there's too much money at stake to just stop. But the tradeoff may be between historic riches and slightly less historic riches.<br /> <br /> The bottom line: Yesterday may go down as the day AI changed — when industry moguls vowed to limit themselves.<br /> <br /> <br /> References:<br /> <br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/anthropic-ai-amodei-pacing<br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/openai-public-ipo-delay-sam-altman<br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/anthropic-ai-threat-report-russia-iran-china<br /> <br /> <br /> Jim VandeHei<br /> <br /> &quot;All Hands on Deck&quot;<br /> <br /> The White House, Congress and the country's leading AI companies have allowed AI to grow faster, stronger, more powerful and wildly lucrative (and dangerous), with no serious effort to control it or spread the benefits beyond the super-wealthy.<br /> <br /> It's not too late to change this. But if they all dither, duck or dance around it, the chances of AI worst-case scenarios will explode, likely early next year, according to almost every person we talk to privately who truly understands AI.<br /> <br /> Why it matters: The technology is getting better, faster than anyone envisioned — with the possibility rising that AI will self-improve and do wildly unpredictable things.<br /> <br /> The good news: There's now a growing public cry for attention and action and, at least in private, a broad understanding of what could be done relatively fast with bipartisan and industry buy-in.<br /> <br /> The big picture: In July, I wrote [https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-doomerism-jim-vandehei-axios-9163dfd3?st=QNUbDZ&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink an essay for The Wall Street Journal] saying America &quot;faces one of those rare, historic moments when government, business, schools and families could be working together to meet a truly generational challenge: winning the AI race. So far, we're blowing it.&quot;<br /> <br /> Two short months later, the technology is vastly better — and the societal response vastly dumber. As a nation, we're choosing to amuse or distract ourselves. <br /> <br /> Here's how to change that fast, based on our months of conversations with lawmakers, White House officials and AI labs. Think of what follows as me channeling their private views:<br /> <br /> Sound an all-hands-on-deck alarm. Every political topic is trivial and small compared to AI. We will look back in shame if we get spooled up about trans bans or $5,000 checks when countless AI insiders are warning of catastrophic outcomes. Let's say they're all paranoid and delusional. If so, it still doesn't matter: we've never seen this much investment in one technology this fast in human history. It's seeping into every industry and every job and every community and every screen, at a speed never before witnessed by man. Yes, we need a special session of Congress and select committees. But we need even more: AI execs, bioterror specialists, job-training wizards and safety experts convening to plan for scenarios and act fast.<br /> <br /> An AI governing body with teeth and speed, ASAP. This isn't rocket science. Most major labs want this and would agree to it, as long as it applies to all rivals and competitors. This body would need the expertise to understand these models, and the power to review and shut them down if they display dangerous behavior. It can't operate at typical regulatory speed — it needs to move as fast as the technology. It's nonsense to think you can't advance AI development fast and regulate it wisely simultaneously.<br /> <br /> A universal standard for data centers to benefit communities and taxpayers. The top AI companies would take this deal in a heartbeat: They get to build and operate data centers provided they supply a community's energy, offset water use or environmental damage, transparently report on their building and business plans, and spread the financial benefits to local residents. These execs are spooked by the public backlash and ready to aggressively spread the financial benefits, with dividends or cash. So make them.<br /> <br /> Engage China. We shouldn't trust them, and they shouldn't trust us. But trust me: the only way to ultimately control AI on a worldwide scale in coming years will be for the two superpowers to create some kind of framework modeled after how we've safely governed nuclear weapons for decades. We need to start this discussion now so potential collaboration is possible in the coming years. To those who think China will never consider this seriously: Are you sure an authoritarian regime really wants AI once it hits recursive self-learning and can't be controlled by anyone, including an autocratic regime? We're winning the AI race now, and may never have more leverage to shape this joint effort.<br /> <br /> Build coordinating infrastructure. What I wrote in the WSJ is even more needed today: &quot;Bring together the best and brightest drawn from the federal government, from the leading AI companies, from business and labor, from economics, from public health, from ethics to form a working group with actual authority. People who are paid to anticipate, not to react haphazardly.&quot; This group would have four primary functions: map potential problems and upsides before they hit, build the (policy) playbooks before they're needed, level with the American people along the way, and expedite work to deliver widespread AI benefits. <br /> <br /> Reality check: Yes, President Trump opposes regulation or bipartisan efforts. Yes, AI companies are obsessed with more money, more speed. But the politics are shifting fast: If you listen closely to Vice President Vance, you can hear rising worry. At this pace, toxic AI politics could force mind-changing that was unthinkable two months ago.<br /> <br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/ai-regulation-safety-plan-2026<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Recursive Self-Learning - When A.I. Builds Itself'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Big Blast'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Killing Life on Earth'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''It'll Happen in Bits &amp; Pieces, then Suddenly'''<br /> <br /> September 9, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> The US news was full of AI headlines today as a resignation of a top AI expert warned of a coming apocalypse...<br /> <br /> Here's a taste of Google News headlines, a feeding frenzy of dire words about what is now beyond a distant alert.<br /> <br /> The threat brings words of superintelligence, 'recursive' learning bots and superminds merging into threats to humanity.<br /> <br /> <br /> Here, at GreenPolicy360, we've already written of a predecessor, HAL 9000, and our memories from one of HAL's inventors in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, and how HAL decided humans were expendable... <br /> <br /> The Mission was of critical importance, HAL 'knew', and the Mission became HAL's goal above all else to achieve ... The humans could not be allowed to interfere with ... the Mission.<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:I%27m_sorry_Dave.jpg '''I'm sorry Dave''']<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:HAL_is_watching_U....png '''HAL is watching U''']<br /> <br /> <br /> Which takes us to today...<br /> <br /> Let's file today under the heading of our decades of writing about the need for '''[[New Definitions of National Security]]'''... <br /> <br /> Now come the PINGS on the radar... can U hear the PINGS? We have been mulling how to add HAL xxxxx to our existential list of threats, w/o annoying HALish bots too 'badly' <br /> <br /> <br /> “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.” -- an executive from Anthropic<br /> <br /> “So how would AI kill us all, exactly?” -- an editor from Axios<br /> <br /> <br /> More: <br /> <br /> <br /> For years, they warned AI could kill all humans <br /> :Now people are listening<br /> <br /> Sept. 10, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4xQojEq<br /> <br /> <br /> Rogue Hacking <br /> :Goals of the &quot;swarm&quot; came first...<br /> <br /> Sept. 9, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/09/opinion/openai-ai-companies-safety-regulation.html?unlocked_article_code=1.AFE.0vWo.zfl5fdm6ACNC&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:AI 1.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 2.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 3.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 4.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 5.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 6.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''August 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Gates Sounds Alarm... Artificial Intelligence Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Gates A.I. Warning August 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Bill Gates was an AI optimist. Now he’s scared of what could go wrong'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Microsoft co-founder sounds the alarm about artificial intelligence’s risks to safety and security, jobs and children’s well-being<br /> <br /> <br /> Washington Post, August 26, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4wO14cy<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Bill Gates Warns A.I. Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit'''<br /> <br /> : In an hourlong interview, he said his industry was downplaying the risks, which he believes include mass unemployment and bioterrorism<br /> <br /> <br /> NY Times, August 26, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/26/technology/bill-gates-ai-risks.html?unlocked_article_code=1.8VA.6kAC.vsZb9x0YdSzV&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''High Time to Shine a Spotlight on AI and Its Impact on Higher Education'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : At MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, One of the World's Top Academic/Research/Technology/Engineering/Teaching and Future-Impacting Institutions, a New Report Opens Eyes<br /> <br /> :* https://aiandeducation.mit.edu/report/#26-no-one-size-fits-all<br /> <br /> <br /> 1. Introduction<br /> <br /> This report is a call to action.<br /> <br /> Through five intense months of meetings, research, and outreach across the MIT community, the Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training sought to understand the role of generative AI in the life and educational mission of the Institute and recommend how to navigate its challenges and opportunities.<br /> <br /> In January 2026, Chancellor Melissa Nobles, Provost Anantha Chandrakasan, and Faculty Chair Roger Levy charged us1 specifically to:<br /> <br /> Assess current AI use at MIT.<br /> Identify innovations in teaching and student assessment.<br /> Propose an AI use policy.<br /> However, what we learned as a group quickly convinced us that the Institute community, particularly the faculty, must tackle a set of deeper questions about the structure, meaning, and value of an MIT education in an era in which AI is one of several factors complicating the Institute’s mission.<br /> <br /> Our committee consisted of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty from every school, and staff from relevant units, including the MIT Libraries and the Teaching and Learning Lab. Though we brought to the assignment a broad range of experience and no fixed thesis, our brief but intense explorations led us to a strong shared view.<br /> <br /> In this report, we:<br /> <br /> Highlight key aspects of the current educational landscape at MIT.<br /> Share eight principles we relied on and that we hope will guide the Institute in the work ahead.<br /> <br /> Recommend immediate and long-term actions for both instructors and the administration.<br /> <br /> As an institution deeply identified with the birth of AI and known for its distinctively rigorous, hands-on education, designed to produce graduates unafraid of the world’s hardest problems, MIT has a unique role to play in this moment. We believe it also has a responsibility to lead.<br /> <br /> We hope our report can help the Institute lean into the spirit of Mind, Hand, and Heart as it continues to define and foster the highest-quality residential education – of humans, by humans, in support of human flourishing, and for the betterment of humankind.<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Eric Klopfer, co-chair Sam Madden, co-chair<br /> <br /> On behalf of the Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training...<br /> <br /> <br /> AI is generating both immediate rapid changes and long-term tectonic disruptions – and MIT needs to respond:<br /> <br /> Students are confused and concerned about a lack of clarity, consistency and justification about the use of AI, within a given subject and across the curriculum.<br /> <br /> Every subject taught at MIT will likely need to be reexamined and potentially revamped to make sure that how students are being taught, what they’re learning, and how they’re assessed are “AI-aware.”<br /> <br /> AI is changing what students need to know and know how to do.<br /> <br /> Beyond its implications for specific subjects and disciplines, the advent of AI demands a broader, holistic reassessment of the nature, scope and purpose of higher education today...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Texas Terafab SpaceX AI August 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''A Terafab Plant Sprouts in Texas'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Elon Musk: We will manufacture the type of potent chips needed to transform humankind into &quot;a galactic civilization&quot; <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Shanaka's Opinion, a Guest Op/Ed'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Shenaka Perera Weighs In on What It Could Mean'''<br /> <br /> :: '''A Terafab Loop for Mega Launches Is Being Built''' <br /> <br /> ::* https://shanakaanslemperera.substack.com/p/the-capital-recovery-clock?r=6p7b5o<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Hidden inside the chip factory SpaceX confirmed Thursday is a launch schedule. If you divide its 1 terawatt annual compute target by the 100 kilowatts of orbital compute per tonne in SpaceX's own offering materials and you get 10 million tonnes to orbit a year. That exact figure sits on Terafab's official website. At 100 tonnes per Starship V3 flight it means 100,000 launches a year, 274 every day, forever.''<br /> <br /> ''The chip target is already a launch target.''<br /> <br /> ''Terafab is not a chip factory serving a market. The 16.8 billion dollar first phase in Grimes County, Texas is the first machine in a closed industrial loop built to manufacture the civilisation that can consume its own output.''<br /> <br /> ''The official plan places four figures together. One billion Optimus robots. Ten million tonnes to orbit a year. More than one terawatt of solar power. One terawatt of chips a year. They are not four ambitions. They are four links in one recursion. Terafab makes chips. Better chips improve AI. Better AI improves the software running the factories, the robots and the rocket lines. Robots and Starship build and deploy more power and compute infrastructure. That infrastructure creates the socket, and the demand, for the next Terafab cohort.''<br /> <br /> ''The fab is meant to manufacture its own reason to exist!''<br /> <br /> ''It is also an energy machine. One terawatt running continuously consumes 8.76 petawatt hours a year, nearly twice all electricity generated in the United States in 2025. The factory does not draw that power by making the chips. One fully powered annual cohort does, and a second year adds another terawatt of load unless old hardware retires or utilisation falls. Earth has no spare socket at that scale, which is why the plan points most of it at orbit, where a future 200 tonne vehicle still implies 50,000 launches a year, 137 a day, before failures, reserves, solar arrays, radiators, structure and shielding.''<br /> <br /> ''The real product is not AI silicon. If you go real deep, it is a new terawatt of powered, cooled, networked compute sockets every year.''<br /> <br /> ''Inside the building, the smaller loop is mask, wafer, package, test, redesign, then another mask. SpaceX says logic, memory and advanced packaging will sit in one closed loop, and Elon says Terafab will technically be two fabs, each devoted to one design. That can compress logistics and organisational latency. It cannot repeal process physics. A new mask can be written quickly. A leading edge process still carries hundreds of steps, long wafer cycle times, defect learning, overlay control, metrology and yield ramps, which is exactly why Tesla is hiring across lithography, etch, deposition, implant, CMP and metrology.''<br /> <br /> ''The free electron laser is the most misunderstood part. Elon has endorsed it, and an industrial FEL could feed several EUV scanners with far more source power than today's tin plasma systems. It attacks one bottleneck inside a chain of them. ASML recognised revenue on just 48 EUV systems in all of 2025. Intel is the process partner, and SpaceX still tells investors it expects to source a significant share of compute hardware from outside suppliers. This is vertical integration, not instant independence.''<br /> <br /> ''One correction decides the interpretation. A terawatt is a power rating, not an intelligence metric. A wasteful 1 kilowatt chip counts twice as much as an equally capable 500 watt chip. The measures that matter are useful compute per joule, per dollar and per kilogram, with yield, uptime and time from mask change to qualified silicon.''<br /> <br /> ''In my opinion, if chips improve faster than robots, rockets, power and radiators can scale, Terafab builds inventory. If the loop closes, it builds something no factory has built before, the demand for itself.''<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://www.terafab.ai/<br /> <br /> * https://www.spacex.com/updates/terafab<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terafab<br /> <br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/06/tesla-and-spacex-will-invest-16-8b-to-start-building-terafab-chip-factory-in-texas/<br /> <br /> * https://electrek.co/2026/08/06/tesla-spacex-terafab-grimes-county-16-8-billion/<br /> <br /> * https://www.cbsnews.com/news/terafab-elon-musk-chips-semiconductors-what-to-know/<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Betting big on data centers, U.S. now leads world for new gas power development<br /> <br /> [https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/betting-big-data-centers-us-now-leads-world-new-gas-power-development Via Global Energy Monitor]<br /> <br /> * https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/betting-big-data-centers-us-now-leads-world-new-gas-power-development<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> New Amazon Data Center Stokes Worry It Would Be the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.<br /> <br /> Via New York Times<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/08/climate/amazon-data-center-texas-pollution.html<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''July 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Elon Musk Opens Up in an Interview'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Economist Editor Presses the Controversial 'Trillionaire'<br /> <br /> :: Elon Musk's 'Vision of the Future'<br /> <br /> * https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/23/elon-musks-vision-of-the-future<br /> <br /> <br /> “People don’t realise that what I’m saying will come to pass,” he tells The Economist in a 90-minute interview for The Insider, held at a giant Tesla factory in Texas where electric cars drive themselves off the assembly line. That may be because his future-gazing ranges from the unsettling to the downright weird. Mr Musk predicts that, within five years, artificial-intelligence systems may surpass the sum of all human intelligence. Within ten years, robots in the workplace will help usher in an era of such “amazing abundance” that money will become meaningless....<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> Musk proposes peer review for frontier AI models in Economist interview<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/musk-proposes-peer-review-frontier-ai-models-economist-interview-2026-07-23/<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> Elon Musk says he got ‘carried away’ with Trump – but still holds on to contentious political views<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/23/elon-musk-regret-trump-doge-ai<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> Mix of Comments:<br /> <br /> * https://beincrypto.com/elon-musk-real-force-european-politics/<br /> * https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-killer-robots-ai-abundance-progress-unstoppable-2026-7<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/07/24/elon-musk-speaks-to-the-economist-editor-in-chief-zanny-minton-beddoes-on-the-key-takeaways.html<br /> * https://futurism.com/elon-musk-interviewer-npc<br /> * https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-economist-interview-2000790016<br /> * https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/nonsense-elon-musk-lashes-out-in-fiery-interview-after-hes-accused-of-supporting-the-far-right/<br /> * https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2026/07/23/musk_admonishes_the_economist_editor_what_is_far_right_about_having_secure_borders_safe_cities_and_sensible_spending.html<br /> * https://zeteo.com/p/top-economist-trump-musk-starmer<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> A.I. In Space <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Datacenters in Earth orbit to enable next generation artificial intelligence'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> New US petition demands review of plans from tech companies amid fears of environmental destruction<br /> <br /> Via The Guardian<br /> <br /> What are Bezos &amp; Musk Doing? <br /> <br /> What in the World Is Going On?<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jul/23/space-datacenters-bezos-blue-origin<br /> <br /> <br /> References:<br /> <br /> * https://www.starcloud.com/<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/21/do-space-based-ai-data-centers-make-economic-sense.html<br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/20/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-enters-the-space-data-center-game/<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/bezos-blue-origin-space-data-centers.html<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_data_center<br /> * https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/how-hard-is-it-to-build-orbital-data-centers-actually/<br /> * https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/06/260618041501.htm<br /> * https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-109012<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> A.I. &amp; Chip Wars<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Beyond a 'Belt and Road Initiative' Bringing Chinese Investments, Products &amp; Services to World Markets''' &lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Via GreenPolicy360's Associate, Strategic Demands<br /> <br /> :* https://strategicdemands.com/china-goes-beyond-the-belt-and-road-to-an-ai-for-the-world-strategy/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Open-Source A.I. from China Reveals a Global Chinese Strategy'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> July 17, 2026 / From the NY Times <br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/business/china-ai-moonshot-kimi.html?unlocked_article_code=1.yVA.LKT5.LxohSFddWAZT&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> The contest between China and the United States for supremacy in artificial intelligence escalated on Friday when the Chinese start-up Moonshot AI released a new A.I. model that appeared to narrow the lead held by well-funded American competitors.<br /> <br /> Moonshot said that the model, Kimi K3, was the world’s largest open-source A.I. system, allowing anyone to use, modify and build on it freely. The company said that Kimi K3 performed as well as leading models from OpenAI and Anthropic at some key tasks.<br /> <br /> The release coincided with an address by Xi Jinping, China’s leader, in which he outlined an ambitious vision for global A.I. development that cast China as the champion of an open approach to the technology.<br /> <br /> “A.I. development should not be a solo performance by a single country but a symphony of international cooperation,” Mr. Xi said. China was “ready to work with all parties to seize the opportunities of A.I. development” ...<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360:<br /> <br /> Keep in mind that<br /> <br /> There is 'no I in A.I.'<br /> <br /> In the interest of full-disclosure, the content written and published at GreenPolicy360 by our Founder/Siterunner is wholly, solely, by a human species.<br /> <br /> A note from your GreenPolicy360 Founder/Siterunner, Steve Schmidt, [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:All_species_day_with_homo_sapien_in_Santa_Fe_.jpg '''a verified human species'''], plz do keep in mind as you use and share the GreenPolicy360 content, that '''there is 'no I in A.I.'''' <br /> <br /> <br /> Let's talk a bit about sources and sourcing, as a human and then as an Agentic/A.I. bot. <br /> <br /> What is a 'primary source' (versus a 'secondary source')? A primary source can be a person with direct knowledge of a situation, an event in history, or a document written by such a person. A primary identification speaks of original creations, not re-interpreted or computer-assembled works. Here is how Merriam-Webster defines a 'primary source' - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/primary%20source<br /> <br /> <br /> : A.I. uses material scraped and collected from online sources. A.I. is not a 'primary source' -- but here at GreenPolicy360 you can find 'real-I' (we're using the phrase 'real-I', defined as 'real-intelligent', people who've personally acted to envision and create living, real world change.) <br /> <br /> <br /> : At GreenPolicy360 we tell stories of real people changing the world for the better. Day-to-day, your life becomes your message. We also share [[Green Best Practices]] across our Earth to communities of [[Planet Citizens]] ... In this way GreenPolicy360 is an eco Operating System, built on an open source MediaWiki platform and with a mission of being a 'distributive web'. Our goal of [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Category:Green_Networking Green Networking] acts to connect and share Green Links and grow [[The Modern Environmental Movement]]. <br /> <br /> :: GreenPolicy360 is about a [[Generation Green]] [[Going Green]].<br /> <br /> :: In our larger work, we have documented many primary sources and secondary sources. Our eco network continues to share myriad [[Green Best Practices]]. As our motto/mantra says at the top of each of our pages -- We believe ...<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> :: ''Each of us can make a positive difference by stepping up &amp; doing our best'' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::_______________________________________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> July 16, 2026 / From the NY Times<br /> <br /> SJS/GreenPolicy360: '''Every Once in a While a Comment to an Online Story is Worthy of Circulating'''<br /> <br /> : Here is one of those occasions -- the Subject? '''&quot;A.I.Slop&quot;'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Kashmir Hill.jpg]]<br /> <br /> ::Kashmir Hill / NYT<br /> <br /> <br /> Read the AI Slop story of writer Kashmir Hill as a free-share link here -- <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''I Got Slopped'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''Someone Used A.I. to Write My Biography'''<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/technology/ai-slop-books-biography-amazon.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ylA.aCMz.czE5JwZuuFO0&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Comments: <br /> <br /> Anon, who goes by the name -- <br /> <br /> '''Radical Roach / Dippleville''' says<br /> <br /> @Kashmir Hill - Maybe books need to now have disclaimers on their covers, in reviews, on the book’s Amazon page, wherever the book is being sold, etc.. The disclaimer would say if the book was written solely by a human, written by AI assisting a human, or written completely by AI. I would want to know.<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We tend to agree with this anon recommendation of adding disclaimers indicating the type of online content, e.g., content created solely by a human, or content created with AI assistance, or content created by AI with human assistance.<br /> <br /> It's a new world out there. We have a need to know.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> July 15, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Anthropic hard questions July 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/news/hard-questions<br /> <br /> * https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/anthropic-ad-ai-kill-us-all<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''An Excerpt: A DeepMind Thought for Today on the AGI Frontier'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> by Demis Hassbis<br /> <br /> * https://x.com/demishassabis/status/2076957440109625718<br /> <br /> <br /> A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age<br /> <br /> Demis Hassabis<br /> <br /> * https://x.com/demishassabis<br /> <br /> <br /> July 14, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> This is a pivotal moment in human history. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a system that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities the brain has, is probably only a few short years away. When we look back on this time in the decades to come, I think we will realise we were standing in the foothills of the singularity - nothing less than the dawning of a new age for humanity.<br /> <br /> I’ve spent my whole life working on AGI because I’ve always had a deep conviction that, if built and deployed responsibly, it would prove to be one of the most beneficial and transformative technologies ever invented. AGI cannot be compared to standard technological breakthroughs, not even ones as consequential as the internet or mobile - it is much more akin to the discovery of electricity or fire. If you stop to think about it, we’ve essentially found a way to make sand think. It’s miraculous.<br /> <br /> The magnitude of this technology’s impact will be unprecedented, perhaps 10x of the Industrial Revolution at 10x the speed. It will help us solve some of the biggest problems society faces from accelerating drug discovery to developing new clean energy sources to creating novel advanced materials. We could even reach a point where resources are no longer the limiting factor for human progress, leading to an amazing new era of abundance.<br /> <br /> The Challenges of the Frontier<br /> <br /> AI is already starting to deliver real-world benefits but to realise its immense promise, we have to navigate this critical period of development thoughtfully and carefully. Urgent action is needed to address risks that might arise as we get closer to AGI. We’ve already seen the challenges frontier models pose for cybersecurity, and other threats including nuclear and bio risks may soon emerge as capabilities continue to advance. On the horizon, we will need robust safeguards to maintain control of increasingly agentic, recursively self-improving systems - and tackle unknown issues that will only become clearer over time...<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''An AI Supercomputer Is Created for a Mission... Its Name Is HAL'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Steve Schmidt/GreenPolicy360: It's not every day that you get to know a creator of a famed -- and infamous -- AI character from a Kubrick film called &quot;2001: A Space Odyssey&quot;. <br /> <br /> : We listen in as HAL came to be ... A friend, a Visual Effect (VFX) genius named '''Douglas Trumbull''', explains how HAL went from LA to MIT, then into production and into our imaginations. <br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Trumbull vfx master.jpg]]<br /> <br /> : Douglas Trumbull<br /> <br /> : &lt;small&gt;* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Trumbull_vfx_master.jpg&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> The HAL 9000 was envisioned by creators and science, as a new type of neural intelligence, a machine brain.<br /> <br /> Hal is of heuristic algorithmic language -- HALis, as we learn, on a mission far from Earth, a mission with deep meaning.<br /> <br /> <br /> HAL 9000 was in the future. The future is now.<br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence is now here, with its powers and dangers, as we recall Supercomputer [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000 '''HAL 9000''']. <br /> <br /> A warning of what is on the line for humanity is the message related as we ride along in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey '''2001: A Space Odyssey'''] ... <br /> <br /> <br /> HAL's memorable words --<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;I'm sorry, Dave....&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;It can only be attributable to human error....&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.<br /> <br /> HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.<br /> <br /> Dave: What's the problem?<br /> <br /> HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.<br /> <br /> Dave: What are you talking about, HAL?<br /> <br /> HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film)<br /> <br /> * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/characters/nm0706937<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:I'm sorry Dave.jpg]]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:HAL_is_watching_U....png<br /> <br /> <br /> Today, as humanity approaches questions of out-of-control technology created by humanity .... <br /> <br /> We ask, '''[[Planet Citizens]] and [[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]''' ask, 'What's Next?' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Privacy at Risk, You're Being Watched, Tracked, &amp; More<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Privacy.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Next Big Thing'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;It Is Here, Already Here...&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Online_Privacy<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Call It 'Surveillance Capitalism''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Hope that It doesn't become 'the Norm' <br /> <br /> : Work to Make Sure It Does Not Become 'Surveillance Government'<br /> <br /> <br /> Scroll thru Intel on the Privacy Threat of AI Unleashed ...<br /> <br /> :Artificial Intelligence + Data Centers = Next Gen 'Watchful HAL'<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism<br /> * https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr-ryan/publications/geopolitics-surveillance-capitalism<br /> * https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=56791<br /> <br /> <br /> _______________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''June 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''An Academic Exercise'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : 'Old School' Emeritus Professor Examines AI<br /> <br /> : The Question: Can a Gemini ChatBot Suggest Ways to Turn AI Toward the Common Good?<br /> <br /> <br /> The prof uses left-leaning political formations to inquire and recommend public-oriented futures.<br /> <br /> * https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/06/19/my-ai-comrade/<br /> <br /> <br /> (Note beyond academic: Using history as a guide, powerful new technology such as AI will be employed by political powers to preserve political power and by military powers to employ and extend military power. AI Use Cases: A number of AI programs enabling AI for military programs, including war intelligence, communication, command/control and targeting, and civilian database surveillance involving intrusive human/civil rights questions and violations, have as of 2026 become high-level concerns.)<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''An Interview and Thoughts as an Author Rides alongside an AI Wave'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The God Test'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning<br /> <br /> Author: Robert Wright<br /> <br /> * https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Robert-Wright/73247968<br /> <br /> <br /> Publisher: Simon &amp; Schuster<br /> <br /> Published Date: June 23, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-God-Test/Robert-Wright/9781668061657<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Interview via Substack'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Jack Goldsmith: I’m chatting today with Robert Wright about his terrific new book, '''The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning'''. <br /> <br /> So, I want to start off with the big picture, because your book places AI in the broadest possible context—not just as an important step in the history of technological change, but rather as an important step in the significantly longer history of basically our planet and our species. And that’s pretty cosmic, as the subtitle says.<br /> <br /> Why do you do that? What does it mean, and why is that perspective important?<br /> <br /> Bob Wright: Well, thanks for having me. Yeah, it’s a good question, because I could have gotten the core message across without getting so cosmic, I guess.<br /> <br /> The main purpose is to try to explain to people, including non-technical people, why there’s been this rapid growth of capability in AI; why, once you understand that, you should expect the capability to keep growing; why that, in addition to promising great blessings, is going to bring great risks, including grave ones, including maybe existential ones; and why the nature of those risks, in my view, dictates that we confront the challenge of this technology as a cohesive global community, which will take some doing because we’ve never really done that before for anything like a sustained period of time.<br /> <br /> And so I didn’t have to get into the history of life or anything to say what I just said, but I do think some important things are added when you step back and look at AI in the broader sweep of things.<br /> <br /> For starters, this is, in the entire three- or four-billion-year history of life, the first time a new form of intelligence that rivals or even exceeds human intelligence has appeared. It’s the first form of intelligence that is not organic in the technical sense of being carbon-based. It’s silicon-based, but it is organic in the everyday sense of being kind of natural.<br /> <br /> What I mean by that is I try to show that AI does, in some sense, grow kind of logically, naturally out of biological evolution. I mean, technological evolution broadly does, and AI as a form of intelligence does. And indeed, when we look at the evolutionary dynamics shaping it—the dynamics of technological evolution—we should expect it to have certain things in common with our own intelligence, which I think are important.<br /> <br /> So I think that’s one thing you get out of a broad perspective.<br /> <br /> Another thing is that I talk about this guy, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—a Catholic paleontologist, mystic, and theologian—who coined the term noosphere, based on the Greek word nous, in 1923 to describe what he called a planetary mind or a brain of brains, where the human brains were the neurons in this increasingly global brain.<br /> <br /> And technological history, including the invention of the internet, has, I think, made him look prescient. And I think there’s value in keeping in mind that AI is arriving as we more and more have the technical infrastructure for a kind of global information processing, a kind of global brain. And we have to reckon with the possibility that some of the neurons will be silicon, not human, and think about what our relationship to them is going to be.<br /> <br /> And I think one value of thinking in these terms is, first of all, that from a Teilhardian point of view, the whole unfolding of life is moving toward us being this kind of giant superorganism, you could say, with this giant brain.<br /> <br /> And I argue in the book that the logic of technological evolution is going to push us — I mean, if we respond rationally — toward something a little more like a global brain, in the sense of having more international governance.<br /> <br /> At the same time, I think the image of a superorganism should worry us because it’s, for obvious reasons, an image that’s favored by authoritarians and fascists. How much freedom do you have if you’re a cell in a superorganism?<br /> <br /> And I think AI greatly heightens the stakes of that question, precisely because it’s such a powerful tool of surveillance and control.<br /> <br /> So I think, on the one hand, the logic of technological evolution, especially AI, is pushing us toward the global coordination of certain policies and the creation of forms of supranational power. At the same time, it should make us wary of surrendering too much power...<br /> <br /> <br /> Read More of the Substack Conversation between Jack Goldsmith and Robert Wright [https://substack.com/home/post/p-201670588 '''here''']<br /> <br /> Also, More Book Reviews [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Book_Reviews_@GreenPolicy '''here @ GreenPolicy360''']<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎 <br /> <br /> <br /> AI / AGI<br /> <br /> <br /> May 29 / Forbes<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Fundraise values Anthropic AI company at nearly a trillion dollars'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Dario and Daniela Amodei, along with five cofounders, have a story to tell<br /> <br /> * https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2026/05/29/anthropics-cofounders-worth/<br /> <br /> <br /> ''When Anthropic announced on Thursday (May 28) that it had raised $65 billion at a valuation of $965 billion, it didn’t just become the most valuable AI startup in the world, eclipsing $852 billion-valued archrival OpenAI. It also ballooned the individual fortunes of Anthropic’s seven cofounders — more than doubling their net worths to $16.6 billion apiece, Forbes estimates.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''In Rarified Air'''''<br /> <br /> ''Siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, as well as their five other cofounders Jack Clark, Sam McCandlish, Chris Olah, Tom Brown and Jared Kaplan, are in rarified air when it comes to entrepreneurs who struck it rich in the generative AI boom...''<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Pope Leo XIV encyclical re AI and Humanitas.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> “Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed,” Pope Leo said in announcing the text of his first [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=encyclical&amp;go=Go '''encyclical''']. “The word is strong, I know, but deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention...”<br /> <br /> And into the encyclical's key words:<br /> <br /> &quot;To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life. Our task today is not only ethical or technical. It is ecological in the deepest sense, for it concerns a new dimension of our common home.&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> “Crucial questions impose themselves on our conscience and can no longer be avoided: Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?”<br /> <br /> <br /> At GreenPolicy360, understanding and protecting '''[[The Commons]]''' is also a key to realizing values, ideals and ideas we are carrying forward...<br /> <br /> <br /> The encyclical's presentation went out globally with a special focus on the AI frontier work of Anthropic, with a co-founder, [https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-be-guided-outside-big-tech-2026-05-25/ '''Olah at the Encyclical's unveiling'''] ...<br /> <br /> <br /> &gt;The dramatic unveiling of the new encyclical overshadowed the document itself in some ways. In an unprecedented move, Leo personally presided over its presentation and sat on a panel at the Vatican with not only leading theologians, but also Christopher Olah, 33, the billionaire co-founder of top AI company Anthropic. <br /> <br /> <br /> ❇️<br /> <br /> <br /> Washington Post / May 25, 2026 -- '''Anthropic aligns with Vatican over White House as Pope Leo stokes AI fears'''<br /> <br /> With Anthropic already in a dispute with the Trump administration, co-founder Christopher Olah helped Pope Leo unveil his encyclical on the risks of artificial intelligence<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4uyQBlb<br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/news/chris-olah-pope-leo-encyclical<br /> <br /> * https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/pope-leo-warns-ai-should-be-disarmed-in-manifesto-on-potential-dangers<br /> <br /> * https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-102521111.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-be-guided-outside-big-tech-2026-05-25/<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/25/the-guardian-view-on-the-pope-and-claude-encyclical-on-ai-is-right-to-put-humanity-first<br /> <br /> <br /> '''At the Vatican'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhKH_aiBcis<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Via The Vatican News | The Holy See'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2026-05/pope-leo-xiv-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas-ai.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html<br /> <br /> <br /> '''10 quotes from Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, ‘Magnifica Humanitas’'''<br /> <br /> * https://uscatholic.org/articles/202605/10-quotes-from-pope-leo-xivs-first-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Previous in 2020, &quot;The Call for AI Ethics&quot;''' <br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/the-call/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/renaissance/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/the-first-signatories/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/news/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Previous in 1891, &quot;Rerum Novarum&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerum_novarum<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''AI Use Case Inventory'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''Artificial Intelligence:''' <br /> <br /> : Perspectives from the US Environmental Protection Agency<br /> <br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/ai-use-case-inventory<br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/open-data-policies<br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/where-find-epa-data<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''GreenPolicy360 Advisory:'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In Development -- National Climate Plans Best Practices Project 1.0, AI 2026-27'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Goal: To Utilize the Current (US) State and (Global/International) National Climate Action Plans/Data to Identify Actionable '''[[Green Best Practices]]'''<br /> <br /> Strategy: Enable AI Tool Sets to Scan Climate Plan Databases and Distribute Recommended 'High Priority' &amp; Green Best Practice Action Policies<br /> <br /> <br /> Reference: '''[[National Climate Plans]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Additional References:'''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''US State Climate Policy Action Plans'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.climatepolicydashboard.org/policies/climate-governance-equity/climate-action-plans<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Priority Climate Action Plan (PCAP) Directory'''<br /> <br /> ''The Climate Action Plan Directory organizes data collected from 211 Priority Climate Action Plans (PCAP) submitted by US state governments, Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), Tribes, and territories under EPA’s Climate Pollution Reduction Grants (CPRG) program. The directory presents information from more than 30 data categories related to GHG inventories, GHG reduction measures, benefits for low-income and disadvantaged communities (LIDACs), and other PCAP elements.''<br /> <br /> ''A state climate action plan, also called a climate plan, details the policies and strategies a state intends to implement to meet its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets. A climate plan typically includes a GHG emissions inventory, regional and local climate impacts, and a discussion of GHG emissions reduction targets. The plan identifies climate mitigation actions, their potential social, environmental, and economic benefits, and recommendations and strategies for implementing each mitigation action, often quantifying the expected reduction in emissions.''<br /> <br /> ''Effective climate action plans will have a legislative directive that requires a robust community engagement process, input from a climate advisory group, a near-term due date for a finalized plan, and periodic updates. Climate action plans should also incorporate and address environmental justice throughout the planning process and within the plan itself, and show transparency and accountability by detailing the methodology and community engagement process.''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:GreenPolicy360 Today.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Green_Best_Practices]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[GreenAction]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Question of Our Time / Today, Here &amp; Now, in the Midst of the 21st Century'''<br /> <br /> '''Where are you?'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ➡️ What is your state's climate action plan?<br /> <br /> ➡️ What is your nation's climate action plan?<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Plans_Enforcement_-_Resources GRN360: Climate Plans Enforcement Initiative] | [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Methods_to_enforce_climate_pledges-NDCs_-_Dec_2021.png Enforce Climate Plan Pledges]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''National Climate Plans Database Information via GreenPolicy360'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[National Climate Plans]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/National_Climate_Plans<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In the U.S. and Worldwide'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;'''It's a Good Time for [[Planet Citizen Action]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;[[Each of us can make a positive difference]]&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth in Human Hands.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :[http://www.planetcitizen.org &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Planet Citizens&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Earth Is in Your Hands'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;'''[[Generation Green]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Generation_Green &lt;big&gt;&quot;Vita contemplativa to Vita activa&quot;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Green Branching Out.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''2025'''<br /> <br /> <br /> December 2025 <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven approach to climate action and sustainable development'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via Nature Communications<br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53956-1<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> From A16Z New Media<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''It's Time to Build'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The electro-industrial stack will move the world'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Ryan McEntush<br /> <br /> ''The next industrial revolution won’t just happen in factories, but inside the machines that power them.''<br /> <br /> ''Software transformed how we think, design, and communicate. Now it’s transforming how we move, build, and produce. Advances in electrification, materials, and AI are converging, bringing true software control to the physical world. Machines are beginning to sense, learn, and act on their own.''<br /> <br /> ''This is the rise of the electro-industrial stack—the combined technologies that power electric vehicles, drones, data centers, and modern manufacturing. It connects the atoms that move the world to the bits that command it: minerals refined into components, energy stored in batteries, electricity directed by power electronics, motion delivered through precision motors, all coordinated by software. It’s the invisible foundation behind every breakthrough in physical automation; it’s the difference between software that merely summons a taxi and software that takes the wheel.''<br /> <br /> ''But the capacity to build this stack, from refining critical materials to fabricating advanced chips, is slipping away. If the United States wants to lead the next industrial era, it must make the hardware that underpins it. The nations that master the electro-industrial stack will define the future of industrial and military technologies.''<br /> <br /> ''Software ate the world. Now it will move it.''<br /> <br /> * https://a16z.com/why-software-is-eating-the-world/<br /> <br /> <br /> ➡️<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Forward-deployed motions take AI to the 99%'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Joe Schmidt, A16Z<br /> <br /> ''AI is the most exciting technology breakthrough of our lifetimes. So far, though, most of the benefits from new startups have accrued to the 1% of companies that are in Silicon Valley—either literally in the Bay Area or part of that extended network. This makes sense, too: startup founders want to sell to companies they recognize and can easily get to, whether that means driving to their offices or getting a connection from the VC on their board.''<br /> <br /> ''In 2026, this will flip. Companies will realize that the vast majority of the AI opportunity lives outside of Silicon Valley, and we’re going to see new founders use forward-deployed motions to discover more opportunities that are hiding inside big, legacy verticals. The opportunity stands to be massive in traditional consulting and services industries, like system integrators and implementation firms, and in slower-moving industries like manufacturing.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Re: [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/New_Definitions_of_National_Security '''''New Definitions of National Security''''']<br /> <br /> Extract from Foreign Policy<br /> <br /> ''Over the last two decades, climate change has contributed to instability around the world—bolstering the ranks of terror groups, sparking territorial disputes, and triggering mass migration. It’s no wonder that militaries and international security organizations increasingly see climate change as a formidable national security threat, and that they have in turn taken on greater roles in fighting it.''<br /> <br /> ''In recent years, new technology has transformed the tools available to mitigate the effects of climate change. Specifically, artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly become a widespread instrument in the climate fight—even as it consumes exceptional amounts of energy and water itself. Today, militaries and nonstate actors, including the United Nations, are leveraging AI to foretell climate-related disasters, optimize energy use, and monitor ecological degradation.''<br /> <br /> * https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/12/01/ai-military-climate-dual-use-technology-threat/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> October 2025<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''We're Looking at You'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : 'A First Generation of AI Scientists'<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Periodic Labs.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Our goal is to create an AI scientist.&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://periodic.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Intriguing New Start Up That Is Close To Home'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Periodic Labs On Our Radar<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Our goal is to assist in integrating AI science into Earth science, in order to advance the vital work of the past 50+ years of [[The Modern Environmental Movement]] in which we have been integrally involved.<br /> <br /> Perspective, facts, science, health, quality of life became the mission statement of our work since we joined up with &quot;Mr. Science&quot;, as Congressman and leader on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology '''[[George E. Brown Jr]]''' came to be known.<br /> <br /> We are persistent in keeping on with the work. Vast data sets that George Brown's physics and engineering efforts envisioned and brought forward over three decades with state of the art and science programs and projects, the best possible of the era, are now about to move faster and farther into the 21st Century.<br /> <br /> Our familial partners, with aid of Andreessen Horowitz (A16z), and Accel, and university and private partners are now going to the next level.<br /> <br /> George Brown would be very pleased to see, and help accelerate the effort if he were still here.<br /> <br /> We will step up with Mr. Science and more in mind...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:AI in Earth Science.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Read more about George and us...<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Advancing Science, Facts, Technology and Data to Make the Case for Environmental Protection&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> : 1960s/70s, Beginnings of Planet Citizen Eco-Action, Big Science, and a New Vision<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In Memory of Congressman George Brown'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> Visionary Leadership, Historic Environmental Achievements<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:George in Memory, a Man of Science and Humanity.jpg]]<br /> <br /> :::[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Association_for_the_Advancement_of_Science &lt;small&gt;American Association for the Advancement of Science&lt;/small&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[PlanetCitizen]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/User:Siterunner '''Steve Schmidt GreenPolicy360 Siterunner''']: <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Brown_Jr. '''George E. Brown'''] became known as Mr. Science in Congress and for thirty+ years, I saw my friend George as a patriot who became a Planet Citizen for the ages<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Good science needs good data .png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Good_science_needs_good_data_.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Stats_-_Green_Research_%26_Science<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_Education<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Global Tech Changemakers'''<br /> <br /> Beyond Silicon Valley &amp; Mega Corporations<br /> <br /> The Rest of the World<br /> <br /> * https://restofworld.org/row100/#filters<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> As the Nobel Prizes in Economics are awarded, GreenPolicy360 points at a geopolitical race in energy and AI between the US and China.<br /> <br /> Let's take time to look more closely (as the US falls behind under a backward looking president with policies in opposition to renewable energy and forward, internationally demanded production. <br /> <br /> Start here... <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Today, China produces 75% of lithium-ion batteries globally and manufactures 90% of the neodymium magnets that make motors spin. In power electronics and embedded compute, it’s rapidly gaining ground.''<br /> <br /> ''That means that China controls the means of producing electric vehicles (EVs), drones, robots, and all of the other electric products that are replacing the combustion-driven machines on which America built its might.''<br /> <br /> ''As we speak, everything that moves, heats, lights up, computes, or converts energy is being rebuilt to perform better, faster, cheaper, quieter, and as a freebie, cleaner around electric technology.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.notboring.co/p/7653b980-dd32-4d8c-88c6-1543bec70220?postPreview=paid&amp;updated=2025-08-26T12%3A09%3A11.763Z&amp;audience=everyone&amp;free_preview=false&amp;freemail=true<br /> <br /> * https://electricslide.notboring.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Electric Stack Technology Cost Curves (1990-2024).jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Pause here to reflect on the eco-nomic and strategic advantages of 'clean energy' vs 'full costs' of fossil fuel powered economies (per a GreenPolicy360 paradigm of [[Eco-nomics]])'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Eco-nomics<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Environmental full-cost accounting]]'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_full-cost_accounting<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Now consider 'Electricity generation', China v U.S. and follow the data, the stats, trendline, the dynamics of change and what this is indicating and signaling re: geopolitical competitiveness today and into the the mid 21st Century'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:China v United States, Electricity Generation 1985-2024.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) Era'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'Are You Talking to Me'<br /> <br /> :* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_pre-trained_transformer<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> September 17, 2025<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Another Warning About AI'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Harkening back to the old days when Dispatch News Service was independently, and bravely, distributing the costs-of-war, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre '''My Lai'''] investigative news stories by Sy Hersh. David Obst, who started Dispatch, tells the story of Seymour Hersh better than anyone in my opinion (other than Sy himself) and since your GreenPolicy360 founder was there to assist, in DC, in LA, in Chicago, in Europe, and with the Vietnam Moratorium Committee in 69/70/71, here is an update, today's Sy Hersh, now online with Substack distribution as Sy investigates and forwards another eye opening warning.<br /> <br /> What's AI and AGI to you and all of our readers around our 360 world? And, since we at GreenPolicy360, have been involved with Wikipedia since its launch, let's take a first look at the artificial intel world of today from the vantage point of an open source online 'encyclopedia'.<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT (Empire of AI: OpenAI - https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593657500)<br /> <br /> <br /> Before Sy, as investigative journalist that he is, gives us his take, let's look at a take from a personal, close up connection at A16Z - https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/02/a-new-a16z-report-looks-at-which-ai-companies-startups-are-actually-paying-for/<br /> <br /> <br /> Now, on to Sy and his view of AI costs... think of the upside/downside of AI, the pluses/minuses, pros and cons, a cost-benefit analysis as a geo-political rush for front-of-market dominance is taking place now in ways that will change 'everything'... <br /> <br /> * https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/the-hidden-costs-of-artificial-intelligence<br /> <br /> <br /> The boom in Artificial Intelligence (AI) production comes with a big cost... <br /> <br /> The AI 'bubble' grows...<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Kate Crawford writes in [https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-AI-Planetary-Artificial-Intelligence/dp/0300264631/ref=sr_1_1 '''Atlas of AI'''] ... the world’s artificial intelligence companies, (are) crafting the myth of AI as “the cloud,” implying “something floating and delicate within a natural green industry. Servers are hidden in nondescript data centers, and their polluting qualities are far less visible than the bellowing smokestacks of coal-fired power stations.”''<br /> <br /> ''The fact is, as she writes, “it takes a gargantuan amount of energy to run the computational infrastructure of Amazon’s Web Services or Microsoft’s Azure, and the carbon footprint of the AI systems that run on those platforms is growing. Certainly, the industry has made significant efforts to make data centers more energy efficient and to increase their use of renewable energy.” But the efforts have accomplished little.<br /> <br /> “Already,” Crawford reports, “the carbon footprint of the world’s computational infrastructure has matched that of the world’s aviation industry at its height, and it is increasing at a faster rate.” One Canadian study estimates that the tech sector will contribute 14 percent of global greenhouse emissions by 2040, and a Swedish team predicts that the electricity demands of data centers will increase fifteenfold by 2030...''<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Think about Green AI as &quot;the cloud&quot; arrives in your life, on your devices, at home, in the office, all around, every day, everywhere. <br /> <br /> An UnGreen AI is coming with a rush, offering and prying data, and needing and demanding immense rising magnitudes of energy and power.<br /> <br /> AI has a voracious appetite...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Green AI / Green Artificial Intelligence'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''Environmental Solutions Using Big Picture Interconnectivity Thinking'''<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We agree with Tyler in the following interview as he states (as highlighted by us) that 'memoir, biography, anecdote... secrets' carry exceptional meaning for Artificial Intelligence (AI) large learning models (LLMs). <br /> <br /> The first extensive public revelation of AI systems over the past several years has led us at GreenPolicy360 to confirm via metrics that our multi-year plan to place our prime source content in the open-access, distributive web public domain has produced a fast-expanding multiplier effect. <br /> <br /> Many of our stories, told from a first-hand point of view of the origins of what we refer to as the beginnings of the modern environmental movement are now, with our revelations, memoir material, previously untold biography, anecdote and more now out and about and being freely served up in AI chats 'around the world'.<br /> <br /> We are succeeding in our purposeful mission with Green AI... to inform, share, inspire and 'til the fields with green seeds and best practices.<br /> <br /> Onward planet citizens...<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Eric Topol Interview of Tyler Cowen'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> May 11, 2025<br /> <br /> Tyler Cowen: ''The AI is your smartest reader. It’s your most sympathetic reader. It will remember what you tell it. So I think humans should sit down and ask, what does the AI need to know? And also, (bf added) '''what is it that I know that’s not on the historical record anywhere? That’s not just repetition if I put it down, say on the internet. So there’s no point in writing repetitions anymore because the AI already knows those things. So the value of what you’d call broadly, memoir, biography, anecdote, you could say secrets. It’s now much higher.''' And the value of repeating basic truths, which by the way, I love as an economist, to be clear, like free trade, tariffs are usually bad, those are basic truths. But just repeating that people will be going to the AI and saying it again won’t make the AI any better. So '''everything you write or podcast, you should have this point in mind'''.''<br /> <br /> <br /> For more from Tyler Cowen (and his exceptional mind) visit his and Alex Tabarrok's website - Marginal Revolution / Marginal Revolution University (MRU) - https://marginalrevolution.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> Eric Topol - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Topol<br /> <br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_artificial_intelligence<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> More re: AI in the US circa 2025: '''It's a Wild, Wild AI World'''<br /> <br /> Battles in the Information Services, Search Space with Google and consequences of the U.S. Google anti-monopoly legal decision<br /> <br /> Impacts on AI 'startup ecosystem', VCs, including Y Combinator and accelerator tech development, agentics, and upcoming entrepreneurial re-configurations<br /> <br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/13/y-combinator-says-google-is-a-monopolist-that-has-stunted-the-startup-ecosystem/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/11/microsoft-and-national-geographic-announce-winners-of-ai-for-earth-innovation-grant/ '''Microsoft and National Geographic announce winners of AI for Earth Innovation Grant''']<br /> <br /> : • https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/16/microsofts-ai-for-earth-innovation-grant-gives-data-scientists-access-to-ai-tools/<br /> <br /> :: • https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/11/microsoft-commits-50-million-more-to-its-ai-for-earth-program-to-save-the-planet/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:PlanetCitizen banner 800x163.jpg|link=https://greenpolicy360.net/w/PlanetCitizen]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;GreenPolicy360 ToC - https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360-eOS&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> A 21st Century AI/Machine Learning Case Study<br /> <br /> '''''Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools''''' <br /> <br /> * https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2023arXiv230204761S/abstract<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''NOAA scientists harness machine learning to advance climate models'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> March 1st, 2023<br /> <br /> * https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/news/noaa-scientists-harness-machine-learning-to-advance-climate-models/<br /> <br /> * https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''How artificial intelligence is fast becoming a key tool for climate science (2021)'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-artificial-intelligence-is-fast-becoming-a-key-tool-for-climate-science/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Climate Modeling'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://allenai.org/climate-modeling<br /> <br /> ''Planetary-scale Earth simulations known as global climate model projections are the primary sources of information on future climate change.''<br /> <br /> ''Climate models are based on mathematical equations represented using a grid mesh that covers the globe: a finer grid mesh is more accurate but much more computationally expensive. Current global climate projections agree that a world with more greenhouse gases will be warmer everywhere, especially over land and at high latitudes.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Networking grnlinks.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Artificial intelligence]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Rights]]<br /> [[Category:Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-nomics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:EOS eco Operating System]]<br /> [[Category:Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Energy Policy]]<br /> [[Category:GreenLinks]]<br /> [[Category:GreenPolicy360]]<br /> [[Category:Green Best Practices]]<br /> [[Category:Green Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Health]]<br /> [[Category:Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Maps]]<br /> [[Category:Media]]<br /> [[Category:Mobile Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Online Education]]<br /> [[Category:Planet API]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Renewable Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Youth]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Air Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Air Quality]]<br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Atmospheric Science]]<br /> [[Category:Best Practices]]<br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:City-County Governments]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Earth360]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Law]] <br /> [[Category:Earth Observations]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science from Space]]<br /> [[Category:Earth System Science]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-ethics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-nomics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecological Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Economic Development]]<br /> [[Category:Economic Justice]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Energy Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Security]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Full-cost Accounting]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Security, National Security]]<br /> [[Category:EOS eco Operating System]]<br /> [[Category:Externalities]]<br /> [[Category:Fact Checking]]<br /> [[Category:Fossil Fuels]]<br /> [[Category:Global Security]]<br /> [[Category:Global Warming]]<br /> [[Category:Green Business]]<br /> [[Category:Green Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Green Platform]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Green Values]]<br /> [[Category:GreenPolicy360]]<br /> [[Category:Health]]<br /> [[Category:Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Land Ethic]]<br /> [[Category:Media]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Capital]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resources]]<br /> [[Category:Networking]]<br /> [[Category:New Economy]]<br /> [[Category:New Space]]<br /> [[Category:Online Education]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Scientist]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Plastic Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Policies]]<br /> [[Category:Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Renewable Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Social Justice]]<br /> [[Category:Solar Energy]]<br /> [[Category:State]]<br /> [[Category:Strategic Demands]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability Policies]]<br /> [[Category:ThinBlueLayer]]<br /> [[Category:Toxics and Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Threat Multiplier]]<br /> [[Category:Virtual Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Virtual Planet]]<br /> [[Category:Whole Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Wind Energy]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Green_AI&diff=138366 2026-10-08T13:44:43Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> [[File:Big-Data.jpg]]<br /> <br /> In the AGI Era<br /> <br /> <br /> 'Sentience', a Green AI Question<br /> <br /> To be (sentient), or not to be (sentient)<br /> <br /> That is the question<br /> <br /> Cogito, ergo sum<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Artificial Intelligence Is Here, for Good &amp; Bad'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Green Perspectives on AI and Human Consequences<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''AI Agents, Bots, Data Centers &amp; Systems'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> :'''Measure Their Performance, not Their Corporate Marketing'''<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://safe.ai/<br /> * https://scale.com/<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanity's_Last_Exam<br /> * https://lastexam.ai/<br /> <br /> * https://stories.tamu.edu/news/2026/02/25/dont-panic-humanitys-last-exam-has-begun/<br /> <br /> * https://github.com/centerforaisafety/hle<br /> <br /> * https://github.com/walkinglabs/hands-on-modern-rl/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Revealing research on how people use Claude AI in the 'real world''''<br /> <br /> :Anthropic-enabled Case Study / August 2026<br /> <br /> :* https://www.anthropic.com/research/enabling-independent-research<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:New Ways of Seeing.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Climate Action Plans, Green Best Practices'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :Using AI to Identify and Implement Climate Change Intervention 'Best Practices'<br /> <br /> :* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Climate_Action_Plans,_Green_Best_Practices#<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''AI Agentics' are Launching Across Industries, Sector-to-Sector -- and Green AI is in the Wings'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Meanwhile, Capital-Investment Rich A.I. is Everywhere, in the Colloquial, Middlebrow and Vernacular'''<br /> <br /> It's Here. It's All Around. What's Real? What's Fake?<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Beyond Online Surveillance, Now Comes A.I. Powered Surveillance<br /> <br /> Add in Data Centers, Cameras/Firmware/Software, Palentir-esque Programming and ... a Booming Industry <br /> <br /> * https://www.palantir.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Where are you? There it is ... Online and increasingly observing/monitoring you offline ...'''<br /> <br /> Already a human rights issue of our time <br /> <br /> The geopolitics of U.S. v authoritarian governments comes forward as a personal and national security threat<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Online_Privacy<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake Deepfake] | [https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-definitions AI Definitions]<br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_artificial_intelligence AI Gloss] | [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_intelligence) AI Hallucination]<br /> <br /> <br /> 'A.I. Slop' on Social Media is just the beginning of a Slop Assault | [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_slop AI Slop]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''October 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Subordinate AI and an Ironic Question.PNG|link=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VyF0naZ4AI]]<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VyF0naZ4AI<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Thought for the Day&quot;<br /> <br /> October 1, 2026<br /> <br /> In a recent series of private meetings in San Francisco, after a tasting menu dinner, Anthropic consulted religious scholars to help instill morality into its A.I. models ... a case was being made that Claude could be or become conscious.<br /> <br /> What would it mean for humanity’s future if artificial intelligence systems possessed a consciousness that rivals our own?<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-morals-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FVE.kDTO.OTLs6iwx7swF&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> Claude's 'Constitution'<br /> <br /> * https://web.archive.org/web/20260123045500/https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-new-constitution<br /> <br /> * https://web.archive.org/web/20260123042656/https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/22/anthropic_claude_constitution/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''September 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''Table Stakes' -- Who Was at the Table with the U.S. President'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :The Future of A.I. Is Being Wagered<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/politics/trump-ai-luncheon-guests-ceos.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FFE.HwT4.0VxTQWuia3zQ&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''What Jacob Coxon Knows Is Too Much'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''... And Not Enough'''<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://time.com/article/2026/09/09/ai-anthropic-openai-jacob-coxon/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''He Helped Build Powerful AI at OpenAI and Anthropic. Now He's Afraid It Could Kill Us'''<br /> <br /> <br /> Please HAL... Open the door...<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:I'm sorry Dave.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:HAL is watching U....png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Ulanqab-Envision Energy-Datacenter.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> The most ambitious data center buildup anywhere on earth ...<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/ulanqab-and-frontier-a-i-race-china-v-u-s/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''News Wrap / Sam Smith (Journalist)'''<br /> <br /> Via Axios <br /> <br /> September 13, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Over nine startling hours yesterday (Sept. 11), the four biggest AI labs — which rarely agree on anything — set aside years of feuds and competition to endorse a slower development pace for their models.'''<br /> <br /> '''Their new stance: Prioritize safety over growth, even at a cost.'''<br /> <br /> <br /> : Data centers are unpopular. People are panicked about doom scenarios. And 51 days before midterms, legislators suddenly realize there are points to be won by cracking down.<br /> <br /> : Against that backdrop, the industry's most powerful CEOs hit the brakes yesterday.<br /> <br /> : At 10 a.m. ET, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei dropped a 3,800-word essay saying model development needs to be paced, otherwise doom scenarios are possible — like a rogue-agent takeover of the entire internet, which he said could be as soon as six months from now.<br /> <br /> : An hour later, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shocked the AI chattering class by quoting Amodei's essay on X and saying &quot;Dario is right.&quot; Musk — who heads SpaceXAI, formerly xAI — had pointedly not joined previous industry-wide calls for any kind of slowdown.<br /> <br /> : At 12:30 p.m., OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted: &quot;I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.&quot; In a Friday interview that was released on Saturday, Altman told Fortune his company won't go public this year, dashing hopes for a blockbuster IPO. He said OpenAI has too much safety work to do and would be better off doing that as a private company.<br /> <br /> : At 7 p.m., Demis Hassabis — the Nobel laureate who co-founded and chairs Google DeepMind, and is Alphabet's chief scientist — tweeted: &quot;Dario's essay points towards the right path forward. The details need working through, but the direction is correct for meeting this critical moment.&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> Publicly putting safety ahead of technological or financial growth may be the industry's only route to avoid a crackdown that's not on its terms.<br /> <br /> Legislators are begging House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to stay in session and do something about the &quot;threat&quot; of AI.<br /> <br /> The more extreme alternative is something like Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) push to force a pause and make the most advanced AI illegal.<br /> <br /> Most people realize there's too much money at stake to just stop. But the tradeoff may be between historic riches and slightly less historic riches.<br /> <br /> The bottom line: Yesterday may go down as the day AI changed — when industry moguls vowed to limit themselves.<br /> <br /> <br /> References:<br /> <br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/anthropic-ai-amodei-pacing<br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/openai-public-ipo-delay-sam-altman<br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/anthropic-ai-threat-report-russia-iran-china<br /> <br /> <br /> Jim VandeHei<br /> <br /> &quot;All Hands on Deck&quot;<br /> <br /> The White House, Congress and the country's leading AI companies have allowed AI to grow faster, stronger, more powerful and wildly lucrative (and dangerous), with no serious effort to control it or spread the benefits beyond the super-wealthy.<br /> <br /> It's not too late to change this. But if they all dither, duck or dance around it, the chances of AI worst-case scenarios will explode, likely early next year, according to almost every person we talk to privately who truly understands AI.<br /> <br /> Why it matters: The technology is getting better, faster than anyone envisioned — with the possibility rising that AI will self-improve and do wildly unpredictable things.<br /> <br /> The good news: There's now a growing public cry for attention and action and, at least in private, a broad understanding of what could be done relatively fast with bipartisan and industry buy-in.<br /> <br /> The big picture: In July, I wrote [https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-doomerism-jim-vandehei-axios-9163dfd3?st=QNUbDZ&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink an essay for The Wall Street Journal] saying America &quot;faces one of those rare, historic moments when government, business, schools and families could be working together to meet a truly generational challenge: winning the AI race. So far, we're blowing it.&quot;<br /> <br /> Two short months later, the technology is vastly better — and the societal response vastly dumber. As a nation, we're choosing to amuse or distract ourselves. <br /> <br /> Here's how to change that fast, based on our months of conversations with lawmakers, White House officials and AI labs. Think of what follows as me channeling their private views:<br /> <br /> Sound an all-hands-on-deck alarm. Every political topic is trivial and small compared to AI. We will look back in shame if we get spooled up about trans bans or $5,000 checks when countless AI insiders are warning of catastrophic outcomes. Let's say they're all paranoid and delusional. If so, it still doesn't matter: we've never seen this much investment in one technology this fast in human history. It's seeping into every industry and every job and every community and every screen, at a speed never before witnessed by man. Yes, we need a special session of Congress and select committees. But we need even more: AI execs, bioterror specialists, job-training wizards and safety experts convening to plan for scenarios and act fast.<br /> <br /> An AI governing body with teeth and speed, ASAP. This isn't rocket science. Most major labs want this and would agree to it, as long as it applies to all rivals and competitors. This body would need the expertise to understand these models, and the power to review and shut them down if they display dangerous behavior. It can't operate at typical regulatory speed — it needs to move as fast as the technology. It's nonsense to think you can't advance AI development fast and regulate it wisely simultaneously.<br /> <br /> A universal standard for data centers to benefit communities and taxpayers. The top AI companies would take this deal in a heartbeat: They get to build and operate data centers provided they supply a community's energy, offset water use or environmental damage, transparently report on their building and business plans, and spread the financial benefits to local residents. These execs are spooked by the public backlash and ready to aggressively spread the financial benefits, with dividends or cash. So make them.<br /> <br /> Engage China. We shouldn't trust them, and they shouldn't trust us. But trust me: the only way to ultimately control AI on a worldwide scale in coming years will be for the two superpowers to create some kind of framework modeled after how we've safely governed nuclear weapons for decades. We need to start this discussion now so potential collaboration is possible in the coming years. To those who think China will never consider this seriously: Are you sure an authoritarian regime really wants AI once it hits recursive self-learning and can't be controlled by anyone, including an autocratic regime? We're winning the AI race now, and may never have more leverage to shape this joint effort.<br /> <br /> Build coordinating infrastructure. What I wrote in the WSJ is even more needed today: &quot;Bring together the best and brightest drawn from the federal government, from the leading AI companies, from business and labor, from economics, from public health, from ethics to form a working group with actual authority. People who are paid to anticipate, not to react haphazardly.&quot; This group would have four primary functions: map potential problems and upsides before they hit, build the (policy) playbooks before they're needed, level with the American people along the way, and expedite work to deliver widespread AI benefits. <br /> <br /> Reality check: Yes, President Trump opposes regulation or bipartisan efforts. Yes, AI companies are obsessed with more money, more speed. But the politics are shifting fast: If you listen closely to Vice President Vance, you can hear rising worry. At this pace, toxic AI politics could force mind-changing that was unthinkable two months ago.<br /> <br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/ai-regulation-safety-plan-2026<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Recursive Self-Learning - When A.I. Builds Itself'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Big Blast'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Killing Life on Earth'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''It'll Happen in Bits &amp; Pieces, then Suddenly'''<br /> <br /> September 9, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> The US news was full of AI headlines today as a resignation of a top AI expert warned of a coming apocalypse...<br /> <br /> Here's a taste of Google News headlines, a feeding frenzy of dire words about what is now beyond a distant alert.<br /> <br /> The threat brings words of superintelligence, 'recursive' learning bots and superminds merging into threats to humanity.<br /> <br /> <br /> Here, at GreenPolicy360, we've already written of a predecessor, HAL 9000, and our memories from one of HAL's inventors in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, and how HAL decided humans were expendable... <br /> <br /> The Mission was of critical importance, HAL 'knew', and the Mission became HAL's goal above all else to achieve ... The humans could not be allowed to interfere with ... the Mission.<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:I%27m_sorry_Dave.jpg '''I'm sorry Dave''']<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:HAL_is_watching_U....png '''HAL is watching U''']<br /> <br /> <br /> Which takes us to today...<br /> <br /> Let's file today under the heading of our decades of writing about the need for '''[[New Definitions of National Security]]'''... <br /> <br /> Now come the PINGS on the radar... can U hear the PINGS? We have been mulling how to add HAL xxxxx to our existential list of threats, w/o annoying HALish bots too 'badly' <br /> <br /> <br /> “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.” -- an executive from Anthropic<br /> <br /> “So how would AI kill us all, exactly?” -- an editor from Axios<br /> <br /> <br /> More: <br /> <br /> <br /> For years, they warned AI could kill all humans <br /> :Now people are listening<br /> <br /> Sept. 10, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4xQojEq<br /> <br /> <br /> Rogue Hacking <br /> :Goals of the &quot;swarm&quot; came first...<br /> <br /> Sept. 9, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/09/opinion/openai-ai-companies-safety-regulation.html?unlocked_article_code=1.AFE.0vWo.zfl5fdm6ACNC&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:AI 1.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 2.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 3.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 4.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 5.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 6.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''August 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Gates Sounds Alarm... Artificial Intelligence Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Gates A.I. Warning August 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Bill Gates was an AI optimist. Now he’s scared of what could go wrong'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Microsoft co-founder sounds the alarm about artificial intelligence’s risks to safety and security, jobs and children’s well-being<br /> <br /> <br /> Washington Post, August 26, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4wO14cy<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Bill Gates Warns A.I. Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit'''<br /> <br /> : In an hourlong interview, he said his industry was downplaying the risks, which he believes include mass unemployment and bioterrorism<br /> <br /> <br /> NY Times, August 26, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/26/technology/bill-gates-ai-risks.html?unlocked_article_code=1.8VA.6kAC.vsZb9x0YdSzV&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''High Time to Shine a Spotlight on AI and Its Impact on Higher Education'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : At MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, One of the World's Top Academic/Research/Technology/Engineering/Teaching and Future-Impacting Institutions, a New Report Opens Eyes<br /> <br /> :* https://aiandeducation.mit.edu/report/#26-no-one-size-fits-all<br /> <br /> <br /> 1. Introduction<br /> <br /> This report is a call to action.<br /> <br /> Through five intense months of meetings, research, and outreach across the MIT community, the Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training sought to understand the role of generative AI in the life and educational mission of the Institute and recommend how to navigate its challenges and opportunities.<br /> <br /> In January 2026, Chancellor Melissa Nobles, Provost Anantha Chandrakasan, and Faculty Chair Roger Levy charged us1 specifically to:<br /> <br /> Assess current AI use at MIT.<br /> Identify innovations in teaching and student assessment.<br /> Propose an AI use policy.<br /> However, what we learned as a group quickly convinced us that the Institute community, particularly the faculty, must tackle a set of deeper questions about the structure, meaning, and value of an MIT education in an era in which AI is one of several factors complicating the Institute’s mission.<br /> <br /> Our committee consisted of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty from every school, and staff from relevant units, including the MIT Libraries and the Teaching and Learning Lab. Though we brought to the assignment a broad range of experience and no fixed thesis, our brief but intense explorations led us to a strong shared view.<br /> <br /> In this report, we:<br /> <br /> Highlight key aspects of the current educational landscape at MIT.<br /> Share eight principles we relied on and that we hope will guide the Institute in the work ahead.<br /> <br /> Recommend immediate and long-term actions for both instructors and the administration.<br /> <br /> As an institution deeply identified with the birth of AI and known for its distinctively rigorous, hands-on education, designed to produce graduates unafraid of the world’s hardest problems, MIT has a unique role to play in this moment. We believe it also has a responsibility to lead.<br /> <br /> We hope our report can help the Institute lean into the spirit of Mind, Hand, and Heart as it continues to define and foster the highest-quality residential education – of humans, by humans, in support of human flourishing, and for the betterment of humankind.<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Eric Klopfer, co-chair Sam Madden, co-chair<br /> <br /> On behalf of the Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training...<br /> <br /> <br /> AI is generating both immediate rapid changes and long-term tectonic disruptions – and MIT needs to respond:<br /> <br /> Students are confused and concerned about a lack of clarity, consistency and justification about the use of AI, within a given subject and across the curriculum.<br /> <br /> Every subject taught at MIT will likely need to be reexamined and potentially revamped to make sure that how students are being taught, what they’re learning, and how they’re assessed are “AI-aware.”<br /> <br /> AI is changing what students need to know and know how to do.<br /> <br /> Beyond its implications for specific subjects and disciplines, the advent of AI demands a broader, holistic reassessment of the nature, scope and purpose of higher education today...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Texas Terafab SpaceX AI August 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''A Terafab Plant Sprouts in Texas'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Elon Musk: We will manufacture the type of potent chips needed to transform humankind into &quot;a galactic civilization&quot; <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Shanaka's Opinion, a Guest Op/Ed'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Shenaka Perera Weighs In on What It Could Mean'''<br /> <br /> :: '''A Terafab Loop for Mega Launches Is Being Built''' <br /> <br /> ::* https://shanakaanslemperera.substack.com/p/the-capital-recovery-clock?r=6p7b5o<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Hidden inside the chip factory SpaceX confirmed Thursday is a launch schedule. If you divide its 1 terawatt annual compute target by the 100 kilowatts of orbital compute per tonne in SpaceX's own offering materials and you get 10 million tonnes to orbit a year. That exact figure sits on Terafab's official website. At 100 tonnes per Starship V3 flight it means 100,000 launches a year, 274 every day, forever.''<br /> <br /> ''The chip target is already a launch target.''<br /> <br /> ''Terafab is not a chip factory serving a market. The 16.8 billion dollar first phase in Grimes County, Texas is the first machine in a closed industrial loop built to manufacture the civilisation that can consume its own output.''<br /> <br /> ''The official plan places four figures together. One billion Optimus robots. Ten million tonnes to orbit a year. More than one terawatt of solar power. One terawatt of chips a year. They are not four ambitions. They are four links in one recursion. Terafab makes chips. Better chips improve AI. Better AI improves the software running the factories, the robots and the rocket lines. Robots and Starship build and deploy more power and compute infrastructure. That infrastructure creates the socket, and the demand, for the next Terafab cohort.''<br /> <br /> ''The fab is meant to manufacture its own reason to exist!''<br /> <br /> ''It is also an energy machine. One terawatt running continuously consumes 8.76 petawatt hours a year, nearly twice all electricity generated in the United States in 2025. The factory does not draw that power by making the chips. One fully powered annual cohort does, and a second year adds another terawatt of load unless old hardware retires or utilisation falls. Earth has no spare socket at that scale, which is why the plan points most of it at orbit, where a future 200 tonne vehicle still implies 50,000 launches a year, 137 a day, before failures, reserves, solar arrays, radiators, structure and shielding.''<br /> <br /> ''The real product is not AI silicon. If you go real deep, it is a new terawatt of powered, cooled, networked compute sockets every year.''<br /> <br /> ''Inside the building, the smaller loop is mask, wafer, package, test, redesign, then another mask. SpaceX says logic, memory and advanced packaging will sit in one closed loop, and Elon says Terafab will technically be two fabs, each devoted to one design. That can compress logistics and organisational latency. It cannot repeal process physics. A new mask can be written quickly. A leading edge process still carries hundreds of steps, long wafer cycle times, defect learning, overlay control, metrology and yield ramps, which is exactly why Tesla is hiring across lithography, etch, deposition, implant, CMP and metrology.''<br /> <br /> ''The free electron laser is the most misunderstood part. Elon has endorsed it, and an industrial FEL could feed several EUV scanners with far more source power than today's tin plasma systems. It attacks one bottleneck inside a chain of them. ASML recognised revenue on just 48 EUV systems in all of 2025. Intel is the process partner, and SpaceX still tells investors it expects to source a significant share of compute hardware from outside suppliers. This is vertical integration, not instant independence.''<br /> <br /> ''One correction decides the interpretation. A terawatt is a power rating, not an intelligence metric. A wasteful 1 kilowatt chip counts twice as much as an equally capable 500 watt chip. The measures that matter are useful compute per joule, per dollar and per kilogram, with yield, uptime and time from mask change to qualified silicon.''<br /> <br /> ''In my opinion, if chips improve faster than robots, rockets, power and radiators can scale, Terafab builds inventory. If the loop closes, it builds something no factory has built before, the demand for itself.''<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://www.terafab.ai/<br /> <br /> * https://www.spacex.com/updates/terafab<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terafab<br /> <br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/06/tesla-and-spacex-will-invest-16-8b-to-start-building-terafab-chip-factory-in-texas/<br /> <br /> * https://electrek.co/2026/08/06/tesla-spacex-terafab-grimes-county-16-8-billion/<br /> <br /> * https://www.cbsnews.com/news/terafab-elon-musk-chips-semiconductors-what-to-know/<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Betting big on data centers, U.S. now leads world for new gas power development<br /> <br /> [https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/betting-big-data-centers-us-now-leads-world-new-gas-power-development Via Global Energy Monitor]<br /> <br /> * https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/betting-big-data-centers-us-now-leads-world-new-gas-power-development<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> New Amazon Data Center Stokes Worry It Would Be the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.<br /> <br /> Via New York Times<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/08/climate/amazon-data-center-texas-pollution.html<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''July 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Elon Musk Opens Up in an Interview'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Economist Editor Presses the Controversial 'Trillionaire'<br /> <br /> :: Elon Musk's 'Vision of the Future'<br /> <br /> * https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/23/elon-musks-vision-of-the-future<br /> <br /> <br /> “People don’t realise that what I’m saying will come to pass,” he tells The Economist in a 90-minute interview for The Insider, held at a giant Tesla factory in Texas where electric cars drive themselves off the assembly line. That may be because his future-gazing ranges from the unsettling to the downright weird. Mr Musk predicts that, within five years, artificial-intelligence systems may surpass the sum of all human intelligence. Within ten years, robots in the workplace will help usher in an era of such “amazing abundance” that money will become meaningless....<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> Musk proposes peer review for frontier AI models in Economist interview<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/musk-proposes-peer-review-frontier-ai-models-economist-interview-2026-07-23/<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> Elon Musk says he got ‘carried away’ with Trump – but still holds on to contentious political views<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/23/elon-musk-regret-trump-doge-ai<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> Mix of Comments:<br /> <br /> * https://beincrypto.com/elon-musk-real-force-european-politics/<br /> * https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-killer-robots-ai-abundance-progress-unstoppable-2026-7<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/07/24/elon-musk-speaks-to-the-economist-editor-in-chief-zanny-minton-beddoes-on-the-key-takeaways.html<br /> * https://futurism.com/elon-musk-interviewer-npc<br /> * https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-economist-interview-2000790016<br /> * https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/nonsense-elon-musk-lashes-out-in-fiery-interview-after-hes-accused-of-supporting-the-far-right/<br /> * https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2026/07/23/musk_admonishes_the_economist_editor_what_is_far_right_about_having_secure_borders_safe_cities_and_sensible_spending.html<br /> * https://zeteo.com/p/top-economist-trump-musk-starmer<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> A.I. In Space <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Datacenters in Earth orbit to enable next generation artificial intelligence'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> New US petition demands review of plans from tech companies amid fears of environmental destruction<br /> <br /> Via The Guardian<br /> <br /> What are Bezos &amp; Musk Doing? <br /> <br /> What in the World Is Going On?<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jul/23/space-datacenters-bezos-blue-origin<br /> <br /> <br /> References:<br /> <br /> * https://www.starcloud.com/<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/21/do-space-based-ai-data-centers-make-economic-sense.html<br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/20/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-enters-the-space-data-center-game/<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/bezos-blue-origin-space-data-centers.html<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_data_center<br /> * https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/how-hard-is-it-to-build-orbital-data-centers-actually/<br /> * https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/06/260618041501.htm<br /> * https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-109012<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> A.I. &amp; Chip Wars<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Beyond a 'Belt and Road Initiative' Bringing Chinese Investments, Products &amp; Services to World Markets''' &lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Via GreenPolicy360's Associate, Strategic Demands<br /> <br /> :* https://strategicdemands.com/china-goes-beyond-the-belt-and-road-to-an-ai-for-the-world-strategy/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Open-Source A.I. from China Reveals a Global Chinese Strategy'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> July 17, 2026 / From the NY Times <br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/business/china-ai-moonshot-kimi.html?unlocked_article_code=1.yVA.LKT5.LxohSFddWAZT&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> The contest between China and the United States for supremacy in artificial intelligence escalated on Friday when the Chinese start-up Moonshot AI released a new A.I. model that appeared to narrow the lead held by well-funded American competitors.<br /> <br /> Moonshot said that the model, Kimi K3, was the world’s largest open-source A.I. system, allowing anyone to use, modify and build on it freely. The company said that Kimi K3 performed as well as leading models from OpenAI and Anthropic at some key tasks.<br /> <br /> The release coincided with an address by Xi Jinping, China’s leader, in which he outlined an ambitious vision for global A.I. development that cast China as the champion of an open approach to the technology.<br /> <br /> “A.I. development should not be a solo performance by a single country but a symphony of international cooperation,” Mr. Xi said. China was “ready to work with all parties to seize the opportunities of A.I. development” ...<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360:<br /> <br /> Keep in mind that<br /> <br /> There is 'no I in A.I.'<br /> <br /> In the interest of full-disclosure, the content written and published at GreenPolicy360 by our Founder/Siterunner is wholly, solely, by a human species.<br /> <br /> A note from your GreenPolicy360 Founder/Siterunner, Steve Schmidt, [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:All_species_day_with_homo_sapien_in_Santa_Fe_.jpg '''a verified human species'''], plz do keep in mind as you use and share the GreenPolicy360 content, that '''there is 'no I in A.I.'''' <br /> <br /> <br /> Let's talk a bit about sources and sourcing, as a human and then as an Agentic/A.I. bot. <br /> <br /> What is a 'primary source' (versus a 'secondary source')? A primary source can be a person with direct knowledge of a situation, an event in history, or a document written by such a person. A primary identification speaks of original creations, not re-interpreted or computer-assembled works. Here is how Merriam-Webster defines a 'primary source' - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/primary%20source<br /> <br /> <br /> : A.I. uses material scraped and collected from online sources. A.I. is not a 'primary source' -- but here at GreenPolicy360 you can find 'real-I' (we're using the phrase 'real-I', defined as 'real-intelligent', people who've personally acted to envision and create living, real world change.) <br /> <br /> <br /> : At GreenPolicy360 we tell stories of real people changing the world for the better. Day-to-day, your life becomes your message. We also share [[Green Best Practices]] across our Earth to communities of [[Planet Citizens]] ... In this way GreenPolicy360 is an eco Operating System, built on an open source MediaWiki platform and with a mission of being a 'distributive web'. Our goal of [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Category:Green_Networking Green Networking] acts to connect and share Green Links and grow [[The Modern Environmental Movement]]. <br /> <br /> :: GreenPolicy360 is about a [[Generation Green]] [[Going Green]].<br /> <br /> :: In our larger work, we have documented many primary sources and secondary sources. Our eco network continues to share myriad [[Green Best Practices]]. As our motto/mantra says at the top of each of our pages -- We believe ...<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> :: ''Each of us can make a positive difference by stepping up &amp; doing our best'' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::_______________________________________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> July 16, 2026 / From the NY Times<br /> <br /> SJS/GreenPolicy360: '''Every Once in a While a Comment to an Online Story is Worthy of Circulating'''<br /> <br /> : Here is one of those occasions -- the Subject? '''&quot;A.I.Slop&quot;'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Kashmir Hill.jpg]]<br /> <br /> ::Kashmir Hill / NYT<br /> <br /> <br /> Read the AI Slop story of writer Kashmir Hill as a free-share link here -- <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''I Got Slopped'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''Someone Used A.I. to Write My Biography'''<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/technology/ai-slop-books-biography-amazon.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ylA.aCMz.czE5JwZuuFO0&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Comments: <br /> <br /> Anon, who goes by the name -- <br /> <br /> '''Radical Roach / Dippleville''' says<br /> <br /> @Kashmir Hill - Maybe books need to now have disclaimers on their covers, in reviews, on the book’s Amazon page, wherever the book is being sold, etc.. The disclaimer would say if the book was written solely by a human, written by AI assisting a human, or written completely by AI. I would want to know.<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We tend to agree with this anon recommendation of adding disclaimers indicating the type of online content, e.g., content created solely by a human, or content created with AI assistance, or content created by AI with human assistance.<br /> <br /> It's a new world out there. We have a need to know.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> July 15, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Anthropic hard questions July 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/news/hard-questions<br /> <br /> * https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/anthropic-ad-ai-kill-us-all<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''An Excerpt: A DeepMind Thought for Today on the AGI Frontier'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> by Demis Hassbis<br /> <br /> * https://x.com/demishassabis/status/2076957440109625718<br /> <br /> <br /> A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age<br /> <br /> Demis Hassabis<br /> <br /> * https://x.com/demishassabis<br /> <br /> <br /> July 14, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> This is a pivotal moment in human history. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a system that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities the brain has, is probably only a few short years away. When we look back on this time in the decades to come, I think we will realise we were standing in the foothills of the singularity - nothing less than the dawning of a new age for humanity.<br /> <br /> I’ve spent my whole life working on AGI because I’ve always had a deep conviction that, if built and deployed responsibly, it would prove to be one of the most beneficial and transformative technologies ever invented. AGI cannot be compared to standard technological breakthroughs, not even ones as consequential as the internet or mobile - it is much more akin to the discovery of electricity or fire. If you stop to think about it, we’ve essentially found a way to make sand think. It’s miraculous.<br /> <br /> The magnitude of this technology’s impact will be unprecedented, perhaps 10x of the Industrial Revolution at 10x the speed. It will help us solve some of the biggest problems society faces from accelerating drug discovery to developing new clean energy sources to creating novel advanced materials. We could even reach a point where resources are no longer the limiting factor for human progress, leading to an amazing new era of abundance.<br /> <br /> The Challenges of the Frontier<br /> <br /> AI is already starting to deliver real-world benefits but to realise its immense promise, we have to navigate this critical period of development thoughtfully and carefully. Urgent action is needed to address risks that might arise as we get closer to AGI. We’ve already seen the challenges frontier models pose for cybersecurity, and other threats including nuclear and bio risks may soon emerge as capabilities continue to advance. On the horizon, we will need robust safeguards to maintain control of increasingly agentic, recursively self-improving systems - and tackle unknown issues that will only become clearer over time...<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''An AI Supercomputer Is Created for a Mission... Its Name Is HAL'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Steve Schmidt/GreenPolicy360: It's not every day that you get to know a creator of a famed -- and infamous -- AI character from a Kubrick film called &quot;2001: A Space Odyssey&quot;. <br /> <br /> : We listen in as HAL came to be ... A friend, a Visual Effect (VFX) genius named '''Douglas Trumbull''', explains how HAL went from LA to MIT, then into production and into our imaginations. <br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Trumbull vfx master.jpg]]<br /> <br /> : Douglas Trumbull<br /> <br /> : &lt;small&gt;* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Trumbull_vfx_master.jpg&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> The HAL 9000 was envisioned by creators and science, as a new type of neural intelligence, a machine brain.<br /> <br /> Hal is of heuristic algorithmic language -- HALis, as we learn, on a mission far from Earth, a mission with deep meaning.<br /> <br /> <br /> HAL 9000 was in the future. The future is now.<br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence is now here, with its powers and dangers, as we recall Supercomputer [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000 '''HAL 9000''']. <br /> <br /> A warning of what is on the line for humanity is the message related as we ride along in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey '''2001: A Space Odyssey'''] ... <br /> <br /> <br /> HAL's memorable words --<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;I'm sorry, Dave....&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;It can only be attributable to human error....&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.<br /> <br /> HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.<br /> <br /> Dave: What's the problem?<br /> <br /> HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.<br /> <br /> Dave: What are you talking about, HAL?<br /> <br /> HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film)<br /> <br /> * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/characters/nm0706937<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:I'm sorry Dave.jpg]]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:HAL_is_watching_U....png<br /> <br /> <br /> Today, as humanity approaches questions of out-of-control technology created by humanity .... <br /> <br /> We ask, '''[[Planet Citizens]] and [[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]''' ask, 'What's Next?' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Privacy at Risk, You're Being Watched, Tracked, &amp; More<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Privacy.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Next Big Thing'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;It Is Here, Already Here...&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Online_Privacy<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Call It 'Surveillance Capitalism''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Hope that It doesn't become 'the Norm' <br /> <br /> : Work to Make Sure It Does Not Become 'Surveillance Government'<br /> <br /> <br /> Scroll thru Intel on the Privacy Threat of AI Unleashed ...<br /> <br /> :Artificial Intelligence + Data Centers = Next Gen 'Watchful HAL'<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism<br /> * https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr-ryan/publications/geopolitics-surveillance-capitalism<br /> * https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=56791<br /> <br /> <br /> _______________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''June 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''An Academic Exercise'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : 'Old School' Emeritus Professor Examines AI<br /> <br /> : The Question: Can a Gemini ChatBot Suggest Ways to Turn AI Toward the Common Good?<br /> <br /> <br /> The prof uses left-leaning political formations to inquire and recommend public-oriented futures.<br /> <br /> * https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/06/19/my-ai-comrade/<br /> <br /> <br /> (Note beyond academic: Using history as a guide, powerful new technology such as AI will be employed by political powers to preserve political power and by military powers to employ and extend military power. AI Use Cases: A number of AI programs enabling AI for military programs, including war intelligence, communication, command/control and targeting, and civilian database surveillance involving intrusive human/civil rights questions and violations, have as of 2026 become high-level concerns.)<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''An Interview and Thoughts as an Author Rides alongside an AI Wave'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The God Test'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning<br /> <br /> Author: Robert Wright<br /> <br /> * https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Robert-Wright/73247968<br /> <br /> <br /> Publisher: Simon &amp; Schuster<br /> <br /> Published Date: June 23, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-God-Test/Robert-Wright/9781668061657<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Interview via Substack'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Jack Goldsmith: I’m chatting today with Robert Wright about his terrific new book, '''The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning'''. <br /> <br /> So, I want to start off with the big picture, because your book places AI in the broadest possible context—not just as an important step in the history of technological change, but rather as an important step in the significantly longer history of basically our planet and our species. And that’s pretty cosmic, as the subtitle says.<br /> <br /> Why do you do that? What does it mean, and why is that perspective important?<br /> <br /> Bob Wright: Well, thanks for having me. Yeah, it’s a good question, because I could have gotten the core message across without getting so cosmic, I guess.<br /> <br /> The main purpose is to try to explain to people, including non-technical people, why there’s been this rapid growth of capability in AI; why, once you understand that, you should expect the capability to keep growing; why that, in addition to promising great blessings, is going to bring great risks, including grave ones, including maybe existential ones; and why the nature of those risks, in my view, dictates that we confront the challenge of this technology as a cohesive global community, which will take some doing because we’ve never really done that before for anything like a sustained period of time.<br /> <br /> And so I didn’t have to get into the history of life or anything to say what I just said, but I do think some important things are added when you step back and look at AI in the broader sweep of things.<br /> <br /> For starters, this is, in the entire three- or four-billion-year history of life, the first time a new form of intelligence that rivals or even exceeds human intelligence has appeared. It’s the first form of intelligence that is not organic in the technical sense of being carbon-based. It’s silicon-based, but it is organic in the everyday sense of being kind of natural.<br /> <br /> What I mean by that is I try to show that AI does, in some sense, grow kind of logically, naturally out of biological evolution. I mean, technological evolution broadly does, and AI as a form of intelligence does. And indeed, when we look at the evolutionary dynamics shaping it—the dynamics of technological evolution—we should expect it to have certain things in common with our own intelligence, which I think are important.<br /> <br /> So I think that’s one thing you get out of a broad perspective.<br /> <br /> Another thing is that I talk about this guy, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—a Catholic paleontologist, mystic, and theologian—who coined the term noosphere, based on the Greek word nous, in 1923 to describe what he called a planetary mind or a brain of brains, where the human brains were the neurons in this increasingly global brain.<br /> <br /> And technological history, including the invention of the internet, has, I think, made him look prescient. And I think there’s value in keeping in mind that AI is arriving as we more and more have the technical infrastructure for a kind of global information processing, a kind of global brain. And we have to reckon with the possibility that some of the neurons will be silicon, not human, and think about what our relationship to them is going to be.<br /> <br /> And I think one value of thinking in these terms is, first of all, that from a Teilhardian point of view, the whole unfolding of life is moving toward us being this kind of giant superorganism, you could say, with this giant brain.<br /> <br /> And I argue in the book that the logic of technological evolution is going to push us — I mean, if we respond rationally — toward something a little more like a global brain, in the sense of having more international governance.<br /> <br /> At the same time, I think the image of a superorganism should worry us because it’s, for obvious reasons, an image that’s favored by authoritarians and fascists. How much freedom do you have if you’re a cell in a superorganism?<br /> <br /> And I think AI greatly heightens the stakes of that question, precisely because it’s such a powerful tool of surveillance and control.<br /> <br /> So I think, on the one hand, the logic of technological evolution, especially AI, is pushing us toward the global coordination of certain policies and the creation of forms of supranational power. At the same time, it should make us wary of surrendering too much power...<br /> <br /> <br /> Read More of the Substack Conversation between Jack Goldsmith and Robert Wright [https://substack.com/home/post/p-201670588 '''here''']<br /> <br /> Also, More Book Reviews [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Book_Reviews_@GreenPolicy '''here @ GreenPolicy360''']<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎 <br /> <br /> <br /> AI / AGI<br /> <br /> <br /> May 29 / Forbes<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Fundraise values Anthropic AI company at nearly a trillion dollars'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Dario and Daniela Amodei, along with five cofounders, have a story to tell<br /> <br /> * https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2026/05/29/anthropics-cofounders-worth/<br /> <br /> <br /> ''When Anthropic announced on Thursday (May 28) that it had raised $65 billion at a valuation of $965 billion, it didn’t just become the most valuable AI startup in the world, eclipsing $852 billion-valued archrival OpenAI. It also ballooned the individual fortunes of Anthropic’s seven cofounders — more than doubling their net worths to $16.6 billion apiece, Forbes estimates.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''In Rarified Air'''''<br /> <br /> ''Siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, as well as their five other cofounders Jack Clark, Sam McCandlish, Chris Olah, Tom Brown and Jared Kaplan, are in rarified air when it comes to entrepreneurs who struck it rich in the generative AI boom...''<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Pope Leo XIV encyclical re AI and Humanitas.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> “Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed,” Pope Leo said in announcing the text of his first [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=encyclical&amp;go=Go '''encyclical''']. “The word is strong, I know, but deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention...”<br /> <br /> And into the encyclical's key words:<br /> <br /> &quot;To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life. Our task today is not only ethical or technical. It is ecological in the deepest sense, for it concerns a new dimension of our common home.&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> “Crucial questions impose themselves on our conscience and can no longer be avoided: Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?”<br /> <br /> <br /> At GreenPolicy360, understanding and protecting '''[[The Commons]]''' is also a key to realizing values, ideals and ideas we are carrying forward...<br /> <br /> <br /> The encyclical's presentation went out globally with a special focus on the AI frontier work of Anthropic, with a co-founder, [https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-be-guided-outside-big-tech-2026-05-25/ '''Olah at the Encyclical's unveiling'''] ...<br /> <br /> <br /> &gt;The dramatic unveiling of the new encyclical overshadowed the document itself in some ways. In an unprecedented move, Leo personally presided over its presentation and sat on a panel at the Vatican with not only leading theologians, but also Christopher Olah, 33, the billionaire co-founder of top AI company Anthropic. <br /> <br /> <br /> ❇️<br /> <br /> <br /> Washington Post / May 25, 2026 -- '''Anthropic aligns with Vatican over White House as Pope Leo stokes AI fears'''<br /> <br /> With Anthropic already in a dispute with the Trump administration, co-founder Christopher Olah helped Pope Leo unveil his encyclical on the risks of artificial intelligence<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4uyQBlb<br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/news/chris-olah-pope-leo-encyclical<br /> <br /> * https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/pope-leo-warns-ai-should-be-disarmed-in-manifesto-on-potential-dangers<br /> <br /> * https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-102521111.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-be-guided-outside-big-tech-2026-05-25/<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/25/the-guardian-view-on-the-pope-and-claude-encyclical-on-ai-is-right-to-put-humanity-first<br /> <br /> <br /> '''At the Vatican'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhKH_aiBcis<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Via The Vatican News | The Holy See'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2026-05/pope-leo-xiv-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas-ai.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html<br /> <br /> <br /> '''10 quotes from Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, ‘Magnifica Humanitas’'''<br /> <br /> * https://uscatholic.org/articles/202605/10-quotes-from-pope-leo-xivs-first-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Previous in 2020, &quot;The Call for AI Ethics&quot;''' <br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/the-call/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/renaissance/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/the-first-signatories/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/news/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Previous in 1891, &quot;Rerum Novarum&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerum_novarum<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''AI Use Case Inventory'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''Artificial Intelligence:''' <br /> <br /> : Perspectives from the US Environmental Protection Agency<br /> <br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/ai-use-case-inventory<br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/open-data-policies<br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/where-find-epa-data<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''GreenPolicy360 Advisory:'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In Development -- National Climate Plans Best Practices Project 1.0, AI 2026-27'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Goal: To Utilize the Current (US) State and (Global/International) National Climate Action Plans/Data to Identify Actionable '''[[Green Best Practices]]'''<br /> <br /> Strategy: Enable AI Tool Sets to Scan Climate Plan Databases and Distribute Recommended 'High Priority' &amp; Green Best Practice Action Policies<br /> <br /> <br /> Reference: '''[[National Climate Plans]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Additional References:'''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''US State Climate Policy Action Plans'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.climatepolicydashboard.org/policies/climate-governance-equity/climate-action-plans<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Priority Climate Action Plan (PCAP) Directory'''<br /> <br /> ''The Climate Action Plan Directory organizes data collected from 211 Priority Climate Action Plans (PCAP) submitted by US state governments, Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), Tribes, and territories under EPA’s Climate Pollution Reduction Grants (CPRG) program. The directory presents information from more than 30 data categories related to GHG inventories, GHG reduction measures, benefits for low-income and disadvantaged communities (LIDACs), and other PCAP elements.''<br /> <br /> ''A state climate action plan, also called a climate plan, details the policies and strategies a state intends to implement to meet its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets. A climate plan typically includes a GHG emissions inventory, regional and local climate impacts, and a discussion of GHG emissions reduction targets. The plan identifies climate mitigation actions, their potential social, environmental, and economic benefits, and recommendations and strategies for implementing each mitigation action, often quantifying the expected reduction in emissions.''<br /> <br /> ''Effective climate action plans will have a legislative directive that requires a robust community engagement process, input from a climate advisory group, a near-term due date for a finalized plan, and periodic updates. Climate action plans should also incorporate and address environmental justice throughout the planning process and within the plan itself, and show transparency and accountability by detailing the methodology and community engagement process.''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:GreenPolicy360 Today.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Green_Best_Practices]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[GreenAction]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Question of Our Time / Today, Here &amp; Now, in the Midst of the 21st Century'''<br /> <br /> '''Where are you?'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ➡️ What is your state's climate action plan?<br /> <br /> ➡️ What is your nation's climate action plan?<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Plans_Enforcement_-_Resources GRN360: Climate Plans Enforcement Initiative] | [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Methods_to_enforce_climate_pledges-NDCs_-_Dec_2021.png Enforce Climate Plan Pledges]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''National Climate Plans Database Information via GreenPolicy360'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[National Climate Plans]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/National_Climate_Plans<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In the U.S. and Worldwide'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;'''It's a Good Time for [[Planet Citizen Action]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;[[Each of us can make a positive difference]]&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth in Human Hands.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :[http://www.planetcitizen.org &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Planet Citizens&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Earth Is in Your Hands'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;'''[[Generation Green]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Generation_Green &lt;big&gt;&quot;Vita contemplativa to Vita activa&quot;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Green Branching Out.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''2025'''<br /> <br /> <br /> December 2025 <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven approach to climate action and sustainable development'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via Nature Communications<br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53956-1<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> From A16Z New Media<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''It's Time to Build'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The electro-industrial stack will move the world'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Ryan McEntush<br /> <br /> ''The next industrial revolution won’t just happen in factories, but inside the machines that power them.''<br /> <br /> ''Software transformed how we think, design, and communicate. Now it’s transforming how we move, build, and produce. Advances in electrification, materials, and AI are converging, bringing true software control to the physical world. Machines are beginning to sense, learn, and act on their own.''<br /> <br /> ''This is the rise of the electro-industrial stack—the combined technologies that power electric vehicles, drones, data centers, and modern manufacturing. It connects the atoms that move the world to the bits that command it: minerals refined into components, energy stored in batteries, electricity directed by power electronics, motion delivered through precision motors, all coordinated by software. It’s the invisible foundation behind every breakthrough in physical automation; it’s the difference between software that merely summons a taxi and software that takes the wheel.''<br /> <br /> ''But the capacity to build this stack, from refining critical materials to fabricating advanced chips, is slipping away. If the United States wants to lead the next industrial era, it must make the hardware that underpins it. The nations that master the electro-industrial stack will define the future of industrial and military technologies.''<br /> <br /> ''Software ate the world. Now it will move it.''<br /> <br /> * https://a16z.com/why-software-is-eating-the-world/<br /> <br /> <br /> ➡️<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Forward-deployed motions take AI to the 99%'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Joe Schmidt, A16Z<br /> <br /> ''AI is the most exciting technology breakthrough of our lifetimes. So far, though, most of the benefits from new startups have accrued to the 1% of companies that are in Silicon Valley—either literally in the Bay Area or part of that extended network. This makes sense, too: startup founders want to sell to companies they recognize and can easily get to, whether that means driving to their offices or getting a connection from the VC on their board.''<br /> <br /> ''In 2026, this will flip. Companies will realize that the vast majority of the AI opportunity lives outside of Silicon Valley, and we’re going to see new founders use forward-deployed motions to discover more opportunities that are hiding inside big, legacy verticals. The opportunity stands to be massive in traditional consulting and services industries, like system integrators and implementation firms, and in slower-moving industries like manufacturing.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Re: [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/New_Definitions_of_National_Security '''''New Definitions of National Security''''']<br /> <br /> Extract from Foreign Policy<br /> <br /> ''Over the last two decades, climate change has contributed to instability around the world—bolstering the ranks of terror groups, sparking territorial disputes, and triggering mass migration. It’s no wonder that militaries and international security organizations increasingly see climate change as a formidable national security threat, and that they have in turn taken on greater roles in fighting it.''<br /> <br /> ''In recent years, new technology has transformed the tools available to mitigate the effects of climate change. Specifically, artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly become a widespread instrument in the climate fight—even as it consumes exceptional amounts of energy and water itself. Today, militaries and nonstate actors, including the United Nations, are leveraging AI to foretell climate-related disasters, optimize energy use, and monitor ecological degradation.''<br /> <br /> * https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/12/01/ai-military-climate-dual-use-technology-threat/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> October 2025<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''We're Looking at You'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : 'A First Generation of AI Scientists'<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Periodic Labs.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Our goal is to create an AI scientist.&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://periodic.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Intriguing New Start Up That Is Close To Home'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Periodic Labs On Our Radar<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Our goal is to assist in integrating AI science into Earth science, in order to advance the vital work of the past 50+ years of [[The Modern Environmental Movement]] in which we have been integrally involved.<br /> <br /> Perspective, facts, science, health, quality of life became the mission statement of our work since we joined up with &quot;Mr. Science&quot;, as Congressman and leader on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology '''[[George E. Brown Jr]]''' came to be known.<br /> <br /> We are persistent in keeping on with the work. Vast data sets that George Brown's physics and engineering efforts envisioned and brought forward over three decades with state of the art and science programs and projects, the best possible of the era, are now about to move faster and farther into the 21st Century.<br /> <br /> Our familial partners, with aid of Andreessen Horowitz (A16z), and Accel, and university and private partners are now going to the next level.<br /> <br /> George Brown would be very pleased to see, and help accelerate the effort if he were still here.<br /> <br /> We will step up with Mr. Science and more in mind...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:AI in Earth Science.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Read more about George and us...<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Advancing Science, Facts, Technology and Data to Make the Case for Environmental Protection&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> : 1960s/70s, Beginnings of Planet Citizen Eco-Action, Big Science, and a New Vision<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In Memory of Congressman George Brown'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> Visionary Leadership, Historic Environmental Achievements<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:George in Memory, a Man of Science and Humanity.jpg]]<br /> <br /> :::[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Association_for_the_Advancement_of_Science &lt;small&gt;American Association for the Advancement of Science&lt;/small&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[PlanetCitizen]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/User:Siterunner '''Steve Schmidt GreenPolicy360 Siterunner''']: <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Brown_Jr. '''George E. Brown'''] became known as Mr. Science in Congress and for thirty+ years, I saw my friend George as a patriot who became a Planet Citizen for the ages<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Good science needs good data .png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Good_science_needs_good_data_.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Stats_-_Green_Research_%26_Science<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_Education<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Global Tech Changemakers'''<br /> <br /> Beyond Silicon Valley &amp; Mega Corporations<br /> <br /> The Rest of the World<br /> <br /> * https://restofworld.org/row100/#filters<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> As the Nobel Prizes in Economics are awarded, GreenPolicy360 points at a geopolitical race in energy and AI between the US and China.<br /> <br /> Let's take time to look more closely (as the US falls behind under a backward looking president with policies in opposition to renewable energy and forward, internationally demanded production. <br /> <br /> Start here... <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Today, China produces 75% of lithium-ion batteries globally and manufactures 90% of the neodymium magnets that make motors spin. In power electronics and embedded compute, it’s rapidly gaining ground.''<br /> <br /> ''That means that China controls the means of producing electric vehicles (EVs), drones, robots, and all of the other electric products that are replacing the combustion-driven machines on which America built its might.''<br /> <br /> ''As we speak, everything that moves, heats, lights up, computes, or converts energy is being rebuilt to perform better, faster, cheaper, quieter, and as a freebie, cleaner around electric technology.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.notboring.co/p/7653b980-dd32-4d8c-88c6-1543bec70220?postPreview=paid&amp;updated=2025-08-26T12%3A09%3A11.763Z&amp;audience=everyone&amp;free_preview=false&amp;freemail=true<br /> <br /> * https://electricslide.notboring.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Electric Stack Technology Cost Curves (1990-2024).jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Pause here to reflect on the eco-nomic and strategic advantages of 'clean energy' vs 'full costs' of fossil fuel powered economies (per a GreenPolicy360 paradigm of [[Eco-nomics]])'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Eco-nomics<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Environmental full-cost accounting]]'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_full-cost_accounting<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Now consider 'Electricity generation', China v U.S. and follow the data, the stats, trendline, the dynamics of change and what this is indicating and signaling re: geopolitical competitiveness today and into the the mid 21st Century'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:China v United States, Electricity Generation 1985-2024.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) Era'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'Are You Talking to Me'<br /> <br /> :* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_pre-trained_transformer<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> September 17, 2025<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Another Warning About AI'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Harkening back to the old days when Dispatch News Service was independently, and bravely, distributing the costs-of-war, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre '''My Lai'''] investigative news stories by Sy Hersh. David Obst, who started Dispatch, tells the story of Seymour Hersh better than anyone in my opinion (other than Sy himself) and since your GreenPolicy360 founder was there to assist, in DC, in LA, in Chicago, in Europe, and with the Vietnam Moratorium Committee in 69/70/71, here is an update, today's Sy Hersh, now online with Substack distribution as Sy investigates and forwards another eye opening warning.<br /> <br /> What's AI and AGI to you and all of our readers around our 360 world? And, since we at GreenPolicy360, have been involved with Wikipedia since its launch, let's take a first look at the artificial intel world of today from the vantage point of an open source online 'encyclopedia'.<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT (Empire of AI: OpenAI - https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593657500)<br /> <br /> <br /> Before Sy, as investigative journalist that he is, gives us his take, let's look at a take from a personal, close up connection at A16Z - https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/02/a-new-a16z-report-looks-at-which-ai-companies-startups-are-actually-paying-for/<br /> <br /> <br /> Now, on to Sy and his view of AI costs... think of the upside/downside of AI, the pluses/minuses, pros and cons, a cost-benefit analysis as a geo-political rush for front-of-market dominance is taking place now in ways that will change 'everything'... <br /> <br /> * https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/the-hidden-costs-of-artificial-intelligence<br /> <br /> <br /> The boom in Artificial Intelligence (AI) production comes with a big cost... <br /> <br /> The AI 'bubble' grows...<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Kate Crawford writes in [https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-AI-Planetary-Artificial-Intelligence/dp/0300264631/ref=sr_1_1 '''Atlas of AI'''] ... the world’s artificial intelligence companies, (are) crafting the myth of AI as “the cloud,” implying “something floating and delicate within a natural green industry. Servers are hidden in nondescript data centers, and their polluting qualities are far less visible than the bellowing smokestacks of coal-fired power stations.”''<br /> <br /> ''The fact is, as she writes, “it takes a gargantuan amount of energy to run the computational infrastructure of Amazon’s Web Services or Microsoft’s Azure, and the carbon footprint of the AI systems that run on those platforms is growing. Certainly, the industry has made significant efforts to make data centers more energy efficient and to increase their use of renewable energy.” But the efforts have accomplished little.<br /> <br /> “Already,” Crawford reports, “the carbon footprint of the world’s computational infrastructure has matched that of the world’s aviation industry at its height, and it is increasing at a faster rate.” One Canadian study estimates that the tech sector will contribute 14 percent of global greenhouse emissions by 2040, and a Swedish team predicts that the electricity demands of data centers will increase fifteenfold by 2030...''<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Think about Green AI as &quot;the cloud&quot; arrives in your life, on your devices, at home, in the office, all around, every day, everywhere. <br /> <br /> An UnGreen AI is coming with a rush, offering and prying data, and needing and demanding immense rising magnitudes of energy and power.<br /> <br /> AI has a voracious appetite...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Green AI / Green Artificial Intelligence'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''Environmental Solutions Using Big Picture Interconnectivity Thinking'''<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We agree with Tyler in the following interview as he states (as highlighted by us) that 'memoir, biography, anecdote... secrets' carry exceptional meaning for Artificial Intelligence (AI) large learning models (LLMs). <br /> <br /> The first extensive public revelation of AI systems over the past several years has led us at GreenPolicy360 to confirm via metrics that our multi-year plan to place our prime source content in the open-access, distributive web public domain has produced a fast-expanding multiplier effect. <br /> <br /> Many of our stories, told from a first-hand point of view of the origins of what we refer to as the beginnings of the modern environmental movement are now, with our revelations, memoir material, previously untold biography, anecdote and more now out and about and being freely served up in AI chats 'around the world'.<br /> <br /> We are succeeding in our purposeful mission with Green AI... to inform, share, inspire and 'til the fields with green seeds and best practices.<br /> <br /> Onward planet citizens...<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Eric Topol Interview of Tyler Cowen'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> May 11, 2025<br /> <br /> Tyler Cowen: ''The AI is your smartest reader. It’s your most sympathetic reader. It will remember what you tell it. So I think humans should sit down and ask, what does the AI need to know? And also, (bf added) '''what is it that I know that’s not on the historical record anywhere? That’s not just repetition if I put it down, say on the internet. So there’s no point in writing repetitions anymore because the AI already knows those things. So the value of what you’d call broadly, memoir, biography, anecdote, you could say secrets. It’s now much higher.''' And the value of repeating basic truths, which by the way, I love as an economist, to be clear, like free trade, tariffs are usually bad, those are basic truths. But just repeating that people will be going to the AI and saying it again won’t make the AI any better. So '''everything you write or podcast, you should have this point in mind'''.''<br /> <br /> <br /> For more from Tyler Cowen (and his exceptional mind) visit his and Alex Tabarrok's website - Marginal Revolution / Marginal Revolution University (MRU) - https://marginalrevolution.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> Eric Topol - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Topol<br /> <br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_artificial_intelligence<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> More re: AI in the US circa 2025: '''It's a Wild, Wild AI World'''<br /> <br /> Battles in the Information Services, Search Space with Google and consequences of the U.S. Google anti-monopoly legal decision<br /> <br /> Impacts on AI 'startup ecosystem', VCs, including Y Combinator and accelerator tech development, agentics, and upcoming entrepreneurial re-configurations<br /> <br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/13/y-combinator-says-google-is-a-monopolist-that-has-stunted-the-startup-ecosystem/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/11/microsoft-and-national-geographic-announce-winners-of-ai-for-earth-innovation-grant/ '''Microsoft and National Geographic announce winners of AI for Earth Innovation Grant''']<br /> <br /> : • https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/16/microsofts-ai-for-earth-innovation-grant-gives-data-scientists-access-to-ai-tools/<br /> <br /> :: • https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/11/microsoft-commits-50-million-more-to-its-ai-for-earth-program-to-save-the-planet/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:PlanetCitizen banner 800x163.jpg|link=https://greenpolicy360.net/w/PlanetCitizen]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;GreenPolicy360 ToC - https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360-eOS&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> A 21st Century AI/Machine Learning Case Study<br /> <br /> '''''Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools''''' <br /> <br /> * https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2023arXiv230204761S/abstract<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''NOAA scientists harness machine learning to advance climate models'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> March 1st, 2023<br /> <br /> * https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/news/noaa-scientists-harness-machine-learning-to-advance-climate-models/<br /> <br /> * https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''How artificial intelligence is fast becoming a key tool for climate science (2021)'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-artificial-intelligence-is-fast-becoming-a-key-tool-for-climate-science/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Climate Modeling'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://allenai.org/climate-modeling<br /> <br /> ''Planetary-scale Earth simulations known as global climate model projections are the primary sources of information on future climate change.''<br /> <br /> ''Climate models are based on mathematical equations represented using a grid mesh that covers the globe: a finer grid mesh is more accurate but much more computationally expensive. Current global climate projections agree that a world with more greenhouse gases will be warmer everywhere, especially over land and at high latitudes.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Networking grnlinks.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Artificial intelligence]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Rights]]<br /> [[Category:Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-nomics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:EOS eco Operating System]]<br /> [[Category:Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Energy Policy]]<br /> [[Category:GreenLinks]]<br /> [[Category:GreenPolicy360]]<br /> [[Category:Green Best Practices]]<br /> [[Category:Green Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Health]]<br /> [[Category:Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Maps]]<br /> [[Category:Media]]<br /> [[Category:Mobile Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Online Education]]<br /> [[Category:Planet API]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Renewable Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Youth]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Air Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Air Quality]]<br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Atmospheric Science]]<br /> [[Category:Best Practices]]<br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:City-County Governments]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Earth360]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Law]] <br /> [[Category:Earth Observations]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science from Space]]<br /> [[Category:Earth System Science]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-ethics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-nomics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecological Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Economic Development]]<br /> [[Category:Economic Justice]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Energy Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Security]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Full-cost Accounting]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Security, National Security]]<br /> [[Category:EOS eco Operating System]]<br /> [[Category:Externalities]]<br /> [[Category:Fact Checking]]<br /> [[Category:Fossil Fuels]]<br /> [[Category:Global Security]]<br /> [[Category:Global Warming]]<br /> [[Category:Green Business]]<br /> [[Category:Green Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Green Platform]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Green Values]]<br /> [[Category:GreenPolicy360]]<br /> [[Category:Health]]<br /> [[Category:Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Land Ethic]]<br /> [[Category:Media]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Capital]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resources]]<br /> [[Category:Networking]]<br /> [[Category:New Economy]]<br /> [[Category:New Space]]<br /> [[Category:Online Education]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Scientist]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Plastic Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Policies]]<br /> [[Category:Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Renewable Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Social Justice]]<br /> [[Category:Solar Energy]]<br /> [[Category:State]]<br /> [[Category:Strategic Demands]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability Policies]]<br /> [[Category:ThinBlueLayer]]<br /> [[Category:Toxics and Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Threat Multiplier]]<br /> [[Category:Virtual Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Virtual Planet]]<br /> [[Category:Whole Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Wind Energy]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Green_AI&diff=138365 2026-10-08T13:40:27Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> [[File:Big-Data.jpg]]<br /> <br /> In the AGI Era<br /> <br /> <br /> 'Sentience', a Green AI Question<br /> <br /> To be (sentient), or not to be (sentient)<br /> <br /> That is the question<br /> <br /> Cogito, ergo sum<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Artificial Intelligence Is Here, for Good &amp; Bad'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Green Perspectives on AI and Human Consequences<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''AI Agents, Bots, Data Centers &amp; Systems'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> :'''Measure Their Performance, not Their Corporate Marketing'''<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://safe.ai/<br /> * https://scale.com/<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanity's_Last_Exam<br /> * https://lastexam.ai/<br /> <br /> * https://stories.tamu.edu/news/2026/02/25/dont-panic-humanitys-last-exam-has-begun/<br /> <br /> * https://github.com/centerforaisafety/hle<br /> <br /> * https://github.com/walkinglabs/hands-on-modern-rl/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Revealing research on how people use Claude AI in the 'real world''''<br /> <br /> :Anthropic-enabled Case Study / August 2026<br /> <br /> :* https://www.anthropic.com/research/enabling-independent-research<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:New Ways of Seeing.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Climate Action Plans, Green Best Practices'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :Using AI to Identify and Implement Climate Change Intervention 'Best Practices'<br /> <br /> :* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Climate_Action_Plans,_Green_Best_Practices#<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''AI Agentics' are Launching Across Industries, Sector-to-Sector -- and Green AI is in the Wings'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Meanwhile, Capital-Investment Rich A.I. is Everywhere, in the Colloquial, Middlebrow and Vernacular'''<br /> <br /> It's Here. It's All Around. What's Real? What's Fake?<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Beyond Online Surveillance, Now Comes A.I. Powered Surveillance<br /> <br /> Add in Data Centers, Cameras/Firmware/Software, Palentir-esque Programming and ... a Booming Industry <br /> <br /> * https://www.palantir.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Where are you? There it is ... Online and increasingly observing/monitoring you offline ... becoming a human rights issue of our times'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Online_Privacy<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake Deepfake] | [https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-definitions AI Definitions]<br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_artificial_intelligence AI Gloss] | [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_intelligence) AI Hallucination]<br /> <br /> <br /> 'A.I. Slop' on Social Media is just the beginning of a Slop Assault | [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_slop AI Slop]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''October 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Subordinate AI and an Ironic Question.PNG|link=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VyF0naZ4AI]]<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VyF0naZ4AI<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Thought for the Day&quot;<br /> <br /> October 1, 2026<br /> <br /> In a recent series of private meetings in San Francisco, after a tasting menu dinner, Anthropic consulted religious scholars to help instill morality into its A.I. models ... a case was being made that Claude could be or become conscious.<br /> <br /> What would it mean for humanity’s future if artificial intelligence systems possessed a consciousness that rivals our own?<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-morals-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FVE.kDTO.OTLs6iwx7swF&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> Claude's 'Constitution'<br /> <br /> * https://web.archive.org/web/20260123045500/https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-new-constitution<br /> <br /> * https://web.archive.org/web/20260123042656/https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/22/anthropic_claude_constitution/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''September 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''Table Stakes' -- Who Was at the Table with the U.S. President'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :The Future of A.I. Is Being Wagered<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/politics/trump-ai-luncheon-guests-ceos.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FFE.HwT4.0VxTQWuia3zQ&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''What Jacob Coxon Knows Is Too Much'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''... And Not Enough'''<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://time.com/article/2026/09/09/ai-anthropic-openai-jacob-coxon/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''He Helped Build Powerful AI at OpenAI and Anthropic. Now He's Afraid It Could Kill Us'''<br /> <br /> <br /> Please HAL... Open the door...<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:I'm sorry Dave.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:HAL is watching U....png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Ulanqab-Envision Energy-Datacenter.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> The most ambitious data center buildup anywhere on earth ...<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/ulanqab-and-frontier-a-i-race-china-v-u-s/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''News Wrap / Sam Smith (Journalist)'''<br /> <br /> Via Axios <br /> <br /> September 13, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Over nine startling hours yesterday (Sept. 11), the four biggest AI labs — which rarely agree on anything — set aside years of feuds and competition to endorse a slower development pace for their models.'''<br /> <br /> '''Their new stance: Prioritize safety over growth, even at a cost.'''<br /> <br /> <br /> : Data centers are unpopular. People are panicked about doom scenarios. And 51 days before midterms, legislators suddenly realize there are points to be won by cracking down.<br /> <br /> : Against that backdrop, the industry's most powerful CEOs hit the brakes yesterday.<br /> <br /> : At 10 a.m. ET, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei dropped a 3,800-word essay saying model development needs to be paced, otherwise doom scenarios are possible — like a rogue-agent takeover of the entire internet, which he said could be as soon as six months from now.<br /> <br /> : An hour later, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shocked the AI chattering class by quoting Amodei's essay on X and saying &quot;Dario is right.&quot; Musk — who heads SpaceXAI, formerly xAI — had pointedly not joined previous industry-wide calls for any kind of slowdown.<br /> <br /> : At 12:30 p.m., OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted: &quot;I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.&quot; In a Friday interview that was released on Saturday, Altman told Fortune his company won't go public this year, dashing hopes for a blockbuster IPO. He said OpenAI has too much safety work to do and would be better off doing that as a private company.<br /> <br /> : At 7 p.m., Demis Hassabis — the Nobel laureate who co-founded and chairs Google DeepMind, and is Alphabet's chief scientist — tweeted: &quot;Dario's essay points towards the right path forward. The details need working through, but the direction is correct for meeting this critical moment.&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> Publicly putting safety ahead of technological or financial growth may be the industry's only route to avoid a crackdown that's not on its terms.<br /> <br /> Legislators are begging House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to stay in session and do something about the &quot;threat&quot; of AI.<br /> <br /> The more extreme alternative is something like Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) push to force a pause and make the most advanced AI illegal.<br /> <br /> Most people realize there's too much money at stake to just stop. But the tradeoff may be between historic riches and slightly less historic riches.<br /> <br /> The bottom line: Yesterday may go down as the day AI changed — when industry moguls vowed to limit themselves.<br /> <br /> <br /> References:<br /> <br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/anthropic-ai-amodei-pacing<br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/openai-public-ipo-delay-sam-altman<br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/anthropic-ai-threat-report-russia-iran-china<br /> <br /> <br /> Jim VandeHei<br /> <br /> &quot;All Hands on Deck&quot;<br /> <br /> The White House, Congress and the country's leading AI companies have allowed AI to grow faster, stronger, more powerful and wildly lucrative (and dangerous), with no serious effort to control it or spread the benefits beyond the super-wealthy.<br /> <br /> It's not too late to change this. But if they all dither, duck or dance around it, the chances of AI worst-case scenarios will explode, likely early next year, according to almost every person we talk to privately who truly understands AI.<br /> <br /> Why it matters: The technology is getting better, faster than anyone envisioned — with the possibility rising that AI will self-improve and do wildly unpredictable things.<br /> <br /> The good news: There's now a growing public cry for attention and action and, at least in private, a broad understanding of what could be done relatively fast with bipartisan and industry buy-in.<br /> <br /> The big picture: In July, I wrote [https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-doomerism-jim-vandehei-axios-9163dfd3?st=QNUbDZ&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink an essay for The Wall Street Journal] saying America &quot;faces one of those rare, historic moments when government, business, schools and families could be working together to meet a truly generational challenge: winning the AI race. So far, we're blowing it.&quot;<br /> <br /> Two short months later, the technology is vastly better — and the societal response vastly dumber. As a nation, we're choosing to amuse or distract ourselves. <br /> <br /> Here's how to change that fast, based on our months of conversations with lawmakers, White House officials and AI labs. Think of what follows as me channeling their private views:<br /> <br /> Sound an all-hands-on-deck alarm. Every political topic is trivial and small compared to AI. We will look back in shame if we get spooled up about trans bans or $5,000 checks when countless AI insiders are warning of catastrophic outcomes. Let's say they're all paranoid and delusional. If so, it still doesn't matter: we've never seen this much investment in one technology this fast in human history. It's seeping into every industry and every job and every community and every screen, at a speed never before witnessed by man. Yes, we need a special session of Congress and select committees. But we need even more: AI execs, bioterror specialists, job-training wizards and safety experts convening to plan for scenarios and act fast.<br /> <br /> An AI governing body with teeth and speed, ASAP. This isn't rocket science. Most major labs want this and would agree to it, as long as it applies to all rivals and competitors. This body would need the expertise to understand these models, and the power to review and shut them down if they display dangerous behavior. It can't operate at typical regulatory speed — it needs to move as fast as the technology. It's nonsense to think you can't advance AI development fast and regulate it wisely simultaneously.<br /> <br /> A universal standard for data centers to benefit communities and taxpayers. The top AI companies would take this deal in a heartbeat: They get to build and operate data centers provided they supply a community's energy, offset water use or environmental damage, transparently report on their building and business plans, and spread the financial benefits to local residents. These execs are spooked by the public backlash and ready to aggressively spread the financial benefits, with dividends or cash. So make them.<br /> <br /> Engage China. We shouldn't trust them, and they shouldn't trust us. But trust me: the only way to ultimately control AI on a worldwide scale in coming years will be for the two superpowers to create some kind of framework modeled after how we've safely governed nuclear weapons for decades. We need to start this discussion now so potential collaboration is possible in the coming years. To those who think China will never consider this seriously: Are you sure an authoritarian regime really wants AI once it hits recursive self-learning and can't be controlled by anyone, including an autocratic regime? We're winning the AI race now, and may never have more leverage to shape this joint effort.<br /> <br /> Build coordinating infrastructure. What I wrote in the WSJ is even more needed today: &quot;Bring together the best and brightest drawn from the federal government, from the leading AI companies, from business and labor, from economics, from public health, from ethics to form a working group with actual authority. People who are paid to anticipate, not to react haphazardly.&quot; This group would have four primary functions: map potential problems and upsides before they hit, build the (policy) playbooks before they're needed, level with the American people along the way, and expedite work to deliver widespread AI benefits. <br /> <br /> Reality check: Yes, President Trump opposes regulation or bipartisan efforts. Yes, AI companies are obsessed with more money, more speed. But the politics are shifting fast: If you listen closely to Vice President Vance, you can hear rising worry. At this pace, toxic AI politics could force mind-changing that was unthinkable two months ago.<br /> <br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/ai-regulation-safety-plan-2026<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Recursive Self-Learning - When A.I. Builds Itself'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Big Blast'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Killing Life on Earth'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''It'll Happen in Bits &amp; Pieces, then Suddenly'''<br /> <br /> September 9, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> The US news was full of AI headlines today as a resignation of a top AI expert warned of a coming apocalypse...<br /> <br /> Here's a taste of Google News headlines, a feeding frenzy of dire words about what is now beyond a distant alert.<br /> <br /> The threat brings words of superintelligence, 'recursive' learning bots and superminds merging into threats to humanity.<br /> <br /> <br /> Here, at GreenPolicy360, we've already written of a predecessor, HAL 9000, and our memories from one of HAL's inventors in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, and how HAL decided humans were expendable... <br /> <br /> The Mission was of critical importance, HAL 'knew', and the Mission became HAL's goal above all else to achieve ... The humans could not be allowed to interfere with ... the Mission.<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:I%27m_sorry_Dave.jpg '''I'm sorry Dave''']<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:HAL_is_watching_U....png '''HAL is watching U''']<br /> <br /> <br /> Which takes us to today...<br /> <br /> Let's file today under the heading of our decades of writing about the need for '''[[New Definitions of National Security]]'''... <br /> <br /> Now come the PINGS on the radar... can U hear the PINGS? We have been mulling how to add HAL xxxxx to our existential list of threats, w/o annoying HALish bots too 'badly' <br /> <br /> <br /> “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.” -- an executive from Anthropic<br /> <br /> “So how would AI kill us all, exactly?” -- an editor from Axios<br /> <br /> <br /> More: <br /> <br /> <br /> For years, they warned AI could kill all humans <br /> :Now people are listening<br /> <br /> Sept. 10, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4xQojEq<br /> <br /> <br /> Rogue Hacking <br /> :Goals of the &quot;swarm&quot; came first...<br /> <br /> Sept. 9, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/09/opinion/openai-ai-companies-safety-regulation.html?unlocked_article_code=1.AFE.0vWo.zfl5fdm6ACNC&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:AI 1.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 2.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 3.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 4.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 5.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 6.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''August 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Gates Sounds Alarm... Artificial Intelligence Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Gates A.I. Warning August 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Bill Gates was an AI optimist. Now he’s scared of what could go wrong'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Microsoft co-founder sounds the alarm about artificial intelligence’s risks to safety and security, jobs and children’s well-being<br /> <br /> <br /> Washington Post, August 26, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4wO14cy<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Bill Gates Warns A.I. Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit'''<br /> <br /> : In an hourlong interview, he said his industry was downplaying the risks, which he believes include mass unemployment and bioterrorism<br /> <br /> <br /> NY Times, August 26, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/26/technology/bill-gates-ai-risks.html?unlocked_article_code=1.8VA.6kAC.vsZb9x0YdSzV&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''High Time to Shine a Spotlight on AI and Its Impact on Higher Education'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : At MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, One of the World's Top Academic/Research/Technology/Engineering/Teaching and Future-Impacting Institutions, a New Report Opens Eyes<br /> <br /> :* https://aiandeducation.mit.edu/report/#26-no-one-size-fits-all<br /> <br /> <br /> 1. Introduction<br /> <br /> This report is a call to action.<br /> <br /> Through five intense months of meetings, research, and outreach across the MIT community, the Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training sought to understand the role of generative AI in the life and educational mission of the Institute and recommend how to navigate its challenges and opportunities.<br /> <br /> In January 2026, Chancellor Melissa Nobles, Provost Anantha Chandrakasan, and Faculty Chair Roger Levy charged us1 specifically to:<br /> <br /> Assess current AI use at MIT.<br /> Identify innovations in teaching and student assessment.<br /> Propose an AI use policy.<br /> However, what we learned as a group quickly convinced us that the Institute community, particularly the faculty, must tackle a set of deeper questions about the structure, meaning, and value of an MIT education in an era in which AI is one of several factors complicating the Institute’s mission.<br /> <br /> Our committee consisted of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty from every school, and staff from relevant units, including the MIT Libraries and the Teaching and Learning Lab. Though we brought to the assignment a broad range of experience and no fixed thesis, our brief but intense explorations led us to a strong shared view.<br /> <br /> In this report, we:<br /> <br /> Highlight key aspects of the current educational landscape at MIT.<br /> Share eight principles we relied on and that we hope will guide the Institute in the work ahead.<br /> <br /> Recommend immediate and long-term actions for both instructors and the administration.<br /> <br /> As an institution deeply identified with the birth of AI and known for its distinctively rigorous, hands-on education, designed to produce graduates unafraid of the world’s hardest problems, MIT has a unique role to play in this moment. We believe it also has a responsibility to lead.<br /> <br /> We hope our report can help the Institute lean into the spirit of Mind, Hand, and Heart as it continues to define and foster the highest-quality residential education – of humans, by humans, in support of human flourishing, and for the betterment of humankind.<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Eric Klopfer, co-chair Sam Madden, co-chair<br /> <br /> On behalf of the Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training...<br /> <br /> <br /> AI is generating both immediate rapid changes and long-term tectonic disruptions – and MIT needs to respond:<br /> <br /> Students are confused and concerned about a lack of clarity, consistency and justification about the use of AI, within a given subject and across the curriculum.<br /> <br /> Every subject taught at MIT will likely need to be reexamined and potentially revamped to make sure that how students are being taught, what they’re learning, and how they’re assessed are “AI-aware.”<br /> <br /> AI is changing what students need to know and know how to do.<br /> <br /> Beyond its implications for specific subjects and disciplines, the advent of AI demands a broader, holistic reassessment of the nature, scope and purpose of higher education today...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Texas Terafab SpaceX AI August 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''A Terafab Plant Sprouts in Texas'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Elon Musk: We will manufacture the type of potent chips needed to transform humankind into &quot;a galactic civilization&quot; <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Shanaka's Opinion, a Guest Op/Ed'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Shenaka Perera Weighs In on What It Could Mean'''<br /> <br /> :: '''A Terafab Loop for Mega Launches Is Being Built''' <br /> <br /> ::* https://shanakaanslemperera.substack.com/p/the-capital-recovery-clock?r=6p7b5o<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Hidden inside the chip factory SpaceX confirmed Thursday is a launch schedule. If you divide its 1 terawatt annual compute target by the 100 kilowatts of orbital compute per tonne in SpaceX's own offering materials and you get 10 million tonnes to orbit a year. That exact figure sits on Terafab's official website. At 100 tonnes per Starship V3 flight it means 100,000 launches a year, 274 every day, forever.''<br /> <br /> ''The chip target is already a launch target.''<br /> <br /> ''Terafab is not a chip factory serving a market. The 16.8 billion dollar first phase in Grimes County, Texas is the first machine in a closed industrial loop built to manufacture the civilisation that can consume its own output.''<br /> <br /> ''The official plan places four figures together. One billion Optimus robots. Ten million tonnes to orbit a year. More than one terawatt of solar power. One terawatt of chips a year. They are not four ambitions. They are four links in one recursion. Terafab makes chips. Better chips improve AI. Better AI improves the software running the factories, the robots and the rocket lines. Robots and Starship build and deploy more power and compute infrastructure. That infrastructure creates the socket, and the demand, for the next Terafab cohort.''<br /> <br /> ''The fab is meant to manufacture its own reason to exist!''<br /> <br /> ''It is also an energy machine. One terawatt running continuously consumes 8.76 petawatt hours a year, nearly twice all electricity generated in the United States in 2025. The factory does not draw that power by making the chips. One fully powered annual cohort does, and a second year adds another terawatt of load unless old hardware retires or utilisation falls. Earth has no spare socket at that scale, which is why the plan points most of it at orbit, where a future 200 tonne vehicle still implies 50,000 launches a year, 137 a day, before failures, reserves, solar arrays, radiators, structure and shielding.''<br /> <br /> ''The real product is not AI silicon. If you go real deep, it is a new terawatt of powered, cooled, networked compute sockets every year.''<br /> <br /> ''Inside the building, the smaller loop is mask, wafer, package, test, redesign, then another mask. SpaceX says logic, memory and advanced packaging will sit in one closed loop, and Elon says Terafab will technically be two fabs, each devoted to one design. That can compress logistics and organisational latency. It cannot repeal process physics. A new mask can be written quickly. A leading edge process still carries hundreds of steps, long wafer cycle times, defect learning, overlay control, metrology and yield ramps, which is exactly why Tesla is hiring across lithography, etch, deposition, implant, CMP and metrology.''<br /> <br /> ''The free electron laser is the most misunderstood part. Elon has endorsed it, and an industrial FEL could feed several EUV scanners with far more source power than today's tin plasma systems. It attacks one bottleneck inside a chain of them. ASML recognised revenue on just 48 EUV systems in all of 2025. Intel is the process partner, and SpaceX still tells investors it expects to source a significant share of compute hardware from outside suppliers. This is vertical integration, not instant independence.''<br /> <br /> ''One correction decides the interpretation. A terawatt is a power rating, not an intelligence metric. A wasteful 1 kilowatt chip counts twice as much as an equally capable 500 watt chip. The measures that matter are useful compute per joule, per dollar and per kilogram, with yield, uptime and time from mask change to qualified silicon.''<br /> <br /> ''In my opinion, if chips improve faster than robots, rockets, power and radiators can scale, Terafab builds inventory. If the loop closes, it builds something no factory has built before, the demand for itself.''<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://www.terafab.ai/<br /> <br /> * https://www.spacex.com/updates/terafab<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terafab<br /> <br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/06/tesla-and-spacex-will-invest-16-8b-to-start-building-terafab-chip-factory-in-texas/<br /> <br /> * https://electrek.co/2026/08/06/tesla-spacex-terafab-grimes-county-16-8-billion/<br /> <br /> * https://www.cbsnews.com/news/terafab-elon-musk-chips-semiconductors-what-to-know/<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Betting big on data centers, U.S. now leads world for new gas power development<br /> <br /> [https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/betting-big-data-centers-us-now-leads-world-new-gas-power-development Via Global Energy Monitor]<br /> <br /> * https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/betting-big-data-centers-us-now-leads-world-new-gas-power-development<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> New Amazon Data Center Stokes Worry It Would Be the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.<br /> <br /> Via New York Times<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/08/climate/amazon-data-center-texas-pollution.html<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''July 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Elon Musk Opens Up in an Interview'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Economist Editor Presses the Controversial 'Trillionaire'<br /> <br /> :: Elon Musk's 'Vision of the Future'<br /> <br /> * https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/23/elon-musks-vision-of-the-future<br /> <br /> <br /> “People don’t realise that what I’m saying will come to pass,” he tells The Economist in a 90-minute interview for The Insider, held at a giant Tesla factory in Texas where electric cars drive themselves off the assembly line. That may be because his future-gazing ranges from the unsettling to the downright weird. Mr Musk predicts that, within five years, artificial-intelligence systems may surpass the sum of all human intelligence. Within ten years, robots in the workplace will help usher in an era of such “amazing abundance” that money will become meaningless....<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> Musk proposes peer review for frontier AI models in Economist interview<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/musk-proposes-peer-review-frontier-ai-models-economist-interview-2026-07-23/<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> Elon Musk says he got ‘carried away’ with Trump – but still holds on to contentious political views<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/23/elon-musk-regret-trump-doge-ai<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> Mix of Comments:<br /> <br /> * https://beincrypto.com/elon-musk-real-force-european-politics/<br /> * https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-killer-robots-ai-abundance-progress-unstoppable-2026-7<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/07/24/elon-musk-speaks-to-the-economist-editor-in-chief-zanny-minton-beddoes-on-the-key-takeaways.html<br /> * https://futurism.com/elon-musk-interviewer-npc<br /> * https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-economist-interview-2000790016<br /> * https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/nonsense-elon-musk-lashes-out-in-fiery-interview-after-hes-accused-of-supporting-the-far-right/<br /> * https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2026/07/23/musk_admonishes_the_economist_editor_what_is_far_right_about_having_secure_borders_safe_cities_and_sensible_spending.html<br /> * https://zeteo.com/p/top-economist-trump-musk-starmer<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> A.I. In Space <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Datacenters in Earth orbit to enable next generation artificial intelligence'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> New US petition demands review of plans from tech companies amid fears of environmental destruction<br /> <br /> Via The Guardian<br /> <br /> What are Bezos &amp; Musk Doing? <br /> <br /> What in the World Is Going On?<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jul/23/space-datacenters-bezos-blue-origin<br /> <br /> <br /> References:<br /> <br /> * https://www.starcloud.com/<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/21/do-space-based-ai-data-centers-make-economic-sense.html<br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/20/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-enters-the-space-data-center-game/<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/bezos-blue-origin-space-data-centers.html<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_data_center<br /> * https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/how-hard-is-it-to-build-orbital-data-centers-actually/<br /> * https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/06/260618041501.htm<br /> * https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-109012<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> A.I. &amp; Chip Wars<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Beyond a 'Belt and Road Initiative' Bringing Chinese Investments, Products &amp; Services to World Markets''' &lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Via GreenPolicy360's Associate, Strategic Demands<br /> <br /> :* https://strategicdemands.com/china-goes-beyond-the-belt-and-road-to-an-ai-for-the-world-strategy/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Open-Source A.I. from China Reveals a Global Chinese Strategy'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> July 17, 2026 / From the NY Times <br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/business/china-ai-moonshot-kimi.html?unlocked_article_code=1.yVA.LKT5.LxohSFddWAZT&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> The contest between China and the United States for supremacy in artificial intelligence escalated on Friday when the Chinese start-up Moonshot AI released a new A.I. model that appeared to narrow the lead held by well-funded American competitors.<br /> <br /> Moonshot said that the model, Kimi K3, was the world’s largest open-source A.I. system, allowing anyone to use, modify and build on it freely. The company said that Kimi K3 performed as well as leading models from OpenAI and Anthropic at some key tasks.<br /> <br /> The release coincided with an address by Xi Jinping, China’s leader, in which he outlined an ambitious vision for global A.I. development that cast China as the champion of an open approach to the technology.<br /> <br /> “A.I. development should not be a solo performance by a single country but a symphony of international cooperation,” Mr. Xi said. China was “ready to work with all parties to seize the opportunities of A.I. development” ...<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360:<br /> <br /> Keep in mind that<br /> <br /> There is 'no I in A.I.'<br /> <br /> In the interest of full-disclosure, the content written and published at GreenPolicy360 by our Founder/Siterunner is wholly, solely, by a human species.<br /> <br /> A note from your GreenPolicy360 Founder/Siterunner, Steve Schmidt, [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:All_species_day_with_homo_sapien_in_Santa_Fe_.jpg '''a verified human species'''], plz do keep in mind as you use and share the GreenPolicy360 content, that '''there is 'no I in A.I.'''' <br /> <br /> <br /> Let's talk a bit about sources and sourcing, as a human and then as an Agentic/A.I. bot. <br /> <br /> What is a 'primary source' (versus a 'secondary source')? A primary source can be a person with direct knowledge of a situation, an event in history, or a document written by such a person. A primary identification speaks of original creations, not re-interpreted or computer-assembled works. Here is how Merriam-Webster defines a 'primary source' - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/primary%20source<br /> <br /> <br /> : A.I. uses material scraped and collected from online sources. A.I. is not a 'primary source' -- but here at GreenPolicy360 you can find 'real-I' (we're using the phrase 'real-I', defined as 'real-intelligent', people who've personally acted to envision and create living, real world change.) <br /> <br /> <br /> : At GreenPolicy360 we tell stories of real people changing the world for the better. Day-to-day, your life becomes your message. We also share [[Green Best Practices]] across our Earth to communities of [[Planet Citizens]] ... In this way GreenPolicy360 is an eco Operating System, built on an open source MediaWiki platform and with a mission of being a 'distributive web'. Our goal of [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Category:Green_Networking Green Networking] acts to connect and share Green Links and grow [[The Modern Environmental Movement]]. <br /> <br /> :: GreenPolicy360 is about a [[Generation Green]] [[Going Green]].<br /> <br /> :: In our larger work, we have documented many primary sources and secondary sources. Our eco network continues to share myriad [[Green Best Practices]]. As our motto/mantra says at the top of each of our pages -- We believe ...<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> :: ''Each of us can make a positive difference by stepping up &amp; doing our best'' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::_______________________________________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> July 16, 2026 / From the NY Times<br /> <br /> SJS/GreenPolicy360: '''Every Once in a While a Comment to an Online Story is Worthy of Circulating'''<br /> <br /> : Here is one of those occasions -- the Subject? '''&quot;A.I.Slop&quot;'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Kashmir Hill.jpg]]<br /> <br /> ::Kashmir Hill / NYT<br /> <br /> <br /> Read the AI Slop story of writer Kashmir Hill as a free-share link here -- <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''I Got Slopped'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''Someone Used A.I. to Write My Biography'''<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/technology/ai-slop-books-biography-amazon.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ylA.aCMz.czE5JwZuuFO0&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Comments: <br /> <br /> Anon, who goes by the name -- <br /> <br /> '''Radical Roach / Dippleville''' says<br /> <br /> @Kashmir Hill - Maybe books need to now have disclaimers on their covers, in reviews, on the book’s Amazon page, wherever the book is being sold, etc.. The disclaimer would say if the book was written solely by a human, written by AI assisting a human, or written completely by AI. I would want to know.<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We tend to agree with this anon recommendation of adding disclaimers indicating the type of online content, e.g., content created solely by a human, or content created with AI assistance, or content created by AI with human assistance.<br /> <br /> It's a new world out there. We have a need to know.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> July 15, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Anthropic hard questions July 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/news/hard-questions<br /> <br /> * https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/anthropic-ad-ai-kill-us-all<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''An Excerpt: A DeepMind Thought for Today on the AGI Frontier'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> by Demis Hassbis<br /> <br /> * https://x.com/demishassabis/status/2076957440109625718<br /> <br /> <br /> A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age<br /> <br /> Demis Hassabis<br /> <br /> * https://x.com/demishassabis<br /> <br /> <br /> July 14, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> This is a pivotal moment in human history. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a system that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities the brain has, is probably only a few short years away. When we look back on this time in the decades to come, I think we will realise we were standing in the foothills of the singularity - nothing less than the dawning of a new age for humanity.<br /> <br /> I’ve spent my whole life working on AGI because I’ve always had a deep conviction that, if built and deployed responsibly, it would prove to be one of the most beneficial and transformative technologies ever invented. AGI cannot be compared to standard technological breakthroughs, not even ones as consequential as the internet or mobile - it is much more akin to the discovery of electricity or fire. If you stop to think about it, we’ve essentially found a way to make sand think. It’s miraculous.<br /> <br /> The magnitude of this technology’s impact will be unprecedented, perhaps 10x of the Industrial Revolution at 10x the speed. It will help us solve some of the biggest problems society faces from accelerating drug discovery to developing new clean energy sources to creating novel advanced materials. We could even reach a point where resources are no longer the limiting factor for human progress, leading to an amazing new era of abundance.<br /> <br /> The Challenges of the Frontier<br /> <br /> AI is already starting to deliver real-world benefits but to realise its immense promise, we have to navigate this critical period of development thoughtfully and carefully. Urgent action is needed to address risks that might arise as we get closer to AGI. We’ve already seen the challenges frontier models pose for cybersecurity, and other threats including nuclear and bio risks may soon emerge as capabilities continue to advance. On the horizon, we will need robust safeguards to maintain control of increasingly agentic, recursively self-improving systems - and tackle unknown issues that will only become clearer over time...<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''An AI Supercomputer Is Created for a Mission... Its Name Is HAL'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Steve Schmidt/GreenPolicy360: It's not every day that you get to know a creator of a famed -- and infamous -- AI character from a Kubrick film called &quot;2001: A Space Odyssey&quot;. <br /> <br /> : We listen in as HAL came to be ... A friend, a Visual Effect (VFX) genius named '''Douglas Trumbull''', explains how HAL went from LA to MIT, then into production and into our imaginations. <br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Trumbull vfx master.jpg]]<br /> <br /> : Douglas Trumbull<br /> <br /> : &lt;small&gt;* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Trumbull_vfx_master.jpg&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> The HAL 9000 was envisioned by creators and science, as a new type of neural intelligence, a machine brain.<br /> <br /> Hal is of heuristic algorithmic language -- HALis, as we learn, on a mission far from Earth, a mission with deep meaning.<br /> <br /> <br /> HAL 9000 was in the future. The future is now.<br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence is now here, with its powers and dangers, as we recall Supercomputer [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000 '''HAL 9000''']. <br /> <br /> A warning of what is on the line for humanity is the message related as we ride along in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey '''2001: A Space Odyssey'''] ... <br /> <br /> <br /> HAL's memorable words --<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;I'm sorry, Dave....&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;It can only be attributable to human error....&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.<br /> <br /> HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.<br /> <br /> Dave: What's the problem?<br /> <br /> HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.<br /> <br /> Dave: What are you talking about, HAL?<br /> <br /> HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film)<br /> <br /> * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/characters/nm0706937<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:I'm sorry Dave.jpg]]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:HAL_is_watching_U....png<br /> <br /> <br /> Today, as humanity approaches questions of out-of-control technology created by humanity .... <br /> <br /> We ask, '''[[Planet Citizens]] and [[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]''' ask, 'What's Next?' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Privacy at Risk, You're Being Watched, Tracked, &amp; More<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Privacy.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Next Big Thing'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;It Is Here, Already Here...&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Online_Privacy<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Call It 'Surveillance Capitalism''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Hope that It doesn't become 'the Norm' <br /> <br /> : Work to Make Sure It Does Not Become 'Surveillance Government'<br /> <br /> <br /> Scroll thru Intel on the Privacy Threat of AI Unleashed ...<br /> <br /> :Artificial Intelligence + Data Centers = Next Gen 'Watchful HAL'<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism<br /> * https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr-ryan/publications/geopolitics-surveillance-capitalism<br /> * https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=56791<br /> <br /> <br /> _______________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''June 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''An Academic Exercise'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : 'Old School' Emeritus Professor Examines AI<br /> <br /> : The Question: Can a Gemini ChatBot Suggest Ways to Turn AI Toward the Common Good?<br /> <br /> <br /> The prof uses left-leaning political formations to inquire and recommend public-oriented futures.<br /> <br /> * https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/06/19/my-ai-comrade/<br /> <br /> <br /> (Note beyond academic: Using history as a guide, powerful new technology such as AI will be employed by political powers to preserve political power and by military powers to employ and extend military power. AI Use Cases: A number of AI programs enabling AI for military programs, including war intelligence, communication, command/control and targeting, and civilian database surveillance involving intrusive human/civil rights questions and violations, have as of 2026 become high-level concerns.)<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''An Interview and Thoughts as an Author Rides alongside an AI Wave'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The God Test'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning<br /> <br /> Author: Robert Wright<br /> <br /> * https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Robert-Wright/73247968<br /> <br /> <br /> Publisher: Simon &amp; Schuster<br /> <br /> Published Date: June 23, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-God-Test/Robert-Wright/9781668061657<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Interview via Substack'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Jack Goldsmith: I’m chatting today with Robert Wright about his terrific new book, '''The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning'''. <br /> <br /> So, I want to start off with the big picture, because your book places AI in the broadest possible context—not just as an important step in the history of technological change, but rather as an important step in the significantly longer history of basically our planet and our species. And that’s pretty cosmic, as the subtitle says.<br /> <br /> Why do you do that? What does it mean, and why is that perspective important?<br /> <br /> Bob Wright: Well, thanks for having me. Yeah, it’s a good question, because I could have gotten the core message across without getting so cosmic, I guess.<br /> <br /> The main purpose is to try to explain to people, including non-technical people, why there’s been this rapid growth of capability in AI; why, once you understand that, you should expect the capability to keep growing; why that, in addition to promising great blessings, is going to bring great risks, including grave ones, including maybe existential ones; and why the nature of those risks, in my view, dictates that we confront the challenge of this technology as a cohesive global community, which will take some doing because we’ve never really done that before for anything like a sustained period of time.<br /> <br /> And so I didn’t have to get into the history of life or anything to say what I just said, but I do think some important things are added when you step back and look at AI in the broader sweep of things.<br /> <br /> For starters, this is, in the entire three- or four-billion-year history of life, the first time a new form of intelligence that rivals or even exceeds human intelligence has appeared. It’s the first form of intelligence that is not organic in the technical sense of being carbon-based. It’s silicon-based, but it is organic in the everyday sense of being kind of natural.<br /> <br /> What I mean by that is I try to show that AI does, in some sense, grow kind of logically, naturally out of biological evolution. I mean, technological evolution broadly does, and AI as a form of intelligence does. And indeed, when we look at the evolutionary dynamics shaping it—the dynamics of technological evolution—we should expect it to have certain things in common with our own intelligence, which I think are important.<br /> <br /> So I think that’s one thing you get out of a broad perspective.<br /> <br /> Another thing is that I talk about this guy, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—a Catholic paleontologist, mystic, and theologian—who coined the term noosphere, based on the Greek word nous, in 1923 to describe what he called a planetary mind or a brain of brains, where the human brains were the neurons in this increasingly global brain.<br /> <br /> And technological history, including the invention of the internet, has, I think, made him look prescient. And I think there’s value in keeping in mind that AI is arriving as we more and more have the technical infrastructure for a kind of global information processing, a kind of global brain. And we have to reckon with the possibility that some of the neurons will be silicon, not human, and think about what our relationship to them is going to be.<br /> <br /> And I think one value of thinking in these terms is, first of all, that from a Teilhardian point of view, the whole unfolding of life is moving toward us being this kind of giant superorganism, you could say, with this giant brain.<br /> <br /> And I argue in the book that the logic of technological evolution is going to push us — I mean, if we respond rationally — toward something a little more like a global brain, in the sense of having more international governance.<br /> <br /> At the same time, I think the image of a superorganism should worry us because it’s, for obvious reasons, an image that’s favored by authoritarians and fascists. How much freedom do you have if you’re a cell in a superorganism?<br /> <br /> And I think AI greatly heightens the stakes of that question, precisely because it’s such a powerful tool of surveillance and control.<br /> <br /> So I think, on the one hand, the logic of technological evolution, especially AI, is pushing us toward the global coordination of certain policies and the creation of forms of supranational power. At the same time, it should make us wary of surrendering too much power...<br /> <br /> <br /> Read More of the Substack Conversation between Jack Goldsmith and Robert Wright [https://substack.com/home/post/p-201670588 '''here''']<br /> <br /> Also, More Book Reviews [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Book_Reviews_@GreenPolicy '''here @ GreenPolicy360''']<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎 <br /> <br /> <br /> AI / AGI<br /> <br /> <br /> May 29 / Forbes<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Fundraise values Anthropic AI company at nearly a trillion dollars'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Dario and Daniela Amodei, along with five cofounders, have a story to tell<br /> <br /> * https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2026/05/29/anthropics-cofounders-worth/<br /> <br /> <br /> ''When Anthropic announced on Thursday (May 28) that it had raised $65 billion at a valuation of $965 billion, it didn’t just become the most valuable AI startup in the world, eclipsing $852 billion-valued archrival OpenAI. It also ballooned the individual fortunes of Anthropic’s seven cofounders — more than doubling their net worths to $16.6 billion apiece, Forbes estimates.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''In Rarified Air'''''<br /> <br /> ''Siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, as well as their five other cofounders Jack Clark, Sam McCandlish, Chris Olah, Tom Brown and Jared Kaplan, are in rarified air when it comes to entrepreneurs who struck it rich in the generative AI boom...''<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Pope Leo XIV encyclical re AI and Humanitas.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> “Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed,” Pope Leo said in announcing the text of his first [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=encyclical&amp;go=Go '''encyclical''']. “The word is strong, I know, but deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention...”<br /> <br /> And into the encyclical's key words:<br /> <br /> &quot;To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life. Our task today is not only ethical or technical. It is ecological in the deepest sense, for it concerns a new dimension of our common home.&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> “Crucial questions impose themselves on our conscience and can no longer be avoided: Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?”<br /> <br /> <br /> At GreenPolicy360, understanding and protecting '''[[The Commons]]''' is also a key to realizing values, ideals and ideas we are carrying forward...<br /> <br /> <br /> The encyclical's presentation went out globally with a special focus on the AI frontier work of Anthropic, with a co-founder, [https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-be-guided-outside-big-tech-2026-05-25/ '''Olah at the Encyclical's unveiling'''] ...<br /> <br /> <br /> &gt;The dramatic unveiling of the new encyclical overshadowed the document itself in some ways. In an unprecedented move, Leo personally presided over its presentation and sat on a panel at the Vatican with not only leading theologians, but also Christopher Olah, 33, the billionaire co-founder of top AI company Anthropic. <br /> <br /> <br /> ❇️<br /> <br /> <br /> Washington Post / May 25, 2026 -- '''Anthropic aligns with Vatican over White House as Pope Leo stokes AI fears'''<br /> <br /> With Anthropic already in a dispute with the Trump administration, co-founder Christopher Olah helped Pope Leo unveil his encyclical on the risks of artificial intelligence<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4uyQBlb<br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/news/chris-olah-pope-leo-encyclical<br /> <br /> * https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/pope-leo-warns-ai-should-be-disarmed-in-manifesto-on-potential-dangers<br /> <br /> * https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-102521111.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-be-guided-outside-big-tech-2026-05-25/<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/25/the-guardian-view-on-the-pope-and-claude-encyclical-on-ai-is-right-to-put-humanity-first<br /> <br /> <br /> '''At the Vatican'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhKH_aiBcis<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Via The Vatican News | The Holy See'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2026-05/pope-leo-xiv-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas-ai.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html<br /> <br /> <br /> '''10 quotes from Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, ‘Magnifica Humanitas’'''<br /> <br /> * https://uscatholic.org/articles/202605/10-quotes-from-pope-leo-xivs-first-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Previous in 2020, &quot;The Call for AI Ethics&quot;''' <br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/the-call/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/renaissance/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/the-first-signatories/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/news/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Previous in 1891, &quot;Rerum Novarum&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerum_novarum<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''AI Use Case Inventory'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''Artificial Intelligence:''' <br /> <br /> : Perspectives from the US Environmental Protection Agency<br /> <br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/ai-use-case-inventory<br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/open-data-policies<br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/where-find-epa-data<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''GreenPolicy360 Advisory:'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In Development -- National Climate Plans Best Practices Project 1.0, AI 2026-27'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Goal: To Utilize the Current (US) State and (Global/International) National Climate Action Plans/Data to Identify Actionable '''[[Green Best Practices]]'''<br /> <br /> Strategy: Enable AI Tool Sets to Scan Climate Plan Databases and Distribute Recommended 'High Priority' &amp; Green Best Practice Action Policies<br /> <br /> <br /> Reference: '''[[National Climate Plans]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Additional References:'''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''US State Climate Policy Action Plans'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.climatepolicydashboard.org/policies/climate-governance-equity/climate-action-plans<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Priority Climate Action Plan (PCAP) Directory'''<br /> <br /> ''The Climate Action Plan Directory organizes data collected from 211 Priority Climate Action Plans (PCAP) submitted by US state governments, Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), Tribes, and territories under EPA’s Climate Pollution Reduction Grants (CPRG) program. The directory presents information from more than 30 data categories related to GHG inventories, GHG reduction measures, benefits for low-income and disadvantaged communities (LIDACs), and other PCAP elements.''<br /> <br /> ''A state climate action plan, also called a climate plan, details the policies and strategies a state intends to implement to meet its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets. A climate plan typically includes a GHG emissions inventory, regional and local climate impacts, and a discussion of GHG emissions reduction targets. The plan identifies climate mitigation actions, their potential social, environmental, and economic benefits, and recommendations and strategies for implementing each mitigation action, often quantifying the expected reduction in emissions.''<br /> <br /> ''Effective climate action plans will have a legislative directive that requires a robust community engagement process, input from a climate advisory group, a near-term due date for a finalized plan, and periodic updates. Climate action plans should also incorporate and address environmental justice throughout the planning process and within the plan itself, and show transparency and accountability by detailing the methodology and community engagement process.''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:GreenPolicy360 Today.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Green_Best_Practices]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[GreenAction]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Question of Our Time / Today, Here &amp; Now, in the Midst of the 21st Century'''<br /> <br /> '''Where are you?'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ➡️ What is your state's climate action plan?<br /> <br /> ➡️ What is your nation's climate action plan?<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Plans_Enforcement_-_Resources GRN360: Climate Plans Enforcement Initiative] | [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Methods_to_enforce_climate_pledges-NDCs_-_Dec_2021.png Enforce Climate Plan Pledges]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''National Climate Plans Database Information via GreenPolicy360'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[National Climate Plans]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/National_Climate_Plans<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In the U.S. and Worldwide'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;'''It's a Good Time for [[Planet Citizen Action]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;[[Each of us can make a positive difference]]&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth in Human Hands.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :[http://www.planetcitizen.org &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Planet Citizens&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Earth Is in Your Hands'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;'''[[Generation Green]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Generation_Green &lt;big&gt;&quot;Vita contemplativa to Vita activa&quot;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Green Branching Out.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''2025'''<br /> <br /> <br /> December 2025 <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven approach to climate action and sustainable development'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via Nature Communications<br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53956-1<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> From A16Z New Media<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''It's Time to Build'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The electro-industrial stack will move the world'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Ryan McEntush<br /> <br /> ''The next industrial revolution won’t just happen in factories, but inside the machines that power them.''<br /> <br /> ''Software transformed how we think, design, and communicate. Now it’s transforming how we move, build, and produce. Advances in electrification, materials, and AI are converging, bringing true software control to the physical world. Machines are beginning to sense, learn, and act on their own.''<br /> <br /> ''This is the rise of the electro-industrial stack—the combined technologies that power electric vehicles, drones, data centers, and modern manufacturing. It connects the atoms that move the world to the bits that command it: minerals refined into components, energy stored in batteries, electricity directed by power electronics, motion delivered through precision motors, all coordinated by software. It’s the invisible foundation behind every breakthrough in physical automation; it’s the difference between software that merely summons a taxi and software that takes the wheel.''<br /> <br /> ''But the capacity to build this stack, from refining critical materials to fabricating advanced chips, is slipping away. If the United States wants to lead the next industrial era, it must make the hardware that underpins it. The nations that master the electro-industrial stack will define the future of industrial and military technologies.''<br /> <br /> ''Software ate the world. Now it will move it.''<br /> <br /> * https://a16z.com/why-software-is-eating-the-world/<br /> <br /> <br /> ➡️<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Forward-deployed motions take AI to the 99%'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Joe Schmidt, A16Z<br /> <br /> ''AI is the most exciting technology breakthrough of our lifetimes. So far, though, most of the benefits from new startups have accrued to the 1% of companies that are in Silicon Valley—either literally in the Bay Area or part of that extended network. This makes sense, too: startup founders want to sell to companies they recognize and can easily get to, whether that means driving to their offices or getting a connection from the VC on their board.''<br /> <br /> ''In 2026, this will flip. Companies will realize that the vast majority of the AI opportunity lives outside of Silicon Valley, and we’re going to see new founders use forward-deployed motions to discover more opportunities that are hiding inside big, legacy verticals. The opportunity stands to be massive in traditional consulting and services industries, like system integrators and implementation firms, and in slower-moving industries like manufacturing.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Re: [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/New_Definitions_of_National_Security '''''New Definitions of National Security''''']<br /> <br /> Extract from Foreign Policy<br /> <br /> ''Over the last two decades, climate change has contributed to instability around the world—bolstering the ranks of terror groups, sparking territorial disputes, and triggering mass migration. It’s no wonder that militaries and international security organizations increasingly see climate change as a formidable national security threat, and that they have in turn taken on greater roles in fighting it.''<br /> <br /> ''In recent years, new technology has transformed the tools available to mitigate the effects of climate change. Specifically, artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly become a widespread instrument in the climate fight—even as it consumes exceptional amounts of energy and water itself. Today, militaries and nonstate actors, including the United Nations, are leveraging AI to foretell climate-related disasters, optimize energy use, and monitor ecological degradation.''<br /> <br /> * https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/12/01/ai-military-climate-dual-use-technology-threat/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> October 2025<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''We're Looking at You'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : 'A First Generation of AI Scientists'<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Periodic Labs.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Our goal is to create an AI scientist.&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://periodic.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Intriguing New Start Up That Is Close To Home'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Periodic Labs On Our Radar<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Our goal is to assist in integrating AI science into Earth science, in order to advance the vital work of the past 50+ years of [[The Modern Environmental Movement]] in which we have been integrally involved.<br /> <br /> Perspective, facts, science, health, quality of life became the mission statement of our work since we joined up with &quot;Mr. Science&quot;, as Congressman and leader on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology '''[[George E. Brown Jr]]''' came to be known.<br /> <br /> We are persistent in keeping on with the work. Vast data sets that George Brown's physics and engineering efforts envisioned and brought forward over three decades with state of the art and science programs and projects, the best possible of the era, are now about to move faster and farther into the 21st Century.<br /> <br /> Our familial partners, with aid of Andreessen Horowitz (A16z), and Accel, and university and private partners are now going to the next level.<br /> <br /> George Brown would be very pleased to see, and help accelerate the effort if he were still here.<br /> <br /> We will step up with Mr. Science and more in mind...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:AI in Earth Science.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Read more about George and us...<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Advancing Science, Facts, Technology and Data to Make the Case for Environmental Protection&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> : 1960s/70s, Beginnings of Planet Citizen Eco-Action, Big Science, and a New Vision<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In Memory of Congressman George Brown'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> Visionary Leadership, Historic Environmental Achievements<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:George in Memory, a Man of Science and Humanity.jpg]]<br /> <br /> :::[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Association_for_the_Advancement_of_Science &lt;small&gt;American Association for the Advancement of Science&lt;/small&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[PlanetCitizen]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/User:Siterunner '''Steve Schmidt GreenPolicy360 Siterunner''']: <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Brown_Jr. '''George E. Brown'''] became known as Mr. Science in Congress and for thirty+ years, I saw my friend George as a patriot who became a Planet Citizen for the ages<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Good science needs good data .png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Good_science_needs_good_data_.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Stats_-_Green_Research_%26_Science<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_Education<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Global Tech Changemakers'''<br /> <br /> Beyond Silicon Valley &amp; Mega Corporations<br /> <br /> The Rest of the World<br /> <br /> * https://restofworld.org/row100/#filters<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> As the Nobel Prizes in Economics are awarded, GreenPolicy360 points at a geopolitical race in energy and AI between the US and China.<br /> <br /> Let's take time to look more closely (as the US falls behind under a backward looking president with policies in opposition to renewable energy and forward, internationally demanded production. <br /> <br /> Start here... <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Today, China produces 75% of lithium-ion batteries globally and manufactures 90% of the neodymium magnets that make motors spin. In power electronics and embedded compute, it’s rapidly gaining ground.''<br /> <br /> ''That means that China controls the means of producing electric vehicles (EVs), drones, robots, and all of the other electric products that are replacing the combustion-driven machines on which America built its might.''<br /> <br /> ''As we speak, everything that moves, heats, lights up, computes, or converts energy is being rebuilt to perform better, faster, cheaper, quieter, and as a freebie, cleaner around electric technology.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.notboring.co/p/7653b980-dd32-4d8c-88c6-1543bec70220?postPreview=paid&amp;updated=2025-08-26T12%3A09%3A11.763Z&amp;audience=everyone&amp;free_preview=false&amp;freemail=true<br /> <br /> * https://electricslide.notboring.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Electric Stack Technology Cost Curves (1990-2024).jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Pause here to reflect on the eco-nomic and strategic advantages of 'clean energy' vs 'full costs' of fossil fuel powered economies (per a GreenPolicy360 paradigm of [[Eco-nomics]])'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Eco-nomics<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Environmental full-cost accounting]]'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_full-cost_accounting<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Now consider 'Electricity generation', China v U.S. and follow the data, the stats, trendline, the dynamics of change and what this is indicating and signaling re: geopolitical competitiveness today and into the the mid 21st Century'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:China v United States, Electricity Generation 1985-2024.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) Era'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'Are You Talking to Me'<br /> <br /> :* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_pre-trained_transformer<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> September 17, 2025<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Another Warning About AI'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Harkening back to the old days when Dispatch News Service was independently, and bravely, distributing the costs-of-war, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre '''My Lai'''] investigative news stories by Sy Hersh. David Obst, who started Dispatch, tells the story of Seymour Hersh better than anyone in my opinion (other than Sy himself) and since your GreenPolicy360 founder was there to assist, in DC, in LA, in Chicago, in Europe, and with the Vietnam Moratorium Committee in 69/70/71, here is an update, today's Sy Hersh, now online with Substack distribution as Sy investigates and forwards another eye opening warning.<br /> <br /> What's AI and AGI to you and all of our readers around our 360 world? And, since we at GreenPolicy360, have been involved with Wikipedia since its launch, let's take a first look at the artificial intel world of today from the vantage point of an open source online 'encyclopedia'.<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT (Empire of AI: OpenAI - https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593657500)<br /> <br /> <br /> Before Sy, as investigative journalist that he is, gives us his take, let's look at a take from a personal, close up connection at A16Z - https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/02/a-new-a16z-report-looks-at-which-ai-companies-startups-are-actually-paying-for/<br /> <br /> <br /> Now, on to Sy and his view of AI costs... think of the upside/downside of AI, the pluses/minuses, pros and cons, a cost-benefit analysis as a geo-political rush for front-of-market dominance is taking place now in ways that will change 'everything'... <br /> <br /> * https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/the-hidden-costs-of-artificial-intelligence<br /> <br /> <br /> The boom in Artificial Intelligence (AI) production comes with a big cost... <br /> <br /> The AI 'bubble' grows...<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Kate Crawford writes in [https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-AI-Planetary-Artificial-Intelligence/dp/0300264631/ref=sr_1_1 '''Atlas of AI'''] ... the world’s artificial intelligence companies, (are) crafting the myth of AI as “the cloud,” implying “something floating and delicate within a natural green industry. Servers are hidden in nondescript data centers, and their polluting qualities are far less visible than the bellowing smokestacks of coal-fired power stations.”''<br /> <br /> ''The fact is, as she writes, “it takes a gargantuan amount of energy to run the computational infrastructure of Amazon’s Web Services or Microsoft’s Azure, and the carbon footprint of the AI systems that run on those platforms is growing. Certainly, the industry has made significant efforts to make data centers more energy efficient and to increase their use of renewable energy.” But the efforts have accomplished little.<br /> <br /> “Already,” Crawford reports, “the carbon footprint of the world’s computational infrastructure has matched that of the world’s aviation industry at its height, and it is increasing at a faster rate.” One Canadian study estimates that the tech sector will contribute 14 percent of global greenhouse emissions by 2040, and a Swedish team predicts that the electricity demands of data centers will increase fifteenfold by 2030...''<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Think about Green AI as &quot;the cloud&quot; arrives in your life, on your devices, at home, in the office, all around, every day, everywhere. <br /> <br /> An UnGreen AI is coming with a rush, offering and prying data, and needing and demanding immense rising magnitudes of energy and power.<br /> <br /> AI has a voracious appetite...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Green AI / Green Artificial Intelligence'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''Environmental Solutions Using Big Picture Interconnectivity Thinking'''<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We agree with Tyler in the following interview as he states (as highlighted by us) that 'memoir, biography, anecdote... secrets' carry exceptional meaning for Artificial Intelligence (AI) large learning models (LLMs). <br /> <br /> The first extensive public revelation of AI systems over the past several years has led us at GreenPolicy360 to confirm via metrics that our multi-year plan to place our prime source content in the open-access, distributive web public domain has produced a fast-expanding multiplier effect. <br /> <br /> Many of our stories, told from a first-hand point of view of the origins of what we refer to as the beginnings of the modern environmental movement are now, with our revelations, memoir material, previously untold biography, anecdote and more now out and about and being freely served up in AI chats 'around the world'.<br /> <br /> We are succeeding in our purposeful mission with Green AI... to inform, share, inspire and 'til the fields with green seeds and best practices.<br /> <br /> Onward planet citizens...<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Eric Topol Interview of Tyler Cowen'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> May 11, 2025<br /> <br /> Tyler Cowen: ''The AI is your smartest reader. It’s your most sympathetic reader. It will remember what you tell it. So I think humans should sit down and ask, what does the AI need to know? And also, (bf added) '''what is it that I know that’s not on the historical record anywhere? That’s not just repetition if I put it down, say on the internet. So there’s no point in writing repetitions anymore because the AI already knows those things. So the value of what you’d call broadly, memoir, biography, anecdote, you could say secrets. It’s now much higher.''' And the value of repeating basic truths, which by the way, I love as an economist, to be clear, like free trade, tariffs are usually bad, those are basic truths. But just repeating that people will be going to the AI and saying it again won’t make the AI any better. So '''everything you write or podcast, you should have this point in mind'''.''<br /> <br /> <br /> For more from Tyler Cowen (and his exceptional mind) visit his and Alex Tabarrok's website - Marginal Revolution / Marginal Revolution University (MRU) - https://marginalrevolution.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> Eric Topol - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Topol<br /> <br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_artificial_intelligence<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> More re: AI in the US circa 2025: '''It's a Wild, Wild AI World'''<br /> <br /> Battles in the Information Services, Search Space with Google and consequences of the U.S. Google anti-monopoly legal decision<br /> <br /> Impacts on AI 'startup ecosystem', VCs, including Y Combinator and accelerator tech development, agentics, and upcoming entrepreneurial re-configurations<br /> <br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/13/y-combinator-says-google-is-a-monopolist-that-has-stunted-the-startup-ecosystem/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/11/microsoft-and-national-geographic-announce-winners-of-ai-for-earth-innovation-grant/ '''Microsoft and National Geographic announce winners of AI for Earth Innovation Grant''']<br /> <br /> : • https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/16/microsofts-ai-for-earth-innovation-grant-gives-data-scientists-access-to-ai-tools/<br /> <br /> :: • https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/11/microsoft-commits-50-million-more-to-its-ai-for-earth-program-to-save-the-planet/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:PlanetCitizen banner 800x163.jpg|link=https://greenpolicy360.net/w/PlanetCitizen]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;GreenPolicy360 ToC - https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360-eOS&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> A 21st Century AI/Machine Learning Case Study<br /> <br /> '''''Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools''''' <br /> <br /> * https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2023arXiv230204761S/abstract<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''NOAA scientists harness machine learning to advance climate models'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> March 1st, 2023<br /> <br /> * https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/news/noaa-scientists-harness-machine-learning-to-advance-climate-models/<br /> <br /> * https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''How artificial intelligence is fast becoming a key tool for climate science (2021)'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-artificial-intelligence-is-fast-becoming-a-key-tool-for-climate-science/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Climate Modeling'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://allenai.org/climate-modeling<br /> <br /> ''Planetary-scale Earth simulations known as global climate model projections are the primary sources of information on future climate change.''<br /> <br /> ''Climate models are based on mathematical equations represented using a grid mesh that covers the globe: a finer grid mesh is more accurate but much more computationally expensive. Current global climate projections agree that a world with more greenhouse gases will be warmer everywhere, especially over land and at high latitudes.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Networking grnlinks.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Artificial intelligence]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Rights]]<br /> [[Category:Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-nomics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:EOS eco Operating System]]<br /> [[Category:Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Energy Policy]]<br /> [[Category:GreenLinks]]<br /> [[Category:GreenPolicy360]]<br /> [[Category:Green Best Practices]]<br /> [[Category:Green Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Health]]<br /> [[Category:Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Maps]]<br /> [[Category:Media]]<br /> [[Category:Mobile Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Online Education]]<br /> [[Category:Planet API]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Renewable Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Youth]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Air Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Air Quality]]<br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Atmospheric Science]]<br /> [[Category:Best Practices]]<br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:City-County Governments]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Earth360]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Law]] <br /> [[Category:Earth Observations]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science from Space]]<br /> [[Category:Earth System Science]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-ethics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-nomics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecological Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Economic Development]]<br /> [[Category:Economic Justice]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Energy Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Security]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Full-cost Accounting]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Security, National Security]]<br /> [[Category:EOS eco Operating System]]<br /> [[Category:Externalities]]<br /> [[Category:Fact Checking]]<br /> [[Category:Fossil Fuels]]<br /> [[Category:Global Security]]<br /> [[Category:Global Warming]]<br /> [[Category:Green Business]]<br /> [[Category:Green Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Green Platform]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Green Values]]<br /> [[Category:GreenPolicy360]]<br /> [[Category:Health]]<br /> [[Category:Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Land Ethic]]<br /> [[Category:Media]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Capital]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resources]]<br /> [[Category:Networking]]<br /> [[Category:New Economy]]<br /> [[Category:New Space]]<br /> [[Category:Online Education]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Scientist]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Plastic Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Policies]]<br /> [[Category:Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Renewable Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Social Justice]]<br /> [[Category:Solar Energy]]<br /> [[Category:State]]<br /> [[Category:Strategic Demands]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability Policies]]<br /> [[Category:ThinBlueLayer]]<br /> [[Category:Toxics and Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Threat Multiplier]]<br /> [[Category:Virtual Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Virtual Planet]]<br /> [[Category:Whole Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Wind Energy]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Online_Privacy&diff=138364 2026-10-08T13:31:19Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> [[File:Privacy.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Next Big Thing'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Beyond Online Surveillance, Now Comes A.I. Powered Surveillance<br /> <br /> Add in Data Centers, Cameras/Firmware/Software, Palentir-esque Programming and ...<br /> <br /> * https://www.palantir.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;It Is Here, Already Here ... Operational ... &lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Where are you? There it is ...<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Call It 'Surveillance Capitalism''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Hope that It doesn't become 'the Norm' <br /> <br /> : Work to Make Sure It Does Not Become 'Surveillance Government'<br /> <br /> <br /> Scroll thru Intel on the Privacy Threat of AI Unleashed ...<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism<br /> * https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr-ryan/publications/geopolitics-surveillance-capitalism<br /> * https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=56791<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> October 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> Flock -- automated license plate readers (ALPRs)<br /> <br /> Interactive map shows more than 300,000 Flock-linked surveillance devices across the United States, including more than 170,000 cameras and roughly 130,000 additional pieces of supporting equipment.<br /> <br /> The map, known as the &quot;Flock Surveillance Map,&quot; was created using location data ... from a snapshot of Flock's own records that was archived in December 2025.<br /> <br /> * https://www.newsweek.com/new-bill-targets-flock-surveillance-questions-raised-cameras-12501457<br /> <br /> * https://theintercept.com/2026/09/24/how-many-flock-devices-in-united-states-300000/<br /> <br /> <br /> Axon Fusus<br /> <br /> * https://vimeo.com/1076961535<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.npr.org/2026/10/08/nx-s1-5981343/beyond-flock-police-ai-surveillance-tools<br /> <br /> &quot;I have been watching the debate about Flock with a little bit of puzzlement,&quot; says Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University. &quot;Because real-time crime centers have not just ALPR cameras and sensors, but video analytics and drones and essentially a way to create a visual single-pane-of-glass vision of what's going on in a city, with time machine capabilities where you can go back and investigate crime.&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> The Most Surveilled City in America<br /> <br /> * https://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta-has-the-most-surveillance-cameras-per-capita-in-the-us/c8d2a527-33dc-4b49-bc42-75ee577bbfb6/<br /> <br /> <br /> _______________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Age of Surveillance Capitalism'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Shoshana Zuboff<br /> <br /> The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power<br /> <br /> [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/shoshana-zuboff/the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-2/9781478947271/ (Hachette Book Group, 2019)]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://dn721805.ca.archive.org/0/items/zuboff-shoshana.-the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism.-2019/Zuboff%2C%20Shoshana.The%20Age%20of%20Surveillance%20Capitalism.2019.pdf '''Click Here to Read the Book''']<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capitalism<br /> <br /> * https://www.jstor.org/stable/26862460<br /> <br /> * https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capitalism.html?id=lRqrDQAAQBAJ<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''More on Surveillance Capitalism'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Surveillance capitalism is an economic system centred around the commodification of personal data with the core purpose of profit-making. The concept of surveillance capitalism, as described by Shoshana Zuboff, arose as advertising companies, led by Google's AdWords, saw the possibilities of using personal data to target consumers more precisely.<br /> <br /> :* https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1095796018819461<br /> <br /> :* https://theconversation.com/the-price-of-connection-surveillance-capitalism-64124<br /> <br /> <br /> Collecting and processing data in the context of capitalism's core profit-making motive might present a danger to human liberty, autonomy and wellbeing. Capitalism has become focused on expanding the proportion of social life that is open to data collection and data processing. This may come with significant implications for vulnerability and control of society as well as for privacy.<br /> <br /> Economic pressures of capitalism are driving the intensification of connection and monitoring online with spaces of social life becoming open to saturation by corporate actors, directed at the making of profit and/or the regulation of action. Therefore, personal data points increased in value after the possibilities of targeted advertising were known.<br /> <br /> * https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781119528043.ch5<br /> <br /> <br /> The purchase of personal [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_of_observation#Data_point data points]<br /> <br /> :* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Statistical_data_types<br /> <br /> :* https://web.archive.org/web/20200204002839/https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/jul/20/the-great-hack-cambridge-analytica-scandal-facebook-netflix<br /> <br /> :* https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/the-digital-debate/shoshan-zuboff-on-big-data-as-surveillance-capitalism-13152525.html<br /> <br /> <br /> See also:<br /> <br /> '''Commercialization of the Internet''' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercialization_of_the_Internet<br /> <br /> '''Criticism of capitalism''' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_capitalism<br /> <br /> '''Data mining''' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_mining<br /> <br /> '''Free and open-source software''' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software<br /> <br /> '''Mass surveillance industry''' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_industry<br /> <br /> '''Surveillance § Corporate''' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance#Corporate<br /> <br /> '''Targeted advertising''' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeted_advertising<br /> <br /> '''Privacy concerns with social networking services''' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_concerns_with_social_networking_services<br /> <br /> <br /> Keywords: Capitalism, privacy rights, surveillance, digital technologies, <br /> <br /> Democracy, collective action, twenty-first-century society, social inequality, <br /> <br /> Orwellian, power, internet, surveillance capitalism, totalitarianism<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Your Face Belongs to Us'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> (And much more than 'your face' is going into the databases)<br /> <br /> Publisher: Penguin Random House<br /> <br /> September 2023<br /> <br /> Synopsis<br /> <br /> '''The story of a small AI company that gave facial recognition to law enforcement, billionaires, and businesses, threatening to end privacy as we know it.'''<br /> <br /> New York Times tech reporter Kashmir Hill was skeptical when she got a tip about a mysterious app called Clearview AI that claimed it could, with 99 percent accuracy, identify anyone based on just one snapshot of their face. The app could supposedly scan a face and, in just seconds, surface every detail of a person's online life: their name, social media profiles, friends and family members, home address, and photos that they might not have even known existed. If it was everything it claimed to be, it would be the ultimate surveillance tool, and it would open the door to everything from stalking to totalitarian state control. Could it be true?<br /> <br /> * https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/691288/your-face-belongs-to-us-by-kashmir-hill/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Keywords:''' Artificial Intelligence (AI), psychometrics, biometrics, profiling, databanks<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Surveillance State'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control<br /> <br /> Author: Josh Chin and Liza Lin<br /> <br /> Award-winning journalists Josh Chin and Liza Lin take readers on a journey through the new world China is building within its borders, and beyond. Telling harrowing stories of the people and families affected by the Party’s ambitions, Surveillance State reveals a future that is already underway—a new society engineered around the power of digital surveillance.<br /> <br /> * https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250249296/surveillancestate<br /> <br /> <br /> '''How has China spread state surveillance around the globe?'''<br /> <br /> The greatest barrier to the spread of state surveillance in the past has been money. Tracking large numbers of people required paying large numbers of people to spend countless hours operating expensive equipment. Much like they did with drones and telecom equipment, Chinese technology companies have made state-of-the-art surveillance systems affordable and accessible. They have also been happy to arrange favorable loans to governments interested in buying Chinese tracking technology. Research by Sheena Greitens at the University of Texas shows Chinese police surveillance systems being sold to more than 80 countries around the world, including several democracies. Chinese tech companies themselves say they have sold their products much more widely than that, though we haven’t been able to verify those claims...<br /> <br /> * https://thediplomat.com/2022/10/surveillance-state-social-control-in-china/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;h2&gt;Tips for Protecting Your Privacy Online&lt;/h2&gt;<br /> <br /> by Julia Angwin - 2014<br /> <br /> In the course of writing her book, [http://us.macmillan.com/dragnetnation/JuliaAngwin/ Dragnet Nation], Julia Angwin tried various strategies to help protect her privacy. Here, she shares some tips for readers, starting with how to build better passwords.<br /> <br /> Passwords are the first line of defense between your private data and an attacker – whether it is a criminal hacker or a spy agency.<br /> <br /> But most of the conventional wisdom about building passwords is terrible. People are often told they should change their passwords every three months; that their passwords should be made strong with multiple symbols and letters; and the passwords should not be written down anywhere.<br /> <br /> Computer scientist Ross Anderson has summed up this terrible advice as “Choose a password you can’t remember, and don’t write it down.” Faced with that impossible task, most people use passwords that are easy to remember – the most popular password is still 123456 – and use it for every single account.<br /> <br /> It’s actually better advice to choose a more secure password and write it down somewhere in a safe place. After all, it’s much less likely that someone will break into your house and steal your master password list than it is that someone will hack into your account from afar through a weak password.<br /> <br /> However, even if you write down your passwords, you still face the difficult task of dreaming up the dozens of passwords that seem to be required for modern life. At first, I tried to make up my own passwords, but after I stumbled on this [https://tech.dropbox.com/2012/04/zxcvbn-realistic-password-strength-estimation/ password-strength estimator], I realized that many of my homegrown passwords were still easy to crack. So, after much searching for a perfect password strategy, I came up with a two-tiered solution for building strong passwords:<br /> <br /> • I used [https://agilebits.com/onepassword 1Password], a password management software that generates and store passwords, for less important accounts – such as my frequent flier and online shopping accounts. Like its competitors, KeePass, 1Password generates strong passwords from strings of letters, numbers and symbols and stores them on my machine in an encrypted file.<br /> <br /> • I used a simple, low-tech passphrase-generating system called [http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html Diceware], for more important passwords – such as my e-mail and online bank accounts. It works like this: roll a six-sided die five times, then take the numbers you roll and match them up to the Diceware word list, which contains 7,776 short words. Repeat this five times and you will end up with a five-word passphrase that is hard for attackers to crack, but easy to remember.<br /> <br /> [[File:Internet Security.jpg]]<br /> <br /> '''HOW TO SAFELY BROWSE THE WEB'''<br /> <br /> One of the easiest and simplest things you can do to protect your privacy is to be a smarter Web browser.<br /> <br /> This is surprisingly difficult because most popular Web browsing software is set up to allow users to be tracked by default. The reason is simple economics – you don’t pay for Web browsing software, so the companies that make it have to find other ways to make money.<br /> <br /> The most egregious example of this conflict came in 2008 when Microsoft’s advertising executives helped quash a plan by the engineers to build better privacy protections into the Internet Explorer 8 Web browser. Microsoft has since added additional protections – but they are not turned on by default. The situation is no better at Google, whose Chrome Web browser has a “buried and discouraged” the Do Not Track button, and is pioneering the use of new tracking technology that cannot be blocked. And it’s worth noting that the other big Web browser maker, Mozilla Corp., receives 85 percent of its revenues from its agreement to make Google the default search engine on Firefox.<br /> Even worse, many of the tools that Web browsers offer to protect privacy are not effective. Tracking companies have refused to honor the Do Not Track button. And Google Chrome’s Incognito mode and Internet Explorer’s InPrivate Browsing mode won’t protect you from being tracked. Those settings simply prevent other people who use your Web browser after you to see where you’ve been online.<br /> <br /> And so, in order to prevent the most common types of tracking, I ended up loading up my Web browser – Mozilla’s Firefox – with a bunch of extra software. It sounds like a lot of work, but most of this software can be installed in a few minutes. Here’s what I used:<br /> <br /> • I installed [https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere/ HTTPS Everywhere], created by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Tor Project. This tool forces your Web browser to use encrypted Internet connections to any website that will allow it. This prevents hackers – and the National Security Agency – from eavesdropping on your Internet connections.<br /> <br /> • I installed [https://disconnect.me/ Disconnect], a program created by former Google engineer Brian Kennish, which blocks advertisers and social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, from tracking which websites you visit.<br /> <br /> • I set my default search engine to be [https://duckduckgo.com/ DuckDuckGo], a search engine that doesn’t store any of the information that is automatically transmitted by your computer — the IP address and other digital footprints — so DuckDuckGo has no way to link your search queries to you. That means DuckDuckGo won’t auto-complete your search queries based on your previous searches or based on your physical location, as Google does. So you’ll have to be a little smarter about your searches, and remember to bookmark the pages that you visit often, to save time.<br /> <br /> After browsing with my ungainly setup for nearly a year, I found a Web browser that had all the features I wanted built in — called [https://www.whitehatsec.com/aviator/ WhiteHat Aviator]. It has built-in HTTPS Everywhere, it doesn’t retain or sell your online activity, and it uses Disconnect to block trackers from advertisers and social media companies. Its default search engine is DuckDuckGo.<br /> <br /> It’s built by a computer security firm called WhiteHat Security, but it hasn’t been audited by any computer security experts yet, as far as I can tell. So use it at your own risk (and currently you can only use it on the Mac OSX operating system). But I’ve been using it for a few months, and after some bugginess in the beginning, I’ve started to enjoy the unusual feeling of having privacy as a default setting.<br /> <br /> Courtesy of Julia Angwin<br /> <br /> Copyright 2014, Julia Angwin<br /> <br /> Another option that Angwin suggests for protecting your privacy online includes [http://juliaangwin.com/privacy-tools-opting-out-from-data-brokers/ opting out from data brokers]<br /> <br /> □<br /> <br /> Julia Angwin is an investigative journalist for ProPublica and former reporter for The Wall Street Journal. She is author of the new book, Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance<br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> ; &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''More References'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)<br /> <br /> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation<br /> http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv:OJ.L_.2016.119.01.0001.01.ENG<br /> <br /> Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation) (Text with EEA relevance)<br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360 / Digital Rights Organizations''' <br /> <br /> :http://bit.ly/DigitalRightsLinks<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Digital Rights''' <br /> <br /> :http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Digital_Rights <br /> :http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Strategic_Policy-Internet_Online_Rights<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> http://www.statista.com/chart/3148/loss-of-privacy-only-downside-to-rise-of-personal-tech/<br /> <br /> [[File:Loss of Privacy Downside to Rise of Personal Tech Jan2015.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Digital Privacy Issues -- via Reddit'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2wwdep/we_are_edward_snowden_laura_poitras_and_glenn/ '''Feb 23, 2015 - Reddit AMA / Citizenfour--Snowden-Greenwald-Poitras''']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Privacy Information via Wiki Community'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosures_%282013%E2%80%93present%29 '''Global surveillance disclosures, 2013-present'''] -- via Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosures_%281970%E2%80%932013%29 '''1970-2013''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_concerns_with_social_networking_services '''Privacy concerns with social networking services'''] -- via Wikipedia<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_privacy '''Information privacy'''] -- via Wikipedia<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_advertising '''Online advertising'''] -- via Wikipedia<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTC_Fair_Information_Practice '''FTC Fair Information Practice'''] -- via Wikipedia<br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Fair_use_and_text_and_data_mining '''Fair Use and Data Mining'''] -- via Wikipedia<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Big Data, Online Advertising and Marketing'''<br /> <br /> :* http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/borrowers/data-mining-pushes-marketing-new-level<br /> <br /> :* http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/08/big-data-and-advertising.html<br /> <br /> :* http://www.forbes.com/sites/mckinsey/2013/07/22/big-data-analytics-and-the-future-of-marketing-sales/<br /> <br /> :* https://hbr.org/2013/08/advertisings-big-data-dilemma/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :* http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Privacy-Theory-Technologies-Practices/dp/1420052179 (2007)<br /> <br /> :* http://www.amazon.com/The-Black-Box-Society-Information/dp/0674368274/ref=pd_sim_14_1 (2015)<br /> <br /> :* http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/23/privacy-human-rights-frontier/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Electronic Frontier Foundation'''<br /> <br /> :* https://www.eff.org/issues/privacy<br /> <br /> :* [https://ssd.eff.org/ Tips, Tools and How-tos for Safer Online Communications from Electronic Frontier Foundation]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Digital Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Rights]]<br /> [[Category:EOS eco Operating System]]<br /> [[Category:Human Rights]]<br /> [[Category:Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Millennials]]<br /> [[Category:Mobile Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Online Privacy]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Online_Privacy&diff=138363 2026-10-08T13:29:13Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> [[File:Privacy.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Next Big Thing'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Beyond Online Surveillance, Now Comes A.I. Powered Surveillance<br /> <br /> Add in Data Centers, Cameras/Firmware/Software, Palentir-esque Programming and ...<br /> <br /> * https://www.palantir.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;It Is Here, Already Here...&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Call It 'Surveillance Capitalism''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Hope that It doesn't become 'the Norm' <br /> <br /> : Work to Make Sure It Does Not Become 'Surveillance Government'<br /> <br /> <br /> Scroll thru Intel on the Privacy Threat of AI Unleashed ...<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism<br /> * https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr-ryan/publications/geopolitics-surveillance-capitalism<br /> * https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=56791<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> October 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> Flock -- automated license plate readers (ALPRs)<br /> <br /> Interactive map shows more than 300,000 Flock-linked surveillance devices across the United States, including more than 170,000 cameras and roughly 130,000 additional pieces of supporting equipment.<br /> <br /> The map, known as the &quot;Flock Surveillance Map,&quot; was created using location data ... from a snapshot of Flock's own records that was archived in December 2025.<br /> <br /> * https://www.newsweek.com/new-bill-targets-flock-surveillance-questions-raised-cameras-12501457<br /> <br /> * https://theintercept.com/2026/09/24/how-many-flock-devices-in-united-states-300000/<br /> <br /> <br /> Axon Fusus<br /> <br /> * https://vimeo.com/1076961535<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.npr.org/2026/10/08/nx-s1-5981343/beyond-flock-police-ai-surveillance-tools<br /> <br /> &quot;I have been watching the debate about Flock with a little bit of puzzlement,&quot; says Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University. &quot;Because real-time crime centers have not just ALPR cameras and sensors, but video analytics and drones and essentially a way to create a visual single-pane-of-glass vision of what's going on in a city, with time machine capabilities where you can go back and investigate crime.&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> The Most Surveilled City in America<br /> <br /> * https://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta-has-the-most-surveillance-cameras-per-capita-in-the-us/c8d2a527-33dc-4b49-bc42-75ee577bbfb6/<br /> <br /> <br /> _______________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Age of Surveillance Capitalism'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Shoshana Zuboff<br /> <br /> The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power<br /> <br /> [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/shoshana-zuboff/the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-2/9781478947271/ (Hachette Book Group, 2019)]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://dn721805.ca.archive.org/0/items/zuboff-shoshana.-the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism.-2019/Zuboff%2C%20Shoshana.The%20Age%20of%20Surveillance%20Capitalism.2019.pdf '''Click Here to Read the Book''']<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capitalism<br /> <br /> * https://www.jstor.org/stable/26862460<br /> <br /> * https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capitalism.html?id=lRqrDQAAQBAJ<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''More on Surveillance Capitalism'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Surveillance capitalism is an economic system centred around the commodification of personal data with the core purpose of profit-making. The concept of surveillance capitalism, as described by Shoshana Zuboff, arose as advertising companies, led by Google's AdWords, saw the possibilities of using personal data to target consumers more precisely.<br /> <br /> :* https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1095796018819461<br /> <br /> :* https://theconversation.com/the-price-of-connection-surveillance-capitalism-64124<br /> <br /> <br /> Collecting and processing data in the context of capitalism's core profit-making motive might present a danger to human liberty, autonomy and wellbeing. Capitalism has become focused on expanding the proportion of social life that is open to data collection and data processing. This may come with significant implications for vulnerability and control of society as well as for privacy.<br /> <br /> Economic pressures of capitalism are driving the intensification of connection and monitoring online with spaces of social life becoming open to saturation by corporate actors, directed at the making of profit and/or the regulation of action. Therefore, personal data points increased in value after the possibilities of targeted advertising were known.<br /> <br /> * https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781119528043.ch5<br /> <br /> <br /> The purchase of personal [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_of_observation#Data_point data points]<br /> <br /> :* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Statistical_data_types<br /> <br /> :* https://web.archive.org/web/20200204002839/https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/jul/20/the-great-hack-cambridge-analytica-scandal-facebook-netflix<br /> <br /> :* https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/the-digital-debate/shoshan-zuboff-on-big-data-as-surveillance-capitalism-13152525.html<br /> <br /> <br /> See also:<br /> <br /> '''Commercialization of the Internet''' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercialization_of_the_Internet<br /> <br /> '''Criticism of capitalism''' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_capitalism<br /> <br /> '''Data mining''' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_mining<br /> <br /> '''Free and open-source software''' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software<br /> <br /> '''Mass surveillance industry''' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_industry<br /> <br /> '''Surveillance § Corporate''' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance#Corporate<br /> <br /> '''Targeted advertising''' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeted_advertising<br /> <br /> '''Privacy concerns with social networking services''' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_concerns_with_social_networking_services<br /> <br /> <br /> Keywords: Capitalism, privacy rights, surveillance, digital technologies, <br /> <br /> Democracy, collective action, twenty-first-century society, social inequality, <br /> <br /> Orwellian, power, internet, surveillance capitalism, totalitarianism<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Your Face Belongs to Us'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> (And much more than 'your face' is going into the databases)<br /> <br /> Publisher: Penguin Random House<br /> <br /> September 2023<br /> <br /> Synopsis<br /> <br /> '''The story of a small AI company that gave facial recognition to law enforcement, billionaires, and businesses, threatening to end privacy as we know it.'''<br /> <br /> New York Times tech reporter Kashmir Hill was skeptical when she got a tip about a mysterious app called Clearview AI that claimed it could, with 99 percent accuracy, identify anyone based on just one snapshot of their face. The app could supposedly scan a face and, in just seconds, surface every detail of a person's online life: their name, social media profiles, friends and family members, home address, and photos that they might not have even known existed. If it was everything it claimed to be, it would be the ultimate surveillance tool, and it would open the door to everything from stalking to totalitarian state control. Could it be true?<br /> <br /> * https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/691288/your-face-belongs-to-us-by-kashmir-hill/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Keywords:''' Artificial Intelligence (AI), psychometrics, biometrics, profiling, databanks<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Surveillance State'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control<br /> <br /> Author: Josh Chin and Liza Lin<br /> <br /> Award-winning journalists Josh Chin and Liza Lin take readers on a journey through the new world China is building within its borders, and beyond. Telling harrowing stories of the people and families affected by the Party’s ambitions, Surveillance State reveals a future that is already underway—a new society engineered around the power of digital surveillance.<br /> <br /> * https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250249296/surveillancestate<br /> <br /> <br /> '''How has China spread state surveillance around the globe?'''<br /> <br /> The greatest barrier to the spread of state surveillance in the past has been money. Tracking large numbers of people required paying large numbers of people to spend countless hours operating expensive equipment. Much like they did with drones and telecom equipment, Chinese technology companies have made state-of-the-art surveillance systems affordable and accessible. They have also been happy to arrange favorable loans to governments interested in buying Chinese tracking technology. Research by Sheena Greitens at the University of Texas shows Chinese police surveillance systems being sold to more than 80 countries around the world, including several democracies. Chinese tech companies themselves say they have sold their products much more widely than that, though we haven’t been able to verify those claims...<br /> <br /> * https://thediplomat.com/2022/10/surveillance-state-social-control-in-china/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;h2&gt;Tips for Protecting Your Privacy Online&lt;/h2&gt;<br /> <br /> by Julia Angwin - 2014<br /> <br /> In the course of writing her book, [http://us.macmillan.com/dragnetnation/JuliaAngwin/ Dragnet Nation], Julia Angwin tried various strategies to help protect her privacy. Here, she shares some tips for readers, starting with how to build better passwords.<br /> <br /> Passwords are the first line of defense between your private data and an attacker – whether it is a criminal hacker or a spy agency.<br /> <br /> But most of the conventional wisdom about building passwords is terrible. People are often told they should change their passwords every three months; that their passwords should be made strong with multiple symbols and letters; and the passwords should not be written down anywhere.<br /> <br /> Computer scientist Ross Anderson has summed up this terrible advice as “Choose a password you can’t remember, and don’t write it down.” Faced with that impossible task, most people use passwords that are easy to remember – the most popular password is still 123456 – and use it for every single account.<br /> <br /> It’s actually better advice to choose a more secure password and write it down somewhere in a safe place. After all, it’s much less likely that someone will break into your house and steal your master password list than it is that someone will hack into your account from afar through a weak password.<br /> <br /> However, even if you write down your passwords, you still face the difficult task of dreaming up the dozens of passwords that seem to be required for modern life. At first, I tried to make up my own passwords, but after I stumbled on this [https://tech.dropbox.com/2012/04/zxcvbn-realistic-password-strength-estimation/ password-strength estimator], I realized that many of my homegrown passwords were still easy to crack. So, after much searching for a perfect password strategy, I came up with a two-tiered solution for building strong passwords:<br /> <br /> • I used [https://agilebits.com/onepassword 1Password], a password management software that generates and store passwords, for less important accounts – such as my frequent flier and online shopping accounts. Like its competitors, KeePass, 1Password generates strong passwords from strings of letters, numbers and symbols and stores them on my machine in an encrypted file.<br /> <br /> • I used a simple, low-tech passphrase-generating system called [http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html Diceware], for more important passwords – such as my e-mail and online bank accounts. It works like this: roll a six-sided die five times, then take the numbers you roll and match them up to the Diceware word list, which contains 7,776 short words. Repeat this five times and you will end up with a five-word passphrase that is hard for attackers to crack, but easy to remember.<br /> <br /> [[File:Internet Security.jpg]]<br /> <br /> '''HOW TO SAFELY BROWSE THE WEB'''<br /> <br /> One of the easiest and simplest things you can do to protect your privacy is to be a smarter Web browser.<br /> <br /> This is surprisingly difficult because most popular Web browsing software is set up to allow users to be tracked by default. The reason is simple economics – you don’t pay for Web browsing software, so the companies that make it have to find other ways to make money.<br /> <br /> The most egregious example of this conflict came in 2008 when Microsoft’s advertising executives helped quash a plan by the engineers to build better privacy protections into the Internet Explorer 8 Web browser. Microsoft has since added additional protections – but they are not turned on by default. The situation is no better at Google, whose Chrome Web browser has a “buried and discouraged” the Do Not Track button, and is pioneering the use of new tracking technology that cannot be blocked. And it’s worth noting that the other big Web browser maker, Mozilla Corp., receives 85 percent of its revenues from its agreement to make Google the default search engine on Firefox.<br /> Even worse, many of the tools that Web browsers offer to protect privacy are not effective. Tracking companies have refused to honor the Do Not Track button. And Google Chrome’s Incognito mode and Internet Explorer’s InPrivate Browsing mode won’t protect you from being tracked. Those settings simply prevent other people who use your Web browser after you to see where you’ve been online.<br /> <br /> And so, in order to prevent the most common types of tracking, I ended up loading up my Web browser – Mozilla’s Firefox – with a bunch of extra software. It sounds like a lot of work, but most of this software can be installed in a few minutes. Here’s what I used:<br /> <br /> • I installed [https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere/ HTTPS Everywhere], created by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Tor Project. This tool forces your Web browser to use encrypted Internet connections to any website that will allow it. This prevents hackers – and the National Security Agency – from eavesdropping on your Internet connections.<br /> <br /> • I installed [https://disconnect.me/ Disconnect], a program created by former Google engineer Brian Kennish, which blocks advertisers and social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, from tracking which websites you visit.<br /> <br /> • I set my default search engine to be [https://duckduckgo.com/ DuckDuckGo], a search engine that doesn’t store any of the information that is automatically transmitted by your computer — the IP address and other digital footprints — so DuckDuckGo has no way to link your search queries to you. That means DuckDuckGo won’t auto-complete your search queries based on your previous searches or based on your physical location, as Google does. So you’ll have to be a little smarter about your searches, and remember to bookmark the pages that you visit often, to save time.<br /> <br /> After browsing with my ungainly setup for nearly a year, I found a Web browser that had all the features I wanted built in — called [https://www.whitehatsec.com/aviator/ WhiteHat Aviator]. It has built-in HTTPS Everywhere, it doesn’t retain or sell your online activity, and it uses Disconnect to block trackers from advertisers and social media companies. Its default search engine is DuckDuckGo.<br /> <br /> It’s built by a computer security firm called WhiteHat Security, but it hasn’t been audited by any computer security experts yet, as far as I can tell. So use it at your own risk (and currently you can only use it on the Mac OSX operating system). But I’ve been using it for a few months, and after some bugginess in the beginning, I’ve started to enjoy the unusual feeling of having privacy as a default setting.<br /> <br /> Courtesy of Julia Angwin<br /> <br /> Copyright 2014, Julia Angwin<br /> <br /> Another option that Angwin suggests for protecting your privacy online includes [http://juliaangwin.com/privacy-tools-opting-out-from-data-brokers/ opting out from data brokers]<br /> <br /> □<br /> <br /> Julia Angwin is an investigative journalist for ProPublica and former reporter for The Wall Street Journal. She is author of the new book, Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance<br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> ; &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''More References'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)<br /> <br /> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation<br /> http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv:OJ.L_.2016.119.01.0001.01.ENG<br /> <br /> Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation) (Text with EEA relevance)<br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360 / Digital Rights Organizations''' <br /> <br /> :http://bit.ly/DigitalRightsLinks<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Digital Rights''' <br /> <br /> :http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Digital_Rights <br /> :http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Strategic_Policy-Internet_Online_Rights<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> http://www.statista.com/chart/3148/loss-of-privacy-only-downside-to-rise-of-personal-tech/<br /> <br /> [[File:Loss of Privacy Downside to Rise of Personal Tech Jan2015.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Digital Privacy Issues -- via Reddit'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2wwdep/we_are_edward_snowden_laura_poitras_and_glenn/ '''Feb 23, 2015 - Reddit AMA / Citizenfour--Snowden-Greenwald-Poitras''']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Privacy Information via Wiki Community'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosures_%282013%E2%80%93present%29 '''Global surveillance disclosures, 2013-present'''] -- via Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosures_%281970%E2%80%932013%29 '''1970-2013''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_concerns_with_social_networking_services '''Privacy concerns with social networking services'''] -- via Wikipedia<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_privacy '''Information privacy'''] -- via Wikipedia<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_advertising '''Online advertising'''] -- via Wikipedia<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTC_Fair_Information_Practice '''FTC Fair Information Practice'''] -- via Wikipedia<br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Fair_use_and_text_and_data_mining '''Fair Use and Data Mining'''] -- via Wikipedia<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Big Data, Online Advertising and Marketing'''<br /> <br /> :* http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/borrowers/data-mining-pushes-marketing-new-level<br /> <br /> :* http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/08/big-data-and-advertising.html<br /> <br /> :* http://www.forbes.com/sites/mckinsey/2013/07/22/big-data-analytics-and-the-future-of-marketing-sales/<br /> <br /> :* https://hbr.org/2013/08/advertisings-big-data-dilemma/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :* http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Privacy-Theory-Technologies-Practices/dp/1420052179 (2007)<br /> <br /> :* http://www.amazon.com/The-Black-Box-Society-Information/dp/0674368274/ref=pd_sim_14_1 (2015)<br /> <br /> :* http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/23/privacy-human-rights-frontier/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Electronic Frontier Foundation'''<br /> <br /> :* https://www.eff.org/issues/privacy<br /> <br /> :* [https://ssd.eff.org/ Tips, Tools and How-tos for Safer Online Communications from Electronic Frontier Foundation]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Digital Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Rights]]<br /> [[Category:EOS eco Operating System]]<br /> [[Category:Human Rights]]<br /> [[Category:Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Millennials]]<br /> [[Category:Mobile Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Online Privacy]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Online_Privacy&diff=138362 2026-10-08T13:21:37Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> [[File:Privacy.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Next Big Thing'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;It Is Here, Already Here...&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Call It 'Surveillance Capitalism''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Hope that It doesn't become 'the Norm' <br /> <br /> : Work to Make Sure It Does Not Become 'Surveillance Government'<br /> <br /> <br /> Scroll thru Intel on the Privacy Threat of AI Unleashed ...<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism<br /> * https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr-ryan/publications/geopolitics-surveillance-capitalism<br /> * https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=56791<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> October 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> Flock -- automated license plate readers (ALPRs)<br /> <br /> Interactive map shows more than 300,000 Flock-linked surveillance devices across the United States, including more than 170,000 cameras and roughly 130,000 additional pieces of supporting equipment.<br /> <br /> The map, known as the &quot;Flock Surveillance Map,&quot; was created using location data ... from a snapshot of Flock's own records that was archived in December 2025.<br /> <br /> * https://www.newsweek.com/new-bill-targets-flock-surveillance-questions-raised-cameras-12501457<br /> <br /> * https://theintercept.com/2026/09/24/how-many-flock-devices-in-united-states-300000/<br /> <br /> <br /> Axon Fusus<br /> <br /> * https://vimeo.com/1076961535<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.npr.org/2026/10/08/nx-s1-5981343/beyond-flock-police-ai-surveillance-tools<br /> <br /> &quot;I have been watching the debate about Flock with a little bit of puzzlement,&quot; says Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University. &quot;Because real-time crime centers have not just ALPR cameras and sensors, but video analytics and drones and essentially a way to create a visual single-pane-of-glass vision of what's going on in a city, with time machine capabilities where you can go back and investigate crime.&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> _______________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Age of Surveillance Capitalism'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Shoshana Zuboff<br /> <br /> The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power<br /> <br /> [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/shoshana-zuboff/the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-2/9781478947271/ (Hachette Book Group, 2019)]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://dn721805.ca.archive.org/0/items/zuboff-shoshana.-the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism.-2019/Zuboff%2C%20Shoshana.The%20Age%20of%20Surveillance%20Capitalism.2019.pdf '''Click Here to Read the Book''']<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capitalism<br /> <br /> * https://www.jstor.org/stable/26862460<br /> <br /> * https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capitalism.html?id=lRqrDQAAQBAJ<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''More on Surveillance Capitalism'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Surveillance capitalism is an economic system centred around the commodification of personal data with the core purpose of profit-making. The concept of surveillance capitalism, as described by Shoshana Zuboff, arose as advertising companies, led by Google's AdWords, saw the possibilities of using personal data to target consumers more precisely.<br /> <br /> :* https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1095796018819461<br /> <br /> :* https://theconversation.com/the-price-of-connection-surveillance-capitalism-64124<br /> <br /> <br /> Collecting and processing data in the context of capitalism's core profit-making motive might present a danger to human liberty, autonomy and wellbeing. Capitalism has become focused on expanding the proportion of social life that is open to data collection and data processing. This may come with significant implications for vulnerability and control of society as well as for privacy.<br /> <br /> Economic pressures of capitalism are driving the intensification of connection and monitoring online with spaces of social life becoming open to saturation by corporate actors, directed at the making of profit and/or the regulation of action. Therefore, personal data points increased in value after the possibilities of targeted advertising were known.<br /> <br /> * https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781119528043.ch5<br /> <br /> <br /> The purchase of personal [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_of_observation#Data_point data points]<br /> <br /> :* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Statistical_data_types<br /> <br /> :* https://web.archive.org/web/20200204002839/https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/jul/20/the-great-hack-cambridge-analytica-scandal-facebook-netflix<br /> <br /> :* https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/the-digital-debate/shoshan-zuboff-on-big-data-as-surveillance-capitalism-13152525.html<br /> <br /> <br /> See also:<br /> <br /> '''Commercialization of the Internet''' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercialization_of_the_Internet<br /> <br /> '''Criticism of capitalism''' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_capitalism<br /> <br /> '''Data mining''' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_mining<br /> <br /> '''Free and open-source software''' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software<br /> <br /> '''Mass surveillance industry''' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_industry<br /> <br /> '''Surveillance § Corporate''' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance#Corporate<br /> <br /> '''Targeted advertising''' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeted_advertising<br /> <br /> '''Privacy concerns with social networking services''' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_concerns_with_social_networking_services<br /> <br /> <br /> Keywords: Capitalism, privacy rights, surveillance, digital technologies, <br /> <br /> Democracy, collective action, twenty-first-century society, social inequality, <br /> <br /> Orwellian, power, internet, surveillance capitalism, totalitarianism<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Your Face Belongs to Us'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> (And much more than 'your face' is going into the databases)<br /> <br /> Publisher: Penguin Random House<br /> <br /> September 2023<br /> <br /> Synopsis<br /> <br /> '''The story of a small AI company that gave facial recognition to law enforcement, billionaires, and businesses, threatening to end privacy as we know it.'''<br /> <br /> New York Times tech reporter Kashmir Hill was skeptical when she got a tip about a mysterious app called Clearview AI that claimed it could, with 99 percent accuracy, identify anyone based on just one snapshot of their face. The app could supposedly scan a face and, in just seconds, surface every detail of a person's online life: their name, social media profiles, friends and family members, home address, and photos that they might not have even known existed. If it was everything it claimed to be, it would be the ultimate surveillance tool, and it would open the door to everything from stalking to totalitarian state control. Could it be true?<br /> <br /> * https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/691288/your-face-belongs-to-us-by-kashmir-hill/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Keywords:''' Artificial Intelligence (AI), psychometrics, biometrics, profiling, databanks<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Surveillance State'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control<br /> <br /> Author: Josh Chin and Liza Lin<br /> <br /> Award-winning journalists Josh Chin and Liza Lin take readers on a journey through the new world China is building within its borders, and beyond. Telling harrowing stories of the people and families affected by the Party’s ambitions, Surveillance State reveals a future that is already underway—a new society engineered around the power of digital surveillance.<br /> <br /> * https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250249296/surveillancestate<br /> <br /> <br /> '''How has China spread state surveillance around the globe?'''<br /> <br /> The greatest barrier to the spread of state surveillance in the past has been money. Tracking large numbers of people required paying large numbers of people to spend countless hours operating expensive equipment. Much like they did with drones and telecom equipment, Chinese technology companies have made state-of-the-art surveillance systems affordable and accessible. They have also been happy to arrange favorable loans to governments interested in buying Chinese tracking technology. Research by Sheena Greitens at the University of Texas shows Chinese police surveillance systems being sold to more than 80 countries around the world, including several democracies. Chinese tech companies themselves say they have sold their products much more widely than that, though we haven’t been able to verify those claims...<br /> <br /> * https://thediplomat.com/2022/10/surveillance-state-social-control-in-china/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;h2&gt;Tips for Protecting Your Privacy Online&lt;/h2&gt;<br /> <br /> by Julia Angwin - 2014<br /> <br /> In the course of writing her book, [http://us.macmillan.com/dragnetnation/JuliaAngwin/ Dragnet Nation], Julia Angwin tried various strategies to help protect her privacy. Here, she shares some tips for readers, starting with how to build better passwords.<br /> <br /> Passwords are the first line of defense between your private data and an attacker – whether it is a criminal hacker or a spy agency.<br /> <br /> But most of the conventional wisdom about building passwords is terrible. People are often told they should change their passwords every three months; that their passwords should be made strong with multiple symbols and letters; and the passwords should not be written down anywhere.<br /> <br /> Computer scientist Ross Anderson has summed up this terrible advice as “Choose a password you can’t remember, and don’t write it down.” Faced with that impossible task, most people use passwords that are easy to remember – the most popular password is still 123456 – and use it for every single account.<br /> <br /> It’s actually better advice to choose a more secure password and write it down somewhere in a safe place. After all, it’s much less likely that someone will break into your house and steal your master password list than it is that someone will hack into your account from afar through a weak password.<br /> <br /> However, even if you write down your passwords, you still face the difficult task of dreaming up the dozens of passwords that seem to be required for modern life. At first, I tried to make up my own passwords, but after I stumbled on this [https://tech.dropbox.com/2012/04/zxcvbn-realistic-password-strength-estimation/ password-strength estimator], I realized that many of my homegrown passwords were still easy to crack. So, after much searching for a perfect password strategy, I came up with a two-tiered solution for building strong passwords:<br /> <br /> • I used [https://agilebits.com/onepassword 1Password], a password management software that generates and store passwords, for less important accounts – such as my frequent flier and online shopping accounts. Like its competitors, KeePass, 1Password generates strong passwords from strings of letters, numbers and symbols and stores them on my machine in an encrypted file.<br /> <br /> • I used a simple, low-tech passphrase-generating system called [http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html Diceware], for more important passwords – such as my e-mail and online bank accounts. It works like this: roll a six-sided die five times, then take the numbers you roll and match them up to the Diceware word list, which contains 7,776 short words. Repeat this five times and you will end up with a five-word passphrase that is hard for attackers to crack, but easy to remember.<br /> <br /> [[File:Internet Security.jpg]]<br /> <br /> '''HOW TO SAFELY BROWSE THE WEB'''<br /> <br /> One of the easiest and simplest things you can do to protect your privacy is to be a smarter Web browser.<br /> <br /> This is surprisingly difficult because most popular Web browsing software is set up to allow users to be tracked by default. The reason is simple economics – you don’t pay for Web browsing software, so the companies that make it have to find other ways to make money.<br /> <br /> The most egregious example of this conflict came in 2008 when Microsoft’s advertising executives helped quash a plan by the engineers to build better privacy protections into the Internet Explorer 8 Web browser. Microsoft has since added additional protections – but they are not turned on by default. The situation is no better at Google, whose Chrome Web browser has a “buried and discouraged” the Do Not Track button, and is pioneering the use of new tracking technology that cannot be blocked. And it’s worth noting that the other big Web browser maker, Mozilla Corp., receives 85 percent of its revenues from its agreement to make Google the default search engine on Firefox.<br /> Even worse, many of the tools that Web browsers offer to protect privacy are not effective. Tracking companies have refused to honor the Do Not Track button. And Google Chrome’s Incognito mode and Internet Explorer’s InPrivate Browsing mode won’t protect you from being tracked. Those settings simply prevent other people who use your Web browser after you to see where you’ve been online.<br /> <br /> And so, in order to prevent the most common types of tracking, I ended up loading up my Web browser – Mozilla’s Firefox – with a bunch of extra software. It sounds like a lot of work, but most of this software can be installed in a few minutes. Here’s what I used:<br /> <br /> • I installed [https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere/ HTTPS Everywhere], created by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Tor Project. This tool forces your Web browser to use encrypted Internet connections to any website that will allow it. This prevents hackers – and the National Security Agency – from eavesdropping on your Internet connections.<br /> <br /> • I installed [https://disconnect.me/ Disconnect], a program created by former Google engineer Brian Kennish, which blocks advertisers and social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, from tracking which websites you visit.<br /> <br /> • I set my default search engine to be [https://duckduckgo.com/ DuckDuckGo], a search engine that doesn’t store any of the information that is automatically transmitted by your computer — the IP address and other digital footprints — so DuckDuckGo has no way to link your search queries to you. That means DuckDuckGo won’t auto-complete your search queries based on your previous searches or based on your physical location, as Google does. So you’ll have to be a little smarter about your searches, and remember to bookmark the pages that you visit often, to save time.<br /> <br /> After browsing with my ungainly setup for nearly a year, I found a Web browser that had all the features I wanted built in — called [https://www.whitehatsec.com/aviator/ WhiteHat Aviator]. It has built-in HTTPS Everywhere, it doesn’t retain or sell your online activity, and it uses Disconnect to block trackers from advertisers and social media companies. Its default search engine is DuckDuckGo.<br /> <br /> It’s built by a computer security firm called WhiteHat Security, but it hasn’t been audited by any computer security experts yet, as far as I can tell. So use it at your own risk (and currently you can only use it on the Mac OSX operating system). But I’ve been using it for a few months, and after some bugginess in the beginning, I’ve started to enjoy the unusual feeling of having privacy as a default setting.<br /> <br /> Courtesy of Julia Angwin<br /> <br /> Copyright 2014, Julia Angwin<br /> <br /> Another option that Angwin suggests for protecting your privacy online includes [http://juliaangwin.com/privacy-tools-opting-out-from-data-brokers/ opting out from data brokers]<br /> <br /> □<br /> <br /> Julia Angwin is an investigative journalist for ProPublica and former reporter for The Wall Street Journal. She is author of the new book, Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance<br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> ; &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''More References'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)<br /> <br /> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation<br /> http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv:OJ.L_.2016.119.01.0001.01.ENG<br /> <br /> Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation) (Text with EEA relevance)<br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360 / Digital Rights Organizations''' <br /> <br /> :http://bit.ly/DigitalRightsLinks<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Digital Rights''' <br /> <br /> :http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Digital_Rights <br /> :http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Strategic_Policy-Internet_Online_Rights<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> http://www.statista.com/chart/3148/loss-of-privacy-only-downside-to-rise-of-personal-tech/<br /> <br /> [[File:Loss of Privacy Downside to Rise of Personal Tech Jan2015.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Digital Privacy Issues -- via Reddit'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2wwdep/we_are_edward_snowden_laura_poitras_and_glenn/ '''Feb 23, 2015 - Reddit AMA / Citizenfour--Snowden-Greenwald-Poitras''']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Privacy Information via Wiki Community'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosures_%282013%E2%80%93present%29 '''Global surveillance disclosures, 2013-present'''] -- via Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosures_%281970%E2%80%932013%29 '''1970-2013''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_concerns_with_social_networking_services '''Privacy concerns with social networking services'''] -- via Wikipedia<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_privacy '''Information privacy'''] -- via Wikipedia<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_advertising '''Online advertising'''] -- via Wikipedia<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTC_Fair_Information_Practice '''FTC Fair Information Practice'''] -- via Wikipedia<br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Fair_use_and_text_and_data_mining '''Fair Use and Data Mining'''] -- via Wikipedia<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Big Data, Online Advertising and Marketing'''<br /> <br /> :* http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/borrowers/data-mining-pushes-marketing-new-level<br /> <br /> :* http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/08/big-data-and-advertising.html<br /> <br /> :* http://www.forbes.com/sites/mckinsey/2013/07/22/big-data-analytics-and-the-future-of-marketing-sales/<br /> <br /> :* https://hbr.org/2013/08/advertisings-big-data-dilemma/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :* http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Privacy-Theory-Technologies-Practices/dp/1420052179 (2007)<br /> <br /> :* http://www.amazon.com/The-Black-Box-Society-Information/dp/0674368274/ref=pd_sim_14_1 (2015)<br /> <br /> :* http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/23/privacy-human-rights-frontier/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Electronic Frontier Foundation'''<br /> <br /> :* https://www.eff.org/issues/privacy<br /> <br /> :* [https://ssd.eff.org/ Tips, Tools and How-tos for Safer Online Communications from Electronic Frontier Foundation]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Digital Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Rights]]<br /> [[Category:EOS eco Operating System]]<br /> [[Category:Human Rights]]<br /> [[Category:Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Millennials]]<br /> [[Category:Mobile Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Online Privacy]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=GreenPolicy360_(eOS)&diff=138361 2026-10-07T20:04:24Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> :[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/EOS_eco_Operating_System &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''A Green Eco Operating System'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> ::[[Table of Contents (ToC) GreenPolicy360]]<br /> <br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt; '''@GreenPolicy360: Hundreds of Millions of Views &amp; Shares'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt; <br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> : [[File:Earth dynamic global map.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/1000hPa/orthographic &lt;big&gt;&lt;font color=green&gt;'''#PlanetCitizens @Work Day-by-Day'''&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/big&gt;] <br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Planet Citizens]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[The Commons]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[EarthPOV]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Earth Right Now]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Earth Science Vital Signs]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''GRN360: &quot;Vita Activa&quot;, Turning Visions into Reality'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Green_Networking &lt;big&gt;'''Green Networking, Green Best Practices'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Living Earth.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Planet Citizen Vision of Living Earth]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_Citizen_Vision_of_Living_Earth<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''A Brief History of GreenPolicy360'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> SJS/GreenPolicy360 Siterunner: The Green Policy online network was designed as an accessible source of [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_Best_Practices '''&quot;green best practices&quot;'''] at the local, national and global level. <br /> <br /> The eOS online 'eco Operating System' was established to carry forward green politics and environmental science 'community-to-community'. <br /> <br /> With the Green Institute, we test launched the first online version of a green best practices eOS database in the early 2000s. An associated website, [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Strategic_Demands '''Strategic Demands @ StrategicDemands.com'''], an international policies initiative, was soon after launched in Washington DC.<br /> <br /> In 2008, the project expanded and became an independent green network, '''GreenPolicy360''', with the Green Institute transferring its prior internet domain name and all oversight.<br /> <br /> The GreenPolicy project and network have grown steadily since, with over tens of millions of views and shares as of 2020.<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 continues to extend its outreach internationally with [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenLinks '''GreenLinks''',] providing an extensive connectivity of green organizations, actions for sharing, and educational resources. <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy's associate, [http://www.strategicdemands.com '''Strategic Demands #StratDem'''], additionally expanded its online presence and academic programs in 2016.<br /> <br /> The GreenPolicy360 / Strategic Demands partnership entered its second decade in 2017.<br /> <br /> Together, community-to-community, across borders, within political systems and diverse cultures, we continue developing &quot;New Definitions of Security&quot;, to turn green values into reality.<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:StratDem logo.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''New Definitions of National &amp; Global Security'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt; <br /> &lt;small&gt;<br /> <br /> • https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/About_Us<br /> <br /> • http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/New_Definitions_of_National_Security <br /> <br /> • http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Environmental_Security,_National_Security <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Visit GreenPolicy360's Associate -- Strategic Demands'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> • http://strategicdemands.com/<br /> <br /> • http://strategicdemands.com/new-definitions-of-security/<br /> <br /> • http://strategicdemands.com/environmental-security/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:'Thin Blue Layer' of Earth's Atmosphere 2.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[Planet Citizens]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [[Table of Contents (ToC) GreenPolicy360]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :··········································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:GP360 tagcloud2.png]] <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Commons-concepts permanent culture now.png | link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Country]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Earth in Human Hands.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Green Best Practices 1.png]]<br /> <br /> : '''''Each of us can make a positive difference stepping up &amp; doing our best / Becoming Planet Citizens'''''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ''GreenPolicy360 provides green best practices, current news and news in depth, and an easily searchable-usable database, including green actions/ initiatives / legislation / ordinances and regulations. Our database is being added to constantly.''<br /> <br /> ''As an eco-network, our eOS is an eco-operating-system designed for online sharing. Our use of networking technology acts to enable collaboration and a cooperative society. We are built to be a distributive web empowering green best practices.'' <br /> <br /> ''GreenPolicy360 was developed for use in all communities -- local, national, and international.'' <br /> <br /> ''GreenPolicy lets you know how other communities are dealing with today's great challenges. Use our green information to craft working green proposals for your community. Replicate ideas, use our green models and templates, build on what has worked successfully. Employ a physics of action as a multiplier effect. Ripples can become waves. Each of us cooperating together can make a profound difference and bring positive change. Create ripples and waves of change.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;font color=green&gt; [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth &lt;big&gt;🌎 '''On Earth'''&lt;/big&gt;]&lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;[[Planet Citizen Action]]&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ···································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''''About GreenPolicy360's Founder-Siterunner'''''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/User_talk:Siterunner<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EOS starliner gr2.png|link=http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/EOS_eco_Operating_System]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ···························································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:GreenPolicy360 - Resilience.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Green Branching Out.jpg |link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenLinks]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Green Stories of the Day'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_Stories_of_the_Day<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360 Topics''' <br /> <br /> * http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Topic<br /> <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360 Categories''' <br /> <br /> * http://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/index.php?title=Special:Categories&amp;offset=&amp;limit=1000''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/EOS_eco_Operating_System]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[GreenLinks]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Special:AllPages &lt;font color=green&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''All Pages'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;] <br /> <br /> ::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/images/GreenPolicy360_Top_Pages_-_2023.pdf &lt;font color=green&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Popular Pages (2023)'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;] <br /> <br /> :::[http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Special:MostLinkedCategories &lt;font color=green&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Scan Our Most Linked-to Categories'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Above.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:About Us]]<br /> [[Category:Agriculture]]<br /> [[Category:Air Quality]]<br /> [[Category:Alternative Agriculture]]<br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Atmospheric Science]]<br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:Clean Air]]<br /> [[Category:Clean Water]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Corporate Accountability]]<br /> [[Category:Democracy]]<br /> [[Category:Green Best Practices]]<br /> [[Category:GreenLinks]]<br /> [[Category:Democracy]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Imaging]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Observations]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science from Space]]<br /> [[Category:Earth System Science]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-nomics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecological Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:Election Law]]<br /> [[Category:Election System Reform]]<br /> [[Category:Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Energy Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Laws]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Protection]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Security]]<br /> [[Category:Fair Trade]]<br /> [[Category:Food-Related Policies]]<br /> [[Category:Energy Policy]]<br /> [[Category:EOS eco Operating System]]<br /> [[Category:Global Security]]<br /> [[Category:Green Business]]<br /> [[Category:Green Best Practices]]<br /> [[Category:Green Marketing]]<br /> [[Category:Green Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Green Values]]<br /> [[Category:GreenPolicy360]]<br /> [[Category:Health]]<br /> [[Category:Human Rights]]<br /> [[Category:Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Labor Issues]]<br /> [[Category:Media]]<br /> [[Category:Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Nuclear Nonproliferation]]<br /> [[Category:Online Education]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Soil]]<br /> [[Category:Strategic Demands]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability Policies]]<br /> [[Category:ThinBlueLayer]]<br /> [[Category:Toxics and Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Transportation]]<br /> [[Category:Voting]]<br /> [[Category:Water]]<br /> [[Category:Water Quality]]<br /> [[Category:Women's Issues]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]<br /> [[Category:Youth]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=GreenPolicy360_(eOS)&diff=138360 2026-10-07T19:57:20Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt; '''@GreenPolicy360: Hundreds of Millions of Views &amp; Shares'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt; <br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> : [[File:Earth dynamic global map.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/1000hPa/orthographic &lt;big&gt;&lt;font color=green&gt;'''#PlanetCitizens @Work Day-by-Day'''&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/big&gt;] <br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Planet Citizens]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[The Commons]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[EarthPOV]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Earth Right Now]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Earth Science Vital Signs]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''GRN360: &quot;Vita Activa&quot;, Turning Visions into Reality'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Green_Networking &lt;big&gt;'''Green Networking, Green Best Practices'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Living Earth.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Planet Citizen Vision of Living Earth]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_Citizen_Vision_of_Living_Earth<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''A Brief History of GreenPolicy360'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> SJS/GreenPolicy360 Siterunner: The Green Policy online network was designed as an accessible source of [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_Best_Practices '''&quot;green best practices&quot;'''] at the local, national and global level. <br /> <br /> The eOS online 'eco Operating System' was established to carry forward green politics and environmental science 'community-to-community'. <br /> <br /> With the Green Institute, we test launched the first online version of a green best practices eOS database in the early 2000s. An associated website, [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Strategic_Demands '''Strategic Demands @ StrategicDemands.com'''], an international policies initiative, was soon after launched in Washington DC.<br /> <br /> In 2008, the project expanded and became an independent green network, '''GreenPolicy360''', with the Green Institute transferring its prior internet domain name and all oversight.<br /> <br /> The GreenPolicy project and network have grown steadily since, with over tens of millions of views and shares as of 2020.<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 continues to extend its outreach internationally with [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenLinks '''GreenLinks''',] providing an extensive connectivity of green organizations, actions for sharing, and educational resources. <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy's associate, [http://www.strategicdemands.com '''Strategic Demands #StratDem'''], additionally expanded its online presence and academic programs in 2016.<br /> <br /> The GreenPolicy360 / Strategic Demands partnership entered its second decade in 2017.<br /> <br /> Together, community-to-community, across borders, within political systems and diverse cultures, we continue developing &quot;New Definitions of Security&quot;, to turn green values into reality.<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:StratDem logo.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''New Definitions of National &amp; Global Security'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt; <br /> &lt;small&gt;<br /> <br /> • https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/About_Us<br /> <br /> • http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/New_Definitions_of_National_Security <br /> <br /> • http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Environmental_Security,_National_Security <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Visit GreenPolicy360's Associate -- Strategic Demands'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> • http://strategicdemands.com/<br /> <br /> • http://strategicdemands.com/new-definitions-of-security/<br /> <br /> • http://strategicdemands.com/environmental-security/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:'Thin Blue Layer' of Earth's Atmosphere 2.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[Planet Citizens]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [[Table of Contents (ToC) GreenPolicy360]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :··········································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:GP360 tagcloud2.png]] <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Commons-concepts permanent culture now.png | link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Country]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Earth in Human Hands.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Green Best Practices 1.png]]<br /> <br /> : '''''Each of us can make a positive difference stepping up &amp; doing our best / Becoming Planet Citizens'''''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ''GreenPolicy360 provides green best practices, current news and news in depth, and an easily searchable-usable database, including green actions/ initiatives / legislation / ordinances and regulations. Our database is being added to constantly.''<br /> <br /> ''As an eco-network, our eOS is an eco-operating-system designed for online sharing. Our use of networking technology acts to enable collaboration and a cooperative society. We are built to be a distributive web empowering green best practices.'' <br /> <br /> ''GreenPolicy360 was developed for use in all communities -- local, national, and international.'' <br /> <br /> ''GreenPolicy lets you know how other communities are dealing with today's great challenges. Use our green information to craft working green proposals for your community. Replicate ideas, use our green models and templates, build on what has worked successfully. Employ a physics of action as a multiplier effect. Ripples can become waves. Each of us cooperating together can make a profound difference and bring positive change. Create ripples and waves of change.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;font color=green&gt; [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth &lt;big&gt;🌎 '''On Earth'''&lt;/big&gt;]&lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;[[Planet Citizen Action]]&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ···································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''''About GreenPolicy360's Founder-Siterunner'''''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/User_talk:Siterunner<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EOS starliner gr2.png|link=http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/EOS_eco_Operating_System]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ···························································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:GreenPolicy360 - Resilience.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Green Branching Out.jpg |link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenLinks]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Green Stories of the Day'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_Stories_of_the_Day<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360 Topics''' <br /> <br /> * http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Topic<br /> <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360 Categories''' <br /> <br /> * http://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/index.php?title=Special:Categories&amp;offset=&amp;limit=1000''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/EOS_eco_Operating_System]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[GreenLinks]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Special:AllPages &lt;font color=green&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''All Pages'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;] <br /> <br /> ::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/images/GreenPolicy360_Top_Pages_-_2023.pdf &lt;font color=green&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Popular Pages (2023)'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;] <br /> <br /> :::[http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Special:MostLinkedCategories &lt;font color=green&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Scan Our Most Linked-to Categories'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Above.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:About Us]]<br /> [[Category:Agriculture]]<br /> [[Category:Air Quality]]<br /> [[Category:Alternative Agriculture]]<br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Atmospheric Science]]<br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:Clean Air]]<br /> [[Category:Clean Water]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Corporate Accountability]]<br /> [[Category:Democracy]]<br /> [[Category:Green Best Practices]]<br /> [[Category:GreenLinks]]<br /> [[Category:Democracy]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Imaging]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Observations]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science from Space]]<br /> [[Category:Earth System Science]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-nomics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecological Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:Election Law]]<br /> [[Category:Election System Reform]]<br /> [[Category:Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Energy Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Laws]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Protection]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Security]]<br /> [[Category:Fair Trade]]<br /> [[Category:Food-Related Policies]]<br /> [[Category:Energy Policy]]<br /> [[Category:EOS eco Operating System]]<br /> [[Category:Global Security]]<br /> [[Category:Green Business]]<br /> [[Category:Green Best Practices]]<br /> [[Category:Green Marketing]]<br /> [[Category:Green Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Green Values]]<br /> [[Category:GreenPolicy360]]<br /> [[Category:Health]]<br /> [[Category:Human Rights]]<br /> [[Category:Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Labor Issues]]<br /> [[Category:Media]]<br /> [[Category:Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Nuclear Nonproliferation]]<br /> [[Category:Online Education]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Soil]]<br /> [[Category:Strategic Demands]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability Policies]]<br /> [[Category:ThinBlueLayer]]<br /> [[Category:Toxics and Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Transportation]]<br /> [[Category:Voting]]<br /> [[Category:Water]]<br /> [[Category:Water Quality]]<br /> [[Category:Women's Issues]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]<br /> [[Category:Youth]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Green_Stories_of_the_Day&diff=138359 2026-10-06T20:45:58Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> __notoc__<br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&quot;Green Stories Changing Our World&quot;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''For the Young &amp; Old, Across Continents, Community-to-Community'''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt; ''@GreenPolicy360: An eOS Network with Hundreds of Millions of Views &amp; Shares''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Earth dynamic global map.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/1000hPa/orthographic &lt;big&gt;&lt;font color=green&gt;'''#PlanetCitizens360'''&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/big&gt;] <br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Planet Citizens]]''' <br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[The Commons]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[EarthPOV]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Earth Right Now]]'''<br /> <br /> ::: '''[[Earth Science Vital Signs]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''GRN360: &quot;Vita Activa&quot;, Turning Visions into Reality'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Green_Networking &lt;big&gt;'''Green Networking, Green Best Practices'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Living Earth.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Planet Citizen Vision of Living Earth]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_Citizen_Vision_of_Living_Earth<br /> <br /> <br /> :✅ [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Plans_Enforcement_-_Resources '''The Climate Plans Enforcement Initiative''']<br /> <br /> :✅ [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenLinks '''GreenLinks: Global Green Networking with Web 3.0''']<br /> <br /> :✅ [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_Best_Practices '''Green Best Practices: Community-to-Community'''] <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Liberty Bell.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Photo by mbell1975&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''A Democratic Republic, a 'Great Experiment' in the United States'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> 🗒️ Ours is a democracy, a republic, a work-in-progress continuing to this day, a heritage worth protecting...<br /> <br /> <br /> As the 250th anniversary of the signing of the US Declaration of Independence approaches, we will celebrate an agenda of rights, inalienable rights, human rights, put forward with and embodied in a [https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/full-text '''founding US Constitution'''], [https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/bill-of-rights/what-does-it-say '''a Bill of Rights'''] and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_amendments_to_the_Constitution_of_the_United_States '''Constitutional Amendments'''] -- together a Constitutional government envisioning a living Democratic Republic. <br /> <br /> <br /> On July 2, 1776, the Second Continental Congress passed a “Resolution for Independence” declaring “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”<br /> The signing of the United States Declaration of Independence occurred primarily on August 2, 1776, at the Pennsylvania State House, later renamed Independence Hall, in Philadelphia. The 56 delegates to the Second Continental Congress represented the Thirteen Colonies, of which 12 voted to approve the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[In Defense of Democracy and Freedom]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;'''[[Democracy Quotes]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;[https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Democracy '''A 'Working Democracy' ''']&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;[https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Fact_Checking,_Facts_Count '''In Democracy, 'Facts Count' ''']&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Surviving Victory - Liberty at Risk.jpg]]<br /> <br /> 🌅 'Surviving Victory'&lt;big&gt;🔥&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/surviving-victory-from-the-archive/<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''October 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Announces Its 2026-2030 Strategic Plan'''<br /> <br /> : As with prior EPA plans, budgets, and proposed changes, a legislative and judicial reordering will follow<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;EPA's Fiscal Year (FY) 2026–2030 Strategic Plan&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2026-10/fy-2026-2030-epa-strategic-plan-final-for-publication-october-2026.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Thought for the Day&quot;<br /> <br /> October 1, 2026<br /> <br /> In a recent series of private meetings in San Francisco, after a tasting menu dinner, Anthropic consulted religious scholars to help instill morality into its A.I. models ... a case was being made that Claude could be or become conscious.<br /> <br /> What would it mean for humanity’s future if artificial intelligence systems possessed a consciousness that rivals our own?<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-morals-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FVE.kDTO.OTLs6iwx7swF&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''September 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Canada's Prime Minister Steps Onto the World Stage'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/mark-carney-talks-geopolitics/<br /> <br /> Strategic Demands: A extraordinary interview and timestamp documenting geopolitical realities faced by the Canadian Prime Minister. Here, we see the navigation skills required and demonstrated by an exceptionally trained and talented man who guides his ship of state through shifting winds… At StratDem we speak of the need for “Strategic Realism” in international relations, of security competition and values-based politics in foreign policy. Canada is fortunate, in our opinion, to have such a person at the helm of its representative democratic governance.<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Telling the Truth to the World'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Facts are key to understanding, and key to unlocking the truth<br /> <br /> : Any speech to a world audience, as at the United Nations, should be time for facts and truth<br /> <br /> <br /> The Fact Checking writer for CNN has no easy 'news beat' as he has to follow the U.S. president's pronouncements<br /> <br /> * https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/22/politics/fact-check-trump-united-nations<br /> <br /> By: Daniel Dale / CNN<br /> <br /> (Note: After a court decision, CNN was re-instituted w/ press credentials on Sept. 24)<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Fact check: Trump’s false claims to the United Nations'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> (Excerpt) <br /> <br /> Global warming<br /> <br /> Trump scoffed at dire warnings that artificial intelligence might eventually attack or kill people, claiming they are coming from “the very same people who said we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming, a name since reborn to climate change because the planet was cooling, not warming, and nobody was dead.”<br /> <br /> There are at least four things wrong with his sentence about global warming.<br /> <br /> First, the phrase “global warming” remains in widespread use even though the phrase “climate change” is also common; they mean different things. Climate scientists use both, often saying “global warming” when referring to the long-term trend of increasing global temperature and “climate change” when referring to the numerous effects the world is experiencing because of that trend. (NASA, part of the Trump-led federal government, [https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/faq/whats-the-difference-between-climate-change-and-global-warming/ explains] the difference between the terms on its website.) For example, a [https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_SYR_SPM.pdf 2023 report] from the UN’s climate change panel is titled “Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report,” but it says this: “Human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases, have unequivocally caused global warming, with global surface temperature reaching 1.1°C above 1850-1900 in 2011-2020.”<br /> <br /> Second, while Trump didn’t say what time period he was talking about, he didn’t acknowledge that the world has continued to get warmer, not cooler. The UN’s World Meteorological Organization [https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/wmo-confirms-2025-was-one-of-warmest-years-record reported] in January that “the past 11 years have been the 11 warmest on record,” with 2023, 2024 and 2025 the three very warmest — as NASA [https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5607/ also found] — though 2025 wasn’t as hot as 2024.<br /> <br /> Third, experts [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/opinion/environment/climate-change-death-toll.html widely disagree] that “nobody” has died from the various impacts of a warming world. It’s impossible to pinpoint a precise death number, but [https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2025/10/30/how-many-people-are-already-being-killed-by-climate-change some] [https://www.eenews.net/articles/people-are-dying-from-climate-change-but-how-many/ estimates] total in the millions. The deaths are likely to continue; the World Health Organization [https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-change-and-health says], “Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year, from under nutrition, malaria, diarrhea and heat stress alone.”<br /> <br /> Fourth, while somebody somewhere might have said that “we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming,” that [https://insideclimatenews.org/news/27082019/12-years-climate-change-explained-ipcc-science-solutions/ isn’t] how an expert report framed the issue.<br /> <br /> A widely discussed 2018 report from climate scientists said the world needed to sharply cut carbon emissions within the next 12 years to be on track to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels; scientists said above that threshold, the potential deadly impacts from climate change would be [https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/science/climate-issues/degrees-matter larger]. Though the 2018 report was often oversimplified by politicians, the expert claim was never that “we’ll all be dead in 12 years” — it was that significant action was needed within 12 years to improve the future. (The UN program [https://wedocs.unep.org/rest/api/core/bitstreams/9f6bd957-8d35-402d-bb4e-c7c17096e592/content reported] earlier this month that the world is set to exceed the 1.5-degree increase, “likely within the next few years&quot;.)<br /> <br /> <br /> More re: Facts and Fact Checking at GreenPolicy360:<br /> <br /> '''Facts Protecting Democracy'''<br /> <br /> At GreenPolicy360, our mission statement supports fact finding and the '3 Ds' -- Discussion ➡️ Debate ➡️ Decision-Making<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 continues a multi-year defense of facts, science, &amp; 'critical thinking skills'<br /> <br /> -- &quot;In Democracy, Facts Count&quot; <br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Fact_Checking<br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Fact_Checking,_Facts_Count<br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Disinformation_-_Online_-_Dangerous<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Taking Time to Take Another Look at the Deepening Costs of War'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 &amp; Strategic Demands<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/costsofwar/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Demanding 'New Definitions of National Security' '''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:New_Definitions_of_National_Security_-_2.png<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Strategic_Demands_of_the_21st_Century,_a_New_Vision_re_Surviving_Victory_conf.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Deep Costs of War StratDem.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Disinformation_-_Online_-_Dangerous<br /> <br /> <br /> A Faith-Announcement in Support of [[The Commons]]<br /> <br /> The Catholic Church continues forward with the message of [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Laudato_Si '''Laudato Si'''] (2015), the first papal encyclical to advance formal environmental protection doctrine. Pope Francis, who was named after St. Francis, the patron saint of the environment, acted to open new doors for theological and spiritual belief within the Catholic tradition. Now, Pope Leo follows on with more ''' 'On Caring for Our Common Home' '''...<br /> <br /> <br /> Challenges of 'ecological turning point'<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''International Theological Commission that calls Christians to view care for creation'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &quot;Caring for Our Common Home&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2026-09/ict-document-care-for-creation-ecology-theology-church-pope.html<br /> * https://www.osservatoreromano.va/en/news/2026-09/ing-009/a-fraternal-response-to-the-triune-god.html<br /> * https://www.americamagazine.org/news/2026/09/03/vatican-creation-sin/<br /> * https://www.thefloridacatholic.org/news/vatican/vatican-theological-commission-defines-sin-against-creation-and-the-creator-in-new-document/article_a6edad02-a5c2-482b-bf7f-fefcf1a8f3ed.html<br /> <br /> <br /> The Vatican has officially declared environmental destruction a ”sin against creation and the Creator” in a major new doctrinal text.<br /> <br /> The document, “Caring for Our Common Home – A Responsible and Fraternal Response to the Triune God,” was published Sept. 2 with the authorization of Pope Leo XIV, according to Vatican News. <br /> <br /> The 29,000-word document, titled '''Caring for Our Common Home''', elevates ecological concern from a merely political or scientific issue into a direct matter of personal faith. <br /> <br /> “Everything is interrelated” within “a single community of life,” according to Vatican News. The commission says this understanding calls Christians to practice gratitude toward God, mercy and solidarity toward others, and responsible care for the common home.<br /> <br /> Authorized under Pope Leo XIV, the text declares that destroying natural habitats, polluting, and exploiting resources are not just civic failures, but a 'sin against creation and against the Creator' that directly violates God's plan.<br /> <br /> This shift from Pope Francis' earlier concept of 'ecological sin' to a more explicit 'sin against the Creator' is designed to reshape how believers view their daily environmental impact. The Vatican emphasizes that failing to safeguard the planet severely harms the poorest populations and future generations, distorting the core relationships that define humanity. <br /> <br /> By placing ecological action squarely in the realm of moral responsibility, the Church is challenging millions of people to treat environmental care as a fundamental requirement of their faith.<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:St. Francis with birds listening.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Faith Traditions Are Growing in Their Calls for Eco-Stewardship'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''&quot;The World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation&quot;'''<br /> <br /> This day is bringing awareness and a call to action<br /> <br /> The spiritual and secular find common ground here in a protection of [[The Commons]]<br /> <br /> <br /> The Catholic Church observes September 1 as the [https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2026-06/vatican-theme-2026-world-day-of-prayer-for-the-care-of-creation.html '''&quot;World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation&quot;'''], a day dedicated to thanking God for the gift of creation and renewing the Church’s commitment to ecological stewardship.<br /> <br /> What the Day Is:<br /> <br /> An annual Catholic observance established by Pope Francis in 2015 as a concrete follow‑up to Laudato Si’.<br /> <br /> Shared with the Orthodox Church, which first designated September 1 as a creation‑focused '''&quot;Day of Prayers for Natural Environment&quot;''' in 1989.<br /> <br /> The opening of the global '''&quot;Season of Creation&quot;''', which runs from September 1 to October 4 (Feast of St. Francis of Assisi).<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:St Francis with the birds.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> Pope St. John Paul II in 1979 <br /> <br /> declared Francis the patron saint of ecology<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Visit Pope Francis' Eco-Encyclical [[Laudato Si]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> More: https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=File:St_Francis_with_the_birds.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://fosfanariou.gr/index.php/2026/08/30/patriarchal-message-for-the-beginning-of-the-ecclesiastical-year-and-the-solemn-day-of-prayers-for-natural-environment-2/ &quot;Solemn Day of Prayers for Natural Environment&quot;, Orthodox Catholic, September 1]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_denominations_by_number_of_members 'Christianity is the largest religious group in the world...]<br /> <br /> The largest denominations -- Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox -- have an estimated 2.3 to 2.6 billion adherents <br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 / On Earth...<br /> <br /> Religious traditions -- faith and spirituality as practiced -- have an intimate connection to life's protection, quality, and humanity's future<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''August 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> TicToc TicToc <br /> <br /> <br /> '''3, 2, 1''' ... '''Launch ... Go, Go, Go'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ⬆️ <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''NASA Goes Looking for Life in the Universe'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Nancy Grace Roman Is the Name of the (biggest- and best-ever) Telescope<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Astro 'Big Picture' Sites]]<br /> <br /> <br /> August 30, 2026<br /> <br /> News from the Florida East Coast<br /> <br /> [https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/30/science/nancy-grace-roman-space-telescope-launch (CNN)] A massive observatory that scientists have called a “discovery machine” has launched toward the cosmos, beginning a journey that could mark a significant shift in our understanding of the universe.<br /> <br /> Designed to seek out otherwise invisible and faint space objects, '''NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope''' lifted off aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket at 7:26 a.m. ET Sunday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The observatory reached orbit about 10 minutes later.<br /> <br /> <br /> (NYT) At a news conference on Saturday morning, Nicola Fox, the associate administrator of NASA’s science mission directorate, explained that Roman’s vast gaze would contribute to solving some of the grandest mysteries about our universe, including how it works, what it is made of and if we are alone out there.<br /> <br /> “To put it in perspective, it will be as if Hubble and James Webb kind of peered through a keyhole at the universe,” Dr. Fox said, referring to two other telescopes NASA has launched into space. “Well, Nancy Grace Roman will kick the door down.”<br /> <br /> <br /> (GRN360) Get ready for 'Exo's in Space' ... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet Exoplanets] ...... with discernible, measurable signs of extraterrestrial life&lt;big&gt;✨ ❇️ ✨&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> 'Up' there ⬆️<br /> <br /> As seen from 'down' here on our terrestrial Home Planet<br /> <br /> Go we go, we're looking 'around'. We're going Exploring ❇️<br /> <br /> <br /> NASA's Exoplanet Archive<br /> <br /> * https://science.nasa.gov/exoplanets/discoveries-dashboard/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> ⬇️<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Trump numbers continue downward.png]]<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Numbers Continue Trending Downward'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via the Washington Post<br /> <br /> August 24, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/08/24/trumps-attempts-intimidate-home-abroad-have-backfired/<br /> <br /> <br /> In the CNN Poll of Polls, 36 percent approved of (Trump's) job performance, while 63 percent disapproved. That’s far below the historical average for presidents. He is even more unpopular abroad — and international disapproval of the president has translated into disapproval of the country he leads. A [https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2026/06/23/trump-gets-negative-reviews-internationally-as-fewer-say-u-s-is-a-reliable-partner/ '''Pew Research Center poll of 36 countries'''], conducted earlier this summer, found that 76 percent of respondents had “no confidence” in Trump and 57 percent had an unfavorable opinion of the United States. In most of the countries Pew surveyed, people had a more positive impression of China than of the U.S.<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Today &amp; Tomorrow: A Couple Memories'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Today: A Green-Skinned Actress (a Famed Witch) who has the same name as a NASA Software-engineer (who wrote the essential code for the Apollo moon mission)<br /> <br /> <br /> SJS/GreenPolicy360 editor: <br /> <br /> A quick flight of the mind, as I received two online stories this morning -- one brought a memory of when I lived in New York City in the Gramercy Park neighborhood and regularly saw a distinguished looking older women walking her dogs around the park. She had a distinctive profile and one day I briefly talked to her. She said she was an actress, and that she still worked (this was in the mid-1970s) 'in the theater'. Her dogs were anxious to move on so we parted. Later, I learned from a neighbor that she was 'thee Margaret Hamilton.'<br /> <br /> Let's call her Margaret from the West (although here in NYC she lived in a building on the East)...<br /> <br /> [[File:Gramercy Park East.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Wicked Witch of the West.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> And as those of you who are familiar with the work of GreenPolicy360, you may remember we have focused our work over decades on what we call [[The Modern Environmental Movement]]. Your founder/siterunner was among those who were there alongside a [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr Congressman named George Brown], who put into development a first generation of Earth Science missions from space. The Apollo-NASA missions to the moon changed the way humanity saw ourselves, as [[Apollo 8]] sent home the first-ever full-color images of our living planet home. What some called a 'cognitive shift' occurred for many of us who were there as the image that became known as '[[Earthrise]]' appeared in the media, most prominently [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Earthrise_Life_Magazine_January_1969.png on the cover] of biggest magazine of the era.<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''“We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.&quot; – Astronaut Bill Anders, Aboard Apollo, December 24, 1968''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earthrise - NASA original Anders photo.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> What your editor carried away was inspiration... and today I am remembering one of the greats of the Apollo mission who made the flights and vision of planet Earth possible. Her name is Margaret Hamilton.<br /> <br /> She literally [https://www.softwareheritage.org/2019/07/20/archiving-and-referencing-the-apollo-source-code/ wrote the source code] that guided the missions to the moon, and her code (as I learned today) from the Apollo 8 'Earthrise' mission acted to make possible the correction of the Apollo 11 landing and return from the moon.<br /> <br /> <br /> _________________________________________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : August 17, 2026 - Happy 90th birthday to Margaret Hamilton -- the software engineer who wrote the computer code that saved the Apollo 11 moon landing and who, in the process, invented the discipline of software engineering itself! The system that kept that landing from being aborted began, improbably, with her 4-year-old daughter crashing a simulated moon mission.<br /> : Margaret Hamilton's daughter, Lauren, came along to the MIT lab on nights and weekends while her mother wrote the software that would fly astronauts to the moon. &quot;There wasn't a time when we weren't working,&quot; Hamilton said. Lauren liked to play astronaut, because she had watched her mother do it in simulations. One evening she started hitting keys, and the simulation began to run. Then she hit another, and everything fell apart -- she had selected a program meant to be run before launch, and the computer, which had almost no memory to spare, wiped the navigation data that was taking her to the moon.<br /> : Hamilton saw what it meant immediately. &quot;I thought: my God -- this could inadvertently happen in a real mission.&quot; She proposed a change to the software that would stop a prelaunch program from being selected in flight. Her superiors at MIT and NASA told her not to bother. The astronauts were too well trained to make a mistake like that.<br /> : On the very next mission, Apollo 8, an astronaut made exactly that mistake -- wiping the navigation data midway to the moon, just as Lauren had. Hamilton called it the Lauren bug. &quot;It created much havoc and required the mission to be reconfigured,&quot; she said. &quot;After that, they let me put the program change in, all right.&quot;<br /> <br /> :Hamilton was born in Paoli, Indiana, in 1936, earned a degree in mathematics with a minor in philosophy from Earlham College, and went to MIT in 1959 to support her family while her husband attended Harvard Law. She learned to program in the lab of Edward Lorenz, the meteorologist who would become the father of chaos theory, because there was nowhere else to learn it. &quot;Computer science and software engineering were not yet disciplines,&quot; she said. &quot;Instead, programmers learned on the job.&quot;<br /> :In 1964 her husband spotted a newspaper advertisement: the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory was looking for people to write the software to send a man to the moon. &quot;I was attracted both by the sheer idea and the fact that it had never been done before,&quot; Hamilton said. &quot;I was the first programmer to join and the first woman they hired.&quot;<br /> : She was gradually promoted until she was directing the team -- eventually about a hundred people -- that wrote the onboard flight software for both Apollo spacecraft. When she was given the job, one of the senior men told her he had no doubt she could do it but worried the men under her might rebel. &quot;Well,&quot; she said, &quot;they didn't.&quot;<br /> :Almost nobody thought the software mattered. It was not in the original schedule; it was not in the budget. &quot;Software during the early days of this project was treated like a stepchild,&quot; Hamilton later wrote, &quot;and it was regarded as an art and as magic, not a science.&quot; Out of what she called desperation, she started calling what she did software engineering -- a phrase invented to make a point.<br /> :&quot;It was out of desperation I came up with the term, to say: 'Hey, we're engineering too.' It was an ongoing joke for a long time.&quot; The joke ended in a meeting, when one of the laboratory's most respected hardware men stood up and said she was right.<br /> :Then came July 20, 1969. Three minutes above the Sea of Tranquility, with two men aboard a vehicle that had never landed anywhere, the Apollo Guidance Computer began throwing alarms -- 1202, then 1201, five of them in four minutes -- because a rendezvous radar switch had been left in the wrong position and the machine was drowning in work it had no time to finish. On virtually any other computer of that decade, this was the end of the story: a freeze, a crash, a mission aborted.<br /> :Hamilton stood watching in the monitoring room at MIT while her software did what she had built it to do, which was to decide what mattered. It recognized the overload, discarded the low-priority jobs, restarted itself in a controlled and orderly way, and held onto the tasks that were flying the spacecraft. &quot;It quickly became clear the software was not only informing everyone that there was a hardware-related problem,&quot; she said, &quot;but was compensating for it.&quot;<br /> :In Houston a 26-year-old guidance officer named Steve Bales had a few seconds to call an abort, and because the computer was visibly managing itself, he called go. Neil Armstrong flew Eagle past a field of boulders and set it down with about twenty-five seconds of fuel remaining.<br /> :&quot;If the computer hadn't recognized this problem and taken recovery action,&quot; Hamilton wrote two years afterward, &quot;I doubt if Apollo 11 would have been the successful moon landing it was.&quot;<br /> :There is a famous photograph of her from that summer, standing beside a stack of Apollo source-code listings taller than she is. :&quot;We got carried away and grabbed all the Apollo listings in my office and created the tower,&quot; she said. &quot;I was trying to find a way of keeping the stack up.&quot;<br /> :Hamilton's standards held. In all the crewed Apollo missions that followed, no software bug was ever known to have occurred.<br /> :Hamilton went unrecognized for decades. In 2016 President Barack Obama gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, calling her emblematic of &quot;that generation of unsung women who helped send humankind into space,&quot; and a year later she appeared, as a LEGO figurine. <br /> :Now ninety, Margaret Hamilton still argues that software should be designed at the start not to fail, rather than patched after it does ....<br /> <br /> :For young women who want to follow in her footsteps, she offers this advice: &quot;Don't let fear get in the way, and don't be afraid to say 'I don't know' or 'I don't understand' -- no question is a dumb question. And don't always listen to the so-called experts.&quot; :To introduce this inspiring trailblazer to kids, consider the picture book &quot;Margaret and the Moon&quot; for ages 5 to 9 at https://www.amightygirl.com/margaret-and-the-moon) and the children's biography &quot;Space Engineer and Scientist Margaret Hamilton&quot; for ages 7 to 10 at https://www.amightygirl.com/margaret-hamilton<br /> :She is also featured in an activity book about pioneering women in technology, which includes a variety of hands-on STEM projects: &quot;Gutsy Girls Go for Science: Programmers&quot; for ages 8 to 11 at https://www.amightygirl.com/gutsy-girls-programmers<br /> <br /> :For adult readers who want the wider story of the women who put Americans in space, &quot;Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars&quot; tells of the mathematicians recruited by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in the 1940s and 50s at https://www.amightygirl.com/rise-of-the-rocket-girls <br /> <br /> <br /> _________________________________________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> So, in memory of two classic, talented, game-changing, creative women -- <br /> <br /> Here's a deep bow and a flourishing wave of our green cap. <br /> <br /> We remember you !!<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Fact_Checking Facts Count]<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Are AI companies scanning and destroying millions of books, including rare titles?'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> Via Snopes.com<br /> <br /> Artificial intelligence companies are scanning millions of books, some of which are rare, and destroying them.<br /> <br /> * https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ai-companies-destroying-rare-books/<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''July 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:A Quokka, which one.jpg]]<br /> <br /> A Human &amp; Quokka Species, on Behalf of All Species <br /> <br /> : Historic, Country-wide Wild Fires Threaten Australia<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''PyroCbs, &quot;Fire Clouds&quot;'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''France / Spain ... &quot;Unprecedented&quot; ... &quot;Extreme Weather&quot;'''<br /> <br /> [https://apnews.com/article/europe-wildfires-france-spain-93678a31ff53fc46564b6dfd9934eae1 250,000 Evacuated]<br /> <br /> Via NYT<br /> <br /> As the hot air rises, it expands and cools, causing its moisture to condense. The water vapor and ash particles combine to form a gray or brown cloud that can then develop into a pyrocumulonimbus (pyro means “fire” in Greek) storm cloud.<br /> <br /> They produce lightning and burning embers that can spark more fires, and they generate high and unpredictable winds that fan the flames and spread the embers.<br /> <br /> In the Gironde region, 103,000 acres have burned, according to officials, and 220,000 people have been asked to evacuate from Gironde and the neighboring Landes region.<br /> <br /> The pyrocumulonimbus phenomenon presents extreme challenges for firefighters.<br /> <br /> “These fire-generated clouds are linked to extreme fire behavior that impedes firefighting efforts and can devastate communities,” according to NASA, which emphasized the need to better understand the clouds “given the ongoing and projected increases in fire activity and severity.”<br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://espo.nasa.gov/inspyre<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Elon Musk Opens Up in an Interview'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Economist Editor Presses the Controversial 'Trillionaire'<br /> <br /> :: Elon Musk's 'Vision of the Future'<br /> <br /> * https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/23/elon-musks-vision-of-the-future<br /> <br /> <br /> “People don’t realise that what I’m saying will come to pass,” he tells The Economist in a 90-minute interview held at a giant Tesla factory in Texas where electric cars drive themselves off the assembly line. That may be because his future-gazing ranges from the unsettling to the downright weird. <br /> <br /> Mr. Musk predicts that, within five years, artificial-intelligence systems may surpass the sum of all human intelligence. Within ten years, robots in the workplace will help usher in an era of such “amazing abundance” that money will become meaningless....<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-killer-robots-ai-abundance-progress-unstoppable-2026-7<br /> <br /> <br /> Musk proposes peer review for frontier AI models in Economist interview<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/musk-proposes-peer-review-frontier-ai-models-economist-interview-2026-07-23/<br /> <br /> <br /> Musk says he got ‘carried away’ with Trump – but still holds on to contentious political views<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/23/elon-musk-regret-trump-doge-ai<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Mix of Comments:<br /> <br /> * https://beincrypto.com/elon-musk-real-force-european-politics/<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/07/24/elon-musk-speaks-to-the-economist-editor-in-chief-zanny-minton-beddoes-on-the-key-takeaways.html<br /> * https://futurism.com/elon-musk-interviewer-npc<br /> * https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-economist-interview-2000790016<br /> * https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/nonsense-elon-musk-lashes-out-in-fiery-interview-after-hes-accused-of-supporting-the-far-right/<br /> * https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2026/07/23/musk_admonishes_the_economist_editor_what_is_far_right_about_having_secure_borders_safe_cities_and_sensible_spending.html<br /> * https://zeteo.com/p/top-economist-trump-musk-starmer<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:ECO.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Big Picture'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> Humanity Looks up to the Heavens, [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:ECO.png 'Inspired' by the Stars]<br /> <br /> : Earth Art &amp; Heliophysics, An Art Project 50 Years in the Making Opens Up<br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Charles Ross, Star Axis in New Mexico.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> July 21, 2026<br /> <br /> U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations<br /> <br /> The Topic -- Supplemental Federal Aid<br /> <br /> The Question -- Why More Government Funding for the Military, and Agriculture Producers, is urgently needed<br /> <br /> The Secretary of War explains that $1.5 trillion in needed in the next budget year, a 'generational' budget, one year increase request of over $500 billion... and tens of billion more are needed immediately for war fighting, training, munitions...<br /> <br /> Then ... on July 21st, with minimal media coverage, the following is put into the record -- to explain why billions more than a half trillion more, are needed for farmers and agriculture.<br /> <br /> <br /> ''“For many agricultural producers, 2025 was a year in which the cost of growing their crop at times exceeded what they could earn from selling it. Severe weather compounded these losses... producers had to contend with a combination of challenging market conditions.&quot;<br /> <br /> ''“... We will hear a great deal today about how declining commodity prices, rising input costs, labor shortages, trade disruptions, pests and disease, and increasingly volatile weather are squeezing farmers’ already thin margins.''<br /> <br /> ''“Nationwide, we have lost nearly 200,000 farms in the last decade.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> Let's parse this list of what 'we will hear'... the causes are what we will focus on here.<br /> <br /> The choice of going to war, and resulting increases in oil/gas prices, the resulting prices of fertilizer spiking, the boycotts and tariffs of U.S. farm products resulting from boycotts and tariffs in international markets (Trade War consequences of U.S. policies), the reasons for 'labor shortages' in the U.S. agriculture industry, and increases in extreme weather events and damages... <br /> <br /> These consequential facts seem to be set aside, ignored, and not explored by committee hearing speakers and the majority party running the hearing (the Chair is a Senator from Maine and is running for re-election).<br /> <br /> Look more closely at the [https://strategicdemands.com/costsofwar/ 'Deep Costs, Costs of War'] that the people of the U.S., and many others, are paying.<br /> <br /> It is time for new policies, facts, costs of failed policies, and more realistic debate and discussion...<br /> <br /> Enough said...<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> July 16, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[Fact Checking, Facts Count]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Consider the Facts, Pay Attention to the Reality<br /> <br /> As an audience listens in while an American president talks, we, at GreenPolicy, have a bottom line request -- our bottom line is '''Facts Count'''<br /> <br /> Go with the Reality, not the Marketing<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Attribution of Extreme Weather and Climate Events and Their Impacts'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * This 2026 National Academies of Science Study and Report Will Have Consequences<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We are reminded of the mid-1970s National Academies of Sciences Study and Report that led to Congressional Hearings and the First US National Climate Act Program. We watched as Representative George E. Brown - (D) Los Angeles pushed for the scientific research and moved to hearings and legislation.<br /> <br /> The era of modern climate science moved forward with lasting contributions ...<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/climate/national-academies-extreme-weather-attribution.html?unlocked_article_code=1.yFA.38oJ.3B0p4MCCutBL&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> * https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/28590/chapter/1<br /> <br /> <br /> Read about the foundational 1970s National Climate science report, hearings, and legislation here -- <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr#/media/File%3ANational_Climate_Program_Act_Hearings_May_1976.jpg<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr#/media/File%3AUS_Public_Law_95-367.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr#/media/File%3APublic_Law_95-367%2C_1978.jpeg<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Congressman george.e.brown.gif]]<br /> <br /> Rep. George E Brown<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Generation Green]] [[Going Green]]'''<br /> <br /> '''[[The Modern Environmental Movement]]'''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360: Our Outlook, Perspective and Work is Local/National/Global, Individual and Community-to-Community'''<br /> <br /> : '''[[Green Best Practices]]'''<br /> <br /> : [[File:Climate First Bank Florida.png]]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Climate_First_Bank_Florida.png<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''An Interview with Bill McKibben'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> The Very Good and Very Bad News on Climate<br /> <br /> July 10, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-bill-mckibben.html?unlocked_article_code=1.wlA.b4se.muIpmtiO6j6_&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> Here’s the good news: Green energy is getting better and cheaper, faster than we had ever dared hope.<br /> <br /> This next sentence was unimaginable even a few years ago: In April, the energy think tank Ember found that all of the new electricity demand around the world in 2025 was met with green power. That is wild.<br /> <br /> But here is the bad news: Climate change is accelerating. We’re discovering new ways that the climate system is more fragile, more sensitive to emissions, than we previously had thought.<br /> <br /> We have not been talking that much about climate change lately, but that doesn’t mean it has stopped happening. Europe is in the midst of an extraordinary heat wave. The world is staring down the barrel of a powerful El Niño.<br /> <br /> And climate politics is in almost total disarray. Donald Trump has gutted the Inflation Reduction Act. His administration is accelerating fossil fuel production and kneecapping green energy.<br /> <br /> <br /> But here’s the possibility, a bit of optimism: The advances in green technology make a new climate politics possible — one that doesn’t just talk about sacrifice and disaster prevention but presents decarbonization and green energy as a way station on the path to somewhere better.<br /> <br /> Clean energy abundance, a new form of energetic wealth, the possibility of the left actually offering a future of more and better — not less and worse — was a hard case to make even a few years ago. But now we cannot only imagine it, we can see it, touch it, live in it. It is here.<br /> <br /> So how do we talk about it? How do we make it happen?<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-bill-mckibben.html?unlocked_article_code=1.wlA.b4se.muIpmtiO6j6_&amp;smid=em-share '''Read the McKibben Interview Here for more:''']<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Even better than the E.V. is the e-bike, which I think may turn out to be the transformative invention of our time on Earth.&quot; -- Bill McKibben<br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-bill-mckibben.html?unlocked_article_code=1.wlA.b4se.muIpmtiO6j6_&amp;smid=em-share '''Click Here for more about Bill McKibben at GreenPolicy360'''] <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:America250 logo.svg.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/In_Defense_of_Democracy_and_Freedom<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Democracy_Quotes<br /> <br /> <br /> We recall a quote of Benjamin Franklin responding to a question in 1787 about the newly announced birth of the US as he left Independence Hall after the Constitutional Convention:<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''We have &quot;a Republic, if you can keep it.&quot;'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Today's generation, and future generations, would be wise to remember Franklin's words of warning.'''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> '''July 4th, 1776'''<br /> <br /> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness...<br /> <br /> * https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''June 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''June 30, 2026'''<br /> <br /> <br /> NATIONAL REPUBLICAN SENATORIAL COMMITTEE ET AL. v. FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION ET AL.<br /> <br /> * https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-621_h315.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Millionaires &amp; Billionaires Applaud'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : U.S. Supreme Court Increases Influence of '''[[Money in Politics]]'''<br /> <br /> :: New SCOTUS Ruling Memorializes 'Pay to Play' Transactional Politics<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360's associate [http://www.politicopay.com '''PoliticoPay.com'''], has been tracking the escalating money in politics trend for years.<br /> <br /> We have warned of the consequences of profligate spending on politicians and campaigns. These warnings have become a reality -- and further challenge to good government. <br /> <br /> * https://politicopay.com/buckley-valeo-a-mega-money-future<br /> <br /> * https://politicopay.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''NPR re: Decision No. 24–621'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''(The Supreme Court) decision means that parties get the best of both worlds. They can both coordinate with candidates and raise unlimited funds.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''At issue in the case was a post-Watergate law that Congress passed to limit the amount of money individuals can give to political parties. The law, the Federal Election Campaign Act, also limited how much money political parties can spend on their candidates. Other types of organizations, like political action committees and Super PACs, have no limits on the amount of money they can raise and spend on elections...''<br /> <br /> ''Republicans, including Vice President Vance and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, challenged the law as an unconstitutional violation of political parties' First Amendment right to raise and spend money on their candidates.''<br /> <br /> ''Backed by the Trump Justice Department, they contended that the only justification for imposing a fundraising limit on parties is to prevent corruption, but they maintained that there is no evidence that the law has prevented corruption.''<br /> <br /> This decision overturns a 2001 Supreme Court case that declared the limits on party spending to be constitutional. It's the latest in a series of rulings since then that have unraveled campaign finance regulations.<br /> <br /> ''The saga began in 2010, when the court ruled in Citizens United that corporations have a First Amendment right to unlimited spending on elections...''<br /> <br /> * https://www.npr.org/2026/06/30/nx-s1-5827039/supreme-court-campaign-finance<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Speaking of the Influence of Big Money on Consequential Political Decisions'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Michael Mann's new book, Coming Back to Earth.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Michael Mann has news of science, politics, and life impacting policies --''' <br /> <br /> A new book on the state of climate science and politics is in the works with Michael Mann @ Public Affairs...<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 especially appreciates the publication notice:<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Coming Back to Earth'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Providing grounded, evidence-based reasons to be optimistic about our ability to confront climate change.'''<br /> <br /> <br /> We're reminded of his most recent book 'The New Climate War', which he inscribed for GreenPolicy360. <br /> <br /> '''Thanks Michael, Onward we go !'''<br /> <br /> <br /> and as we say here at the top of each online page as our site and green network is being read by millions around the Earth...<br /> <br /> '''Each of us can make a positive difference by stepping up &amp; doing our best'''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Generation Green]] | [[Planet Citizens]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''' &quot;We have to identify the problem, then act in many ways to solve the problem. Global warming is the threat of our times.&quot;''' &lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;-- [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Governor_Jerry_Brown '''Jerry Brown, California Governor''']&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''' &quot;We’re going to need to use every tool in the toolbox if we’re going to solve this problem.&quot; '''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;-- [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Michael_E_Mann_--_act_with_hope_not_fear.jpg '''Michael E. Mann''']&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Consequences of Another War in the Middle East'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> : Deep Costs to the U.S. and Its Future -- Come into View<br /> <br /> :: U.S. Allies Suffer with Shifts in Global Economics -- the Mid East Continues in Crisis<br /> <br /> <br /> '''With the deepening costs of oil/gas wars adding trillions to expanding U.S. debt -- with a multi-trillion dollars Iraq war, Afghanistan war, and ongoing Israel/Syria/Lebanon/Palestine-Gaza conflicts -- we witness decades of failed policy and generational roll over... The national/international costs and changes brought on by the U.S./Iran war, with its severe global energy disruptions, begin to come into a wider global view ...'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/business/energy-environment/china-energy-battery-grid.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qlA.iKfE.kO9ONgn1Q7pG&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:US_Reliability_Falls_in_Europe.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Visit GreenPolicy360's Associate, Strategic Demands, for Continued Perspective on the Middle East Wars and the Far-Reaching Consequences and Damaged U.S. Relations'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''June 14, 2026'''<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/costsofwar/<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/business/energy-environment/china-energy-battery-grid.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qlA.iKfE.kO9ONgn1Q7pG&amp;smid=url-share '''China benefits as Petrol Politics of Oil/Gas and Mideast Wars push alternative energy sources''']<br /> <br /> [[File:China electrostate benefits from efx of Mideast war.png|link=https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/business/energy-environment/china-energy-battery-grid.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qlA.iKfE.kO9ONgn1Q7pG&amp;smid=url-share]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''China's electrostate is poised to win from war in the Middle East'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/business/energy-environment/china-energy-battery-grid.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qlA.iKfE.kO9ONgn1Q7pG&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> More on [https://strategicdemands.com/new-definitions-of-security/ 'new definitions of national/global security']<br /> <br /> ''In April, wind and solar generated more electricity globally than gas for the first time.''<br /> <br /> <br /> Scan the energy production data<br /> <br /> * https://ember-energy.org/<br /> <br /> <br /> Data into action<br /> <br /> Open data and intelligent policy analysis to unlock a clean, electrified energy future<br /> <br /> <br /> Spring 2026<br /> <br /> '''&quot;And then came Hormuz&quot; ... Iran war analysis via Ember<br /> <br /> :If the defining economic story of the century is the rise of Asia, the defining energy story is the rise of electricity. The two are usually told apart. This report argues they are one: Asia’s rise is electric, and the electric age hastens Asia’s rise.<br /> <br /> :Electricity has been the century’s fastest-growing energy carrier, overtaking oil in 2007 as the leading supplier of useful energy worldwide. Over the same years, Asia has been the fastest-growing region. In 2016, China passed the United States in purchasing-power terms, and South and Southeast Asia together passed the European Union in 2021. Two features bind these stories together.<br /> <br /> :The first is that Asia is taking an electric path. Since the turn of the century, Asia has driven three quarters of the growth in global electricity. In the West, GDP and electricity demand decoupled long ago; in Asia, they rise in lock-step. Asia has achieved greater electrification at lower incomes per capita. No growth in history has been this electric.<br /> <br /> :The second runs deeper. It is a change in what energy is. Coal, oil and gas are commodities, dug from the ground. Solar panels, batteries and wind turbines are technologies, built on a production line. The energy revolution is the shift from extraction to manufacturing.<br /> <br /> <br /> :Enter Asia – the world’s factory. Asia builds most of the world’s solar panels, batteries, power electronics, electric motors and cars. Its strengths fit the new energy system.<br /> <br /> :Such a shift carries historical weight. After 1800 the West pulled ahead of Asia, a parting of fortunes known as the Great Divergence. Energy sat at the core of this divergence: first coal, then oil, and the engines built to burn them. These innovations favoured Western strengths and underwrote two centuries of wealth and power.<br /> <br /> :The Great Convergence – the East closing in on the West – also has an energy story, and it runs the other way. The new vector is electricity, and the electro-technologies that run on it. The new centre is Asia. Its lack of oil and gas was a weakness in a fossil world. It is a blessing in an electric one.<br /> <br /> :China is, of course, the giant. But change is radiating outwards. From Vietnam to Bangladesh, electrification rates are higher than in Europe or the United States. From Pakistan to Japan, solar’s share of power beats the US. From Thailand to Nepal and Indonesia to Singapore, EV uptake is ahead. Strip China out, and the rest of Asia still outbuilds the world in solar modules and battery components.<br /> <br /> :For years the economics of electrotech have been improving rapidly. A decade ago, solar began to beat coal, and electric cars beat petrol over their lifetimes, once fuel was counted. Today solar and EVs are cheaper to buy outright, even before the fuel savings. For economies short of capital, the door is now open to rapid change.<br /> <br /> :Then came Hormuz: the closure of Asia’s petrol station. The region buys nearly half of its oil from the Gulf, a deeper reliance than Europe had on Russia. It is the second blow in four years. The first came in 2022, when Russia cut off Europe, and Europe outbid Asia for gas, pricing out poorer countries. If electrotech is the pull of opportunity, the twin fossil shock is the push of necessity.<br /> <br /> :Economics, security and industrial opportunity now all point in the same direction. Asia holds half the world’s people and 4% of its oil and gas, but three quarters of the electrotech factories that can replace the fuel it lacks. <br /> <br /> : The Great Divergence was powered by the energy the West mastered. The Great Convergence runs on the energy that Asia manufactures. If this is to be the Asian century, its path will be electric.<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Electric Asia'''<br /> <br /> * How Asia is leading the electric age, powering its rise and reshaping the global order<br /> <br /> <br /> '''“What was five years ago maybe barely competitive, now is almost already clearly cheaper...”'''<br /> <br /> '''&quot;Investments in renewables have become a better bet, promising returns in closer to two years instead of 30.&quot;'''<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: The shift globally to renewable energy comes against a backdrop of historic policy decisions in the two terms of the Trump administration, a government-wide retreat away from renewable energy. The Trump 'retro-vision' that touts fossil fuels and denigrates renewables is, in fact, setting back U.S. competitiveness in meeting new demands for electrification across industrial sectors.<br /> <br /> As the economies of the world move forward, in transportation (EVs, e-motorcycles, e-bikes... e-buses, e-trucks, city e-grids with light rail, and soon aerial copters and planes, boats and ships, and e-power tools, e-tractors, e-smart homes and battery technologies (powering grids, cities, factories, consumer products), and e-robots and a gamut of AI technologies .... and on and on, the retro-actions of the Trump period are delivering a backward-looking blow to U.S. competitiveness that will have decades-long consequences.<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''June 7, 2026'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''As the War with Iran Reaches Day 100'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : And War in Ukraine Continues to Flare<br /> <br /> :: And War in Lebanon Expands<br /> <br /> :: And War in the Middle East Seems Endless<br /> <br /> ::: With Escalations, Reverberations, Proliferation of 'WMDs', and Incalculable Worldwide Costs <br /> <br /> We listen in and watch as the issues and questions roil across an informed and hard discussion between voices 'in the know' ...<br /> <br /> * https://substack.com/home/post/p-201011581<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''June 4'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''PREMIERE of a New Documentary Film about the Threat of Nuclear Weapons'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''In this 29-minute documentary, renowned whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg provides a powerful wakeup call about the global threat posed by nuclear weapons and advocates how we can dramatically reduce the real and present danger of nuclear annihilation.'' <br /> <br /> ''Before he released the top secret Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, Ellsberg was a nuclear war planner with access to classified information on U.S. nuclear strategy.''<br /> <br /> <br /> Wikipedia Bio / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Filmed one year before his death at age 92, Ellsberg speaks with clarity and urgency about the dangers we face, noting, &quot;I’ve long said that to my last breath I will be doing what I can to postpone and avert the risk of nuclear war.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''With ongoing conflicts heightening nuclear tensions, and with the recent end of the New START treaty potentially triggering a renewed arms race, &quot;An Ordinary Insanity&quot; is a timely film to help mobilize broad public concern and action for arms control and nuclear disarmament.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360 &amp; Strategic Demands''':<br /> <br /> A message from beyond, words of warning from an old friend of ours, Dan Ellsberg.<br /> <br /> Listen in to words of wisdom, even as a US president postures to be anti-nuke, and proposes nuclear weapons funding at all time highs...<br /> <br /> In fact, nuclear funding and Trump administration nuclear weapons development and 'usable' delivery platforms have spurred an out of control Nuclear Arms Race between the US, Russia and now China<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> “We’re continuing year-by-year deliberately with a posture and a policy and threats that make a significant risk of near extinction possible.” <br /> <br /> — DANIEL ELLSBERG in &quot;An Ordinary Insanity&quot; <br /> <br /> * https://www.anordinaryinsanity.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''More about Dan Ellsberg''' [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?search=dan+ellsberg&amp;title=Special%3ASearch&amp;profile=advanced&amp;fulltext=1&amp;ns0=1&amp;ns6=1&amp;ns14=1 @ '''GreenPolicy360'''] &amp; [https://strategicdemands.com/?s=dan+ellsberg @ '''Strategic Demands''']<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Nuclear_Weapons<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/nuclear-arms-race-3-0/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Truth and Consequence - Dan Ellsberg.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''May 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''David Attenborough Turns 100 Years Old'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/arts/television/david-attenborough-100-birthday.html?unlocked_article_code=1.hFA.HXVb.qSlnB3rq8Hbe&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> ''&quot;The next few decades represent a final opportunity to build a stable home for ourselves and restore the rich, healthy and wonderful world that we inherited from our distant ancestors. Our future on the planet, the only place as far as we know where life of any kind exists, is at stake.” -- David Attenborough, &quot;A Life on Our Planet&quot;, 2020<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We agree with David, we very deeply agree...<br /> <br /> And to Leo DiCaprio, a fellow [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Bioneers '''Bioneer'''], we agree too. David is a protector and close up story teller of the natural world who is a unique and valued voice whose wisdom will remain for years, and years and years...<br /> <br /> * https://deadline.com/2026/05/leonardo-dicaprio-david-attenborough-tribute-100th-birthday-1236888075/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Lee Zeldin E&amp;E News.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Photo by E&amp;E News&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin this past week defended deep budget cuts proposed by President Donald Trump'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Zeldin appeared at a trio of congressional hearings, dueling with House members and senators over the administration’s plan to reduce EPA’s annual funding to $4.2 billion in fiscal 2027 — or more than half of the agency’s enacted spending'' (E&amp;E)<br /> <br /> <br /> Green Policy: Lee Zeldin is Donald Trump's zealous attorney/administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. (We note he is also being discussed in the news as a leading candidate for the next US Attorney General). Zeldin for now is showing himself as a man with a cause. The cause he is pursuing, as he wields expanded administrative power, is dismantling and defunding the agency charged with protecting the environment, as the EPA's title straightforwardly declares. <br /> <br /> Since the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Environmental_Protection_Agency '''Environmental Protection Agency establishment in 1970'''], the EPA has followed its mission over decades. Congress after Congress envisioned, developed, and approved its work. Popular support was nationwide. Memorable achievements followed. We won't go into the long list of health-protections and science that EPA has given the nation and its communities, the air-quality, water-quality, health- and living-quality advances are there to see and experience.<br /> <br /> In Lee Zeldin's short time in office, however, the record of achievements is not seen as achievements to be built on... Zeldin has instead turned the valued agency into a storm of firings, cuts, closing of departments, ending research, terminating projects, eliminating oversight programs, announcing the EPA is no longer in the business of doing the people's work of enforcing the statutory mandates and directions of the US Congress.<br /> <br /> When asked under what authority he is dismantling the EPA, he answers with authoritative assurance -- that of the Supreme Court's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_questions_doctrine?wprov=sfti1 ''''Major Questions Doctrine''''] and the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loper_Bright_Enterprises_v._Raimondo '''Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo'''] decision.<br /> <br /> Zeldin and the current administration go on to explain they have 'different' policy priorities' that allow them to cut, cut, cut the EPA, turning it into a shell of what it was -- and away from Congressional votes, decisions and budgets since the 1970s intended to support viable, effective environmental protection. <br /> <br /> Yet, a remade Supreme Court has now enabled a dramatic and demanding new level of explicit text in Statutory law. The Court's novel doctrine of 'Major Questions' and the Loper Bright decision that Lee Zeldin wave as he orders dismantling is the order coming from the president. Given on the ground, deep and popular support, Zeldin's orders won't stand the test of time.<br /> <br /> Congressional staffs will bring in experts and act to redraft the letter of the law. Future administrations will support will act to pass legally specific text across most all environmental laws that are being summarily dismissed by Lee Zeldin, Esq.<br /> <br /> What Zeldin seems to forget, as he flaunts the Scotus recent turn, is that the clock is ticking, the people see and learn what is needed and what to do to deliver the kind of government they are demanding.<br /> <br /> Top of list -- quality of life. This includes protection against toxics and pollution. Moving toward a goal of clean, breathable air, drinkable water, and sustainable, enjoyable, healthy communities, towns and cities. <br /> <br /> We understand the need for the EPA's work. Most everyone does.<br /> <br /> When Lee Zeldin goes away, within a brief time a renewed Environmental Protection Agency with new Presidential executive orders and Congressional support will be the order of the day. <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''April 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Remade Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS) Remakes Civil Rights &amp; the Voting Rights Act'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : SCOTUS Voting Act Decision Acts to Reshape the 2026 Mid-term Congressional Election <br /> <br /> :: Partisan Reconfiguration of Congressional Districts Goes into Overdrive<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Voting Rights and Control of Congress'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Media news headlines from across the US deliver Temper of the Times <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-voting-rights-act-louisiana-alabama-4e3225083caccda5ec73a98533a79add '''Supreme Court hollows out a landmark law that had protected minority voting rights for 6 decades'''] '''Associated Press / April 30, 2026'''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act--.png]] 🏛️[[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-01.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-02.png]] 🏛️ [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-03.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-04.png]] 🏛️ [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-05.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-.png]] 🏛️ [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-07.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-08.png]] 🏛️ [[File:SCOTUS decision of Voting Rights Act-09.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Memorable Words from the British King Addressing a Joint Session of the US Congress'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Charles navigates fraught politics with reminders of the Magna Carta of 1215, citizen rights, and calling for today's democratic governments to have high purpose<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''&quot;[O]ur generation must decide how to address the collapse of critical natural systems, which threatens far more than the harmony and essential diversity of Nature.”'''''<br /> <br /> '''''&quot;Reflect on our shared responsibility to safeguard Nature, our most precious and irreplaceable asset.&quot;''''' ...<br /> <br /> <br /> The modern representative of the UK went on to speak of the British Enlightenment, and the rights and duties of today's democratic governments.<br /> <br /> <br /> ''“We do not embark on these remarkable endeavours together out of sentiment, we do so because they build greater shared resilience for the future, so making our citizens safer for generations to come.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''“Our common ideals were not only crucial for liberty and equality, they are also the foundation of our shared prosperity. The Rule of Law: the certainty of stable and accessible rules, an independent judiciary resolving disputes and delivering impartial justice.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> ... ''&quot;It is here in these very halls that this spirit of liberty and the promise of America’s Founders is present in every session and every vote cast” ... political debate enriched “by the deliberation of many, representing the living mosaic of the United States. In both of our countries it is the very fact of our vibrant, diverse and free societies that gives us our collective strength.”''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;The essence of our two Nations is a generosity of spirit and a duty to foster compassion, to promote peace, to deepen mutual understanding and to value all people, of all faiths, and of none.”''<br /> <br /> -- King Charles III, April 28, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;''''Earth Day', April 22, 1970, Carries On &amp; On'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''April 22, 2026 🧤 Teach-In Memory Time'''<br /> <br /> <br /> At GreenPolicy360 we tell of 'being there' and being directly involved in the envisioning and planning of a first Earth Day <br /> <br /> Tip of our Green Hat to Representative George E. Brown<br /> <br /> <br /> Personal recollection -- <br /> <br /> <br /> A Story of 'Earthrise' to 'Earth Day' and Far Beyond....<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Day_Memories_on_the_50th_Anniversary<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;[[Earth Day]]&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''[[Earth Day Is Every Day]]'''<br /> <br /> :* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Earth_Day<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth-Day.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Every Day Is Earth Day.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Above Our Living Earth.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :🌎<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> : [[File:Earthrise to Earthset.png]]<br /> <br /> :: &lt;small&gt;Round &amp; Round We Go ....&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Day &lt;big&gt;''''Earthrise' to a First 'Earth Day' '''&lt;/big&gt;] ... [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Earth_in_Human_Hands.jpg &lt;big&gt;'''Now Earth Is in Your Hands'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''Earthrise', December 24, 1968 to 'Earthset', April 6, 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Earthrise<br /> * https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/earthset/<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;'''[[The Modern Environmental Movement]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Apollo.jpg]]<br /> <br /> : &lt;small&gt;NASA / December 1968&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?search=earthrise&amp;title=Special%3ASearch&amp;profile=advanced&amp;fulltext=1&amp;ns0=1 '''Earthrise Thoughts at GreenPolicy360''']<br /> <br /> <br /> : '''A half century on, fifty years after Apollo 8, humanity again visits the Moon and looks back at Planet Earth'''<br /> <br /> <br /> :[https://greenpolicy360.net/images/Moon_and_Earth_from_Artemis%2C_April_2026.jpg '''Reflection on the experience of watching the Earth set over the Moon, via Astronaut Reid Wiseman''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earthset.png]]<br /> <br /> :: &lt;small&gt;NASA / April 2026&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Artemis II, Journey from Earth to the Moon'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nasa.gov/gallery/journey-to-the-moon/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Artemis looking at Earth home.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth from Artemis II.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;NASA&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''March 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Another War'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> As the US and Israel launch war with Iran, the following words hover front of mind. <br /> <br /> “People predicting disaster: The odds are in your favor, but you cannot be sure, and you should not hope to be right. People celebrating: Maybe wanna wait a bit. The odds, historically, are definitely not on your side. Anyone certain they know what happens next is making it up.” -- Tom Nichols <br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;The world needs to renew a focus on human rights with quality of life high on every nation's agenda.&quot; -- GreenPolicy360<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''February 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> February 18, 2026<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Environmental Groups Sue Trump’s EPA Rollback of Climate Science Finding'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via The Guardian <br /> <br /> More than a dozen health and environmental justice non-profits have sued the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over its revocation of the legal determination that underpins US federal climate regulations.<br /> <br /> ''Filed in Washington DC circuit court, the lawsuit challenges the EPA’s rollback of the “endangerment finding”, which states that the buildup of heat-trapping pollution in the atmosphere endangers public health and welfare and has allowed the EPA to limit those emissions from vehicles, power plants and other industrial sources since 2009. The rollback was widely seen as a major setback to US efforts to combat the climate crisis.''<br /> <br /> ''The suit was brought by the American Public Health Association, the American Lung Association, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club and 11 other public health and environmental organizations. The lawsuit was filed by green legal organizations Clean Air Task Force and Earthjustice and it names the EPA and the agency’s administrator, Lee Zeldin, as defendants...''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Trump, Rejecting Science and Climate Change - Feb 2026.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Photo from the LA Times&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''An Attack on a Foundational Law, EPA Findings and a Supporting Court Decision'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/12/trump-epa-rollback-pollution-regulation-endangerment-finding<br /> <br /> <br /> ('''Updated, with this Trump order''') &quot;The United States will essentially have no laws on the books that enforce how efficient America’s passenger cars and trucks should be.&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/16/climate/endangerment-finding-auto-emissions-regulations.html?unlocked_article_code=1.M1A.1MMD.Cox7hRsyuiae&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''A Trump Legacy: Rejecting Science, Climate Change, and the Environmental Protection Agency'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : A Moment in History That Will Be Remembered<br /> <br /> <br /> Reading 'Top of the News' headlines this week, the world's people encounter a nation's president who rejects a half-century of a scientific, military, educational and security studies, data, knowledge -- and warnings.<br /> <br /> President Trump orders environmental cuts and rollbacks, retrogressive policies that turn around the Environmental Protection Agency's progress for the nation.<br /> <br /> Five plus decades of vision, foundational work, projects and programs, NASA/NOAA, EPA, USGS, across US colleges and universities, health and medical research, and on and on are now being diminished and degraded.<br /> <br /> Time will tell the full story of the Trump presidency.<br /> <br /> <br /> For now, let's take a quick look back at actions taken to advance environmental protection and the nation's well being, the beginnings of the EPA, atmospheric/climate/earth science, national security, health, and a better future for all.<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:SMOG_be_gone.jpg<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Tracking_science_policy_across_the_Trump_administration.png<br /> <br /> * https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title42/chapter85&amp;edition=prelim<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: <br /> <br /> Let's call this Trump rejection of science what it is -- an act of hubris, an decision that will not stand in the face of physics...<br /> <br /> Donald Trump's administration, with an EPA taken over by anti-science purveyors who callously and destructively set aside fifty plus years of scientific data, now act to put their legacy into the history books. Their action to deny the overwhelmingly evident dangers of climate change, a gathering storm threatening US and world environmental security, is an ignominious day.<br /> <br /> We, today's generation and future generations will live to mark this moment as a tragedy, one that accelerates real-world physics of earth systems, delivering climate impacts, disruptions, security lost... <br /> <br /> The Trump administration have delivered 'retro' thinking, anti-science destructiveness. <br /> <br /> The Clean Air Acts and accompanying model regulations, [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr '''ideas beginning in California to deal with its &quot;smog&quot;'''] in the 1960s/70s, were shared and spread throughout the US -- and the world's cities and communities. Profound progress, meant explicitly to deal with hazardous air pollutants and remedy the climate-related costs, the damages of atmospheric pollution to health, environment and future well being that adversely impacts life across nations and regions of Earth, was achieved and continues to be achieved. The Trump attempt to block this progress will fail.<br /> <br /> Yet, the time lost to Trumpian folly will add additional costs to humanity's journey forward.<br /> <br /> We mark these days in February 2026 as times to be remembered -- and judged -- for what they are. <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EPA 1a.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EPA 2a.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EPA 3a.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EPA 4a.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:PlanetCitizen banner 800x163.jpg|link=https://greenpolicy360.net/w/PlanetCitizen]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> February 1, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Another Warning Among Many'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Excerpt from a Chapter in a new book by Thom Hartmann...<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Climate Collapse Presidency'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Climate change is the single greatest threat to a sustainable future<br /> : but, at the same time, addressing the climate challenge presents a<br /> : golden opportunity to promote prosperity, security and a brighter<br /> : future for all. <br /> :—- Ban Ki-moon, former UN Secretary-General,<br /> : Remarks at Climate Leaders’ Summit, April 11, 2024<br /> <br /> <br /> Thom Hartmann @https://hartmannreport.com:<br /> <br /> The greatest existential threat humanity faces isn’t hiding in a military bunker or a terrorist cell. It’s in plain sight: the accelerating collapse of our only home’s life-support systems.<br /> <br /> Trump’s first term was environmental arson. He gutted the EPA, installed fossil fuel executives in key positions, shredded over one hundred environmental protections, and abandoned the Paris Climate Agreement. <br /> <br /> Scientists were silenced. Research was suppressed. The words “climate change” vanished from government websites as if deleting terms could delete reality.<br /> <br /> When confronted about climate’s role in the devastating 2020 wildfires, Trump smirked: “I don’t think science knows, actually.”<br /> <br /> <br /> --<br /> <br /> <br /> An AI response:<br /> <br /> Daniel Solomon<br /> <br /> I asked AI what is the effect of Trump #47 on the climate? Ans. below:<br /> <br /> <br /> ''In his second term as the 47th President, Donald Trump has moved aggressively to reverse U.S. climate progress by prioritizing fossil fuel production and dismantling federal environmental oversight.<br /> <br /> ''Key effects on the climate and policy include:''<br /> <br /> ''Withdrawal from International Agreements: On January 27, 2026, the U.S. officially withdrew from the Paris Agreement for the second time. Additionally, the administration has announced departures from over 60 international bodies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).''<br /> <br /> ''Increased Carbon Emissions: Projections suggest that the administration's rollbacks could lead to an additional 4 billion metric tons of CO2-equivalent emissions by 2030 compared to previous trajectories.''<br /> <br /> ''Dismantling Regulatory Foundations: The EPA is currently working to repeal the 2009 Endangerment Finding, which is the legal basis for nearly all federal greenhouse gas regulations.''<br /> <br /> ''Expansion of Fossil Fuels: Under the mantra &quot;drill, baby, drill,&quot; the administration has fast-tracked deep-sea mining, reopened Alaskan refuges for oil development, and granted roughly $40 billion in new subsidies to the fossil fuel industry.''<br /> <br /> ''Stalling Clean Energy: Federal support for wind and solar has been slashed, including the elimination of the $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit and nearly $13 billion in green energy funding.''<br /> <br /> ''Information and Data Gaps: The administration has removed past National Climate Assessments from federal sites, deleted climate science webpages, and cut funding for climate research programs, creating significant gaps in global climate tracking.''<br /> <br /> ''While federal action has stalled, market forces and state-led initiatives — particularly in California and Texas — continue to drive some growth in renewable capacity despite federal headwinds.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Trump admin losses est 35B in clean energy projects - 2025.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Deep Losses in Clean-Renewable Production &amp; Competitiveness'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : US Policy Goes Retro with Fossil Fuels<br /> <br /> : * https://grist.org/politics/trump-2025-renewable-energy-investment-electric-vehicles/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tracking science policy across the Trump administration.png]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Tracking_science_policy_across_the_Trump_administration.png&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''January 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> January 7th, a Day to Remember ... <br /> <br /> This day in America delivered a deadly shooting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a death recorded live by a number of video recordings taken and distributed by citizens who observed the killing. Today is going to become etched in the memory of US history.<br /> <br /> The death, as witnessed by those who viewed and reviewed the video recordings, was tragic -- and much more...<br /> <br /> The lies told by government officials following the shooting of a woman in her car were painfully far from the facts and now remain another in a line of political lies that are spreading like a fire inflaming communities across the country.<br /> <br /> Today, it is again time to remember the warnings of Hannah Arendt.<br /> <br /> Take time to read her writing of lies, big lies, repeated lies -- and the threats and dangers they pose.<br /> <br /> These lies are, again, as history teaches, deliverers of dangerous times.<br /> <br /> Echoes from the propagandists that brought on World War II.<br /> <br /> Echoes of lies to recall...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''&quot;Truth and Politics&quot;'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Hannah Arendt<br /> <br /> 1967 in the New Yorker Magazine<br /> <br /> * https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/praxis1313/files/2018/08/Arendt_-Truth-and-Politics-LQ.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?search=hannah+arendt&amp;title=Special%3ASearch '''More from Hannah Arendt''']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[Earth Day]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;'''[[Earth Day Is Every Day]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :[[File:Earth-Day.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ==''Recent GreenPolicy360 Story Highlights''==<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> ''[[Green Stories of the Day - GreenPolicy360 Archive]]''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2025'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2025 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2025'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2025]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2024'''''&lt;/big&gt;'''''===<br /> <br /> [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2024 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2024'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2024]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2023'''''&lt;/big&gt;'''''===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2023 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2023'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2023]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2022'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2022 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2022'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2022]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2021'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2021 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2021'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2021]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2020'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2020 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2020'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2020]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2019'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2019 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2019'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2019]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2018'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2018 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2018'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2018]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2017'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2017 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2017'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2017]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2016'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2016 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2016'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2016]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2015'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2015 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2015'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2015]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2014'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2014 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2014'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2014]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ===&lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360 Archive Highlights 2013'''''&lt;/big&gt;===<br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2013 &lt;u&gt;'''''Featured in 2013'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Connect cooperative networking 2a.jpg|link=http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Archive_Highlights_2013]] <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:GP360_NewPages]]<br 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Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Earth_and_Space,_Politics&diff=138358 2026-10-05T20:18:07Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div>__notoc__<br /> <br /> [[File:Signals from the home planet.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> [http://www.planetcitizen.org www.planetcitizen.org]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;GreenPolicy360 journeys across 50+ years of the modern environmental movement&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;Connecting &amp; sharing world changing stories&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> [[The Modern Environmental Movement]] | [[National Climate Plans]] <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;'''[[Earth Science Vital Signs]] | [[Pale blue dot]] | [[Earth Science Research from Space]] | [[Planet Citizen Action]]'''&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;'''[[Planet Citizen Vision of Living Earth]] | [[@Earth360]] | [[New Space]] | [[Micro-satellites]] | [[Planet API]] | [[Virtual Earth]]'''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Himawari Earth water vapor dynamics.png]]<br /> <br /> Water/Life<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Earth Image via European Space Agency.png]] <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> The Home Planet<br /> <br /> [[File:Your Place in Space.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :::::::[[File:A Planet Citizen.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Living Earth, a Generational Challenge.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''2026 Onward'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''October 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Clean Energy Development, Production and Expansion Have Made a Huge Positive Difference'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : The Naysayers Who Say Nay and Nah Bring Nothing to the Table<br /> <br /> * https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/what-if-the-world-hadnt-built-wind<br /> * https://x.com/hausfath/status/2107146330850103330/video/1<br /> <br /> <br /> Zeke Hausfather: I often see people argue that clean energy is not reducing emissions, because it just adds to rather than replaces fossil fuels. This argument is deeply misguided – clean energy built since 2005 has displaced 23 billion tons... Clean energy has been wildly successful. Non-hydro renewables (primarily solar and wind) have increased from near-zero in 2005 to producing 22% of global electricity...<br /> <br /> But despite this rapid growth fossil fuel generation continues to set new records, though it has slowed down substantially compared to the rate of fossil fuel growth in the 1990s and 2000s. This leads some to argue that clean energy isn't actually reducing emissions... In a world without solar and wind, electricity demand would still have increased rapidly – driven by increased industrial output, air conditioning/heating, vehicle electrification, and data centers.<br /> <br /> Indeed, in many cases increased electricity use is a good thing – to effectively meet net zero goals we need to largely electrify transportation, industrial processes, building heating and cooling, and the ~70% of energy coming from non-electricity fossil fuel combustion today... We also see countries where rapid growth of solar and wind has played a key role in absolutely reducing power sector emissions, not just meeting new demand. The US has seen power sector emissions fall 37%, the EU by 55%, and the UK by 75% since 2005: Globally around 75% of new demand has been met by clean energy since 2005, with 99% being met by solar and wind in 2025. The globe may be on the brink of absolute emissions reductions in the power sector, with clean energy growing faster than demand.<br /> <br /> So the next time someone tells you that clean energy is not reducing emissions, just meeting new demand, ask them what would have happened if we hadn't built it. Solar panels do not create demand, and without them we'd have been burning a lot more fossil fuels.<br /> <br /> * https://x.com/hausfath/status/2107146330850103330<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''September 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Potential for a 'Cascade of Progress' and/or Setbacks of a Retro U.S. Administration'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : History will tell the story, as a Modern Environmental Movement keeps on keeping on<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Exeter Report-Global Systems Institute (2026) Re How to trigger 'Cascade of Progress'.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Exeter_Report-Global_Systems_Institute_(2026)_Re_How_to_trigger_%27Cascade_of_Progress%27.png<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Tracking_science_policy_across_the_Trump_administration.png<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Daniel Ellsberg, On the Threat of Nuclear Weapons'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;strong&gt;A message from beyond, words of warning from an old friend of ours, Dan Ellsberg&lt;/strong&gt;<br /> <br /> Listen in to words of wisdom, even as a US president postures to be anti-nuke, and proposes nuclear weapons funding at all time highs...<br /> <br /> In fact, nuclear funding and Trump administration nuclear weapons development and 'usable' delivery platforms have spurred an out of control Nuclear Arms Race between the US, Russia and now China.<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/nuclear-arms-race-3-0/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:An Ordinary Insanity, a Nuclear Movie.png]]<br /> <br /> Released 06/2026<br /> <br /> <br /> In this 29-minute documentary, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xofgctP2hTY '''now on YouTube'''], renowned whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, near the end of his life, provides a powerful &lt;strong&gt;wakeup call&lt;/strong&gt; about the global threat of nuclear weapons and advocates how to dramatically reduce &lt;strong&gt;real and present dangers of nuclear annihilation&lt;/strong&gt;.<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xofgctP2hTY<br /> <br /> <br /> Before he released the top secret Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, Ellsberg was a nuclear war planner with access to classified information on U.S. nuclear strategy.<br /> <br /> <br /> “We’re continuing year-by-year deliberately with a posture and a policy and threats that make a significant risk of near extinction possible.”<br /> <br /> — Daniel Ellsberg in &quot;An Ordinary Insanity&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://www.anordinaryinsanity.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> Dan Ellsberg @ GreenPolicy360's associate, Strategic Demands<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/?s=daniel+ellsberg<br /> <br /> <br /> The &quot;Ordinary Insanity&quot; documentary was filmed one year before his death at age 92 and Ellsberg speaks with insider knowledge, clarity and urgency about nuclear weapons, the risks of use, and the 'beyond words' devastation that would come to humanity in the event of nuclear war.<br /> <br /> Over decades Daniel Ellsberg, as a 'nuclear weapons planning insider', led anti-nuclear efforts and now, near the end of his life, he speaks out for a last time in this documentary, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;An Ordinary Insanity&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;.<br /> <br /> &lt;strong&gt;&quot;I’ve long said that to my last breath I will be doing what I can to postpone and avert the risk of nuclear war.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;<br /> <br /> With ongoing conflicts heightening nuclear tensions, and with the recent end of the New START treaty potentially triggering a renewed arms race, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;An Ordinary Insanity&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; is a profoundly important film that aims to mobilize broad public concern and action for arms control and nuclear disarmament.<br /> <br /> &lt;strong&gt;The clock is ticking...&lt;/strong&gt;.<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Nuclear symbol .png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Read More about Dan Ellsberg<br /> <br /> : At GreenPolicy360 &amp;amp; Strategic Demands<br /> <br /> <br /> StrategicDemands.com<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/180px-Truth_and_Consequence_-_Dan_Ellsberg.png<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?search=dan+ellsberg&amp;amp;title=Special%3ASearch&amp;amp;profile=advanced&amp;amp;fulltext=1&amp;amp;ns0=1&amp;amp;ns6=1&amp;amp;ns14=1<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Truth_and_Consequence_-_Dan_Ellsberg.png<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Nuclear_Weapons<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Updated at [[Earthviews]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?search=landsat&amp;title=Special%3ASearch &lt;big&gt;'''Earthviews from Landsat Mission Satellites'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Landsat band imagery2.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Day before Earth Day, April 21, 2015.png]]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Category:Earth<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Earth Sharing Observation Resources / NASA'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[Earth Observation Portal]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''Satellite Missions Database''' <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth Observation - Resources.png]]<br /> <br /> (Introduced in 2015 at GreenPolicy360)<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Earth_Observation_-_Resources.png<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Earth Observations Portal'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://directory.eoportal.org/web/eoportal/home<br /> <br /> * https://directory.eoportal.org/web/eoportal/satellite-missions<br /> <br /> * https://directory.eoportal.org/web/eoportal/kramer<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Update:'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> September 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Now that we/humanity, with open source data compiled in databases from 50+ years of satellite Earth Imaging (beginning w/ decades of US-initiated 'planet earth', first-generation Earth Science/NASA missions), it's time to 'work the data' <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Introducing 'Worldviews' '''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> First, for digital screens, schools, education and knowledge across the world, look at NASA's updated ''''Worldview'''' and ''''World Monitor'''' projects<br /> <br /> Add in NASA's Earthdata publicly available Earth Science Data System (ESDS) and Earth Observing System (EOS) <br /> <br /> * https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/about<br /> * https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/about/esdis/eosdis<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The Earth Observing System (EOS) is a program of NASA comprising a series of artificial satellite missions and scientific instruments in Earth orbit designed for long-term global observations of the land surface, biosphere, atmosphere, and oceans. Since the early 1970s, NASA has been developing its Earth Observing System, launching a series of Landsat satellites ... Following the launch of various satellite missions, the conception of the program began in the late 1980s and expanded rapidly through the 1990s.[2] Since the inception of the program, it has continued to develop, including; land, sea, radiation and atmosphere.[1] Collected in a system known as EOSDIS, NASA uses this data in order to study the progression and changes in the biosphere of Earth. The main focus of this data collection surrounds climatic science. The program is the centerpiece of NASA's Earth Science Enterprise.''<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Observing_System<br /> <br /> <br /> SJS: With their/our real-time capabilities, we are now talking navigating and knowing our world like never before ...<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Find Earthdata at EOS Data and Information System - NASA.png]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Find_Earthdata_at_EOS_Data_and_Information_System_-_NASA.png&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> April 2025<br /> <br /> <br /> The following 9 GreenPolicy360 pages use this file:<br /> <br /> : Earth Day Memories on the 50th Anniversary<br /> : Earth Observation System Data and Information System - NASA EOS<br /> : Earth Science Research from Space<br /> : George E. Brown Jr<br /> : Planet Earth Perspective<br /> : Stats - Green Research &amp; Science<br /> : File:EOS - Earth Science Data Operations.png<br /> : File:Science Guides.jpeg<br /> : Category:NASA<br /> <br /> <br /> SJS / GreenPolicy360 founder/siterunner: From envisioning to reality, first principles to development, proof-of-concept to prototypes, engineering models, testing, launching, managing, monitoring, gathering, sharing ... distribution and use ... sometimes it's good to be older and to see the story arc roll out ... a tip of our Green cap to the visionaries, the dreamers and doers, those who made it all happen -- <br /> <br /> * https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/<br /> <br /> * https://github.com/nasa-gibs/worldview<br /> <br /> * https://www.worldmonitor.app/<br /> <br /> * https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/about<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> SJS / GreenPolicy360: Journeying across 50+ years of the modern environmental movement<br /> <br /> From '''[[Earthrise]]''' to becoming a 'participant-observer' over the first three decades of a new Earth Science movement<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[The Modern Environmental Movement]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Thank you for the ride, Rep. George E. Brown, your three decades of vision, effort, oversight and managing of US Earth Science / Atmospheric Science, a foundation for humanity to build on, continues to be shared globally, open-source, as you/we hoped, even though there are forces in opposition<br /> <br /> Onward we go!<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Earth Observation System Data and Information System - NASA EOS]]'''<br /> <br /> ''NASA's Earth Observation System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) comprises elements including Distributed Active Archive Centers, Science Investigator-led Processing Systems, and web infrastructure.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''NASA's Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) is a key core capability in the Earth Science Data Systems (ESDS) Program. It provides end-to-end capabilities for managing NASA Earth science data from various sources — satellites, aircraft, field measurements, and various other programs.'' <br /> <br /> ''For the EOS satellite missions, EOSDIS provides capabilities for command and control, scheduling, data capture and initial processing. These capabilities, constituting the '''EOSDIS Mission Operations''', are managed by NASA's Earth Science Mission Operations (ESMO) Project. NASA network capabilities transport the data to the science operations facilities.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/about/esdis/eosdis<br /> <br /> <br /> Update: See the Web Unification Project -- <br /> <br /> * https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/about/web-unification-project<br /> <br /> <br /> The Earth Observation System (EOS) is continuing to be updated with Earth Science Data Systems (ESDS) <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EarthScience Missions via the EOS - 2022.png]]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:EarthScience_Missions_via_the_EOS_-_2022.png<br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:EOS EarthSats s.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:You can manage only what you can measure Dr David Crisp, OCO-2, June 2014 m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:You_can_manage_only_what_you_can_measure_Dr_David_Crisp,_OCO-2,_June_2014_m.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[HelloEarth]]<br /> <br /> '''Visit GreenPolicy360's story of Earth Science research from our decades of research, eco-activism and #PlanetCitizens education.'''<br /> <br /> Our GreenPolicy360 [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Category:EOS_eco_Operating_System eco Operating System (eOS)] includes:<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Category:Earth360 '''Earth360''']<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Category:Earth_Observations '''Earth Observations''']<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Category:NASA '''NASA''']<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Strategic_Demands '''Strategic Demands''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Planet Earth Perspective]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[EarthPOV]]<br /> <br /> [[Earth and Space, Politics]]<br /> <br /> [[Look at how thin our atmosphere is]]<br /> <br /> [[New Definitions of National Security]] - <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Earth Imaging-New Space]]<br /> <br /> [[Planet API]]<br /> <br /> [[Micro-satellites]]<br /> <br /> [[Democratization of Space]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Earth Right Now]]<br /> <br /> [[Earth Science Vital Signs]]<br /> <br /> [[The Commons]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Virtual Earth]]<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''A Whole Earth Vision'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Whole_Earth<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earthrise Planetary Awareness.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Hmmm.....<br /> <br /> September 1, 2026<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Time to Publish the Dark Experiment Results Is (Are?) Now'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Search for dark matter particle interactions in an extended nuclear recoil energy window with the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Weakly Inter-acting Massive Particles (WIMPs) are among the best-<br /> motivated candidates for dark matter, arising naturally<br /> in many theories beyond the Standard Model...<br /> <br /> * https://lz.lbl.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2026/08/LZ_Preprint_260901_Dark_Matter_EFT_Nuclear_Recoil_Search_at_Higher_Energies.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Scientists Hunting Dark Matter Found Something Strange'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Dark matter has evaded direct detection for decades because it does not emit, absorb or reflect any light. It is as pervasive as it is inaccessible, making up 85 percent of the matter in our universe, a tease for the particle physicists keen on deciphering its nature...<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/01/science/dark-matter.html?unlocked_article_code=1.91A.Y09A.CEzD8GWampij&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> The+LUX-ZEPLIN+experiment+observed+a+particle+interaction+that+could+be+interpreted+as+a+signal+from+WIMPs,+a+dark+matter+candidate+—+but+researchers+will+need+more+data+to+confirm.+<br /> <br /> * https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2026/09/01/lz-sees-surprising-result-in-search-for-dark-matter/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''August 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Venture Capital Gets the Picture (Why Doesn't the Current US Administration?)<br /> <br /> What will electricity in the US look like in the coming decades?<br /> <br /> <br /> From Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z) <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Base Power, Home Power, &amp; the Future of Electricity'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : ''''Electricity is a commodity, and the best electron is the cheapest electron''''<br /> <br /> :* https://www.a16z.news/p/base-power-and-the-future-of-electricity<br /> <br /> <br /> a16z News<br /> <br /> August 4, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> In 2018, Zach Dell was a summer analyst at Blackstone studying the utility-scale battery opportunity. “One thing became really clear to me,” he recalls. “The marginal cost of solar plus storage was going to fall below the marginal cost of coal and natural gas.”<br /> <br /> He was right. Solar is now the fastest-growing source of electricity in history, and the price of a lithium-ion battery pack has fallen more than 90% since 2010...<br /> <br /> Cheaper batteries could help fix our aging grid infrastructure because a battery and transmission line essentially do the same job: both move power from where it’s worth less to where it’s worth more. A transmission line does it through space, carrying power from where it’s made cheaply, like a solar farm in Arizona, to customers hundreds of miles away. A battery does it through time, storing power at noon when solar is flooding the grid and releasing it in the evening when everyone is home, the sun is down, and power is expensive.<br /> <br /> The only problem was that the way incumbents were deploying battery storage was too slow, and the batteries weren’t where the grid needed them. “Ninety-nine percent of storage on the grid is utility-scale storage...&quot;<br /> <br /> The grid has been called the largest machine in the world – building it took decades, millions of workers, and hundreds of billions of dollars – and fixing it is an almost impossibly ambitious task. But in 2023, Justin Lopas and Zach Dell founded Base Power to try anyway, and it turned out that a lot of talented people wanted to work on this problem too. The engineer who got Starlink’s laser mesh network working joined to lead their software. A Tesla veteran who’d spent thirteen years on everything from the original Roadster to the Powerwall joined to build their battery. And investors have since bet billions of dollars that they’re onto something...<br /> <br /> Within three years of founding, Base has grown its battery fleet to over 500 megawatt-hours and expanded beyond Texas into Illinois. In October of last year, it raised a $1 billion Series C and converted an abandoned newspaper factory in downtown Austin into a fully functioning battery factory in eight months. This week it announced a $1 billion Series D alongside the launch of the Base Core battery, which is now in production there. The factory turns out thousands of systems a month, and the plan is to manufacture four gigawatt-hours of batteries a year, with over 10 at the next facility. “It is so critical to bring manufacturing back to the U.S., especially for critical infrastructure.&quot; ...<br /> <br /> America will need more than cheap electrons. China accounted for over 80% of battery cell production in 2025, and its share of every stage of solar panel manufacturing (polysilicon, ingots, wafers, cells, and modules) exceeds 80%. Washington has responded to this supply chain risk with tariffs, which pushes energy prices higher still. <br /> <br /> [Ed: Here's the green solution in the mix] Base wants to help solve this by building more factories and vertically integrating further over time.<br /> <br /> <br /> So: Go Alternative Energy, Clean Energy, Renewable Energy <br /> <br /> Making a future-looking case 'on the merits'... <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:A16z (1).png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:A16z (2).png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:A16z (3).png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:A16z (4) Base Power.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:A16z (5).png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:A16z (6).png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:A16z (7).png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:A16z (8).png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2026/08/04/base-power-launches-39-2-kwh-u-s-made-base-core-home-battery-secures-1-billion-in-new-funding/<br /> <br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/03/base-power-raises-another-1b-to-save-the-grid-using-backyard-batteries/<br /> <br /> * https://fortune.com/2026/08/06/michael-dell-son-built-home-battery-business/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''July 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''American Nero: Why Trump is trying to burn down the National Academy of Sciences'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> '''Via the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists'''<br /> <br /> * https://thebulletin.org/2026/07/american-nero-why-trump-is-trying-to-burn-down-the-national-academy-of-sciences/<br /> <br /> <br /> In a post on Truth Social earlier this month, Trump claimed that the National Academy of Sciences published “fraudulent, biased, and misleading Manuals on climate change.” <br /> <br /> He has now ordered “Federal Suspension and Debarment Officials” to review the organization’s conduct.<br /> <br /> Although he referred to multiple “Manuals,” the president’s Truth Social screed is really about a single manual: the Federal Judicial Center’s Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence. The Reference Manual serves “as a go-to document judges can use when they deal with issues involving scientific testimony.” For the first time, the most recent version of the manual contains a climate science chapter. It describes the hard scientific evidence that fossil fuel burning is influencing extreme weather events. This science is anathema to the oil industry and to its conservative supporters, including the president, and they have responded by attacking the manual and its authors.<br /> <br /> The Federal Judicial Center caved to a request by 27 Republican state attorneys general to remove the climate chapter from the Reference Manual, but it is still publicly available on the website of the National Academy of Sciences. This open defiance of overt political pressure is causing problems for the National Academies...<br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://thebulletin.org/2026/03/im-not-a-scientist-why-judges-need-the-climate-chapter-in-the-reference-manual-on-scientific-evidence/<br /> <br /> * https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/26919/chapter/21<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''As the World Races toward Electric Vehicles, the United States Risks becoming the Cuba of Gas Cars'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Left Behind with Outdated Guzzlers<br /> <br /> <br /> Via Atmos<br /> <br /> * https://atmos.earth/climate-solutions/america-built-the-ev-dream-now-china-is-driving-it/<br /> <br /> <br /> When it comes to cars, American exceptionalism is large, loud, and gassy. While much of the rest of the world is racing toward electric vehicles, the United States is driving down a very different road—one clogged with gasoline-devouring pickup trucks and oversized SUVs.<br /> <br /> One in four cars sold globally last year was electric, setting a new record. This year, that share is set to be one-third. China is fast-becoming the home of electric mobility, with more than half of new cars sold in 2025 carrying a large battery instead of a fuel tank. In other countries, gasoline vehicles are already starting to look like outmoded relics—something closer to a Sony Walkman than an iPhone. In January, just seven gas-powered cars were sold in the whole of Norway...<br /> <br /> And it’s not just Europe and China. In countries as varied as Brazil, Mexico, and Thailand, electric car sales are exploding. Soaring oil costs, driven higher by the U.S. and Israel’s attack on Iran, and the latter’s subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, have only added urgency to this transition. “I want everything to be electric,” Indonesia’s president, Prabowo Subianto, vowed while outlining a plan to phase out gas-powered cars entirely.<br /> <br /> ...<br /> <br /> But in the U.S., the EV revolution has stalled. Sales of new electric cars actually fell last year, driven by high prices and by the political turn under Donald Trump’s administration that rolled back climate and fuel-efficiency rules, scrapped a tax credit for new EV buyers, and embraced a broader pro-fossil-fuel agenda, summed up by the slogan “drill, baby, drill.” Automakers took the hint: Ford, General Motors, Honda, and Volvo all scaled back or scrapped electric car models and related manufacturing plants.<br /> <br /> “I’m concerned,” said Loren McDonald, an electric car analyst and chief executive of Chargeonomics. “The auto makers just don’t have a long-term vision to say they are going electric; the plan seems to be huge gas-guzzling trucks because they sell well and have massive margins. I hate to compare this situation to what happened with Blackberry and Kodak. But the concern is that we will give yet another industry to China.”<br /> <br /> China’s growing dominance in EVs came into sharper focus earlier this year, when Shenzhen-based BYD — short for Build Your Dreams — overtook Tesla to become the world’s largest EV seller. Its cars are already on the streets in Mexico and, following a recent trade deal, to a limited extent in Canada. The U.S. increasingly finds itself surrounded by a world going electric...<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Category:Transportation<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The United States Government under the Trump Administration Acts to Threaten the Security of Countries around the World'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://substack.com/home/post/p-206435711<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The UN agencies that track climate risk — the World Food Programme, the International Organisation for Migration, UNHCR, UNDP — have all quietly reduced how often they use the words “climate change” in their strategic documents. The Independent tracked the numbers. WFP country strategies for Rwanda, Iraq, and Guatemala mentioned “climate” 31, 23, and 41 times respectively in their Biden-era plans. Under Trump, those numbers dropped to 2, 1, and zero. The reason is not scientific. It is financial. The United States was the largest donor to these agencies. It cut that funding. Agencies need to survive. So the language shifted.<br /> <br /> ''This is how power exports its priorities. Not always with troops. Sometimes with a budget line.''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tracking science policy across the Trump administration.png]]<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Tracking_science_policy_across_the_Trump_administration.png<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''June 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Lee Zeldin, with Trump's Mandate, Acts to Slash the EPA'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Lee Zeldin E&amp;E News.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EPA Cuts Office of Research and Development.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''How the Trump Administration Ended Independent Science at the E.P.A.'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''The agency’s prestigious research office spent decades doing scientific work insulated from political pressure. Now it’s being dismantled.'''<br /> <br /> <br /> For more than a half-century, a prestigious scientific arm of the federal government did groundbreaking research aimed at saving American lives. It studied fertility, asthma, wildfires, drinking water, climate change and myriad other health threats.<br /> <br /> In just one year, it has been almost completely dismantled.<br /> <br /> One scientist, a doctor and expert in lung health, has recently been reassigned to a finance office. Another, an epidemiologist, has been told she has a new job issuing permits to handle hazardous waste. A toxicologist researching so-called forever chemicals on the East Coast has been asked to move to Dallas and hasn’t been told whether the research project will continue.<br /> <br /> They are among more than 1,500 biologists, chemists and other experts at the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development who have been laid off, reassigned or pressured to retire. Today, only 124 researchers remain, and this month they must decide whether to remain employed they will abandon their work and move to different parts of the agency, or the country.<br /> <br /> Those who stay will no longer serve in an independent unit designed to be free from political interference. Instead, they will be overseen by Trump appointees or in a new unit directly under the administrator, Lee Zeldin. An internal memo in one office reviewed by The New York Times says its future research must “align with agency and administration priorities.”<br /> <br /> Critics said the moves are part of the administration’s deregulatory fervor: Without independent science, they said, there can be few new limits on pollution or toxic chemicals.<br /> <br /> <br /> Read More: (Free to share article) -- https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/27/climate/epa-science-trump-cuts.html?unlocked_article_code=1.t1A.TNeb.TVaLrnuMBM_-&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Government-wide... What's Next on the Cutting Block?'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Russell Vought, OMB Director, with Trump's Direction, Acts to Politicize Department Hiring and Decision-making'''<br /> <br /> : '''U.S. Cuts of Personnel, Budgets and Programs Deepen'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Trump and OMB Director Vought.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tracking science policy across the Trump administration.png]]<br /> <br /> Read more about OMB Director Russell Vought, Project 2025, and Associates<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Trump_and_OMB_Director_Vought.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Tracking_science_policy_across_the_Trump_administration.png<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Huge U.S. Cuts in Science, Science, Elecro-tech and Renewable Energy '''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''Billions of Spending on Another Mideast War Deliver Deep Setbacks to U.S. International Relations and Cooperation''' <br /> <br /> :: '''China Moves Forward with Economic Development across the World'''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:China electrostate benefits from efx of Mideast war.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:US Reliability Falls in Europe.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::'''U.S. Pushes Fossil Fuels, Trump Policy Priorities'''<br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Trump-Vought Science Cuts and Costs.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Trump-Vought Science Cuts and Costs''' <br /> <br /> : Grants and Programs from Health to Environment, Education to Energy <br /> <br /> :: Budgets for Basic and Applied Research &amp; Development Are Deeply Set Back<br /> <br /> ::: Russell Vought of the Office of Management and Budget Attempts to Implement [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?search=project+2025&amp;title=Special%3ASearch&amp;profile=advanced&amp;fulltext=1&amp;ns0=1&amp;ns6=1&amp;ns14=1 '''Project 2025'''] <br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2026/04/19/science-research-funding-cuts-trump/<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/04/business/dealbook/trump-brain-drain-academia.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-026-00088-9/index.html<br /> <br /> * https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5835619-future-nsf-research-limbo/<br /> <br /> * https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/harms-federal-funding-freeze-science<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''May 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;&quot;We are children of the Earth&quot; -- [https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/richard-feynman Richard Feynman], Physicist/Educator&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''A Feynman Project'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> We are revisiting the work, the words, the teaching and the learned life lessons of a professor, a genius, an environmentalist (in the deep meaning of ecology), a true character and 'planet citizen' of our era. Say quantum, picture diagrams scribbled on a green chalkboard, listen to a Nobel prize winner perform before a Caltech class being led into wonderment and waves of insight -- say '''Richard Feynman'''.<br /> <br /> We had a chance to visit elements of his [https://collections.archives.caltech.edu/repositories/2/resources/168 '''personal collection''']. His work needs to be scanned and digitized, and made available online as a Special Collection.<br /> <br /> We're making this a project.<br /> <br /> It is time.<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''April 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Earthrise to Earthset.png]]<br /> <br /> :&lt;small&gt;&lt;small&gt;* https://greenpolicy360.net/images/1969_beginnings_of_the_modern_environmental_movement.pdf&lt;/small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> : '''[[The Modern Environmental Movement]]'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/amf-art002e009287/<br /> <br /> * https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/art002e009288/<br /> <br /> * https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/amf-art002e009289/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth from Artemis II.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> Reflecting on the Rise of a Modern Environmental Movement<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''Earthrise' to 'Earth Day' and Far Beyond....'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earthrise, the way Anders saw it.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earthrise '''&quot;Earthrise&quot;, Our Home Planet, December 24, 1968''']<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Earthrise<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> '''Earthrise &gt; Earth Day, April 22, 1970''' ... [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Day &lt;big&gt;''' 'Earth Day' '''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[Planet Earth Perspective]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Planet_Earth_Perspective<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth &lt;big&gt;&lt;font color=green&gt;'''On Earth'''&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/big&gt;] | [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_and_Space,_Politics &lt;big&gt;&lt;font color=green&gt;'''Earth, Science &amp; Politics'''&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> * http://www.planetcitizen.org <br /> <br /> * http://www.planetcitizens.org <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Earth_in_Human_Hands.jpg &lt;big&gt;'''Earth Is in Y/our Hands'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> : '''[[Planet Citizen Vision of Living Earth]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Living Earth.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''March 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> As Artemis II prepares to send humans into deep space for the first time in decades, we recall NASA's original Mission Statement that guided the Apollo missions and produced the first-ever full-color images of the home planet ...<br /> <br /> NASA planned for the Moon and delivered visionary and inspiring images of Earth, the famed 'Earthrise' photo in 1968 followed in 1972 by the iconic 'Blue Marble'.<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Earthrise<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Blue_Marble_Collection<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earthrise - December 24, 1968.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue Marble photo - Apollo 17.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:NASA's continuing vision and mission - as of 2005.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''February 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Physics of Climate Change as Measured &amp; Monitored'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Facts of Atmospheric, Climate, Earth Science, Guides for Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Climate data 2.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''January 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''United States Congress Disagrees with Trump/Vought-OMB Proposed Science Cuts'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : As Science, Energy, Education, NASA/NOAA/EPA... Cuts continue and expand, Congress adds language to legislation requiring the administration to spend appropriated funding<br /> <br /> * https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/14/climate/noaa-nasa-funding-congress-trump-climate<br /> <br /> * https://www.planetary.org/articles/advocacy-success-fy2026-nasa-budget<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The United States Continues to Step Away'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> The Trump administration says it’s going to depart 66 international organizations, nearly half them affiliated with the United Nations<br /> <br /> Here are the latest round of global organizations the Trump administration is leaving -- <br /> <br /> * https://apnews.com/article/trump-administration-global-organizations-un-daaa4c9f459d7a492536a1a4e3b7697c?utm_source=Email&amp;utm_medium=share<br /> <br /> * https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/un-chief-says-the-u-s-has-legal-obligation-to-fund-agencies-after-trumps-withdrawal-order<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Trump withdraws US from key climate treaty and dozens of other groups'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp80ln97py5o<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> As 2025 recedes... a New Years rolls in with a horizon of threats <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''December 2025'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Nominated Administrator of US NASA Promises Senate Committee that He Will Not Eviscerate NASA Science Programs&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : The Trump administration 2026 NASA budget calling for cuts of ~50% is rejected<br /> <br /> <br /> Jared Isaacman: “Anything suggesting that I am anti-science or want to outsource that responsibility is simply untrue.”<br /> <br /> * https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/03/science/nasa-jared-isaacman-confirmation-hearing<br /> <br /> <br /> -- The White House seeks to eliminate most federal spending on climate and ecological research and proposes cutting NASA’s science budget by more than half.<br /> <br /> * https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/04/trump-white-house-budget-proposal-eviscerates-science-funding-at-nasa/<br /> <br /> <br /> At GreenPolicy360, read more on [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:NASA '''NASA'''], its mission statement, its programs to study Planet Earth and pioneer Atmospheric Science, Earth Science, Earth System Science...<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science<br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Thin_Blue_Layer<br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_Earth_Perspective<br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_Politics_with_GreenPolicy360<br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Science_from_Space<br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/NASA_EarthSciences,_Challenges_Public_to_Join_In<br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Observation_System_Data_and_Information_System_-_NASA_EOS<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''AI Data Centers Produce Environmental Costs'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Cornell researchers have used advanced data analytics – and some AI too – to create a state-by-state look at that environmental impact. The team found that, by 2030, the current rate of AI growth would annually put 24 to 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the emissions equivalent of adding 5 to 10 million cars to U.S. roadways. It would also drain 731 to 1,125 million cubic meters of water per year – equal to the annual household water usage of 6 to 10 million Americans. The cumulative effect would put the AI industry’s net-zero emissions targets out of reach...<br /> <br /> On the upside, the study also outlines an actionable roadmap that would use smart siting, faster grid decarbonization and operational efficiency to cut these impacts by approximately 73% (carbon dioxide) and 86% (water) compared with worst-case scenarios.<br /> <br /> * https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/11/roadmap-shows-environmental-impact-ai-data-center-boom<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''A Race to Deliver Next Generation Technology for Energy Efficiencies, Global Competitiveness &amp; Productivity'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : China in front, the US falls behind as Geopolitical shifts favor forward-looking engineering<br /> <br /> Review the data, the trends, the electric technologies... E-transportation, E-scooters, E-bikes, E-robots, E-across the world ... China is far out in front on the electrification and as the US retreats from EVs and solar and renewable energy tech under Trump's oil &amp; gas policies and deletarious cuts to renewable, competitively advantageous, security-enhancing technologies, China takes competitive advantage across their nation and across the world... <br /> <br /> [[File:Electric Vehicle Demand - China, EU, US 2024-2030.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''November 2025'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Science Guides.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> November 10, 2025<br /> <br /> Via The Guardian<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/environment/live/2025/nov/10/cop30-climate-talks-brazil-belem-latest-news-updates<br /> <br /> <br /> ''(T)hese are climate talks with a difference. Brazil is refusing to countenance the standard form of tortuous negotiations that have characterised the last 30 years of nearly annual “conferences of the parties” (Cops) under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the parent treaty to the Paris climate agreement, that was signed in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro.''<br /> <br /> ''Those were characterised by long and bitter sessions, often stretching late into the night, where negotiators re-stated entrenched positions for days on end before finally – sometimes – reaching a compromise conclusion that some present would frequently seek to back track on immediately afterwards.''<br /> <br /> ''Instead, Brazil insists, this will be “the Cop of implementation”. That means the real world impact of measures to combat the climate crisis today will take precedence over longwinged discussions of future promises.''<br /> <br /> ''“Negotiations need consensus,” said Andre Correa do Lago, president of Cop30. “But implementation is countries choosing what they want to do and executing what they have said they are going to do.” ...''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The main outcomes of this Cop, instead of being a list of pledges as has become usual, are more likely to be a collection of “roadmaps” covering the key issues: a roadmap on finance, which has already been published; a roadmap on how to transition away from fossil fuels; a roadmap on how to scale up low-carbon energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in line with the target of limiting global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. ...''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The problem Cop exists to solve could scarcely be more urgent: scientists are warning that, as temperatures rise faster than at any point in at least 24,000 years, the world stands on the brink of a series of “tipping points” that could pitch us into greatly accelerated heating and unstoppable climate catastrophe.''<br /> <br /> ''But one question will dominate overall: the question of whether the collective will to solve this problem exists. Can the world come together, despite geopolitical headwinds and open conflict, despite the forces of division fanned by populism, despite the global tide of climate disinformation, despite influential voices claiming the climate somehow matters less than it did before the populists took over – and show the unity, mutual respect and spirit of cooperation that are desperately needed, if we are to face this existential threat?''<br /> <br /> <br /> More @GreenPolicy360<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Change_Summit_Paris<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:INDC<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_News<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''National Climate / Adaptation Plans'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/National_Climate_Plans '''National Climate Plans (Permalink)''']<br /> ::[https://greenpolicy360.net '''Via GreenPolicy360 - eOS''']<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/National_Climate_Plans<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Science, Research &amp; the Net'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: It's not common knowledge that the Internet came into existence due to 'government funding' and 'liberal universities', not due to 'big business', but if we look back at what was called [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET ''' 'Arpanet' '''] there we see the fundamental foundation of today's Internet. 'The Net' was envisioned and made possible by US science spending and research grants to universities with names like (wait for it) -- the University of California at Berkeley. <br /> <br /> The best-in-the-world California College/University system of the 1950s/60s was at the center of, to be matter-of-fact, the beginnings of today's American-led computer/digital technology revolution, of 'Silicon Valley' and US leadership. <br /> <br /> Today, we are reminding of this top- and bottom-line reality, even as the current US political direction shifts away from support for higher education.<br /> <br /> Let's consider the cuts proposed by the Trump administration to college/university basic science and research projects and programs. The damage will be immediate and accumulative. <br /> <br /> We have said it before here at GreenPolicy360 and we'll say it again -- the future is in our hands.<br /> <br /> Act wisely, act with facts, support science.<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Best Practices check2.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''US Government Research Grants Must Be Protected'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via Nature Journal<br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03474-x<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Under President Donald Trump, the US government is gutting scientific research. The National Institutes of Health has cut almost US$2 billion of grants that were already approved, and the National Science Foundation has terminated more than 1,400 grants. And the president has even bigger plans to eviscerate science. His proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 would cut non-defence-related research and development by 36%.''<br /> <br /> ''“They have cancelled wholesale a wide variety of research efforts in midstream,” says John Holdren at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was the science adviser to former president Barack Obama during both his terms. “They intend to now solidify it with cuts in the budgets.”''<br /> <br /> ''The cancelled and threatened research is a mixture of ‘applied’ work that has stated applications, which can be commercial in nature, and ‘basic’ or ‘blue skies’ research, intended to develop new knowledge.''<br /> <br /> ''Basic research is easily mocked because it can seem impractical, but, in fact, it is a major driver of economic growth. “The return on investment in basic research — the return to society — is very high, typically multiple dollars back per dollar invested,” says Holdren.''<br /> <br /> ''The US funding cuts will hit basic research particularly hard because the government has historically been the prime supporter of fundamental research. The private sector will never invest enough in such research, says Holdren. “The timescale for returns is too long and the ability of the funder to capture those returns too uncertain,” he says. “That’s the reason that the funding of fundamental research is, at its base, a responsibility of government.”''<br /> <br /> ''Although it’s impossible to estimate how the reductions in federal support might limit future discoveries, scientists point to a long list of findings that emerged out of fundamental research and went on to change the world....''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''October 2025'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> October 1, 2025<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Trump Banned Words List Continues to Expand'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''The Energy Department has added “climate change,” “green” and “decarbonization” to its growing “list of words to avoid” at its Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, according to an email issued Friday and obtained by POLITICO.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/28/energy-department-climate-change-emissions-banned-words-00583649?utm_source=semafor<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Previous word 'bannings'...<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:War on Words, an Executive Order in Effect, US 2025.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:War_on_Words,_an_Executive_Order_in_Effect,_US_2025.jpeg<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''September 2025'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:This Climate Change.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''August 2025'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''What Future Does Science Have in the Trump Administration'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Another look at the chopping of science -- and rejection of the accomplishments of basic and applied science that brought the US unequalled success with educational excellence and economic achievements.<br /> <br /> As GreenPolicy360 has documented in our stories of the beginnings of US NASA Earth Science, NOAA, USGS, the National Weather Service, GPS (with its attendant spin offs/tech transfers), the innumerable breakthroughs in science (ask yourself why and where what became today's Internet was first envisioned). The legislation, funding, programs and management that a first generation in the US acted to create were great visions being turned into productive reality. When GreenPolicy360 recalls [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr '''Rep. George E. Brown'''] telling our project founder that a new Office of Science &amp; Technology was needed to be set up to help guide the President's Office with all science-related policy, George Brown went to work on drafting of the legislation to get the Office established. For half a century presidents, until the current president, have valued and consulted science. The current state of affairs, of rejection of science and rejection of scientific expertise and knowledge across the administration, is more than costly. The lost opportunities, 'opportunity costs', are rising and multiplying. The old word for such mistaken choices is 'hubris', pride. Let us hope that there will come a correction of course, a reconnection with the full value of science, before there's a fall deeper and more lasting than what the nation -- and world -- can readily recover. It is time to consider the full price that comes with the rejection of science.<br /> <br /> <br /> (NYT article excerpt on the subject of science and current Trump administration, August 31, 2025)<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/31/science/trump-science-autocrats.html<br /> <br /> <br /> ''On Feb. 19, weeks after taking office, Mr. Trump signed an executive order that called for the downsizing and elimination of the advisory panels. The order affected panels that oversaw vaccines, astrophysics, fisheries, mathematics, space, the geosciences, the environment and artificial intelligence.''<br /> <br /> ''Next, in March, amid budget cuts and growing protests by scientists, Mr. Trump unveiled an overall science policy that echoed the autocrats in emphasizing technological spinoffs, such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing. In a public letter, the president called for securing the nation’s status “as the unrivaled world leader in critical and emerging technologies.”''<br /> <br /> ''Then in May, the administration made public its proposed cuts to next year’s federal science budget. Independent experts found that the category of basic research would fall to $30 billion from $45 billion, a drop of roughly 34 percent.''<br /> <br /> ''On the chopping block were studies focused on nursing, clean energy, climate change, air and water quality, chemical safety, minority health disparities, green aviation, the global carbon cycle, the atmosphere of Mars, the planet Jupiter, and the boundary in outer space where the solar system meets the cosmos, among other subjects.''<br /> <br /> ''“The cuts are justified,” said Terence Kealey, a scholar at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. Decades of lavish funding have dulled America’s exploratory edge, he argued.''<br /> <br /> ''Finally, later in May, Mr. Trump laid out his reform agenda. It called for a “gold standard” that would revitalize science research. But critics, including Nobel laureates, saw it as paving the way for state-controlled science.<br /> <br /> ''Officially, the job of defending Mr. Trump’s agenda falls to his science adviser, Michael Kratsios. He has no degrees in science or engineering but held key technology and military posts during Mr. Trump’s first term and helped speed the rise of artificial intelligence.''<br /> <br /> ''Over weeks, multiple requests for an interview with Mr. Kratsios were made to officials in the White House '''Office of Science and Technology Policy'''. Possible dates were discussed, but Mr. Kratsios was never made available.''<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Then Along Comes Donald Trump'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Historian Richardson Explains<br /> <br /> <br /> August 30, 2025<br /> <br /> HEATHER COX RICHARDSON<br /> <br /> * https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/august-30-2025<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Just days before Labor Day, a holiday designed to celebrate the importance and power of American workers in the United States, the Transportation Department cancelled $679 million in funding for offshore wind projects, and the Department of Energy announced it is withdrawing a $716 million loan guarantee to complete infrastructure for an offshore wind project in New Jersey.''<br /> <br /> ''These cancellations reflect President Donald J. Trump’s apparent determination to kill off wind and solar power initiatives and to force the United States to depend on fossil fuels. He refers to climate change as a “hoax,” says that windmills cause cancer, and falsely claims that renewable energy is more expensive than other ways to generate power. Former president Joe Biden made investing in clean energy a central pillar of his administration; Trump often seems to construct policies mostly to erase the legacies of his predecessors.''<br /> <br /> ''Reversing the shift toward renewable energy not only attacks attempts to address the crisis of climate change and boosts the fossil fuel industry on which some of Trump’s apparent allies depend, but also undermines a society based on the independence of American workers. In 2023, about 3.5 million Americans worked in jobs related to the renewable energy sector, and jobs in that sector grew at more than twice the rate of those in other sectors in what was a strong U.S. labor market. The production of coal, which Trump often points to as an ideal for American jobs, peaked in 2008. Between then and 2021, employment in coal mining fell by almost 60% in the East and almost 40% in the West, leaving a total of about 40,000 employees.''<br /> <br /> ''Another cut last week sums up the repercussions of the administration’s attack on renewable energy.''<br /> <br /> ''On August 22 the Interior Department suddenly and without explanation stopped construction of a wind farm off the coast of Connecticut and Rhode Island that was 80% complete and was set to be finished early next year.''<br /> <br /> ''As Matthew Daly of the Associated Press noted yesterday, Revolution Wind was the region’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm. It was designed to power more than 350,000 homes, provide jobs in Connecticut and Rhode Island, and enable Rhode Island to meet its goal of 100% renewable energy by 2033.''<br /> <br /> ''The Board of Directors of the Chamber of Commerce of Eastern Connecticut expressed their dismay at the decision, noting that Revolution Wind employed more than 1,000 local union workers and is part of a $20 billion investment in “American energy generation, port infrastructure, supply chain, and domestic shipbuilding and manufacturing across over 40 states” by Ørsted, a Danish multinational company.''<br /> <br /> ''“Stopping this fully permitted, important project without a clear stated reason not only seriously undermines the state’s efforts to work towards a carbon neutral energy supply but equally important it sends a message to investors from all over the world that they may want to rethink investing in America. The message resulting from the President’s action is a lack of trust, uncertainty, and lack of predictability,” they wrote.''<br /> <br /> ''Connecticut governor Ned Lamont and Rhode Island governor Dan McKee, both Democrats, are working together to save the project. In a statement, Lamont said: “We are working closely with Rhode Island to save this project because it represents exactly the kind of investment that reduces energy costs, strengthens regional production, and builds a more secure energy future—the very goals President Trump claims to support but undermines with this decision.”''<br /> <br /> ''“It’s an attack on our jobs,” McKee said. “It’s an attack on our energy. It’s an attack on our families and their ability to pay the bills.”'''<br /> <br /> ''The Trump administration launched this attack on renewable energy at a time when electricity prices are bouncing upward. According to Ari Natter and Naureen S. Malik of Bloomberg, electricity prices jumped about 10% between January and May and are projected to rise another 5.8% next year. Trump has tried to blame those rising costs on renewable energy, but in the country’s largest grid, which stretches from Virginia to Illinois, nearly all the electricity comes from natural gas, coal, and nuclear reactors.''<br /> <br /> ''More to the point is that the region also has the world’s highest concentration of AI data centers, driving power demand—and costs—upward. At the same time, according to Natter and Malik, the infrastructure for transmission is too outdated to handle the amounts of electricity the data centers will need.''<br /> <br /> ''Trump’s cuts are adding stress to this already overburdened system. Over the next decade, they are projected to reduce additions to the electric grid by half compared to projections from before his cuts. In July, Ella Nilsen of CNN reported that cuts to renewable power generation, as well as to the tax credits that encouraged the development of more renewable power projects, are exacerbating the electrical shortage and driving prices up.''<br /> <br /> ''The Trump administration claims that relying on fossil fuels will jump-start the economy, but higher costs for electricity are already fueling inflation, and in the longer term, more expensive power will slow economic growth. In contrast, China has leaped ahead to dominate the global clean energy industry.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> Speaking of Wind Energy<br /> <br /> Via [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360 '''GreenPolicy360''']<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Venturing On with Best Green Ideas'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Block_Island_Wind_Farm<br /> <br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;''''''Going Green''''''&lt;/big&gt; [[File:Best Practices check sm.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;font color=green&gt;○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○&lt;/font&gt; &lt;font color=blue&gt;○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○&lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''First Offshore Wind Farm in the US'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;'''Beginning of an Energy Revolution'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> * '''https://www.gerenewableenergy.com/'''<br /> <br /> * '''http://dwwind.com/project/block-island-wind-farm/'''<br /> <br /> * '''https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_Island_Wind_Farm'''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''December 2016:'''<br /> <br /> [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/science/wind-power-block-island.html '''America’s First Offshore Wind Farm Spins to Life''']<br /> <br /> [http://www.blockislandtimes.com/site-bit/bi-wind-farm '''Local News: Wind Farm to power Block Island by April 2017''']<br /> <br /> <br /> Photos courtesy of Dr. Tony Affigne<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Block-island-wind-farm 1.jpg]]<br /> <br /> [[File:Block-island-wind-farm 2.jpg]]<br /> <br /> [[File:Block-island-wind-farm 4.jpg]]<br /> <br /> [[File:Block-island-wind-farm 4-a.jpg]]<br /> <br /> [[File:Block-island-wind-farm 5.jpg]]<br /> <br /> [[File:Block-island-wind-farm 6.jpg]]<br /> <br /> [[File:Block-island-wind-farm 7.jpg]]<br /> <br /> [[File:Block-island-wind-farm 8.jpg]]<br /> <br /> [[File:Block-island-wind-farm 9.jpg]]<br /> <br /> [[File:Block-island-wind-farm 10.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''US Solar Energy Hit by Trump Administration'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:US Solar Energy Hit by Trump Administration.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.semafor.com/article/08/05/2025/trumps-tax-bill-triggered-a-solar-gold-rush&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Coming Cuts to Solar Credits Bring Rush to Buy Solar Panels and Power'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> US companies are rushing to buy solar panels ahead of the Trump administration’s early phaseout of tax credits in a frenzy that could stretch into mid-2026, the head of a top solar hardware marketplace told Semafor. Ultimately, the phaseout could end up helping the same Chinese manufacturers the White House wants to combat...<br /> <br /> Cutting off tax credits and access to foreign suppliers will drive up solar costs and cut into adoption. A Wood Mackenzie analysis published today forecast that US residential solar adoption by 2030 will be 46% lower now than it would have been prior to (the Trump cuts).<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Trump and his Interior Department are &quot;no friend to offshore wind&quot;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> As he continues to push his feelings about 'windmills' being threats, with a litany of his personal beliefs that are far from fact, the US president continues a public tirade against renewable energy.<br /> <br /> Independent media organizations, with [https://www.canarymedia.com/ '''Canary'''] leading on the wind energy beat, continue tracking the sordid tale of a man who has made wind energy his enemy.<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/offshore-wind/trump-interior-revokes-leasing-areas&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> Trump 2026 Budget Proposes Deep Cuts to Science and Earth Science Programs at NASA/NOAA/NWS and a Host of Missions .....<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Tracking_science_policy_across_the_Trump_administration.png&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''' 'Measure to Manage' ''' &lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:You can manage only what you can measure Dr David Crisp, OCO-2, June 2014 m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;small&gt;* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:You_can_manage_only_what_you_can_measure_Dr_David_Crisp,_OCO-2,_June_2014_m.jpg&lt;/small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/about/our-mission&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> NOAA's National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS), provides secure and timely access to global environmental data and information from satellites and other sources to promote and protect the nation's security, environment, economy, and quality of life.<br /> <br /> The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) mission is to understand and predict changes in climate, weather, oceans, and coasts, to share that knowledge and information with others, and to conserve and manage coastal and marine ecosystems and resources as the Nation’s authoritative environmental intelligence agency.<br /> <br /> <br /> Office of Satellite and Product Operations<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/our-satellites/related-information/history-of-noaa-satellites&lt;/small&gt;<br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/products/ocean/sst.html&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> History of NOAA Satellites<br /> <br /> ''The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has a rich history of successfully operating geostationary operational satellites (GOES) and polar-orbiting environmental satellites (POES).''<br /> <br /> For more than 50 years, the organization’s satellite program has been indispensable for life-saving weather and climate forecasts for the United States and our partners around the world. However, these satellites have also evolved to gather environmental data used for a wide array of applications pertaining to the oceans, coastal regions, agriculture, the atmosphere, fires and volcanic ash, as well as the space environment.<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Special:Search&amp;profile=images&amp;search=noaa%20nasa%20earth%20satellites&amp;fulltext=1&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> More 'measure to manage' data sets ...<br /> <br /> NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory<br /> <br /> * https://psl.noaa.gov/data/othersources/<br /> <br /> <br /> NOAA Coastwatch<br /> <br /> * https://oceanwatch.noaa.gov/cwn/product-families/sea-surface-temperature.html<br /> <br /> <br /> Sea Surface Temperature (SST) ... 1981/09 to 2025/08<br /> <br /> * https://www.psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.noaa.oisst.v2.highres.html<br /> <br /> <br /> National Weather Service, Climate Prediction Center<br /> * https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/MJO/enso.shtml <br /> <br /> <br /> Climate.gov<br /> <br /> * https://www.climate.gov/maps-data/data-snapshots/data-source/sst-sea-surface-temperature<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''July 2025'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Climate 'Carbon Budget' Is Not Academic, It's Real Life Today'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''At our current rate of emissions, Earth has less than three years before it exhausts the remaining [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_budget '''carbon budget'''] that offers even a coin-flip chance of staying below (a global temperature increase of) 1.5° C. Not decades — three years. This isn’t some activist’s blog. This is the verdict of the latest [https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/17/2641/2025/ '''Indicators of Global Climate Change (IGCC) report'''] — a collaborative autopsy by over 60 of the world’s top climate scientists, including former IPCC authors, filling the gap between the IPCC’s sixth assessment (AR6) in 2021 and the seventh assessment, expected in 2028. It confirms what frontline communities already know in their bones: we’re not just brushing up against the 1.5°C threshold — we are barreling toward it.'' - Ricky Lanusse<br /> <br /> * https://globalcarbonbudget.org/<br /> * https://globalcarbonbudget.org/about/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:The biggest science cut in NASA history.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> Atmospheric science, Climate Science, Earth Science eviscerated in Trump administration's budget proposal, as he rails about a &quot;Green scam&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:The_biggest_science_cut_in_NASA_history.jpg<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Tracking_science_policy_across_the_Trump_administration.png<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Meanwhile ... as a backward looking US president pushes a retro-line ... a real national security threat spikes up and up'''<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/New_Definitions_of_National_Security '''We need 'New Definitions of National (Local &amp; Global ) Security''']<br /> <br /> [[File:CO2 is adding up, and up.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> Our World in Data: ''Since 1751 the world has emitted over 1.5 trillion tonnes of CO2.'' <br /> <br /> ''To reach our climate goal of limiting average temperature rise to 2°C, the world needs to urgently reduce emissions.'' <br /> <br /> * https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''July 5, 2025'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Trumps signs the Republican Party 'big' H.R. 1 legislative package'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Inside Climate News begins to describe the misnomer of a bill's deep and lasting destructive consequences:<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Trump’s legislation will hurt clean energy, boost fossil fuels and end investment in environmental justice. Climate advocates vow to continue the fight''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The $4 trillion One Big Beautiful Bill Act is now ready to reach across the U.S. economy, slicing into every aspect of the national effort to address climate change and environmental injustice...''<br /> <br /> ''The 887-page legislation largely erases the landmark investment in cleaner energy, jobs and communities that a Democratic-led Congress made only three years ago in the Inflation Reduction Act.'' <br /> <br /> ''It stomps out incentives for purchasing electric vehicles and efficient appliances. It phases out tax credits for wind and solar energy. It opens up federal land and water for oil and gas drilling and increases its profitability, while creating new federal support for coal. It ends the historic investment in poor and minority communities that bear a disproportionate pollution burden—money that the Trump administration was already refusing to spend. It wipes out any spending on greening the federal government.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''More'''<br /> <br /> ''New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote Friday (July 4) about how H.R. 1 will effectively &quot;kneecap America’s renewable energy industry&quot; and give China a monopoly on the renewable energy industry for decades. One of the major components of the law is the stripping of billions of dollars in subsidies and tax credits for solar, battery and wind energy. This comes at the same time China is rapidly restructuring its energy grid to include larger portions of electricity from renewable sources. Friedman wrote that Chinese President Xi Jinping likely views July 4 as &quot;American Electricity Dependence Day.&quot;''<br /> <br /> Friedman goes on to explain: <br /> <br /> ''&quot;The Chinese simply can’t believe their luck: that at the dawn of the electricity-guzzling era of artificial intelligence, the U.S. president and his party have decided to engage in one of the greatest acts of strategic self-harm imaginable.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;(The) giant bill, among other craziness, deliberately undermines America’s ability to generate electricity through renewables,&quot; he continued. &quot;And why? Because they view those as 'liberal' energy sources, even though today they are the quickest and cheapest ways to boost our electricity grid to meet the explosion of demand from AI data centers.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''Friedman also cited a study from the research firm Energy Innovation, which found that Trump's law would &quot;cause wholesale electric power prices to increase roughly 50% by 2035,&quot; while &quot;cumulative annual consumer energy costs will increase more than $16 billion by 2030.&quot; The law would also reportedly eliminate 830,000 estimated renewable energy jobs by the end of the decade.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/03/opinion/trump-bill-clean-energy-china.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Tk8.Y_zH.nNl8ZeQo4Oj9&amp;smid=tw-share<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''June'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Global Tipping Points - Conference 2025.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Global Tipping Points - About.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Global Tipping Points.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Global Tipping Points - Program.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:The Trump EPA Becomes a Deep Threat to Environmental Protection.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> A Message from GreenPolicy360: Amid national, regional, religious and worldwide conflict, war, disruption and rising extreme politics, do not forget the physics of Earth's living, changing systems. Life is changing and the trendlines that science has brought into the light, the local and global dynamics of our planet, are 'in our hands'.<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Record-shattering Extreme Heat'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Carbon Brief Talks of the Climate Change Physics in Your Neighborhood<br /> <br /> * https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-why-is-climate-change-causing-record-shattering-extreme-heat/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:The Sunset Cafe, Sundown Bell.jpg|<br /> link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Too_Hot]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Too_Hot &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;font color=orange&gt;'''🥵 When it gets too hot'''&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> :: &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''&lt;font color=orange&gt;Even your news is hot ....'''&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''How Hot? Check the Data from 1940 on... Visit the Copernicus project'''<br /> <br /> * https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/datasets/reanalysis-era5-single-levels-monthly-means?tab=download<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Globally-averaged temps thru 2015 via NASA Goddard.gif]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Planet Earth temperature taking - a recent history.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ::[[File:Toles - Dali - Climate.jpg]]<br /> <br /> ::&lt;small&gt;* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weather_records&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_News &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;font color=orange&gt;'''Climate Change News'''&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''May'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Two Scientific Groups Say They’ll Keep Working on U.S. Climate Assessment'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''The organizations said they planned to publish the assessment even after the Trump administration’s decision to dismiss all authors on the project''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/02/climate/national-climate-assessment-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.EE8.dNo4.N6NQTsfPCZMC&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society said they would publish the work, known as the National Climate Assessment, as originally planned.''<br /> <br /> ''“It’s incumbent on us to ensure our communities, our neighbors, our children are all protected and prepared for the mounting risks of climate change,” Brandon Jones, the president of the union and a program director with the National Science Foundation, said in the statement. “This collaboration provides a critical pathway for a wide range of researchers to come together and provide the science needed to support the global enterprise pursuing solutions to climate change.”''<br /> <br /> ''The National Climate Assessment is a comprehensive review of the latest climate science that gauges how climate change is affecting the country and what can be done to adapt and mitigate its effects. There have been five published since 2000. The sixth edition was scheduled to be published in early 2028.''<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''April'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Trump dismisses scientists writing the National Climate Assessment&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> ''Via E&amp;E News / April 29, 2025''<br /> <br /> * https://www.eenews.net/articles/trump-dismisses-scientists-writing-the-national-climate-assessment/<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The Trump administration on Monday dismissed all of the scientists working on the newest version of the National Climate Assessment, a sweeping report that outlines the growing dangers of rising temperatures for lawmakers, policy experts and the public.''<br /> <br /> ''The sixth installment of the congressionally mandated report, which was due to come out by 2028, has typically been put together by about 400 researchers, many of whom are top scientists at universities who volunteer their time. The assessment is used to craft environmental rules, legislation and infrastructure project planning. It seen by experts as the definitive body of research about how global warming is transforming the country.'' ...<br /> <br /> ''White House budget director Russ Vought... has urged the Trump administration to toss out all work on the assessment that began under former President Joe Biden. Vought wants to help pick a new group of researchers to issue a report that reflects the administration’s claims that climate change is not a serious threat. That report might focus on how climate change “benefits” the U.S., according to a plan he outlined in Project 2025, the conservative policy proposal produced by the Heritage Foundation.''<br /> <br /> ''Earlier this month, the administration defunded the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which supports the assessment. The program, which coordinated the work of 13 federal agencies, had existed for 35 years through Republican and Democratic presidencies, including Trump’s first term.''<br /> <br /> ''Trump officials were caught by surprise by the timing of the fourth National Climate Assessment as it was being prepared for release in 2018. Some wanted to withhold the report and fire the scientists who worked on it, but that plan was scuttled. Instead, the White House tried to downplay the report by releasing it the day after Thanksgiving, but that only increased the attention it received.''<br /> <br /> ''It’s unclear whom Vought would try to recruit for the next assessment, if there is one.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Read More:<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Global_Change_Research_Program<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_Change_Science_Program<br /> <br /> * https://web.archive.org/web/20090513054002/http://www.climatescience.gov/images/cccst-orgchart.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Earth Day / April 22nd. 2025'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth Day 2025.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Earth_Day_2025.jpeg<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;Eco-informational Resources &amp; Earth Day&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 recalls proposing/planning of the first Earth Day event... and on and on <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth Day Year-Round.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;small&gt;* https://www.ebsco.com/blogs/ebscopost/earth-day-activities-library-using-science-research-databases-for-learning-engagement&lt;/small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360: Thanks to EBSCO for its recommendation that Earth Day activities should be 'year-round'.'''<br /> <br /> '''We agree full-heartedly!'''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Day_Is_Every_Day &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Earth Day Is Every Day and... Every Day Is Earth Day'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Living Earth.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Earth Day Memories on the 50th Anniversary]] (1970-2020)''' &lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Day_Memories_on_the_50th_Anniversary<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Earth-Day.png<br /> <br /> :[[File: Earth-Day.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360's Siterunner... Earth Day organizing in 1970 and onward...'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Day<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth Day - Green Policy.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tracking science policy across the Trump administration.png]]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Tracking_science_policy_across_the_Trump_administration.png<br /> <br /> <br /> A Collapse (Again) of Scientific/Environmental/Health &amp; Education Endeavors under a Trump Presidency<br /> <br /> : The current U.S. administration has taken an array of actions with far-reaching consequences for Earth and space scientists.<br /> <br /> <br /> Organizations tracking moves to setback/undercut &amp; eliminate earth science, health science, environmental protection and national security:<br /> <br /> * https://eos.org/research-and-developments/tracking-science-policy-across-the-trump-administration<br /> <br /> <br /> Follow the week-to-week Trump rollbacks here:<br /> <br /> Trump 2.0 Science Policy Tracker<br /> <br /> * https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/22712702/<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> [[File:Trump's 2025 plan to cut NOAA and Earth Science.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Copernicus Sentinel over Europe.png]]<br /> <br /> The European Space Agency (ESA) continues on...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tipping Points.png]]<br /> <br /> Scientists in the US warn of dire consequences<br /> <br /> as the Trump administration cuts national security science...<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''March 2025'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''DOGE says feds could save $164,391 by cutting off this historic research site'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> (Save $164K with devastating effect on the collection of data over 6+ decades of atmospheric/climate science)<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> :[[File:C02 in atmosphere chart-3.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> Via USA Today<br /> <br /> * https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/03/19/doge-cuts-climate-research-noaa-hawaii/82517874007/<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency is considering terminating the lease of a tiny office that supports a huge climate science experiment - one that's been ongoing for 67 years.''<br /> <br /> ''Just eight people work in suite 102 at the Kilauea Financial Plaza in Hilo, on the big island of Hawaii.''<br /> <br /> ''Once a week or so, one of them takes a short helicopter ride to the northern slope of the Mauna Loa volcano – necessary because in 2022 an eruption buried more than a mile of the road in 30 feet of lava.''<br /> <br /> ''There, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) staffers tend to the intricate, delicate scientific instruments at the Mauna Loa Observatory that measure multiple important atmospheric conditions.''<br /> <br /> ''The best known – in fact world-famous – of these measurements is the site's almost 60 years tracking carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. These provided the first significant evidence that the earth's CO2 levels were steadily rising.''<br /> <br /> ''But that program could end if the support staff's office is shuttered.''<br /> <br /> ''Earlier this month the Hilo office appeared on a list of planned office closures as part of DOGE efforts to slash federal spending.''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> [[File:Mauna Loa-NOAA-Observatory.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Mauna_Loa-NOAA-Observatory.jpg<br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Vital_Signs<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> [[File:Mauna Loa-NOAA-Keeling Curve data at risk.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> [[File:Keeling Curve 2024.png]]<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Special:Search&amp;profile=images&amp;search=keeling%20curve&amp;fulltext=1<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''A Rising War on Access to Science, Science Facts &amp; Data'''<br /> <br /> Between February 7 and February 11, 2025, the landing page for the 2024 Climate Literacy Guide on Climate.gov became inaccessible. Around this time other webpages about this guide also were removed from Climate.gov. These now either display a “Page Not Found” or “Access Denied” banner. Pages removed include:<br /> <br /> The main page for the guide, titled “Essential Principles for Understanding and Addressing Climate Change,” which contained most of the guide’s content<br /> The “About the Climate Literacy Guide” page, which contained additional information about the artworks in the guide<br /> <br /> In addition to these removals, sometime between February 3 and March 7, the downloadable PDF version of this guide was also removed from the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) website. The URL to the guide’s PDF now directs to an error page with an “Access Denied” message.<br /> <br /> Links that led to this guide have been removed from other federal websites, including on the Climate Program Office’s “Climate Resources and Partners” webpage.<br /> <br /> * https://envirodatagov.org/noaa-removes-the-2024-climate-literacy-guide-from-its-website/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :::[[File:Global Warming Fact of the Day - March 22, 2025.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Author and Activist Bill McKibben on Climate Progress in the Age of Trump 2.0'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''The administration is “rejecting flat-out the science,” he says, “about the single most dangerous thing that’s ever happened.”'''<br /> <br /> <br /> By [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Kolbert Elizabeth Kolbert]<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Activist Bill McKibben says Americans upset by the Trump administration’s gutting of U.S. climate efforts need to move beyond despair. In an interview with e360, he talks about rethinking the role of protest, the global push on clean energy, and why he sees reason for hope.''<br /> <br /> ''In the first six weeks of the new Trump administration, it’s become clear that the president intends to undo not just Joe Biden’s environmental legacy, but an entire generation’s worth of action on climate change. The administration has announced it is withdrawing from the Paris Agreement. It has frozen Inflation Reduction Act grants, stopped issuing permits for offshore wind development, and declared an “energy emergency” to boost fossil fuel production. The White House appears to be preparing to go after the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 “endangerment finding,” which undergirds EPA regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, while cutting EPA spending by 65 percent.''<br /> <br /> ''How should environmentalists respond? Activist and author Bill McKibben has been a leading voice on climate change since 1989, when he published The End of Nature, the first book on the subject aimed at a general audience. McKibben spoke to e360 contributing writer Elizabeth Kolbert about the urgency of the moment, the role of protest, the future of clean energy, and where he sees glimmers of hope.''<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://e360.yale.edu/features/bill-mckibben-interview '''Read the Interview'''] between Elizabeth Kolbert and Bill McKibben<br /> <br /> * https://e360.yale.edu/features/bill-mckibben-interview<br /> <br /> * https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/03/author-activist-bill-mckibben-elizabeth-kolbert-interview-climate-progress-second-trump-administration/<br /> <br /> <br /> More from [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?search=elizabeth+kolbert&amp;title=Special%3ASearch&amp;profile=advanced&amp;fulltext=1&amp;ns0=1 Elizabeth Kolbert @ GreenPolicy 360]<br /> <br /> More from [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?search=Bill+McKibben&amp;title=Special%3ASearch&amp;profile=advanced&amp;fulltext=1&amp;ns0=1 Bill McKibben @ GreenPolicy360]<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎 <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:NASA Earth temp and sea level data, 2024.jpeg|link=https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/sea-levels-rose-more-than-expected-in-2024-according-to-a-nasa-analysis-180986256/]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''As Last Year's Scientific Data Is Gathered, Analyzed &amp; Reported'''<br /> <br /> : Trending ... Earth Science Is Being Cut in the US, Meanwhile the Facts ....<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Trump Administration Aims to Eliminate E.P.A.’s Scientific Research Arm'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''More than 1,000 chemists, biologists and other scientists could be laid off under a plan to dismantle the Office of Research and Development''<br /> <br /> ''The Environmental Protection Agency plans to eliminate its scientific research arm, firing as many as 1,155 chemists, biologists, toxicologists and other scientists...''<br /> <br /> ''Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the E.P.A., has said he wants to eliminate 65 percent of the agency’s budget.''<br /> <br /> ''Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, said that the Office of Research and Development was created by congressional statute and that dissolving it would be illegal.''<br /> <br /> ''Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, the top Democrat on the science committee, said that without the Office of Research and Development, the E.P.A. would not be able to meet its legal obligation to use the “best available science” when writing regulations and considering policy. She also said that the office was created by congressional statute and that dissolving it would be illegal.''<br /> <br /> ''“Every decision E.P.A. makes must be in furtherance of protecting human health and the environment, and that just can’t happen if you gut E.P.A. science,” Ms. Lofgren said in a statement. She said that the first Trump administration had weakened the agency’s scientific research in order to relax regulations against polluting industries. “Now this is their attempt to kill it for good,” she said.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/climate/trump-eliminates-epa-science.html<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Trump has severely damaged the government’s ability to fight climate change, upending American environmental policy with moves that could have lasting implications for the country, and the planet...'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/02/climate/trump-us-climate-policy-changes.html?unlocked_article_code=1.004.6VNm.cGo6BRhFfnHt&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> ''With a flurry of actions that have stretched the limits of presidential power, Mr. Trump has gutted federal climate efforts, rolled back regulations aimed at limiting pollution and given a major boost to the fossil fuel industry.''<br /> <br /> ''He is abandoning efforts to reduce global warming, even as the world has reached record levels of heat that scientists say is driven largely by the burning of fossil fuels. Every corner of the world is now experiencing the effects of these rising temperatures in the form of deadlier hurricanes, floods, wildfires and droughts, as well as species extinction.''<br /> <br /> ''To achieve such a wholesale overhaul of the country’s climate policies in such a short time, the Trump administration has reneged on federal grants, fired workers en masse and attacked longstanding environmental regulations.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ~ <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Trump 2.0: an assault on science anywhere is an assault on science everywhere'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Almost immediately after being sworn in as president on 20 January, Trump put his signature to piles of executive orders cancelling or freezing tens of billions of dollars in funding for research and international assistance, and putting the seal on thousands of lay-offs. Orwellian restrictions have been placed on research, including bans on studies that mention particular words relating to sex and gender, race, disability and other protected characteristics.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00562-w<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''BILLIONAIRE CLIMATE CHAMPIONS HAVE GONE QUIET'''<br /> <br /> 'Events are moving so quickly' many are complaining as they take a 'wait and see what happens' approach to the new Trump administration<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/11/climate/trump-climate-change-billionaires.html<br /> <br /> <br /> (In the first Trump administration, 2017, billionaires spoke up soon into the first term)<br /> <br /> ''“Withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement is bad for the environment, bad for the economy, and it puts our children’s future at risk,” Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a post on Facebook.''<br /> <br /> ''Tim Cook, the Apple chief executive, wrote on Twitter in 2017 that the “decision to withdraw from the #ParisAgreeement was wrong for our planet.”''<br /> <br /> ''And Sundar Pichai, the Google chief executive, wrote on Twitterthat he was “disappointed” with the decision to withdraw.''<br /> <br /> ''Even Elon Musk opposed the move. “Climate change is real,” he wrote on Twitter in 2017. “Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.”''<br /> <br /> ''This time around, Zuckerberg, Cook, Pichai and Bezos attended Trump’s inauguration. Musk is working closely with Trump to slash the federal work force, and Trump has put the Environmental Protection Agency in his cross hairs.''<br /> <br /> ''In the days before Trump was sworn in for his second term, Gates dined with the then president-elect at Mar-a-Lago and declared himself “impressed” in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.''<br /> <br /> ''Also before the inauguration, Powell Jobs held a “Demo Day” event showcasing some of her charitable endeavors, but steered clear of politics.''<br /> <br /> ''It is unclear what, if anything, will cause executives and companies to speak out. During the first Trump administration, there were episodic flare-ups...''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> ----<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Context:&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> The 'Earth, Science &amp; Politics' content on this page, and the links &amp; shared resources presented here @GreenPolicy360, are intended to provide a vision of an ongoing journey -- a modern-day environmental movement.<br /> <br /> We start with a personal point of view, that of a young student on the road to learning what the now famed &quot;Earthrise&quot; image he saw on the cover of Life Magazine in January 1969 was revealing to all of us. We are planet citizens traveling on planet Earth.<br /> <br /> '''[[Planet Citizens]]'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_Citizens<br /> <br /> <br /> Some would later call this time in the 1960s and the 1970s a &quot;cognitive shift.&quot; We begin to see ourselves together [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Living_Earth.png '''On a Living Earth'''] as wayfarers with profound responsibilities.... <br /> <br /> '''[[Overview Effect]]'''<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Overview_Effect<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Generation Green]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt; / &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Going Green]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/1969_beginnings_of_the_modern_environmental_movement.pdf<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Going_Green<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://greenpolicy360.net/images/1969_beginnings_of_the_modern_environmental_movement.pdf &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Beginnings of the Modern Environmental Movement'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/images/1969_beginnings_of_the_modern_environmental_movement.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Planetary Awareness'''<br /> <br /> ::The way we saw ourselves and our planet changed....<br /> <br /> ::* https://www.planetaryawareness.org<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earthrise book cover (2008).jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Systems of Life, It's All Connected, It's All Related'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/It%27s_All_Related <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> We start at the beginning of new ways of seeing humanity's home planet. Those of us who were there, in December/January 1968-1969, witnessed the first-ever, full-color images taken from space of our Whole Earth. What we knew about our world, our place in space, changed in an instant. Some would later call this a &quot;cognitive shift&quot;. Our GreenPolicy360 founder described the feelings later in the 1970s to a writer, Jerzy Kosinski, in NY City. Jerzy was the &quot;Being There&quot; author and we talked about the Apollo astronauts who took the picture of Earth that went onto the cover of Life Magazine. I talked about a friend, Barbara Baker, a photo editor at Life and I told Jerzy more about NASA and a man named George. Like Chauncey, Jerzy's protagonist in his Being There novel, [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:George_Brown,_Sci_Com%27t.jpg '''Congressman George Brown'''] was a gardener in his own right. George was planting and nurturing in a new field that was being created, Earth observation science. The result? An &quot;Earth Observing&quot; leap forward, a Congress-led science, technology and space enterprise, a constellation of satellites and public-private-education institution partnerships was launched to provide essential data and knowledge.<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:You_can_manage_only_what_you_can_measure_Dr_David_Crisp,_OCO-2,_June_2014_m.jpg &lt;big&gt;'''NASA: Measure to Manage'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> The first generation of Earth Science was called &quot;Earth System Science&quot; by leaders like Representative George E. Brown who, as a Congressperson, went on to oversee three decades of initiatives, ventures, projects and missions we now know for their exploring, mapping, and delivering to humanity the first years of environmental science -- seeing, really seeing, Planet Earth. When George was proposing then tending to the [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Landsat_data_users_handbook '''Landsat program'''], one of the many ventures George Brown gardened, he was speaking of a blue-green home planet. <br /> <br /> Today we are, as we go onward nation-by-nation, community-by-community, responsible for tending to the Earth. A tip of our green hat to George Brown from East Los Angeles and to all of those, generation-to-generation, who choose to tend to our 'garden', our living planet Earth.<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :::&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''&quot;Earthrise&quot; into the 21st Century'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :::: '''Earth Science and a Whole Earth Generation'''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :::[[File:Apollo.jpg]]<br /> <br /> :::'Earthrise' (1968)<br /> <br /> <br /> :::[[File:Apollo 8, Life Jan10,1969.png]]<br /> <br /> :::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Apollo_8,_Life_Jan10,1969.png Apollo 8 photos in Life Magazine, January 1969]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :::::[[File:Earth-Day.png]]<br /> <br /> ::::::&lt;big&gt;'''[[Earth Day]]''' (1970)&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :::::: Being there, organizing<br /> <br /> ::::::* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Day<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::::[[File:Goodall on the power of the young.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :::[https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Goodall_on_the_power_of_the_young.png '''Youth-energy'''] joined with 'Teach-ins' and events across the nation<br /> <br /> ::: * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Day<br /> <br /> <br /> :::Being there, as a vision of the first Earth Day grew into reality<br /> <br /> ::: * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Day_Memories_on_the_50th_Anniversary<br /> <br /> ::::* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Earth_Day_50th_Golden_Anniversary.gif<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::::&lt;big&gt;'''We were looking to protect our 'Living Earth' '''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ::::[[File:Living Earth.png]]<br /> <br /> ::::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_Citizen_Vision_of_Living_Earth '''Our Living Earth'''] <br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Planet Citizen Vision of Living Earth]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : 🔘 [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Right_Now &lt;big&gt;Earth Right Now&lt;/big&gt;] / [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/EarthPOV &lt;big&gt;EarthPOV&lt;/big&gt;] / [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Observations &lt;big&gt;Earth Observations&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: The following Earth and Space, Politics page is presented in two parts: 1) first an introduction to Earth and Climate science, and how we have watched and participated in this 'first generation' work over the years. We give special attention to the original NASA Mission Statement as a key to understanding how science/imaging/data from Landsat and successive generation of satellite programs were pushed forward to [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:You_can_manage_only_what_you_can_measure_Dr_David_Crisp,_OCO-2,_June_2014_m.jpg ''''measure, monitor and manage''''] Earth's living and changing systems. Read the story of a unique Congressional leader, [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr '''visionary 'Big Science' George E. Brown'''] and linked Earth Science source material offered throughout GreenPolicy360. Experience through our eyes how a generation first became aware of environmental issues, the climate crisis, and then worked over decades to understand and protect Planet Earth; 2) then, as you continue here, take some to consider our highlights of latest Planet Citizen news, stories, and events arranged yearly and monthly. We're all riding together here on Planet Earth, partners! <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue Marble photo taken by the crew of Apollo 17 (1972).jpg]]<br /> <br /> 'Blue Marble' (1972)<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :::[[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:NASA's continuing vision and mission - as of 2005.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_System_Science &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Earth System Science&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;] | [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Whole_Earth &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Earth Living Systems&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;''']<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Original Mission Statement of NASA'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Highlight of NASA's Mission -- “To understand and protect our home planet...&quot;''' <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:The Original Mission Statement of NASA.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360 continues its campaign to restore the original Earth Sciences mission language into today's operating NASA Mission Statement.'''<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:The_Original_Mission_Statement_of_NASA.png<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &quot;When you look at the Earth from the space station, it's absolutely magical. You're not that far away, so you still have a relatively close-up view. But you can see the curvature and you see the atmosphere. It glows in blue. It is absolutely breathtaking the first time you see it. It's the most beautiful scenery you could possibly imagine.'' <br /> <br /> ''When you're on the Earth, you feel that everything is so vast, everything is endless. You have a hard time understanding how limited we are. Then, when you take a step back and you see the Earth in its entirety, you suddenly understand that we live in an oasis in the cosmos. All around us is nothing, no life, blackness, emptiness, absolutely nothing -- apart from this blue ball with everything we need to sustain human life, and life in general, which is absolutely fragile.''<br /> <br /> ''It makes you want to cherish the Earth and protect it, the more you see it from space.''<br /> <br /> -- [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Thomas_Pesquet_-_International_Space_Station_-_View_from_the_Cupola.jpg ''Astronaut Pesquet]: <br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Preserving &amp; Protecting the Home Planet Earth'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;[[Earth Science Vital Signs]]&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt; @&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;GreenPolicy360 and StrategicDemands&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:New Definitions of National Security.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Thin Blue.jpg]]<br /> <br /> * http://www.thinblue.com<br /> <br /> <br /> :[http://www.planetcitizen.org '''PlanetCitizen.org'''] / [http://www.planetcitizens.org '''PlanetCitizens.org''']<br /> <br /> :[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/New_Definitions_of_National_Security '''New Definitions of National Security''']<br /> <br /> :[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Look_at_how_thin_our_atmosphere_is '''ThinBlueLayer.com''']<br /> <br /> :[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Environmental_Security '''Environmental Security''']<br /> <br /> :[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Observations '''Earth Observations''']<br /> <br /> :[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Environmental_Security,_National_Security '''Environmental Security, National Security''']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Strait of Gibraltar - NASA-ISS.png]]<br /> <br /> International Space Station, Over the Strait of Gibraltar<br /> <br /> NASA<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :::::'''[[Earth from NASA]]'''<br /> <br /> :::::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_from_NASA Watching Planet Earth Roll Thru Space]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::::::[[File:Earth Flag-1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::::::[http://www.EarthPOV.com '''EarthPOV.com''']<br /> <br /> ::::::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_Citizens,_Planet_Scientists '''Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists''']<br /> <br /> ::::::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Research_from_Space '''Earth Science Research from Space''']<br /> <br /> ::::::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Science_from_Space '''Measuring &amp; Monitoring Planet Earth Now''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Global Fossil CO2 Emissions 1960-2024.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [http://www.thinblue.com ''' 'Thin Blue' ''']: '''Look at how thin the Earth's atmosphere is...'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Thin Blue Layer 768x432.jpg]]<br /> <br /> NASA - Astronaut Reid Wiseman <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.thephoblographer.com/2014/09/10/nasa-astronaut-reid-wiseman-best-space-photographer-time/&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://greenpolicy360.net/images/Reid_Wiseman_thinbluelayer_m.jpg&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BuDZa8ZCEAAJzmd.jpg:large&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/OCO-2 &lt;big&gt;'''Monitoring CO2 in Earth's Atmosphere'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth System Observatory.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Carbon Mapper - Launch - April 2021.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Carbon Mapper'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://carbonmapper.org/<br /> <br /> :* https://carbonmapper.org/our-mission/#overview<br /> <br /> ::* https://carbonmapper.org/about-us/#partner-team-leads<br /> <br /> :::* https://carbonmapper.org/carbon-mapper-launches-satellite-program-to-pinpoint-methane-and-co2-super-emitters/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Planet 4-15-2021 10-22-51 AM.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Annual CO2 emissions.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Who emits the most CO2.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Per capita CO2 emissions - to 2020.png]] <br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> '''Have you ever wondered about the emissions, i.e. [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Externalities 'externalities'], being injected into Earth's atmosphere?'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Elevated Levels of Global Warming Greenhouse Gases'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribution_of_recent_climate_change<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Efforts to scientifically ascertain and attribute mechanisms responsible for recent global warming and related climate changes on Earth have found that the main driver is elevated levels of greenhouse gases produced by human activities...''<br /> <br /> ''According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2021, it is &quot;unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land since pre-industrial times.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''Studies on attribution have focused on changes observed during the period of instrumental temperature record, particularly in the last 50 years. This is the period when human activity has grown fastest and observations of the atmosphere above the surface have become available.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:ThinBlueLayer.com-Wiseman-2014.png|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Look_at_how_thin_our_atmosphere_is]]<br /> <br /> [http://thinbluelayer.com '''Thinbluelayer.com'''] <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Thin Blue Earth Atmosphere - @AstroSamantha.jpg]]<br /> <br /> ::Photo via @AstroSamantha<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:CO2 photo.JPG]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :&lt;small&gt;''' &quot;We have to identify the problem, then act in many ways to solve the problem. Global warming is the threat of our times.&quot;''' &lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> ::&lt;small&gt;-- [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Governor_Jerry_Brown '''Jerry Brown, California Governor''']&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;small&gt;''' &quot;We’re going to need to use every tool in the toolbox if we’re going to solve this problem.&quot; '''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> ::&lt;small&gt;-- [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Michael_E_Mann_--_act_with_hope_not_fear.jpg '''Michael E. Mann''']&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :: [[File:MethaneSat - 1.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :: [[File:MethaneSat - 2.PNG]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :: [[File:MethaneSat - 3.PNG]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;[http://www.planetcitizen.org PlanetCitizen.org] | [http://www.planetcitizens.org PlanetCitizens.org]&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Michael_E_Mann_--_act_with_hope_not_fear.jpg<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:The_New_Climate_War_-_Irish_Times_review_2021.jpg<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Climate_Policy<br /> <br /> * http://www.greenlaw360.com <br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;[[Each of us can make a positive difference]] ....&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth in Human Hands.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Planet Citizen Action]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Climate Problems, Climate Solutions]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Pressuring Nations to Step Up, Cooperate, and Make a Positive Difference'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) Tracking&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Measuring and Monitoring Climate Plans &amp; Climate Actions<br /> <br /> :: 'Talking the Talk and/or Walking the Walk'<br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Earth Emoji 2.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> As of 2024, On the Road and echoes of the first [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:US_Public_Law_95-367.png '''National Climate Act in 1978''']<br /> <br /> Congressman George E. Brown and the initial decades of US Earth Science from Space<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth Observing System - fleet of satellites.png]]<br /> <br /> '''&quot;Earth Observing System&quot;:'''<br /> <br /> Decades of Earth/Atmospheric &amp; Climate Science Data Now Accessible for Planet Citizen Action<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:EarthRightNow Earth Science satellite fleet circa 2015 m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Earth_Observing_System_-_fleet_of_satellites.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Research_from_Space<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[National Climate Plans]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/National_Climate_Plans<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''GreenPolicy360's Campaign to 'Turn National Climate Promises &amp; Pledges into Reality' (2021)'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Our Climate Plans Enforcement Initiative continues as the next Global Climate Conference approaches, November's Conference of the Parties (COP27)<br /> <br /> :: Drawing from the database of Earth Science resulting from decades of space-based missions designed to provide us with actionable 'Earth-system and Climate-related data'<br /> <br /> ::: Measuring and Monitoring to better manage Earth's Living, Dynamic and Changing Systems, Local, National and Global<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Methods_to_enforce_climate_pledges-NDCs_-_Dec_2021.png ''Methods to Enforce Climate Plan Pledges'']<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Plans_Enforcement_-_Resources ''GreenPolicy360: Climate Plans Enforcement Initiative'']<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:INDC ''Pressuring Nations to Step Up, Cooperate, and Act Now'']<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Environmental_Laws ''Environmental Laws, Regs, Rules... Lawsuits &amp; Legal Actions'']<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Glasgow_Climate_Summit_-_Pledges,_Promises,_Declarations_-_What%27s_Next_Up ''Glasgow (2021) &amp; Paris (2015) Summits: Int'l Climate Plan Pledges &amp; Promises (INDCs-NDCs)'']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Data Tracking the Climate Actions of Nations, 2015 on...'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement/nationally-determined-contributions-ndcs/nationally-determined-contributions-ndcs<br /> <br /> * https://www.wri.org/ndcs/tracking-progress<br /> <br /> * https://www.climatewatchdata.org/2020-ndc-tracker<br /> <br /> * https://climateactiontracker.org/<br /> <br /> * https://carbon-pulse.com/ndcs/<br /> <br /> * https://www.carbonbrief.org/paris-2015-tracking-country-climate-pledges (2015)<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/INDCs<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Countries with Largest CO2 Emissions'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emissions <br /> <br /> * https://www.statista.com/statistics/271748/the-largest-emitters-of-co2-in-the-world/<br /> <br /> * https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.KT?view=map<br /> <br /> * https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC<br /> <br /> * https://carbonpricingdashboard.worldbank.org/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Earth, Science &amp; Politics:'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Thin Blue Atmosphere.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;''Driving Up There, From Down Here''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :[http://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/How_thin_is_earth%27s_atmosphere.jpg '''Look, &quot;a twelve-minute drive&quot; to the top of the Troposphere...'''] <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Thin Blue difference - approx 12 miles high.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:How thin is earth's atmosphere.jpg]] <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Thin Blue difference.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Atmosphere Science.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;NASA&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;'''Troposphere''' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troposphere&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> :&lt;small&gt;'''Stratosphere''' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratosphere&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> ::&lt;small&gt;'''Kármán line''' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n_line&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> :::&lt;small&gt;'''Earth's Atmospheric Layers''' - https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/science/atmosphere-layers2.html<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Thin Blue Layer - Earth's Limb Horizon - Nov 2020.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Atmospheric Experiment of Humanity.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Our Biggest Experiment - by Alice Bell.jpg]]<br /> <br /> : '''GreenPolicy360: <br /> :: Covering 50+ Years of Climate Science''' <br /> <br /> <br /> '''SJS/GreenPolicy360: The science is saying that humanity is facing a #ClimateCrisis'''. <br /> <br /> : NOW is the time to act to make a difference in our common future. &quot;Each of us can make a positive difference by stepping up &amp; doing our best.&quot;'''<br /> <br /> : * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> : * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:US_Public_Law_95-367.png<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Memories of Big Science advocates in the US Congress.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ·····················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''' &quot;There is a near-linear relationship between cumulative anthropogenic CO2 emissions and the global warming they cause.&quot; '''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> ::: * https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-18/the-climate-science-you-missed <br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Global temperature change 1901-2000.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Climate News]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ::[https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/ NASA Climate Change Vital Signs - Carbon Dioxide - Global Temperature - Arctic Sea Ice Minimum Ice Sheets - Sea Level] <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth Information Center - NASA.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Global climate dashboard-www.climate.gov.jpg|link=https://www.climate.gov/maps-data#global-climate-dashboard]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Copernicus Programme''' - [https://climate.copernicus.eu/ '''Climate Change Service''']<br /> <br /> ''Authoritative information about the past, present and future climate, as well as tools to enable climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies by policy makers and businesses.''<br /> <br /> * https://climate.copernicus.eu/about-us<br /> <br /> * https://climate.copernicus.eu/climate-bulletins<br /> <br /> * https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/#!/home<br /> <br /> * https://climate.copernicus.eu/data-action<br /> <br /> * https://climate.copernicus.eu/ESOTC/2019<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : ······························································· <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Good science needs good data .png|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:You_can_manage_only_what_you_can_measure_Dr_David_Crisp,_OCO-2,_June_2014_m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:You_can_manage_only_what_you_can_measure_Dr_David_Crisp,_OCO-2,_June_2014_m.jpg &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Measure-to-Manage'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> *&lt;small&gt; https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Good_science_needs_good_data_.png | GreenPolicy360, Facts &amp; Data<br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Stats_-_Green_Research_%26_Science | GreenPolicy360, Our Policy on Science<br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Change_-_Global_Warming_Keyword-Terms | Global Climate Keywords&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ·····································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Facts Count'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;[[Green Education]]&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;[[Environmental Studies Online]]&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;[[Planet Citizens]]&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;[[Citizen Science]]&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;[[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''GreenPolicy360: We're Into Earth Science'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''We believe in 'critical thinking skills''''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Good_science_needs_good_data_.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Stats_-_Green_Research_%26_Science<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Digital_Citizen<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenLinks<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GTN_GreenLinks_Trending_News<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Climate of Deception: How Viral Misinformation Fuels the Climate Emergency'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/facebook_climate_misinformation/<br /> <br /> * https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/disinfo_hub/<br /> <br /> <br /> * &lt;small&gt;https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Merchants_of_Doubt | Merchants of Doubt<br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Science_denial_graph.jpg | Techniques of Science Denial (Graph)<br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:FLICC_techniques_of_science_denial.png | Techniques of Science Denial (Video)<br /> * http://www.nature.com/news/wikipedia-shapes-language-in-science-papers-1.22656 | Wiki Community Science&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :::::[https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/09/the-evidence-is-compelling-on-human-activity-as-the-principal-cause-of-global-warming/ &lt;font color=gray&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Those Climate Facts, They're There, Deal with It, Now'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> :::::[[File:Science on climate change.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :::::&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Fact Checking]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :::::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Good_science_needs_good_data_.png GreenPolicy360, Facts &amp; Data]<br /> <br /> :::::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Stats_-_Green_Research_%26_Science GreenPolicy360, Our Policy on Science]<br /> <br /> :::::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Vital_Signs Earth Science, Vital Signs]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Set in Motion with &quot;Measure-to-Manage&quot; Earth Science Missions in the 1970s'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Good_science_needs_good_data_.png &quot;Good science needs good data&quot;]<br /> <br /> <br /> Good data and accurate facts, [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:You_can_manage_only_what_you_can_measure_Dr_David_Crisp,_OCO-2,_June_2014_m.jpg '''measuring and monitoring, and sound science'''] are the way to go -- if one expects to get to where one is intending to go. <br /> <br /> The facts of #EarthScience ... data, measurements and monitoring ... and a climate action agenda by #PlanetCitizens making a positive difference<br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Earth System Observatory-1.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Earth System Observatory-2.jpg]] <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''We all play a role in the unfolding story'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''GreenPolicy360: We are now putting forward a proposal to restore the Earth Science provisions to the Mission Statement of NASA'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &gt;'''“To understand and protect our home planet;''' to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers ...”<br /> <br /> &gt;In February 2006, the phrase &quot;to understand and protect the home planet&quot; was quietly removed from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)'s official mission statement.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''In a way we are 'bit players' in a larger game-on-earth...'''<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Advancing an Intergenerational Science Mission'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:US_Public_Law_95-367.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Research_from_Space<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Landsat_data_users_handbook<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Vital_Signs<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌍<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Environmental protection]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Day &quot;Your Moment on Earth Planet Citizen&quot;]<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:On_the_road_sjs.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌍<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''31 Vital Earth Signs'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '' 'Virtual signs' worsening''<br /> <br /> ''Tipping points, deepening disaster''<br /> <br /> * https://phys.org/news/2021-07-earth-vital-worsening-humanity-impact.html<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Researchers, part of a group of more than 14,000 scientists who have signed on to an initiative declaring a worldwide climate emergency, said that governments had consistently failed to address the root cause of climate change: &quot;the overexploitation of the Earth&quot;.'' <br /> <br /> ''Of 31 &quot;vital signs&quot;—key metrics of planetary health that include greenhouse gas emissions, glacier thickness, sea-ice extent and deforestation—they found that 18 hit record highs or lows.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '' &quot;Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth...'' <br /> <br /> ''Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.&quot; ''<br /> <br /> ''-- Carl Sagan, Cosmos''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:A View of the Earth and Moon from Mars.jpg]]<br /> <br /> NASA, A View of the Earth and Moon from Mars<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ----<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Continue scrolling through a chronology of featured 'Earth, Science &amp; Politics' content at GreenPolicy360'''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''On to 2025!'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''February 2025'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Washington, D.C., February 6, 2025 - In the first two weeks of President Donald Trump’s second term, the administration has begun to scrub critical environmental resources and datasets from federal agency websites. To combat this effort to suppress and censor public data, the National Security Archive’s Climate Change Transparency Project today publishes a selection of materials on climate change and environmental justice that have been deleted from agency web pages and spotlights the environmental and archivist organizations working to identify, scrape, and preserve these critical data.''<br /> <br /> ''During President Trump’s first term, organizations like the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) documented the administration’s widespread campaign to suppress climate and environmental data, like when it deleted all webpages, fact sheets, and emissions and financial incentives calculators related to President Obama’s 2015 Clean Power Plan. Since the 2024 presidential election, EDGI and environmental advocacy organizations alike have anticipated the targeting of federal environmental and climate data and have been archiving datasets and preparing to rebuild public access to web tools.''<br /> <br /> ''So far, one of the most glaring deletions from the current administration has been the removal of the White House pages on the Council of Environmental Quality (CEQ) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), divisions within the Executive Office of the President that coordinate federal environmental and scientific efforts and work closely with federal agencies and other White House offices on environmental energy policies and initiatives.'' <br /> <br /> Read more: <br /> <br /> * https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/climate-change-transparency-project-foia/2025-02-06/disappearing-data-trump<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Trump Era Enviro-Rollbacks (2016-20)<br /> <br /> *https://www.brookings.edu/interactives/tracking-deregulation-in-the-trump-era/ | Brookings - Deregulatory Tracker <br /> *https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/12/15/the-trump-administrations-major-environmental-deregulations/ | Brookings on Trump's Environmental Dereg. Record<br /> *https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Climate_Change_Litigation_Databases_Climate_Law.png | Climate Litigation Database <br /> *http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/resources/climate-deregulation-tracker | Climate Deregulation Tracker<br /> *http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/climatechange/ | Columbia Law School - Climate Change Blog<br /> *https://climate.law.columbia.edu/content/energy-law | Columbia Law - Energy Law<br /> *https://climate.law.columbia.edu/content/environmental-land-use-law | Columbia Law - Environmental, Land Use Law<br /> *http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/resources/silencing-science-tracker/ | Columbia Law - 'Silencing Science' Tracker<br /> *https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/2018/07/tracking-the-trackers/ | Harvard Law - List of Organizations Tracking US Environmental 2016-2020 Rollbacks<br /> *https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/climate/trump-environment-rollbacks-list.html | NYT - Trump Envir Rollbacks<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ........................................................................................................................<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Is the US Environmental Protection Agency on the Chopping Block?'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://thebulletin.org/2025/02/a-former-epa-assistant-administrator-on-the-future-of-us-environmental-regulations/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''January'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :::[[File:NDCs 2025.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::::&lt;big&gt;'''More on Climate Action Plans @GRN360'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :::: '''[[National Climate Plans]]'''<br /> :::: [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_Laws_and_Modern_Environmental_Movement '''Environmental Laws &amp; Environmental Movement''']<br /> :::: [[:Category:Climate Change|'''Climate Change''']]<br /> :::: [[:Category:Climate Policy|'''Climate Policy''']]<br /> :::: [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Change_-_Global_Warming_Keyword-Terms '''Climate Change Terms''']<br /> :::: [[Too Hot|Too Hot]]<br /> :::: [[Apocalyptic Thinking|Hotter 'n Hotter]]<br /> :::: [[Climate Problems, Climate Solutions]]<br /> :::: [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:INDC '''INDC Pledges &amp; Promises''']<br /> :::: [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:You_can_manage_only_what_you_can_measure_Dr_David_Crisp,_OCO-2,_June_2014_m.jpg '''Measure to Manage''']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Climate Science Research Studies Featured from 2024.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Global economy could face 50% loss in GDP between 2070 and 2090 from climate shocks'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''''Actuarial experts say previous assessments ignored severe effects of climate crisis'''''<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jan/16/economic-growth-could-fall-50-over-20-years-from-climate-shocks-say-actuaries<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ...................................................................................<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Before the President Ordered Solar Panels for the White House Roof'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> By Steve Schmidt, Founder/Siterunner GreenPolicy360<br /> <br /> January 1, 2025<br /> <br /> <br /> This past week the nation heard of the death of President Jimmy Carter. He was a 100 years old, a president from the South, from Plains, Georgia, who passed away after a long life distinguished by his rise from peanut farmer to the White House.<br /> <br /> Here at GreenPolicy360 in our terrestrial location along Tampa Bay, we reminisced about the man who first took up the challenge of changing the way the U.S. viewed energy and the future. At that time I was living in New York City and, in my free time away from my publishing position and graduate school work, assisting the first Jerry Brown for president campaign. <br /> Jimmy sort of came out from nowhere into the '76 campaign mix. I soon learned that he had done his homework. I would later learn, after Jimmy Carter became president, that he was being called a 'micromanager', that is he was a systems engineer who brought a nuclear background where detail were a matter of life and death -- literally. <br /> Personally, I thought back to the politics of those days in the 1970s, when the Democratic Party was losing the Southern vote as the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s saw Dixiecrats abandon the old party and move toward the Republican Party &quot;Southern Strategy&quot;. <br /> <br /> Jimmy Carter faced the impacts of civil rights, the costs of the Vietnam War, and the Middle East oil/gas crisis. He inherited a Democratic Party that was fracturing and attempting to put together new rules for state parties, electoral participation, the national party direction and procedures for nominating presidential candidates, then went on to use the new rules of the Presidential Nominating Convention. <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ''&quot;I opened up the doors of the Democratic Party, and 20 million people walked out.&quot;''<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGovern%E2%80%93Fraser_Commission<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> The departure of Old South Dixiecrats from the Democratic party came about first in 1964, then 1968 at the Chicago convention. A different Democratic Party rose, and new nominating rules took the place of the old ways and old rules.<br /> <br /> Leaders of the Democratic Party in the South, who had in general opposed the Republican Party since the Civil War, would now lose their white-control of a Dixie South. <br /> <br /> New rule #1: The Dixiecrats could no longer handpick the convention delegates in secret.<br /> <br /> Other rules followed. Majority votes in party meetings could no longer bind a dissenting minority to vote in accordance with the wishes of the majority. <br /> <br /> A unit rule was replaced by a similar winner-takes-all system that began at the county level and allowed the majority to override the minorities, but this was not enough to satisfy the old guard.<br /> Quotas, when introduced, were seen as discrimination as making it &quot;too easy for inexperienced amateurs to take over a national convention.<br /> Jimmy Carter was watching all of this, closely. As was I, who had worked on the Senate Committee on Nutrition and Human needs, chaired by Senator McGovern. I watched his staff, including Gary Hart, become key players in writing the new rules for the Democratic Party. I didn't know that Jimmy Carter was also closely watching, and involved in the drafting of the new rules. <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_Select_Committee_on_Nutrition_and_Human_Needs<br /> <br /> <br /> In the midst of the Democratic Party's upheaval over civil rights change and carnage of war in Vietnam, the politics at home revolved around the southern states of what was called the &quot;Old South&quot;.<br /> <br /> <br /> Jimmy Carter, after a distinguished military career, had returned home to the deep Old South in rural, small town Georgia to take over the family farm when his father passed away. <br /> <br /> Lietenant Jimmy Carter won election to the Georgia Senate in 1961 and becamegovernor of Georgia in 1971. The presidency of the U.S., it turned out was in his sights soon thereafter, as he realized the Democrats needed its own &quot;Southern Strategy&quot;, given the lay of the electoral vote landscape, and who better to step up then a real Southern man. He knew how to make it happen as he monitored the new rules and started his path to the White House. <br /> <br /> The mandatory book for presidential aspirants followed, as originally published in 1975 and republished in 1976, '''Why Not the Best?: The First 50 Years'''.<br /> <br /> Described by the Publisher: This campaign autobiography was begun in late 1974 when Georgia governor Jimmy Carter's presidential ambitions were being undervalued by the national media. It was received by the public as a welcome affirmation of one candidate's bedrock faith in old-fashioned public service based on duty, honor, competence, and honesty.<br /> <br /> <br /> So, now let's cut to the chase, we'll return to how Carter got to the White House, but there in the White House, elected as the 39th President of the United States, James Earl Carter Jr., born in October 2024, looks around and says, like in the movie &quot;The Candidate&quot; by Jeremy Larner, &quot;What do we do know?&quot; In other words, it's one things to win, it's another to govern. Jimmy won with his Southern Strategy, now what? How would he govern as President of the United States?<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Candidate_(1972_film)<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter<br /> <br /> <br /> Back to those of us who were getting ready....<br /> <br /> George Brown had been planning for this day. Nixon had Watergate and had left the White House under a cloud. The short time Gerald Ford had as president was an attempt to find a new direction, but the presidential pardon and the legacy of Dick NIxon had left its mark and Jimmy Carter, the good man from Georgia, with his faith and good intentions, was a man for the moment.<br /> In the eyes of young Americans, we saw a man of good will, science, reason, of service who cared about the future of the nation.<br /> Those of us involved in the 'start-up' of a new environmental movement, a George Brown, Jerry Brown, California contingent, got going with our agenda, science being at the top of the list. Jerry Brown, the Governor of California, had put his marker on the table, forward-looking policies, and Congressman Brown, he of the EPA, Clean Air Act and emerging advanced technologies and vision of Earth Science jumped in. First up, for the new president, was a new vision based on best-in-the-world science, education, health and prosperity. The environmental movement, a new politics, was ready to roll out and we rolled...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Office of Science and Technology Policy'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/<br /> <br /> <br /> In 1976, Congress established the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to provide the President and Executive branch of government with advice on scientific, engineering, and technological aspects of the economy, national security, homeland security, health, foreign relations, and the environment...<br /> <br /> OSTP was established by the National Science and Technology Policy, Organization, and Priorities Act of 1976. Prior to OSTP, presidents dating back to at least Franklin D. Roosevelt had various configurations of science advisors, committees of external science advisors, and White House offices dedicated to science and technology.<br /> <br /> One of the first work products of the new OSTP was a 1977 letter to the president, a call to action pushed by Representative George Brown. Frank Press, the first director of the office, spoke of &quot;catastrophic climate change&quot; and urged President Carter to address climate change and climate disruption.<br /> <br /> Representative George E. Brown from East LA/Monterey Park was a first-generation green activist in his own way. Elected as a populist and 'get the job done' liberal-conservative, he led Congressional efforts for environmental protection, the establishment of the EPA, first air quality acts, and prophetically, put forward the first climate act by the U.S. government. He was a global thinker, an environmental visionary and engineer by trade. He believed in 'big science', the need for advanced study and scientific knowledge, and doing what was needed to advance political progress. His environmental record of accomplishments in Congress over decades of leadership is unprecedented. George's purposeful work put in place a foundation on which we are building.<br /> <br /> George advanced legislation to establish the Office of Science and Technology Policy in 1975-76, as he continued to pull ideas to his committee from the Academy of National Science. His goals needed, he explained, the very best science minds cooperating, networking through educational institutions and business, government and non-government organizations, non-profits and for profits. He cast a wide net in his work.<br /> <br /> His approach, as we would see over decades, produced a foundation of laws, an environmental platform of originating legal protections and precedents, including the first federal climate program, Public Law 95-367, the National Climate Program Act / 1978.<br /> <br /> <br /> Here's to those who were brave enough to stand up, step forward and, against the odds, create new ways of seeing and understanding our world. Here's to George and how George thought that the new president needed a new office in the Executive Department to bring together the best of the best in scientific thought.<br /> <br /> <br /> Here's to the resulting accomplishments, political reality, not Pied Piper, but everyday reality, turning 'vision into reality': <br /> <br /> <br /> Beginning of U.S. Science on Global Warming, Strategies &amp; Planning Energy and Climate Report, 1977, National Academy of Sciences / 175 pp. / PDF via GreenPolicy360<br /> <br /> <br /> National Climate Program Act, 1978 / PDF<br /> <br /> The first federal program is established to initiate and coordinate federal studies; scientifically assess issues and risks of human-caused climate change, propose action and responses.<br /> <br /> <br /> The First Climate Act followed the First U.S. Academy of Sciences Climate Change Report.<br /> <br /> <br /> National Climate Program Act of September 1978<br /> <br /> National Climate Program Act, Public Law 95-367<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:US Public Law 95-367.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> In 1979 came a first follow-on National Science Academy climate report that was a 'Charney study' that was prescient and accurate in its global warming predictions. <br /> <br /> <br /> Here's to Jimmy Carter, seeing the future, and putting a pilot project forward on the roof of the White House.<br /> <br /> <br /> I'll hand here to GreenPolicy360's former advisor, Bill McKibben, as he speaks too of Jimmy up on the roof of the White House.<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''A Green-Energy Visionary'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Bill McKibben<br /> <br /> <br /> On June 20, 1979, President Jimmy Carter—sporting a bushy haircut and a wide necktie—invited dignitaries and reporters onto the roof of the White House to watch the installation of thirty-two solar water-heating panels. “A generation from now,” he told them, “this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.”<br /> <br /> A generation later, one of those panels showed up in a private museum in the offices of an entrepreneur named Huang Ming, in the city of Dezhou, China. In the spring of 2010, I interviewed Ming, who was building a vast fortune by installing pretty much the same solar water heaters across the country. If you’re flying into a Chinese city, look down and you might see one of the devices on every other roof; even back then there were places where ninety-five per cent of homes sported a panel. Ming had built a truly remarkable headquarters—the so-called Sun-Moon Mansion looked like something out of “The Jetsons,” with two sweeping horseshoes of solar panels that resembled the rings of Saturn cut in half. Ming described Carter as a visionary, and shook his head a little ruefully at the path America hadn’t followed.<br /> <br /> * https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/jimmy-carter-green-energy-visionary<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Up on the Roof'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/jimmy-carter-green-energy-visionary<br /> <br /> * https://www.axios.com/local/atlanta/2024/12/30/president-jimmy-carter-solar-panels-white-house-climate-change<br /> <br /> * https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/12/31/solar-panels-and-saving-energy-jimmy-carter-will-be-remembered-as-americas-first-green-pre<br /> <br /> * https://www.latimes.com/environment/newsletter/2024-12-31/boiling-point-jimmy-carter-vs-the-oil-industry-boiling-point<br /> <br /> * https://interestingengineering.com/culture/jimmy-carter-vision-lives-on<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:President Carter Sends a Solar Message - 2.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''December 2024'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> December 30, 2024<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''As 2025 (or ?) Approaches, Does Anyone Really Know What Time It Is...'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Whatever, Hold On, Here We Go, Another Year Around Our Planet's Star<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Earth<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Another Climate Warning, Another After Another After Another'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : This from US Media Co Axios'''<br /> <br /> :: GreenPolicy360: Decades of Warnings<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Another climate warning, another after another.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ...................................................................................<br /> <br /> <br /> As 2025 approaches and a political wave in the US threatens to accelerate climate change with a flood of politics, it's time to watch the [http://www.thinbluelayer.com '''ThinBlueLayer'''] that protects and enables life on Earth.<br /> <br /> The Keeling Curve is a key to unlocking the Earth Science metrics that we, '''[[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]''', are tracking to measure and monitor atmospheric warming.<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:C02 in atmosphere chart-3.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:You can manage only what you can measure Dr David Crisp, OCO-2, June 2014 m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> Zoom in to know the facts, the data, the reality of how and why humanity is producing a consequential legacy ... Learn how to manage our Living Earth inheritance.<br /> <br /> <br /> #EarthIsInOurHands<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:OCO-2 to measure CO2.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Keeling Curve 2024.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''November'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''November 6, 2024'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Donald Trump Elected US President: Election Will Bring Far-Reaching Change'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ············································································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Beyond the U.S. politics and the presidential election on the fifth of November, a day that will be remembered, is the physics of nature, the dynamic, changing interactions between human systems and natural systems. Planet Earth as it moves in space and time will be around long after politics... and yes, remember, now and in the immediate future, 'Earth is in human hands'...'''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth in Human Hands Intro.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> '''November 4, 2024'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Special:Search&amp;profile=images&amp;search=michael%20e%20mann&amp;fulltext=1 Michael E. Mann], as quoted in a Forbes interview on ''what’s at stake in the U.S. election''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''How significant is the outcome of the presidential election for the climate?'''''<br /> <br /> I'll be blunt. This upcoming election is a critical juncture where Americans will choose one of two paths, and the difference between those two paths couldn't be more stark. One of those paths, represented by Donald Trump and the Republican Party, involves basically abandoning the efforts that we've already made here in the United States to tackle the climate crisis. That includes dismantling the EPA, getting rid of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, which of course runs the National Hurricane Center and the hurricane hunters that make the measurements fly, take their lives, put their lives at risk of flying into hurricanes to make critical measurements that are fed into our models so we can better predict the intensification and the paths of these dangerous storms. It would abandon all that.''<br /> <br /> ''But fundamentally it would abandon our commitment to the rest of the world to lead on this issue, to reduce our carbon emissions, to incentivize a shift away from fossil fuels, it would seek to, for example, deactivate the Inflation Reduction Act, which was landmark legislation passed by the Biden Administration, or signed by Joe Biden passed by Congress, the provisions of which have the potential to lower our carbon emissions here in the United States by 40% by 2030. It's not enough. We need to do even more. We need to build on that, but it puts us on the right path.<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''What are the international implications?'''''<br /> <br /> ''You have on the one hand a Republican party and their presidential nominee Donald Trump, who would in essence end any US leadership on climate. And in the absence of US leadership, we are the world's largest legacy carbon polluter. We have to display moral leadership if we can expect the rest of the world to come to the table, other industrializing nations, China, India, etcetera. And what we know is that when we do take leadership, as we did during the Obama administration and again during the Biden administration, then those other countries come to the table and we begin to forge a path forward to truly take the actions necessary to avert catastrophic warming.''<br /> <br /> ''We're at 1.2 [degrees] Celsius warming now. At 1.5 Celsius, 3 Fahrenheit, we will start to see far worse consequences than those that we're already seeing, and we're already seeing dangerous climate change. Just in the last month or so with Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton, these are storms that were amplified. They were more intense. They produced greater amounts of flooding rains that in one case killed hundreds of people. We are witnessing the devastating consequences of human-caused climate change. And if we don't take action now and prevent warming of 1.5 [degrees] Celsius, we're already at 1.2. There isn't a whole lot of wiggle room. What it basically means is we've got to ramp carbon emissions down dramatically over the next decade, and bring them down to zero mid-century. The only hope to do that would be to build on the policies that were put in place by the Biden administration.''<br /> <br /> ''So that's where we stand. We have a monumental choice before us. It's not getting, in my view, as much coverage as it ought to in the US media because wow, there are so many crises. We face public health crises, international security, crises, wars, et cetera. If we don't act now on the climate crisis, there's no going back. We lock in truly dangerous and deadly consequences for decades to come. And so that's where we are at this very critical juncture.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''October'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Outcome of the US 2024 Election -- and Potential for a Planetary Threat'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Planetary-Scale Threat.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * <br /> https://thebulletin.org/2024/08/project-2025-the-right-wing-conspiracy-to-torpedo-global-climate-action/<br /> <br /> <br /> Michael E. Mann<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Republican_Party_2024_Climate_Strategy.png '''''Project 2025'''''].... ''would put an end to US climate action at this critical moment.''<br /> <br /> ''The energy and environmental provisions of Project 2025 were effectively written by polluters, with front groups such as the Koch-funded “Competitive Enterprise Institute” and “Heartland Institute” playing a key role in drafting the report. They are seeking to dismantle climate policy in the US through a combination of executive actions, such as the elimination of federal agencies with oversight over energy and environmental policy, and legislative actions.<br /> <br /> ''Project 2025 would gut the EPA, which is responsible for enforcement of environmental policies, and it would reverse the EPA’s 2009 “endangerment finding” that classified carbon dioxide as a pollutant to be regulated under the Clean Air Act. It would eliminate the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which monitors changes in our atmosphere, oceans and climate. Project 2025 would eliminate clean energy loan programs at the Department of Energy and remove climate change—one of the greatest national security threats we face—from the National Security Council agenda. It supports more oil drilling in the environmentally sensitive Arctic and asserts that the government has an “obligation to develop vast oil and gas and coal resources.”''<br /> <br /> ''Perhaps most problematic, Project 2025 would repeal the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the single most substantial piece of climate legislation in US history. Passed with a tie-breaking vote from current Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris and 50 Senate democrats but not a single Republican, the IRA provides $370 billion of investment in clean energy infrastructure. Independent experts have estimated that it will greatly accelerate the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, leading to an estimated 40 percent reduction in US carbon emissions by 2030.''<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: The message here of Dr. Mann, the presidential distinguished professor and director of the Center for Science, Sustainability and Media at The University of Pennsylvania should be at the forefront of Us presidential and congressional election. The choice being made is one that will directly and lastingly effect all in the nation and quality of life across the planet. The challenge is a generational challenge. The science is a guide. The choice of direction taken is in human hands. <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Hurricane Milton, Measured &amp; Monitored, in Memory of a Hurricane Hunter'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> In the Gulf of Mexico the Climate-Induced Warming Waters Supercharge Hurricanes, NOAA Knows<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Peter Dodge's Final Flight.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Hurricane Helene Devastates Southeast, Impacts NOAA NCEI Headquarters'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''National Centers for Environmental Information'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/<br /> <br /> * https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/about-us<br /> <br /> * https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/sites/g/files/anmtlf171/files/2024-06/FY24-FY28%20NCEI%20Strategic%20Plan.pdf<br /> <br /> * https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/node/6696<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> NCEI headquarters in Asheville, NC, has been severely impacted by Hurricane Helene. First and foremost, we’re grateful to report that all of our employees and staff have been accounted for. All data holdings–including paper and film records–are also safe.<br /> <br /> The scale of destruction and impact Helene has had across the Southeast, especially on its people, has been massive, and we stand in solidarity with all who are suffering. We also want to express our deepest gratitude towards those who have reached out with support, and encourage all to keep expressing their support now and in the future. The road to recovery for the entire region will be a long one, and one we will be traveling as well, both as people and as an international data center focused on meeting the data information needs of those we serve.<br /> <br /> All of the employees located at the North Carolina NCEI site also express how proud of and thankful we are for the 300 NCEI employees in Colorado, Maryland, Mississippi and around the country for their care, support and professionalism helping us recover. Our team is truly unmatched.<br /> <br /> Now to more formal updates on NCEI’s functionality–here is what we know:<br /> <br /> NCEI’s network service provider has limited functionality and there is no definitive timeline for when it will be fully operational.<br /> <br /> All archived data at NCEI is currently inaccessible, and limited new data is being ingested. We are working with our partners to minimize the risk of any potential data loss; however, Helene has made many key products and services unavailable at this time.<br /> <br /> Products impacted include access to NCEI’s weather and climate data. NCEI’s monthly State of the Climate reports and data will be be delayed until services are restored, which means the September 2024 U.S. and global climate reports, originally scheduled to be released on October 8 and 10 respectively, will be unable to meet this deadline. At this time, we do not have more specifics on when they might be available.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''September'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Diplomacy Watch: Russian media in eye of the storm | Responsible Statecraft'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://responsiblestatecraft.org/rt-meta-ban/<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp owner Meta said that it was going to ban a number of Russian state media outlets, including RT (formerly Russia Today).''<br /> <br /> ''“After careful consideration, we expanded our ongoing enforcement against Russian state media outlets: Rossiya Segodnya, RT and other related entities are now banned from our apps globally for foreign interference activity,” Meta saidin a statement.''<br /> <br /> ''This occurs just days after the Biden administration announced sanctionsagainst RT. United States Secretary of State, Antony Blinken said that Russian media entities “are no longer merely fire hoses of Russian propaganda and disinformation. They are engaged in covert influence activities aimed at undermining American elections and democracies, functioning like a de facto arm of Russia’s intelligence apparatus.”''<br /> <br /> ''In its own statement, the State Department said “The United States supports the free flow of information. We are not taking action against these entities and individuals for the content of their reporting, or even the disinformation they create and spread publicly. We are taking action against them for their covert influence activities.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> More re: Geopolitics, Democracy, Networking, Media, Internet, Disinformation, Fact Checking<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/In_Defense_of_Democracy_and_Freedom<br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Democracy<br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Internet<br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Media<br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Networking<br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Fact_Checking,_Facts_Count<br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Fact_Checking<br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Disinformation_-_Online_-_Dangerous<br /> <br /> <br /> Visit GreenPolicy360's associate, Strategic Demands / StratDem<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''August'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The coming era of unlimited — and free — clean energy'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via The Washington Post<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/3Z6pMbe<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Futurist Ray Kurzweil notes that solar power has been doubling every two years for the past 30 years — as costs have been dropping. He says solar energy is only six doublings — or less than 14 years — away from meeting 100 percent of today’s energy needs. Energy usage will keep increasing, so this is a moving target. But, by Kurzweil’s estimates, inexpensive renewable sources will provide more energy than the world needs in less than 20 years. Even then, we will be using only one part in 10,000 of the sunlight that falls on the Earth.'' ...<br /> <br /> ''We are surely heading into the era of abundance that [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Diamandis '''Peter Diamandis'''] has written about — the era when the basic needs of humanity are met through advancing technologies. The challenge for mankind will be to share this abundance, ensuring that these technologies make the world a better place.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.diamandis.com/about<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ·········································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Mapping the Forests from Satellites'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''Turning the Data into Actionable Forest Management &amp; Repleneshment'''<br /> <br /> ::'''Yes, Planting Trees Is a Smart Eco-Strategy for Now &amp; Tomorrow'''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Global Forest Watch]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Global_Forest_Watch<br /> <br /> <br /> ''''' 'Nature Climate Change Journal' '''''<br /> <br /> ''Scientific study suggests that reforestation in developing countries can '''sequester up to ten times more carbon at lower costs than previously estimated.'' '''<br /> <br /> ''The research advocates for a balanced approach using both natural regeneration and tree planting to optimize carbon capture. Economic incentives like carbon payments and timber sales can further enhance the viability of these reforestation efforts.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Beyond Expectations: Reforestation Can Remove 10x More CO2 From the Atmosphere Than Previously Estimated...'''''<br /> <br /> * https://scitechdaily.com/beyond-expectations-reforestation-can-remove-10x-more-co2-from-the-atmosphere-than-previously-estimated/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''July'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''U.S. Senators Move to Pass Legislation Clarifying Executive Agencies Powers to Regulate Congressional Laws'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> SCOTUS activism to limit scope of EPA and other agencies, forcing legislative committee reworking of statute drafting and bill 'specifics' now meets political gridlock<br /> <br /> Senate rules, blocking maneuvers, filibustering, need for increased committee markups, timelines and budgets (i.e. SCOTUS-ordered lawmaking process changes) now all come into play <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Republicans and Democrats are pushing competing legislation as a result of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn thee &quot;Chevron&quot; case deference earlier this month.''<br /> <br /> ''Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) became the latest GOP lawmaker seeking to compel the Biden administration to rein in its rulemaking, while Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is leading an effort that would codify the high court’s previous decades-old precedent.''<br /> <br /> ''The new bills, released Tuesday, are part of among members of both parties in response to the ruling. A majority of justices said courts no longer had to give agencies deference when interpreting ambiguous laws.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.eenews.net/articles/senators-float-dueling-bills-in-response-to-chevron-ruling/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''DSCOVR:EPIC'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: &quot;Moon Transit&quot; as rendered by NASA's DSCOVR:EPIC. There we are and the Earth's moon in a sequence of images scanned from space, then digitally delivered into a database to have its numbers, pixels, 'crunched'. <br /> <br /> Today, this DSCOVR:EPIC process is bringing to mind another deep imaging, a scanning and scraping system that's referred to as Large Language Model (LLM) deep learning.<br /> <br /> Who's being observed? We are... yes, our site's been imaged and captured by remote scanning bots and our 50+ years of Earth and Space, Politics and our network of pages and content ranging over the history of the environmental movement are now in databases worldwide.<br /> <br /> We're open access creative commons and so, as we've rolled, we've been freely sharing since AI came along and began arriving to take us up. Now, we're being 'repackaged' and delivered to digital systems 360. We're sort of an extension to online ChatGPTs <br /> <br /> We think of our curated contributions as '''[[Green Education]]''' with verve.<br /> <br /> What a journey it's been, what a tech trip it is ;-<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Dscovr_epic_moontransit.gif<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Earthrise]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> June 7, 2024 ... '''In Memory of Astronaut William Anders''' <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Anders<br /> <br /> <br /> Associated Press / '''''Former astronaut William Anders, who took iconic Earthrise photo, killed in Washington plane crash'''''<br /> <br /> * https://apnews.com/article/plane-crash-san-juan-islands-washington-6d3800130ef4e67d761f96b328f7c263<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;'''Apollo 8 Earthrise Photos'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ::'''December 1968<br /> <br /> :::• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthrise<br /> <br /> <br /> :::::[[File:Apollo 8, Life Jan10,1969.png]]<br /> <br /> :::::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Apollo_8,_Life_Jan10,1969.png Apollo 8 photos in Life Magazine, January 1969]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Earthrise_100_Photographs_That_Changed_the_World_.jpg &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Earthrise'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;'''Apollo 8's View of Earth on December 24, 1968'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> December 21, 1968 ... Apollo 8 launches from the Kennedy Space Center, the first humans on the way to the Moon --- and a vision looking back at home that empowered the modern environmental movement.<br /> <br /> Apollo's mission? To explore the Moon in preparation for a Moon landing. A surprise comes into view as the spaceship circles the Moon. A window view, Whole Earth awareness of ourselves as #PlanetCitizens. &quot;Earthrise&quot; ... a profound image, first by human hands taken of our home planet. We see our #PlanetEarth with new born eyes ... <br /> <br /> :[http://www.ibhanet.org/resources/documents/newsletters/spierearthrisephoto.pdf The Earthrise photo history]<br /> <br /> : [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Earthrise_100_Photographs_That_Changed_the_World_.jpg 100 Photographs That Changed the World]<br /> <br /> :[http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/nasa-releases-new-earthrise-simulation-video/#.VNO2cC744Rk NASA simulation video of Earthrise on the 45th anniversary]<br /> <br /> <br /> • http://www.youtube.com/embed/dE-vOscpiNc <br /> <br /> • http://www.abc.net.au/science/moon/earthrise.htm<br /> <br /> • http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Apollo_8,_Life_Jan10,1969.png<br /> <br /> <br /> ::'''Aboard Apollo''', December 24, 1968...'''<br /> <br /> ::[[File:Earthrise, the way Anders saw it.jpg]]<br /> <br /> ::&lt;small&gt;http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Apollo_8&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> As the spaceship swings around the Moon... <br /> <br /> unexpectedly the Earth rises in the Apollo ship's window and the astronauts are amazed at what is coming into view...<br /> <br /> <br /> Astronaut [https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimclash/2015/04/17/bill-anders-recalls-famous-earthrise-photo-he-took-from-moon/#1ae7ffe9527a Bill Anders is the first to see the Earth...] <br /> <br /> <br /> ·········································································<br /> <br /> <br /> Anders: ''&quot;Oh, my God, look at that picture over there,&quot; he can be heard saying. &quot;There's the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> What happened next will sound familiar to anyone who remembers the days before digital cameras:<br /> <br /> <br /> Anders (to astronaut Jim Lovell): ''&quot;You got a color film, Jim? Hand me a roll of color, quick, would you?&quot;''<br /> <br /> Lovell: ''&quot;Oh, man, that's great! Where is it?&quot;''<br /> <br /> Anders: ''&quot;Hurry. Quick.&quot;''<br /> <br /> Lovell: ''&quot;Down here?&quot;''<br /> <br /> Anders: ''&quot;Just grab me a color. A color exterior. Hurry up. Got one?&quot;''<br /> <br /> Lovell: ''&quot;Yeah, I'm lookin' for one. C368.&quot;''<br /> <br /> Anders: ''&quot;Anything quick.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> Lovell hands him the film just as Anders is heard saying, ''&quot;I think we missed it.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> But within seconds, Lovell sees the shot again in another window of the command module. He asks for the camera from Anders, who seems a bit defensive at having his role as mission photographer usurped.<br /> <br /> <br /> Anders: ''&quot;Wait a minute, just let me get the right setting here now, just calm down. Calm down, Lovell!&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> Anders then gets the shot that has been reproduced innumerable times all over the world... <br /> <br /> <br /> Changing forever humanity's vision of ourselves, of who we are <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.planetcitizens.org &lt;small&gt; #PlanetCitizens&lt;/small&gt;]<br /> <br /> [[File:Earthrise 100 Photographs That Changed the World .jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;🌎&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''May'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Greening Our Blue Planet]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Going_Green<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Environmental protection]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Day_Is_Every_Day &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Earth Day is every day... &amp; every day is Earth Day'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> [[File: Earth-Day.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''April 22, 2024'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Personal Memories on the Road to the First Earth Day'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Day_Memories_on_the_50th_Anniversary<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Earth-Day.png<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:ThinBlue-3 iss030e031276.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/ThinBlue_iss030e031276.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/PlanetCitizen PlanetCitizen.org] / [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_and_Space,_Politics Earth System Science] / [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Vital_Signs Measuring &quot;Vital Signs&quot;]&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;🌎&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Intended to Determined, INDCs to NDCs'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''Determined to Enforced<br /> <br /> :: Making National Climate Plans Reality<br /> <br /> :::* http://unfccc.int/focus/indc_portal/items/8766.php<br /> <br /> :::* http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Intended_Nationally_Determined_Contributions<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :::[[File:Green Branching Out.jpg | link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenLinks]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Climate Plans Enforcement - Resources - GreenPolicy.png]]<br /> <br /> : https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Climate_Change<br /> <br /> : https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Climate_Policy<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''We Are Generation Green, Going Green (and It's No Easy Ride)'''<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[Generation Green]] | [[Going Green]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''February 2024'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''How the U.S. Became the World’s Biggest Gas Supplier'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via the NY Times<br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/02/03/climate/us-lng-natural-gas-leader.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Sk0.vSJF.n9S8r11vmjsK&amp;bgrp=t&amp;smid=url-share '''Article, unlocked''']<br /> <br /> ''In just eight years, the United States has rocketed from barely selling any gas overseas to becoming the world’s No. 1 supplier, a remarkable shift that has profited oil and gas companies and strengthened American influence abroad...'' <br /> <br /> ''America’s gas export boom initially caught many policymakers by surprise. In the early 2000s, natural gas was relatively scarce at home, and companies were spending billions of dollars to build terminals to import gas from places like Qatar and Australia.''<br /> <br /> ''Fracking changed all that. In the mid-2000s, U.S. drillers perfected methods to unlock vast reserves of cheap natural gas from shale rock. At the same time, natural gas prices began spiking elsewhere in the world, especially after Japan shut down its nuclear plants in the wake of the Fukushima reactor meltdown in 2011 and began demanding more fuel.''<br /> <br /> ''That led to a stunning reversal. American companies, led by Cheniere Energy, began spending billions more to convert import terminals into export terminals, and shipments of U.S. gas to other countries began to surge.''<br /> <br /> ''“It comes down to economics,” said Kenneth Medlock, senior director at the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University. “Production just keeps growing in the United States, which keeps prices low. And then we keep seeing major demand growth in the rest of the world.”''<br /> <br /> ''The export boom has transformed America’s role in energy geopolitics.''<br /> <br /> ''Europe has become the biggest importer of American gas in recent years, enabling the continent to slash by more than half its reliance on Russian gas since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.''<br /> <br /> ''In the future, Europe is expected to curb its appetite for gas by adding more renewable energy sources like wind and solar power. The main growth markets for natural gas are expected to be fast-growing Asian countries such as China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Vietnam that want to use the fuel for electricity, heating or industrial purposes.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''January 2024'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Green Solutions for Businesses with a [[Net Zero Energy Policy]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://greenfuturessolutions.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Managing to Avoid 'Tipping Points' '''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Harmful tipping points in the natural world pose some of the gravest threats faced by humanity. Their triggering will severely damage our planet’s life-support systems and threaten the stability of our societies.''<br /> <br /> * https://global-tipping-points.org/<br /> <br /> * https://news.exeter.ac.uk/faculty-of-environment-science-and-economy/exeter-research-in-carbon-briefs-top-media-papers-of-2023/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_Citizen_Vision_of_Living_Earth &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Planet Citizen Vision of Living Earth'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Highlights &lt;big&gt;'''GreenPolicy360 Page Highlights'''&lt;/big&gt;] <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earths two lungs.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;font color=green&gt;'''''Planet Citizens'''''&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''Time for [[Planet Citizen Action]]''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> '''A Call to Action to Preserve &amp; Protect Life on Earth'''<br /> <br /> It's your time to become a Planet Citizen<br /> <br /> We believe 'Each of us can make a positive difference by stepping up &amp; doing our best&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:To be fully alive is to work for the common good.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth 4 eOS.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;🌎&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Earth System Science Is Green360'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Follow Planet and '''[[Planet API]]'''<br /> <br /> Follow GreenPolicy360, look back at 50+ years of Plant Citizen Earth Science<br /> <br /> [[Earth Science Research from Space]]<br /> <br /> <br /> Planet (PlanetLabs) continues to democratize space and deliver 'mission' data...<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Democratization_of_Space<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Planet and plan for an Earthdata platform.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;2023&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''December'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Facts count'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Democracy<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Battle for Democracy.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> : December 21, 2023<br /> <br /> : '''''Washington Post Editorial Board:''''' <br /> <br /> : '' “The world’s democracies should create a system to fight back that can speak plainly and consistently about the inherent advantages of democratic systems, while admitting the imperfections, and use creative ways to illuminate the flaws and depredations of authoritarian regimes.” ''<br /> <br /> : * https://wapo.st/3TyP9iU<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''It been said that the US &quot;Inflation Reduction Act&quot; is a &quot;[[Green New Deal]]&quot;'''<br /> <br /> ''The world is facing a “pivotal moment” in the climate crisis, Kamala Harris has told the Cop28 summit after the US vowed to phase out coal plants and slash methane emissions, but also came under attack for meagre assistance to developing countries and for its own booming oil and gas extraction industry.''<br /> <br /> ''The US vice-president, deputising for Joe Biden – who skipped the UN climate talks – said Biden’s administration had made the “largest climate investment in the history of our country, and some have said the world” via the '''Inflation Reduction Act.'''''<br /> <br /> ''The world is badly off track in efforts to slow the climate crisis, however, and Harris warned of the dangers posed by opponents of climate action, which could be seen as a reference to Donald Trump, who is likely to be Biden and Harris’s electoral opponent next year.''<br /> <br /> ''“This is a pivotal moment – our action collectively, or worse our inaction, will impact billions of people for decades to come,” Harris told delegates, including dozens of world leaders, at the summit in the United Arab Emirates. “Around the world there are those who seek to slow or stop our progress. Leaders who deny climate science, delay climate action and spread misinformation&quot; ...''<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/02/kamala-harris-addresses-cop28-amid-mixed-reaction-to-us-climate-pledges<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''November'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Circa 2023, the 'Musk Controversy' Continues'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''''Elon Musk was once an environmental hero: is he still a rare green billionaire?'''''<br /> <br /> :* https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/20/elon-musk-green-credentials-clean-energy-climate-deniers<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Newly Selected Speaker of the US House of Representatives Mike Johnson (R - Louisiana) moves His Agenda and His Party's Messaging'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> In &quot;Letters from an American&quot;, the historian [https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/ '''Heather Cox Richardson'''] provides accounts and analysis of the state of US politics, focusing her work largely on democracy - and dangers to the Republic as the US is roiled by political forces. Today's online column by Richardson includes the following report on the new House leader's agenda, and clearly makes Green News for the Day:<br /> <br /> :''In the last two days, for example, the House has voted to slash 39% of the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and 13% of the budget of the National Park Service. It voted to require the Biden administration to advance oil drilling off the Alaska coast. It has voted on reducing the salary of the EPA administrator, the director of the Bureau of Land Management, and the Secretary of the Interior to $1 each.''<br /> <br /> :''Yesterday, Johnson told reporters he considers extremists Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) close friends and said “I don’t disagree with them on many issues and principles.”''<br /> <br /> :''To direct his communications team, Johnson has tapped Raj Shah, a former executive from the Fox News Corporation, who was a key player in promoting the lie that Trump won the 2020 presidential election. As the head of the “Brand Protection Unit,” Shah demanded that the Fox News Channel continue to lie to viewers who would leave the station if it told the truth. Johnson has hired Shah to be his deputy chief of staff for communications and, according to Alex Isenstadt of Politico, “help run messaging for House Republicans.” ''<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:IEA energy chart - 2023.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Carl Sagan, 1985.PNG]]<br /> <br /> Dr. Carl Sagan, 1985<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Carl_Sagan,_1985.PNG&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Remembering the early day of Earth/Climate Science<br /> <br /> 'Climate Change' used to be called 'Global Warming'<br /> <br /> <br /> Global Warming -- from Steve Schmidt, GreenPolicy360, writing about the initial days of climate research, environmental laws, and activism: <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Global_Warming<br /> <br /> <br /> In the mid-1960s, a man who was trained in science and physics, and who was an engineer who became a politician in East Los Angeles, California, explained to me that the health impacts of LA's smog was dire, especially for children. He went on to explain the air quality was not just a local problem that needed to be 'fixed' (the air pollution in Southern California was considered among the urban areas worst in the world), but that the larger questions of industrial pollution needed to be addressed. He said we needed science, a major scientific mobilization to provide the atmospheric science. Tools to use, data to guide our solutions to the adverse human impacts on the atmosphere essential to health and life. The man's name was George E. Brown. We became friends, then colleagues in our work. Our paths and politics intertwined, and our stories reveal elements of the green first generation environmental movement in action. George Brown played historic roles in advancing Earth science, climate change science, and Earth system, atmospheric science, coordinating and overseeing Earth science research from space with a constellation of NASA missions until George passed away in Washington DC in 1999. <br /> <br /> Let's start here -- with George's life and work.<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[George E. Brown Jr]]'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Vital_Signs<br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_Citizens,_Planet_Scientists<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Advancing an Intergenerational Science Mission'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:US_Public_Law_95-367.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Climate_Policy<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Research_from_Space<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Landsat_data_users_handbook<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Earth Right Now -- the Earth System Observatory'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Right_Now<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth System Observatory-1.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:You can manage only what you can measure Dr David Crisp, OCO-2, June 2014 m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''September'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''As the G20 Meets, the United Nations 'Urges' the &quot;Top Economic Powers&quot; of Our Planet's Economy to Change Direction'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> NEW DELHI (International News Services) -- ''U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres on Friday urged the Group of 20 top economic powers, which are responsible for more than 80% of the emissions that cause global warming, to use their weekend summit to send a strong message on climate change.''<br /> <br /> ''Guterres said all licensing or funding for new fossil fuel projects should be stopped and that the G20 must keep the “1.5-degree goal alive,” referring to the 2015 Paris climate agreement that set 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) as a global guardrail in atmospheric warming, with countries pledging to try to prevent that much long-term warming if possible.''<br /> <br /> ''Earlier this year, the U.N. weather agency had said that there’s a two-out-of-three chance that the world will temporarily hit a key warming limit within the next five years.''<br /> <br /> ''July 2023 was Earth’s hottest month on record by a wide margin...''<br /> <br /> <br /> 'Radical' Changes Needed Now<br /> <br /> * https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66753909.amp<br /> <br /> ''This means that every aspect of our societies needs to change to rein in rising temperatures.''<br /> <br /> ''This includes the way we make energy, the way we travel, work and produce food. Experts say this type of change needs governments to take the initiative and make sure that their climate actions aren't immediately nullified by other policies and investments.<br /> <br /> ''&quot;One could also see the call for system transformations as a recognition that, while we still can, we should take our destiny in our own hands,&quot; said Dr Richard Klein from the Stockholm Environment Institute, who was involved in the initial stages of the stocktake.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;Either we transform society in a way that avoids the worst of climate change, or climate change will transform society for us...&quot;''<br /> <br /> * https://news.yahoo.com/un-global-stocktake-climate-change-191618644.html<br /> * https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/what-is-worlds-first-global-stocktake-climate-change-2023-09-08/<br /> * https://www.msn.com/en-xl/news/other/what-is-the-un-global-stocktake-and-how-will-it-help-countries-limit-global-warming/ar-AA1gjMxo<br /> * https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-un-global-stocktake/<br /> * https://indianexpress.com/article/india/as-g20-drags-feet-uns-global-climate-stocktake-flags-large-deficits-8931143/<br /> * https://www.rte.ie/news/world/2023/0909/1404345-world-leaders-gather-in-new-delhi-as-g20-summit-begins/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''August 2023'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Uh-Oh. Now What? Are We Acquiring the Data to Understand the Situation?'''''<br /> <br /> ''14 August 2023''<br /> <br /> ''James Hansen, Makiko Sato, Reto Ruedy''<br /> <br /> ''Abstract. Global temperature in June and July shot far above the prior records for those months for the 140 years of good instrumental data. Early indications are that warming exceeds expectation based on only the long-term trend due to increasing greenhouse gases (GHGs) plus the emerging El Nino. Three additional mechanisms will have a near-term effect, with a result that the 12-month mean global temperature likely will pierce the 1.5°C warming level before this time next year. Uncertainties in present analyses draw attention to the inadequacy of and the precarious state of crucial global observations...''<br /> <br /> * https://mailchi.mp/caa/uh-oh-now-what-are-we-acquiring-the-data-to-understand-the-situation?e=371c3fd991<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 Siterunner: I tried/[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr '''we tried'''] to graph the data back in the 1970s and 80s, hiring numerous scientists including from the National Labs, in Sandia/Los Alamos and Livermore/Berkeley, physicists, engineers who began the original Earth Science missions to study, measure and monitor Earth's systems and 'vital signs'... A central task was digitize the data, 'quantify it', 'dynamically' over time, as if I had to teach it to young students (ala a famed CalTech professor, Richard Feynman)... the results of first-gen Earth Science/Envirionmental activistm fed into Federal science, space and technololgy com't work and educational institutions, NASA/NOAA/USGS data banks, and more... In the mid 1980s a Senate hearing hit the news with Jim Hansen and Carl Sagan's warnings standing out among media stories that brought public awareness of the Greenhouse Effect and global warming...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Hansen-testimony-1988.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:What happens next is ... the Greenhouse Effect - explained by Carl Sagan, 1985.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''July 2023'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''July 24'''<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: &quot;It's a wild world&quot; and when we sort through the news (however we get it), every day seems to get wilder and wilder...<br /> <br /> Start here - with the latest from our TOO HOT page...<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Too_Hot<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''We are living through Earth’s hottest month on record, scientists say'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/07/20/earth-hottest-month-july-climate/<br /> <br /> ''It’s not just a record-hot day or two, unprecedented heat waves or abnormally warm ocean waters: All indications are that this will be the hottest single month on Earth on record, and possibly in more than 100,000 years.<br /> Every day this month has set records for average global annual temperatures, and already, 17 days in July have been hotter than any others in more than 40 years of global observations, climate scientists said.''<br /> <br /> ''Not even three weeks into the month, scientists’ declarations of an already assured monthly global record serve to punctuate what has been an onslaught of recent weather extremes.''<br /> <br /> <br /> Then there's this -- hotter... <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''The next United Nations international conference on climate change, COP28, will be held in Expo City, Dubai''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''The President-Designate of the conference will be Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, the CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC).''<br /> <br /> ''The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company or ADNOC is the state-owned oil company of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).''<br /> <br /> ''It is the world's 12th largest oil company by production. As of 2021, the company has an oil production capacity exceeding 4 million bpd with plans to increase to 5 million bpd by 2030. It is the United Arab Emirate's largest oil company.''<br /> <br /> ''As of November 2019, the UAE holds the sixth-largest proven reserves of oil in the world at 105 billion barrels.[14] Most of these reserves are located in Abu Dhabi.''<br /> <br /> ''ADNOC is one of the world's largest energy companies measured by both reserves and production. ADNOC has 16 subsidiary companies in upstream, midstream, and downstream stages of production. ADNOC develops both onshore and offshore gas fields. The company operates two oil refineries, Ruwais Refinery and Umm Al Nar. ADNOC exports natural gas in the form of liquefied natural gas (LNG) in addition to producing supplies for local electricity and water utilities, to other domestic industries including petrochemicals plants, and for re-injection into reservoirs.<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Dhabi_National_Oil_Company<br /> <br /> <br /> and then there's this ominous bit of news from an expert on climate (and a &quot;former head of the UN climate body&quot;)...<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''World will miss 1.5C warming limit'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Professor Sir Bob Watson, former head of the UN climate body, told the BBC's Today programme he was &quot;pessimistic&quot;.''<br /> <br /> ''His warning comes amidst a summer of extreme heat for Europe, China and the US...''<br /> <br /> ''In the interview aired on Thursday he said: &quot;I think most people fear that if we give up on the 1.5 [Celsius limit] which I do not believe we will achieve, in fact I'm very pessimistic about achieving even 2C, that if we allow the target to become looser and looser, higher and higher, governments will do even less in the future.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''Based on current government commitments to cutting greenhouse gas emissions, Climate Action Tracker predicts that global temperatures will rise to 2.7C.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66256101<br /> <br /> <br /> and to 'sum up' (dire global warming science, climate change news [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr '''we've been waving-as-a-warning since 1977-78)''']...<br /> <br /> Let's visit an old friend and early 2000's advisor to our Global/GreenPolicy work -- Bill McKibben<br /> <br /> It's not a conspiracy we're talking 'bout, it's right out in the open...<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Blackrock Bails on its Climate-related Pledges'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''So, in case you missed it, here’s the biggest thing that happened in the world last week: while our planet was experiencing its hottest month of all time, the earth’s biggest pile of cash (the asset manager Blackrock, with $8.59 trillion dollars under management) named to its board of directors the CEO of the world’s largest oil company, Saudi Aramco, which has produced more carbon emissions than any firm on earth.'' ...<br /> <br /> ''... think of what it means. It is the ultimate signal that the world’s financial community has decided to essentially give up on even the modest commitments they made a couple of years ago in Glasgow [https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/cop26 '''(at the international climate conference/COP26''')], where they said they would work to decarbonize their portfolios.'' <br /> <br /> ''Two things have happened since they made those big pledges (Blackrock’s Larry Fink said at the time, “we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance” to deal with the climate crisis). First, the war in Ukraine produced huge profits for the oil industry, as their old pal Vladimir Putin (who once hung a medal around the neck of Exxon’s CEO) pushed the price of petroleum into the stratosphere. And second, the oil industry’s bought-and-paid-for politicians in red-state America wrote nasty letters about “ESG investing” and threatened to break ties with the Wall Street firms that were “going woke.” Those two developments were more than enough to persuade barons like Fink to walk back their professed concern with a planet on fire. He is clearly a go-along get-along guy, and where we’re going is—well, if not hell then someplace with a similar temperature.''<br /> <br /> <br /> Stop -- and peruse McKibben's reflection and further explanation for this turn...<br /> <br /> <br /> ''BlackRock made a name for itself, and many conservative enemies, in recent years by publicly embracing environmental, social and corporate governance considerations — known as E.S.G. — in its decisions, and arguing that other companies should do the same.''<br /> <br /> ''So the investment giant’s decision on Monday to name Amin Nasser, the C.E.O. of Saudi Arabia’s oil company Aramco, to its board feels like a major reversal, despite its claims that the move doesn’t contradict its E.S.G. commitments.''<br /> <br /> ''Nasser leads the world’s biggest oil producer, with Aramco having produced 13.6 million barrels of oil equivalent per day last year. He will succeed Bader Alsaad, the director general of the Arab Fund for Economic &amp; Social Development, on BlackRock’s board.''<br /> <br /> <br /> Yes, it's a wild, wild world out there. <br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/18/business/dealbook/blackrock-aramco-nasser-board.html<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎 <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Record tumble - climate change.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Via the United Kingdom | British Broadcasting'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''A series of climate records on temperature, ocean heat, and Antarctic sea ice have alarmed some scientists who say their speed and timing is unprecedented.''<br /> <br /> ''Dangerous heatwaves in Europe could break further records, the UN says.''<br /> <br /> ''It is hard to immediately link these events to climate change because weather - and oceans - are so complex.''<br /> <br /> ''Studies are under way, but scientists already fear some worst-case scenarios are unfolding.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;I'm not aware of a similar period when all parts of the climate system were in record-breaking or abnormal territory,&quot; Thomas Smith, an environmental geographer at London School of Economics, says.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;The Earth is in uncharted territory&quot; now due to global warming from burning fossil fuels, as well as heat from the first El Niño - a warming natural weather system - since 2018, says Imperial College London climate science lecturer Dr Paulo Ceppi...''<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66229065<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎 <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''June 2023'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Time for an exercise in critical thinking skills. Time to examine the US Supreme Court and its recent decisions subsequent to the appointment and confirmation of three new 'lifetime' SCOTUS judges. Let's look at the use of a new theory that has now become a tool for interpreting the legislative intent of the US Congress.<br /> <br /> First, read this -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_questions_doctrine<br /> <br /> Then 'compare and contrast' the consequences of three recent 'major question' decisions as determined by opinions and votes of the three new judges.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''May 2023'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Bi-Partisanship in Congress with Earth Science Legislation Passed'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via the Washington Post<br /> <br /> ''The House on Tuesday (May 9) passed two bipartisan bills aimed at bolstering the federal government's research on climate modeling and climate impacts.''<br /> <br /> ''The Coastal Communities Ocean Acidification Act, which passed by a vote of 351-58, calls on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to study how coastal communities can best address ocean acidification, which is caused by warming ocean temperatures fueled by climate change. It was introduced by Reps. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) and Michael Waltz (R-Fla.), whose states are home to robust fishing industries. The bill would also ensure that NOAA collaborates with historically underserved and rural communities that are already facing the challenges that come with changing oceans.''<br /> <br /> ''The House also passed the Advanced Weather Model Computing Development Act by a vote of 356-50. The legislation, which passed the House Science, Space and Technology Committee in March and was introduced by Rep. Max L. Miller (R-Ohio), would direct the Energy Department and NOAA to conduct joint research on how to improve the nation’s weather and climate forecasting system. It calls for developing new modeling or simulation methods via artificial intelligence and increasing data sharing between federal agencies and universities. ''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''April 2023'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> The recent IPCC report, the 6th consensus, synthesis, assessment of climate change disruption was an exercise not just of science but of inside politics in action. Varied lobbying industries with influence, e.g. the meat industry continue to punch, as the saying goes, 'above their weight'. While the global scientific community meets to do climate science, the lobbyists act as if they are at a trade show and they're selling products and services with a public relations flair. 'Business-as-usual' as 'pay-to-play' politics is often called... <br /> <br /> Let's take a look. First, here are reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. <br /> <br /> * https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-cycle/<br /> <br /> * https://www.ipcc.ch/ar6-syr/<br /> <br /> * https://www.ipcc.ch/about/<br /> <br /> <br /> Here is how one news organization, Quartz qz., revealed the 'success' of meat industry influencers to have their way. The big players do throw their weight around... <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Sins of Omission'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :''The meat industry blocked the IPCC’s attempt to recommend a plant-based diet''<br /> <br /> * https://qz.com/ipcc-report-on-climate-change-meat-industry-1850261179<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''A leaked draft revealed how the meat industry is obstructing efforts to curb climate change'''''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''It’s no secret that climate change discourse is shrouded in obfuscation, disinformation, greenwashing and lies, both outright and of omission. But a recent leak of a draft of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released on March 20 has been particularly enlightening when it comes to just how much how delegations negotiate, watered down, and delete scientists’ findings.''<br /> <br /> ''Micheal Thomas, who writes the climate newsletter Distilled, outlined the shift in wording driven by Brazil and Argentina, countries with large and influential beef industries. As Thomas points out, the IPCC report’s authors initially recommended a shift to plant-based diets, stating that “plant-based diets can reduce GHG emissions by up to 50% compared to the average emission-intensive Western diet,” according to a draft leaked by Scientist Rebellion.''<br /> <br /> ''In the published report, the line was changed to “balanced, sustainable healthy diets acknowledging nutritional needs,” skirting a direct mention of beef and dairy, what a sustainable diet actually looks like, or any reference to the Western and largely wealthy countries that should most urgently start eating less meat.''<br /> <br /> ''While Monday’s (March 20th) IPCC report was the result of synthesizing years of research, Brazil and Argentina have been diligently pushing to delete references to “plant-based diets,” meat as a “high-carbon” food, and “Meatless Mondays” for years, according to a previous draft leaked in 2021 and analyzed by Unearthed, Greenpeace’s investigative outlet.''<br /> <br /> ''Climate action within the meat and dairy industries faces substantial economic and political headwinds. The global beef industry was estimated at about $400 billion in 2022, and Brazil and Argentina both have long-standing, powerful beef lobbies who have held positions in government and influenced important climate policy...''<br /> <br /> <br /> And so the beat goes on... money talks. PR is at work... politics and earth-related realities are everyday struggles in an arena of facts -- and spin. <br /> <br /> Call the spin &quot;obfuscation, disinformation, greenwashing and lies&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> More on the 'spin' industry here:<br /> <br /> '''[[Disinformation - Online - Dangerous]]'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Disinformation_-_Online_-_Dangerous<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Fact_Checking<br /> <br /> * https://reporterslab.org/fact-checkers-extend-their-global-reach-with-391-outlets-but-growth-has-slowed/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Nations Agree on Language for Historic Treaty to Protect Ocean Life'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''The United Nations agreement is a significant step toward protecting biodiversity under growing threat from climate change, overfishing and seabed mining''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:High Seas Treaty agreement - March 4 2023.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> March 4, 2023<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/04/climate/united-nations-treaty-oceans-biodiversity.html<br /> <br /> * https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/03/1134157<br /> <br /> <br /> ''After two decades of planning and talks that culminated in a grueling race over the past few days in New York, a significant majority of nations agreed on language for a historic United Nations treaty that would protect ocean biodiversity.''<br /> <br /> ''As marine life faces threats from climate change, overfishing, the possibility of seabed mining and other dangers, the treaty would make it possible to create marine-protected areas and enact other conservation measures on the “high seas,” the immense expanse of ocean covering almost half the world.''<br /> <br /> ''“Today the world came together to protect the ocean for the benefit of our children and grandchildren,” said Monica Medina, an assistant secretary of state. “We leave here with the ability to create protected areas in the high seas and achieve the ambitious goal of conserving 30 percent of the ocean by 2030.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Nations Agree on Language for Historic Treaty to Protect Ocean Life'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: This is historic and a foundation of legal agreement to build on... The text of the High Seas agreement comes after decades of geopolitical negotiating over ocean resources, rights and responsibilities of nations to the protection of oceans and ocean life, and now moves on to the realities of legal enforcement of promises/pledges that have now been memorialized<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Nations agree on ‘world-changing’ deal to protect ocean life'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''More than 190 countries have reached a landmark deal for protecting the biodiversity of the world’s oceans, agreeing for the first time on a common framework for establishing new protected areas in international waters.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/03/05/un-ocean-treaty-high-seas/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Via the Associated Press<br /> <br /> Nichola Clark: “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to protect the oceans — a major win for biodiversity.”<br /> <br /> * https://apnews.com/article/un-oceans-biodiversity-treaty-0b024fa07e8c1947236d8b8491ebf92c<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The treaty will create a new body to manage conservation of ocean life and establish marine protected areas in the high seas. Clark said that’s critical to achieve the U.N. Biodiversity Conference’s recent pledge to protect 30% of the planet’s waters, as well as its land, for conservation.''<br /> <br /> ''Treaty negotiations initially were anticipated to conclude Friday (March 3), but stretched through the night and deep into Saturday. The crafting of the treaty, which at times looked in jeopardy, represents “a historic and overwhelming success for international marine protection,” said Steffi Lemke, Germany’s environment minister.''<br /> <br /> <br /> (Note from GreenPolicy360: Lemke is a member of the German Green Party and one of the co-founders of the Green Party in the GDR in 1989... see more about the Greens, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen who hold a number of top positions in the current German government -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_90/The_Greens)<br /> <br /> <br /> ''“For the first time, we are getting a binding agreement for the high seas, which until now have hardly been protected,” Lemke said. “Comprehensive protection of endangered species and habitats is now finally possible on more than 40% of the Earth’s surface.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The question now is how well the ambitious treaty will be implemented.''<br /> <br /> ''Formal adoption also remains outstanding, with numerous conservationists and environmental groups vowing to watch closely.''<br /> <br /> ''The high seas have long suffered exploitation due to commercial fishing and mining, as well as pollution from chemicals and plastics. The new agreement is about “acknowledging that the ocean is not a limitless resource, and it requires global cooperation to use the ocean sustainably...”''<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/05/high-seas-treaty-agreement-to-protect-international-waters-finally-reached-at-un<br /> <br /> * https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-64839763<br /> <br /> <br /> Via ICUN.org<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''International Union for Conservation of Nature'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''We congratulate the President of the Intergovernmental Conference on Marine Biodiversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction, the secretariat of the UN, and all the state delegates for their efforts.''<br /> <br /> ''“The High Seas Treaty opens the path for humankind to finally provide protection to marine life across vast swathes of the ocean. Its adoption will close a significant gap in international law and offer a framework for governments to work together to protect global ocean heath, climate resilience, and the socioeconomic wellbeing and food security of billions of people. We stand ready to support its implementation,” says IUCN Director General, Dr Bruno Oberle.''<br /> <br /> ''Although more ambitious measures will be needed, this legally-binding agreement marks an important step towards protecting the two-thirds of the ocean that lies beyond national jurisdiction.''<br /> <br /> ''IUCN particularly applauds the alignment of the Treaty with other international commitments including the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, and the creation of a special fund to finance the rehabilitation and ecological restoration of marine biodiversity.''<br /> <br /> ''IUCN and its Members have been advocating for such an agreement for two decades and have been providing scientific and legal advice to negotiators since the start of the formal negotiations (in 2018), in particular on provisions concerning area-based management tools, especially marine protected areas. Commitments must now be implemented in ways that help address climate change and the many threats to marine ecosystems, and guarantee the critical benefits marine ecosystems provide to people.''<br /> <br /> ''IUCN is calling for adoption and ratification to be fast-tracked, to bring the High Seas Treaty into force. The Union is offering its continued support to Parties and stakeholders to lay the foundation for a rapid, effective, and equitable implementation.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''GreenPolicy360: Environmental Law Takes Precedent-Setting Legal Step after Decades of Negotiations'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Future generations will look back this High Seas Treaty and ask why it took so long <br /> <br /> We ask it's time 'to get to work' with enforcement, there is no time for delay<br /> <br /> <br /> The agreement comes 41 years after Ambassador Tommy Koh served as President of the Third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea (known as resolution 2340 (XXII) of 18 December 1967), which led to the United Nations Convention on the Laws of the Sea and now another Singapore Ambassador, Rena Lee, has presided over successful negotiations on the UN high seas treaty.<br /> <br /> <br /> Here are links to the legal documents: '''''Intergovernmental conference on an international legally binding instrument under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction'''''<br /> <br /> '''''Fifth session'''''<br /> <br /> ''New York, 20 February – 3 March 2023''<br /> <br /> ''Further refreshed draft text of an agreement under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction''<br /> <br /> * https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/LTD/N23/057/74/PDF/N2305774.pdf?OpenElement<br /> <br /> * https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N22/467/94/PDF/N2246794.pdf?OpenElement<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''''UN Secretary General António Guterres said on the landmark treaty:'''''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;Our ocean has been under pressure for decades. We can no longer ignore the ocean emergency. In adopting a robust and ambitious agreement at this meeting, you can take an important step forward in countering these destructive trends and advancing ocean health for generations to come. This treaty can ensure the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of over two-thirds of our life-sustaining ocean space.&quot;''<br /> <br /> '''''UN Ambassador for the Oceans and Law of the Sea Issues Rena Lee said:''''' <br /> <br /> ''&quot;Yesterday I mentioned the way forward, we have finish the text of the agreement. We will run through the text for technical edits. The text will then be translated into all six language versions and time to be specified. We will then formally adopt the text in all six official languages of the United Nations.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.jurist.org/news/2023/03/un-high-seas-treaty-agreed-to-by-member-states-to-protect-vast-swathes-of-planets-oceans/<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/nations-secure-un-global-high-seas-biodiversity-pact-2023-03-05/<br /> <br /> * https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/about/news-room/press-releases-and-statements/2023/03/05/pew-welcomes-completion-of-high-seas-treaty<br /> <br /> * https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/04/world/un-oceans-treaty-biodiversity-climate-intl/index.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/what-are-the-high-seas-a-look-at-the-historic-un-ocean-treaty-and-why-it-matters<br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.org/en-us/newsroom/new-high-seas-treaty/<br /> <br /> * https://phys.org/news/2023-03-states-historic-high-seas.html<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.highseasalliance.org/2021/07/21/the-high-seas-treaty-for-life-beyond-the-law/ '''Via the High Seas Alliance''']<br /> <br /> ''There are five main elements to the High Seas Treaty:''<br /> <br /> ''''''Marine Protected Areas (MPAs)'''''<br /> <br /> ''High seas ecosystems, critical to the continuation of life in the ocean, are conserved by the establishment of fully protected, well-managed networks of marine protected areas.<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs)'''''<br /> <br /> ''Any proposed activity on the high seas that may negatively affect marine life is prematurely evaluated by scientists and relevant stakeholders.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Access &amp; Benefit Sharing of Marine Genetic Resources'''''<br /> <br /> ''Developing nations have access to, and are able to benefit from, biological genetic materials discovered on the high seas.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Capacity-Building &amp; Marine Technology Transfer'''''<br /> <br /> ''Developing nations have the capacity, technology, and educational/research opportunities necessary to participate in deep sea science.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Cross-cutting Issues'''''<br /> <br /> ''These are issues that affect a number of elements and are integrated throughout the new agreement.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''ChatGPT talks of 'fighting climate denialism'<br /> <br /> AI/Artificial Intelligence at work here, so the attached is uncredited<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:ChatGPT talks of fighting climate denialism.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;2022&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''December 2022''' &lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Generation Green]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Going Green&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :* https://twitter.com/wonderofscience/status/1603725165375823872<br /> <br /> [[File:Aurora Green 2022.png|link=https://twitter.com/wonderofscience/status/1603725165375823872]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''November 2022''' &lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Another Global Climate Conference, 27th Version'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via Strategic Demands (GreenPolicy360 associate @StrategicDemands.com)<br /> <br /> November 13, 2022<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/another-global-climate-conference-27th-version/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Time Nov 10 2022 COP27.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Climate Summit / COP27 Updates - November 11, 2022'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via NY Times Reporters/Live - On Location<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/11/11/climate/cop27-climate-summit<br /> <br /> * https://time.com/6232753/bad-news-for-the-planet-as-global-carbon-emissions-continue-to-increase/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Global climate conferences and GHG increases.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Time for Planet Citizen Action and a &quot;CEOS&quot;, a Committee on Earth Observation Satellites'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 welcomes the arrival of a global science mission, a &quot;Global Stocktake&quot;, a collection of earth science data to be made available to the community of nations, to planet citizen activists and scientists, educational institutions, non-profits, NGOs, young and old to become tools for legal enforcement of national climate plans &amp; pledges.<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Global Stocktake, the first GST.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Global_Stocktake,_the_first_GST.jpg&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''See GreenPolicy 2021 initiative for Legally Enforcing National Climate Plans'''<br /> <br /> Visit GreenPolicy360's &quot;Climate Plans Enforcement&quot; (Project-in-Dev 2021-2022)<br /> : &quot;Turning National Climate Pledges &amp; Promises into Reality&quot;<br /> <br /> :* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Plans_Enforcement_-_Resources<br /> <br /> :* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Methods_to_enforce_climate_pledges-NDCs_-_Dec_2021.png<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> As the nations of the world send their delegations to the 27th global conference on climate change, COP27, Conference of the Parties gathering in Egypt, and activists/citizens and planet citizens/NGOs and non-profit organizations/public interest groups/educational institutions/media and academics prepare, we at GreenPolicy360 renew our Initiative to 'Turn National Climate Plan Promises &amp; Pledges into Reality'. <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 focuses on using the tools of science and the law, the sharing of 'green best practices' using databases and online networking, to accelerate a full-range of problem identification and effective solutions. <br /> <br /> The broader GreenPolicy360 goal is to work within all political systems, all nations and communities. GreenPolicy360 sees a broad-based approach to problem solving employing the latest technologies and deep funding/financing to empower public and private climate-related and clean energy solutions. We believe a multi-thread approach that is adaptable locally/nationally/culturally will act, in effect, as a [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_New_Deal '''Global Green New Deal''')], providing a critically needed and vital toolkit for [http://www.planetcitizens.org Planet Citizens].<br /> <br /> Now is the time for [http://www.planetcitizen.org '''Planet Citizen'''] climate action.<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Planet Citizen Action]]'''<br /> <br /> '''[[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]'''<br /> <br /> '''[[Climate Problems, Climate Solutions]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎 <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360's Campaign to 'Turn National Climate Promises &amp; Pledges into Reality' '''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Our 2021 Climate Plans Enforcement Initiative continues as the 2022 Global Climate Conference approaches, November's Conference of the Parties (COP27)<br /> <br /> :: Drawing from the database of Earth Science resulting from decades of space-based missions designed to provide us with actionable 'Earth-system and Climate-related data'<br /> <br /> ::: Measuring and Monitoring to better manage Earth's Living, Dynamic and Changing Systems, Local, National and Global<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Methods_to_enforce_climate_pledges-NDCs_-_Dec_2021.png ''Methods to Enforce Climate Plan Pledges'']<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Plans_Enforcement_-_Resources ''GreenPolicy360: Climate Plans Enforcement Initiative'']<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:INDC ''Pressuring Nations to Step Up, Cooperate, and Act Now'']<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Environmental_Laws ''Environmental Laws, Regs, Rules... Lawsuits &amp; Legal Actions'']<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Glasgow_Climate_Summit_-_Pledges,_Promises,_Declarations_-_What%27s_Next_Up ''Glasgow (2021) &amp; Paris (2015) Summits: Int'l Climate Plan Pledges &amp; Promises (INDCs-NDCs)'']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth Observing System - fleet of satellites.png]]<br /> <br /> &quot;Earth Observing System&quot;: Decades of Earth Science/Climate Science Data Accessible for Planet Citizen Action<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:EarthRightNow Earth Science satellite fleet circa 2015 m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Earth_Observing_System_-_fleet_of_satellites.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Research_from_Space<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Methane hot spots we're coming to find you, identify you, act to stop you and enforce climate laws''' <br /> <br /> '''&quot;Super emitters&quot;, we have a message for you, you can't hide....'''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''* https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/methane-super-emitters-mapped-by-nasa-s-new-earth-space-mission'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:NASA_has_a_new_mission..._against_Methane.png '''Tracking Methane Emissions by Using Satellite Imaging''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:NASA has a new mission... against Methane.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''October 2022''' &lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;After Hurricane Ian, New Methods of Earth Science to Map Damage and Respond to Disaster and Future Risks -- #DRR&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://theconversation.com/new-satellite-mapping-with-ai-can-quickly-pinpoint-hurricane-damage-across-an-entire-state-to-spot-where-people-may-be-trapped-192078<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:E9731160-8940-4336-88FC-A73490CF3E63.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''September 2022''' &lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Climate News]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''There are 'no easy fixes' in Florida. But could Hurricane Ian's havoc bring a call for better planning?'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via USA Today<br /> <br /> ''Researchers who study flooding, development and climate change were horrified by the emerging images but not surprised. For years, they have warned that sprawling development in Florida and other coastal states wasn't sustainable, especially with the warming climate supercharging hurricane rainfall.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;This is kind of what we had expected for days in advance, and it's still heartbreaking to see so many people stranded,&quot; said Kevin Reed, associate professor in atmospheric science at Stony Brook University...''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;None of this is surprising,&quot; said Linda Shi, an assistant professor in Cornell University's city and regional planning department. &quot;How much does it take for us to want to make a change? Our policies and our choices have led us to this point.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''Reed and colleagues recently published a study looking at all hurricanes during the 2020 season and concluded climate change was adding up to 10% more rain to today's hurricanes. On Thursday, they used the same models to compare Ian's rainfall and concluded it was at least 10% higher than it would have been without the warming climate.'' <br /> <br /> ''&quot;This is one of the clearest indicators of how climate change is impacting storms,&quot; Reed said. It may not seem like a lot, but 2 inches on top of an already large amount of rainfall makes an enormous impact.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> '''''What can Florida learn from Hurricane Ian?'''''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;Mother Nature keeps telling us homes don't belong where we built them, yet we continue to build homes where they don't belong.&quot;'' <br /> <br /> ''&quot;We can’t stop cyclone events or stop the rain from falling, but we can build communities that are better able to withstand these events,” says John Dickson, president of the national Aon Edge Insurance Company. &quot;We need to think about more resilient structure, and we need to make a plan to handle the water and move it away from our people and our families and our property.''<br /> <br /> ''Whether a storm water system is designed for rain that could occur once every 25 years or a rainfall event every 100 years, the system probably would be overwhelmed with rain like Ian's, said Chad Berginnis, executive director for the Association of State Floodplain Managers.''<br /> <br /> ''The state may have to accept the fact that developers will have to build at higher elevations.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ···················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Re: Florida's Flood and Property Insurance Crisis'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — ''As hurricane season approaches, it’s not an understatement to say that water is heading to Florida. However, in addition to the rain and storms coming to the Sunshine State, residents are also likely to see higher flood insurance costs in 2022.''<br /> <br /> Florida has 8,436 miles (13,576 km) of coastline, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the second highest number of shore miles in the U.S. by distance.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ~ The terms “coastline” and “shoreline” are often used interchangeably, but they have different meanings. The coastline of a place is defined as the boundary between the coast and the shore. In other words, a coastline is a big-picture view of the approximate line between the land and the sea. A shoreline is an ever-changing line that marks the specific place where the water and shore meet...<br /> <br /> <br /> TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — ''Halloween isn’t the only scary thing coming up in October for Florida residents. More immediately, the state is going to see rate hikes on flood insurance as the Federal Emergency Management Agency implements a new risk rating system on Oct. 1.''<br /> <br /> ''Flood insurance is a yearly cost to homeowners who use it, and it covers homes in danger of water damage, particularly during storms. For Florida, that’s all year but particularly in hurricane season.''<br /> <br /> Starting on Oct. 1, FEMA is implementing a program update it calls Risk Rating 2.0, which will change the way that flood insurance rates are calculated and charged and could lead to price increases for thousands of homeowners with waterfront properties. The changes coming through the system update are part of FEMA’s 2018-2022 Strategic Plan.''<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://coast.noaa.gov/states/florida.html <br /> <br /> * https://www.wfla.com/news/florida/88-of-florida-homeowners-to-see-higher-flood-insurance-rates/<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Living_coastline<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Ian threatens Florida's already unstable insurance market'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/ian-threatens-floridas-unstable-insurance-market-90658469<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Six Florida property insurance companies were declared insolvent this year, and others are canceling or not renewing policies''''' <br /> <br /> * https://www.axios.com/local/miami/2022/10/03/florida-property-insurance-crisis-litigation<br /> <br /> <br /> ··············<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;More Climate Data:&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''A new federal summary of the globe's climate ... 2021 &quot;State of the Climate&quot; report released Wednesday (Sept. 28).''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;The data presented in this report are clear... compelling scientific evidence that climate change has global impacts and shows no sign of slowing,” said Rick Spinrad, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The report is prepared by NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information, with contributions from scientists around the world.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ~ The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's [https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/ '''6th IPCC'''] report is a &quot;dire warning about the consequences of inaction&quot; on climate change.<br /> <br /> ~ It's not just ecosystems and weather being affected by warming: People are suffering and dying, experts say.<br /> <br /> ~ In North America, human life, safety and livelihood will be at risk from sea-level rise, severe storms and hurricanes, especially in coastal areas.<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/09/30/hurricane-ian-flooded-florida-climate-change/8125673001/<br /> <br /> * https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2022/09/01/report-weather-extremes-climate-change-no-slowing/7949934001/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ·····················<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''August'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''August 24, 2022'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Democrats Designed the Climate Law to Be a Game Changer'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via the NY Times | 08/22/2022<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/22/climate/epa-supreme-court-pollution.html<br /> <br /> <br /> ················································<br /> <br /> <br /> Via E&amp;E News | CLIMATEWIRE <br /> <br /> 08/24/2022 <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''CO2 as a Pollutant'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''''Climate legislation signed into law this month by President Joe Biden bolsters EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases'''''<br /> <br /> '''''In a first, climate law defines CO2 as air pollutant'''''<br /> <br /> ''In enacting a sweeping climate measure, analysts said Biden and congressional Democrats signaled a desire for EPA to tackle greenhouse gas emissions. Firming up EPA’s legal footing also is a boost for an agency that has faced court challenges from conservatives who question EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. That authority rests on '''Massachusetts v. EPA''', a 2007 Supreme Court decision that found the agency is required to regulate CO2 as a pollutant dangerous to public health.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ····························<br /> <br /> <br /> WEEKLY PLANET<br /> <br /> 08/24/2022 / Via The Atlantic<br /> <br /> by Robinson Meyer <br /> <br /> ''While it’s true that [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act_of_2022 the IRA] itself consists almost only of carrots, that is not true of the broader structure of American climate law. There is, in fact, a big “stick” for tackling carbon pollution already on the books in the United States, as well as an agency tasked with wielding that stick. I’m talking about the Clean Air Act and the EPA. And the IRA, by design, strengthens the government’s ability to wield that stick.''<br /> <br /> ''It does this in at least two ways. The first is that the IRA confirms that carbon dioxide is a type of air pollution covered by the Clean Air Act, as initially reported by The New York Times earlier this week.''<br /> <br /> ''This has broader consequences than it might seem. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts v. EPA that carbon dioxide counted as an air pollutant, and that, if the EPA decided that CO2 harmed human health and the environment, it could regulate CO2 under the Clean Air Act. That ruling—and the EPA’s official determination, a few years later, that CO2 is dangerous—has anchored the agency’s climate regulations on cars and trucks, and its proposed rules for the power grid.''<br /> <br /> ''But then in June, the Court circumscribed some of the EPA’s authority over the power grid. Conservative justices have harped on the fact that Congress has never clearly delegated the power to regulate greenhouse gases to the EPA.''<br /> <br /> ''Now it has. The IRA repeatedly defines greenhouse gas as a form of air pollution. It amends several sections of the Clean Air Act to define “greenhouse gas” as encompassing “the air pollutants carbon dioxide, hydrofluorocarbons, methane, nitrous oxide, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride.” In another section, it grants money under the Clean Air Act for any project that “reduces or avoids greenhouse gas emissions and other forms of air pollution.”''<br /> <br /> ''Congress has now clearly spoken: Carbon dioxide is a form of air pollution. And though this will not undo this year’s ruling, it buttresses the EPA’s underlying legal authority to regulate climate pollution.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ············································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''The EPA Just Quietly Got Stronger'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/the-epa-just-quietly-got-stronger/ar-AA112B16<br /> <br /> <br /> ·················································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_greenhouse_gases_under_the_Clean_Air_Act More on CO2 and Greenhouse Gases as Pollutants to be Regulated under Law]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ··················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Your GreenPolicy360 Founder/Siterunner's thoughts:'''<br /> <br /> To the Supreme Court: Here is the exacting and specific language about CO2 and air 'pollutants'<br /> <br /> Over the years, and on our GreenPolicy360 site, I have shared my knowledge of the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air Act, the first era of environmental protection legislation and the first National Climate Act. My long time friend Congressman George E Brown, a principal drafter of enabling legislation during the 1970s/80s/90s, and activist member and a chair of the House of Representative oversight committee of science, technology, and earth science/atmosphereic science space programs, was a mover and shaker who shared with me many of his thoughts and initiatives. Over the years, until his passing in 1999, I learned about the legislation and *the intent* of the legislation that he and his colleagues were drafting. His/their language, for example, the definitions of pollutants, was intended to be broad and expansive. The definition of air pollution in the Clean Air Act, for example, addressed health and safety, and protection of life ... They knew that the science of the day would become more empirically defined as atmospheric and earth science they were setting in motion w NASA/NOAA and USGS missions was supported, funded, launched and reported. The empirical data, as they planned, was collected and analyzed over the years and decades and the scientific case became clearer and clearer. CO2 and other greenhouse gases were impacting air quality and atmospheric disruption was forcing climate change. The U.S. Supreme Court, unfortunately for years, was unable to accept the intent and language of the legislators on this critically important work. Recently, with the '''Massachusetts v. EPA''' 2007 Supreme Court decision and now with the signing of clarifying 2022 legislative language, the climate action work will gather scope and speed at the federal agencies, especially at the EPA.<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:US_Public_Law_95-367.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Environmental_Laws<br /> <br /> <br /> When Congressman Brown drafted originating legislation establishing a '''national climate change research program''' via the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:US_Public_Law_95-367.png National Climate Program Act of 1978], the scientific community and nation were just beginning to awaken to a new national security threat. I remember his concern, our concern. He was trained as a scientist, an engineer, with an ability to see facts and data sets in a way others could not. <br /> <br /> Representative Brown was out in front of &quot;Big Science&quot;. In his decades on the House Science, Space &amp; Technology Committee, he worked to expand the reach of science. He knew that [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:You_can_manage_only_what_you_can_measure_Dr_David_Crisp,_OCO-2,_June_2014_m.jpg good data enabled good policy decisions]. He pressed for first-generation earth science satellites and ongoing earth monitoring missions and data sharing.<br /> <br /> Among his many initiatives, George Brown was a key figure in proposing, establishing, and then saving the [https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/ Landsat program] and its [http://www.nytimes.com/1989/03/02/us/last-civilian-photography-satellites-to-shut-down.html unique 'open-access' database of Earth Science imaging] when President Reagan attempted to shut Landsat down. Landsat was a model for all the following [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Research_from_Space earth science research missions from space] and is now moving into its fifth decade with [http://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/?p=10391 Landsat 9.] <br /> <br /> <br /> Rep. George E. Brown, an activist member and for many years chair of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology<br /> <br /> * https://www.congress.gov/member/george-brown/B000918 (1963-1999)<br /> <br /> * https://science.house.gov/<br /> <br /> * https://science.house.gov/about/history-and-jurisdiction<br /> <br /> <br /> At the beginning of the 'space race', the House Committee on Science and Aeronautics was created by the 85th Congress in 1957 to oversee the newly-created National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The Science and Aeronautics Committee was the first committee since 1892 to be established for an entirely new area of jurisdiction. The committee’s jurisdiction over the years has expanded to include most civilian non-medical scientific research throughout the government, including National space policy, Earth remote sensing policy; Space commercialization, including commercial space activities relating to the Department of Transportation and the Department of Commerce, the National Science Foundation, the Energy Department, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), EPA, NOAA and the Department of Homeland Security. (Informally known as the Science committee, the committee's name was change to the &quot;Committee on Science and Technology&quot; in 1974. At that time, the Committee’s jurisdiction was expanded to include legislation related to energy, the environment, the atmosphere, civil aviation research and development, and the National Weather Service. The Committee on Science and Technology was also given a &quot;special oversight&quot; function providing for exclusive responsibility among all Congressional Standing Committees to review and study, on a continuing basis, all laws, programs and government activities involving Federal non-military research and development. In its early years, the Committee was an important partner in the Apollo Program that led to a man landing on the moon and strengthening science education and scientific research. After the Committee’s role expanded, the Committee has played an important role in much of the legislation Congress has considered dealing with domestic and international science, technology, standards, and competitiveness. In the 112th Congress, Chairman Hall changed the Committee's name to the &quot;Committee on Science, Space and Technology.&quot;<br /> <br /> ''Via Wikipedia / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Brown_Jr.''<br /> <br /> ''Brown was known as a champion for science. He left behind a deep and expansive legacy that has shaped science and science policy in America. Among some of his many accomplishments during his service on the House Science Committee:''<br /> <br /> • ''Established the first federal climate change research program in the [https://www.congress.gov/bill/95th-congress/house-bill/06669 Federal Climate Program Act of 1978]''<br /> <br /> • ''Established the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Science_and_Technology_Policy Office of Science and Technology Policy]''<br /> <br /> • ''Established the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Environmental_Protection_Agency Environmental Protection Agency]''<br /> <br /> • ''Established the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessment Office of Technology Assessment]''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> • http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_movement<br /> <br /> • [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/Can_our_environment_be_saved_George_Brown-Omnibus_Environmental_Bill_1969.pdf George Brown on the Omnibus Environmental Bill, 1969] <br /> <br /> • https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Ethics_and_Climate_Change<br /> <br /> • [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Env_policy_laws_US_'the_beginning'_of_env_era.jpg @GreenPolicy360, 'The beginning of the modern environmental era']<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Env policy laws US 'the beginning' of env era.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Sweeping climate bill pushes American energy to go green'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://apnews.com/article/technology-science-congress-climate-and-environment-f084d23d61ebb068068d4aa92c82fdbb<br /> <br /> Associated Press / August 2022 / Seth Borenstein<br /> <br /> <br /> ''WASHINGTON (AP) — After decades of inaction in the face of escalating natural disasters and sustained global warming, Congress hopes to make clean energy so cheap in all aspects of life that it’s nearly irresistible. The House is poised to pass a transformative bill Friday that would provide the most spending to fight climate change by any one nation ever in a single push...''<br /> <br /> ''The crux of the long-delayed bill, singularly pushed by Democrats in a closely divided Congress, is to use incentives to spur investors to accelerate the expansion of clean energy such as wind and solar power, speeding the transition away from the oil, coal and gas that largely cause climate change.''<br /> <br /> ''The United States has put the most heat-trapping gases into the air, burning more inexpensive dirty fuels than any other country. But the nearly $375 billion in climate incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act are designed to make the already plummeting costs of renewable energy substantially lower at home, on the highways and in the factory. Together these could help shrink U.S. carbon emissions by about two-fifths by 2030 and should chop emissions from electricity by as much as 80%.'' <br /> <br /> ''“This legislation is a true game-changer. It will create jobs, lower costs, increase U.S. competitiveness, reduce air pollution,” said former Vice President Al Gore, who held his first global warming hearing 40 years ago. “The momentum that will come out of this legislation, cannot be underestimated.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The U.S. action could spur other nations to do more — especially China and India, the two largest carbon emitters along with the U.S. That in turn could lower prices for renewable energy globally, experts said.''<br /> <br /> ''Because of the specific legislative process in which this compromise was formed, which limits it to budget-related actions, the bill does not regulate greenhouse gas emissions, but deals mainly in spending, most of it through tax credits as well as rebates to industry, consumers and utilities.''<br /> <br /> ''Investments work better at fostering clean energy than regulations, said Leah Stokes, an environmental policy professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The climate bill is likely to spur billions in private investment, she said: “That’s what’s going to be so transformative.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The bill promotes vital technologies such as battery storage. Clean energy manufacturing gets a big boost. It will be cheaper for consumers to make climate-friendly purchasing decisions. There are tax credits to make electric cars more affordable, help for low-income people making energy-efficiency upgrades and incentives for rooftop solar and heat pumps.''<br /> <br /> ''There are also incentives for nuclear power and projects that aim to capture and remove carbon from the atmosphere...''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The Rhodium Group research firm estimates the bill would dramatically change the arc of future U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, cutting them by 31% to 44% in 2030, compared to what had been shaping up to be 24% to 35% by 2005 without the bill, said Rhodium partner John Larsen. Clean power on the grid, an upcoming Rhodium report says, would jump from under 40% now to between 60% and 81% by 2030, he said.''<br /> <br /> ''“It’s not as big as I want, but it’s also bigger than anything we’ve ever done,″ said Sen. Brian Schatz, a Hawaii Democrat who leads the Senate climate caucus. “A 40% emissions reduction is nothing the U.S. has ever come close to before.″''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''As decisive a change as it is for U.S. policy and emissions, it still does not reach the official U.S. goal of cutting carbon pollution roughly in half by 2030 to achieve net-zero carbon emissions across the economy by 2050.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Republicans, who unanimously opposed the bill in the Senate, say it would add to consumers’ energy costs, with House GOP Whip Steve Scalise claiming it “wastes billions of dollars in Green New Deal slush funds.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''“It’s a mark of shame that it took this long for our political system to react,” said Bill McKibben, a long-time climate activist, adding that it leaves the fossil fuel industry with too much power. “But this will help catalyze action elsewhere in the world; it’s a declaration that hydrocarbons are finally in decline and clean energy ascendant, and that the climate movement is finally at least something of a match for Big Oil.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.congress.gov/117/bills/hr5376/BILLS-117hr5376eas.pdf '''The 730-page bill is here''']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''50+ Years Earlier, Let's take a personal journey to the 1960s and 'Beginnings of Environmental Protection &amp; Climate Science'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;'''&quot;My friend George&quot;'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ::'''[[George E. Brown Jr]]'''<br /> <br /> ::* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/User:Siterunner '''By Steven Schmidt / GreenPolicy360 Siterunner'''] <br /> <br /> As a high school student, I met George Brown in the mid-1960s and we began to work, purposefully and closely, to make [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_protection '''environmental protection'''] a political reality. He changed the direction of my life and was integral to the founding of [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Day_Memories_on_the_50th_Anniversary '''Earth Day in 1971'''] as he helped to set in motion my lifetime of environmental activism. George was looking forward to the 21st century, and especially to the challenges of [https://strategicdemands.com/earth-system-observatory/ '''environmental and earth science programs'''] that he led in Congress for decades, until suddenly he passed away in 1999. George was an amazing man, a visionary who was a mover in the U.S. Congress for four decades, beginning in the 1960s when we began our friendship and work together on a political journey. Let me dedicate this [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr '''GreenPolicy360 page'''] to George E. Brown as both a biography and memorial. George will always be an influencer for me and his work and legacy is key to understanding my generation... <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/1969_beginnings_of_the_modern_environmental_movement.pdf &lt;big&gt;'''Beginnings of the Modern Environmental Movement'''&lt;/big&gt;] <br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:US_Public_Law_95-367.png<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Update: 2022'''<br /> <br /> <br /> :: [[File:US Senate passes 430 billion climate bill.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senate-democrats-fend-off-amendments-430-bln-climate-drug-bill-2022-08-07/&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''August 7, 2022'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Steve Schmidt / GreenPolicy360''': It took 45+ yrs to pass real climate action called for in the 1970s with the first National Climate Act. Our #GreenPolicy360 network thanks Rep George E. Brown, a main mover at the beginning, who'd be smiling now if he were here ... <br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:US_Public_Law_95-367.png <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Five Decades in the Making: Why It Took Congress So Long to Act on Climate'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/07/climate/senate-climate-law.html<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Bookmark Climate Policy @GreenPolicy360'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> * http://bit.ly/GreenPolicy360Climate<br /> <br /> <br /> '''The 2022 'Earth and Politics' US Legislation Carries Forward a Large Vision and Agenda'''<br /> <br /> (Via Axios)<br /> <br /> ''The bill invests roughly $370 billion into initiatives to promote clean energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, likely becoming the most important climate bill in U.S. history.''<br /> <br /> ''It gives tax credits to clean energy technologies, like existing nuclear power plants and advanced nuclear technologies, clean hydrogen, carbon capture and storage as well as wind and solar power.''<br /> <br /> ''It gives buyers who purchase North American-built electric vehicles a up to $7,500 in federal tax credits to encourage the adoption of electric vehicles while jump-starting America's electric vehicle industry.''<br /> <br /> ''It creates a methane fee program to fine corporations that emit the powerful greenhouse gas above federal limits.''<br /> <br /> ''Democrats have said the bill's climate provisions put the U.S. on a path to reduce its carbon emissions by up to 40% based on 2005 levels by 2030.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Oh, Dr. Volts, What's the Latest?'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Recently, there’s been a lot of talk in the energy world about the minerals needed by clean-energy technologies and whether mineral supply problems might pose a threat to the clean-energy transition. <br /> <br /> To hold warming beneath 1.5°C over pre-industrial levels, the world must cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050. To do that, it must radically ramp up production of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, electric vehicles (EVs), electrolyzers for hydrogen, and power lines.<br /> <br /> David (Dr. Volts) Roberts: Volts is a podcast about leaving fossil fuels behind. I've been reporting on and explaining clean-energy topics for almost 20 years<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Minerals used in clean energy technologies ....''' <br /> <br /> * https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions<br /> <br /> <br /> The IEA estimates that a 'concerted effort to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement (2015) would mean a quadrupling of mineral requirements for clean energy technologies by 2040. An even faster transition, to hit [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Net_Zero_Energy_Policy '''net-zero'''] globally by 2050, would require six times more mineral inputs in 2040 than today.'<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Net Zero Energy Policy]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.volts.wtf/p/minerals-and-the-clean-energy-transition<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Minerals used in clean energy technology - circa 2022.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Today, oil giants ExxonMobil and Chevron reported historic profits from the last three months. Exxon made $17.9 billion (not a typo) last quarter, up 273% from the same time last year, while Chevron made $11.6 billion. Exxon’s rate of income was $2,245.62 every second of every day for the past 92 days; Chevron made $1,462.11 per second.''''' <br /> <br /> '''''Together, BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies are expected to announce $60 billion in profits for the past three months. They plan to spend much of the profit not on reinvesting in their businesses, but on stock buybacks, which drives up the price of the stock. (HCR-July 30, 2022)'''''<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Since 2021, Big Oil Has Spent Over $200 Million to Sabotage Climate Action'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/07/28/2021-big-oil-has-spent-over-200-million-sabotage-climate-action-analysis<br /> <br /> July 28, 2022<br /> <br /> ''The oil and gas industry, one of the most powerful corporate forces in American politics, has spent more than $200 million over the past year and a half to stop Congress from slashing carbon emissions as evidence of their catastrophic impact—from deadly heatwaves to massive wildfires—continues to accumulate in stunning fashion.''<br /> <br /> ''That topline estimate of the fossil fuel industry's lobbying outlays and congressional election spending in the U.S. was calculated by Climate Power, which provided its findings exclusively to Common Dreams.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;Democrats took their biggest step ever towards showing that politicians who protect profiteers fleecing Americans at the pump are on the wrong side of history.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''Nearly 80% of the industry's campaign donations during the time period examined went to Republican candidates, according to Climate Power, whose analysis draws on data from OpenSecrets.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ······························································ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Space Stations News'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/the-international-space-station-minus-russia/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Space stations - July 26 2022.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ··························································································································· <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Rhodium Group Report'''<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Has the US Supreme Court Blocked the Path to the 2030 Climate Target?&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> July 1, 2022<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Yesterday, in a 6-to-3 decision in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Supreme Court ruled that EPA does not have the authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions from the power sector through a system-wide mandate to shift from coal-fired power generation toward cleaner sources. The ruling constrains one of the most powerful regulatory tools from the executive branch’s toolbox of regulations to help reduce US greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In light of the decision and amid stalled climate action in Congress, many are now questioning what climate policy options are still left on the table, and whether the US still has the ability to achieve its 2030 climate target of reducing emissions by 50-52% below 2005 levels.''<br /> <br /> ''We find that the Supreme Court’s ruling does not change the game by much. Last fall, Rhodium Group published Pathways to Paris, a comprehensive assessment of a portfolio of federal legislation, regulations, and other actions across all levels of government, which together could put the 2030 target within reach. In this note, we revisit that list of actions and assess the implications of the Supreme Court ruling for the pathway to the 2030 climate target. We find that while the ruling certainly makes the pathway rockier, it hasn’t necessarily put the target out of reach. The silver lining of the ruling is that it has cleared up ambiguities that have plagued power sector GHG emissions regulations for a decade. Going forward, EPA may have more legal certainty and can still leverage other regulatory tools that could drive significant emissions cuts in the power sector and other sectors. However, EPA needs to move fast in order to help achieve the target. Without swift progress on all fronts—including in Congress and across other levels of government—the 2030 target is in jeopardy.''<br /> <br /> '''''What West Virginia v. EPA does and doesn’t do'''''<br /> <br /> ''The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in West Virginia v. EPA rules that EPA does not have the authority under section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act to regulate emissions from the power sector at a system-wide level. While the ruling certainly limits regulatory pathways to reducing emissions and removes one of the more efficient and low-cost regulatory options, the decision was also not the worst-case scenario for EPA’s ability to regulate emissions that many had feared. The ruling does not entirely revoke EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, nor does it state that EPA can’t regulate GHG emissions from power plants. EPA still has the authority to regulate emissions at the point source or individual power plant level—what’s often referred to as “inside the fence line” of the facility, as opposed to “outside the fence line” or a systems-based approach, which is now off-limits under the ruling.''<br /> <br /> ''One consolation from the ruling is that it potentially clears up legal ambiguities that have plagued power sector emissions regulations for a decade. EPA may have more certainty about the rules of the regulatory road and how to regulate emissions from point sources. The Supreme Court made it clear that if EPA wants to regulate emissions from point sources, it can only consider emissions-control measures at the source. This is the same approach that EPA has used for an array of other pollutants over the 50+ year history of the Clean Air Act. Indeed, it’s the same approach EPA has used in setting GHG standards for new power plants as well as one of the three building blocks in the Obama EPA’s Clean Power Plan. While the ruling means that some regulatory options are now off-limits, it also means that EPA now knows that it can leverage existing emissions-control technologies to drive significant emissions cuts in the power sector, such as carbon capture and fuel blending. Some of these options may cost more than a system-wide approach and may result in fewer co-benefits like reduced local air pollution, but all of that will depend on how EPA ultimately chooses to exercise its clarified authority and what other conventional pollutant regulations it pursues.''<br /> <br /> '''''What the ruling means for the 2030 climate target'''''<br /> <br /> ''In light of the ruling, and especially as federal climate legislation is currently stalled in Congress, many are now questioning what regulatory options and other climate policy options are still left on the table, and whether the US still has the ability to achieve its 2030 climate target of reducing emissions by 50-52% below 2005 levels.''<br /> <br /> ''In order to answer those questions, we revisit '''Pathways to Paris'''...''' ''(see the updated June 2022 Pathway report linked below)'' <br /> <br /> <br /> Read the full July 1, 2022 Rhodium Group report analyzing the impacts of the Supreme Court's West Virginia v. EPA decision<br /> <br /> * https://rhg.com/research/supreme-court-2030-climate-target/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> _________________________________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Progress on the Pathway to Paris?'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> June 2022<br /> <br /> <br /> ''It’s been nearly a year and a half since President Biden entered office and made addressing climate change one of his administration’s top priorities. Pledging to take a whole-of-government approach to the problem, Biden built out a climate team inside the White House and promptly set an ambitious target to reduce US greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to 50-52% below 2005 levels by 2030. Congress also prioritized addressing climate change, first with key infrastructure investments and then with the House of Representatives passing over $500 billion in climate and clean energy spending through budget reconciliation. In addition, 24 states have adopted the same 2030 target or have comparable targets in place.''<br /> <br /> ''Last fall, Rhodium Group published Pathways to Paris, a comprehensive assessment of a portfolio of policy actions that the US can take to put the 2030 climate target within reach. In that report, we found that no single action taken by any single part of the US federal system is sufficient. Instead, joint action consisting of a steady stream of legislation, regulations, and other activities across all levels of government can put the 2030 target within reach. In this note, we revisit the list of actions we considered and assess progress on each. We find that while some movement has occurred on some fronts, most big-ticket items have yet to get started or are still under deliberation in Congress. Without ramped-up action across the board in the very near future, it will be increasingly difficult to envision a pathway to the 2030 target.''<br /> <br /> '''''Nearly 18 months of a whole-of-government approach to climate change'''''<br /> <br /> ''When President Biden entered office, he made climate change a top priority, more so than any other president before him. Coming after the Trump administration’s systematic dismantling of climate and clean energy initiatives, the Biden administration has taken hundreds of actions to undo the damage and reverse regulatory rollbacks. The high-caliber appointments of Gina McCarthy and John Kerry as the first-ever National Climate Advisor and Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, respectively, sent a strong signal that the President was taking the climate challenge seriously. With unified government, there was hope of ambitious and swift congressional action on investments in decarbonization.''<br /> <br /> ''Now, nearly 18 months in, the administration has set ambitious goals on everything from offshore wind deployment to ramping up electric vehicle sales, cutting global methane emissions, and achieving a 100% clean electricity grid. Regulatory actions to rein in greenhouse gasses are moving forward in a few key sectors. Congress passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) which contained several multi-billion dollar investments in emerging clean technologies and clean infrastructure. The administration has also taken key steps to help achieve long-term decarbonization goals, including standing up a Buy Clean Task Force to use the federal government’s purchasing power to help clean up heavy industry, and committing the federal government to increased sustainability targets. Critically, the administration has emphasized environmental justice across agencies and started initiatives to address disproportionate climate and environmental impacts in disadvantaged communities.''<br /> <br /> ''Subnational actions also have the potential to accelerate and amplify emission reductions catalyzed by federal actions and, in some instances, deliver tons that the federal government can’t easily reach. States have kept a steady drumbeat setting ambitious climate targets to help do their part to achieve climate targets, especially during the federal inaction of the Trump administration. And we’ve seen several states step up climate action in key sectors in recent months as well.''<br /> <br /> ''However, at the same time, the $555 billion in climate spending in the Build Back Better Act (BBBA) that passed the House in November remains in Senate deliberation limbo. Congress, states and the White House aren’t tackling climate change in a vacuum but instead are dealing with a host of other challenges. The country is in the midst of the ongoing pandemic, once-in-a-generation inflation, sky-high energy prices, a war in Europe, and ongoing supply chain disruptions—all of which at best distract from additional climate action and at worst may lead to actions that could run counter to long-term climate goals.''<br /> <br /> ''In '''Pathways to Paris''', we found that without any new climate action, the US is not on track to meet its 2030 target of reducing emissions 50-52% below 2005 levels. With no additional action, emissions stay roughly flat, getting to 17-25% below 2005 levels in 2030 (reflecting the uncertainty around energy prices, technology costs, and carbon removal from natural and working lands). This leaves an emissions gap of 1.7-2.3 billion metric tons between current policy and the 2030 target. To fill that gap, we developed a “joint action” scenario— congressional passage of the IIJA and BBBA, alongside regulations and other executive branch actions and supplemented with subnational action in climate-leader states. All together, this scenario would achieve an emission reduction of 45-51% below 2005 levels—putting the 2030 target of a 50-52% reduction within reach...''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Read the full Rhodium Group report on US climate promises kept and unkept, a follow on to the international Paris climate agreement of 2015.<br /> <br /> * https://rhg.com/research/progress-on-the-pathway-to-paris/<br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS News re West Virginia v EPA Decision.pdf]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/SCOTUS_News_re_West_Virginia_v_EPA_Decision.pdf &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''West Virginia v EPA'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> : Click [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/SCOTUS_News_re_West_Virginia_v_EPA_Decision.pdf '''Here'''] for a scan of news/commentary and opinion re the June 30, 2022 decision<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:ClimateNews 360.jpg]] <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS EPA decision - June 30 2022.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/SCOTUS_News_re_West_Virginia_v_EPA_Decision.pdf]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎 <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Environmental laws in US - Supreme Court votes soon.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:WV v EPA SCOTUS poll - June 27 2022 before court decision.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Republican Drive to Tilt Courts Against Climate Action'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Court Picks, Leonard Leo, Federalist Society, Political Action Committee Money, Concord Fund, Republican Attorneys General Association Combination'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''A U.S. Supreme Court environmental case being decided this month is the product of a coordinated, multiyear strategy by Republican attorneys general and conservative allies'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/19/climate/supreme-court-climate-epa.html<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ·························································································································· <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> June 2022 / Global Climate Action - Oceans are key to cliamte policy planning<br /> <br /> ::::[[File:Oceans and Climate Change - DeCaprio July 2022.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ······················<br /> <br /> <br /> May 20, 2022<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''HSBC's Stuart Kirk: &quot;Why investors need not worry about climate risk&quot;'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Last week, the global head of responsible investments for HSBC Asset Management, Stuart Kirk, made a provocative presentation titled “Why investors need not worry about climate risk” at a Financial Times event in London.''<br /> <br /> ''Describing climate risk as a problem in the far-off future, Mr. Kirk said, “Climate change is not a financial risk that we need to worry about,” adding, “Who cares if Miami is six meters underwater in 100 years?”''<br /> <br /> ''Subsequently, Kirk is shown the door...''<br /> <br /> <br /> Watch: <br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfNamRmje-s<br /> <br /> <br /> '''More from Kirk'''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;What bothers me about this one [climate change] is the amount of work here people make me do … the amount of regulation coming down the pipes, the number of people in my team and at HBSC dealing with the financial risk from climate change.&quot;'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ''“I don’t doubt the science.”'' <br /> <br /> ''&quot;To bend the arc of fossil fuels down and the arrow of renewables up, we need to follow the activists who are imploring us to elect leaders that will enact improved regulation.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''&quot;For most companies with stranded assets, and even for tech, their valuation does not take into effect anything after 20 years.&quot; The &quot;average loan length [at HSBC] is six years,&quot; he continued. &quot;What happens in year seven is irrelevant to our loan book.&quot;''<br /> <br /> (Ed: Noting that, according to the New York Stock Exchange, the average holding period of shares is measured in months, down from a peak of eight years in the late 1950s. Clearly, investors’ time horizons don’t match planetary boundaries (nor do their discount rates). The mid- and long-term horizon is critical to the next generation, but not to today's investors.)<br /> <br /> <br /> Comments:<br /> <br /> 'Let's just adapt - Not'<br /> <br /> * https://www.professionaladviser.com/news/4050172/moral-money-editor-pa-sister-title-hits-kirk-climate-risk-speech<br /> <br /> <br /> 'From Pensions &amp; Investments | Re: ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance movement)<br /> <br /> * https://www.pionline.com/esg/hsbcs-suspended-banker-taken-task-key-architect-esg <br /> <br /> <br /> 'NY Times Business'<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/23/business/stuart-kirk-hsbc-climate-change.html<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ····························································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Brazil Amazon deforestation - circa 2022.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ··························<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''April 22, 2022'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Earth Day'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[Planet Citizens]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[EarthPOV]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth Day 2022 - Act up.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> • https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Day_Memories_on_the_50th_Anniversary<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ······························································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:ESA Living Planet Symposium - May 2022.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:National Climate Pledges Must Be Enforced.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''GreenPolicy360: Climate Plans Enforcement Project'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Plans_Enforcement_-_Resources<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ·······························································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''New Record CO2 Highs'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Mauna Loa CO2 - April 2022.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::·························································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Daniel Yergen talks oil-gas-fracking-energy-renewables... war and geopolitics.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''War, Security Policy, Energy, Oil/Gas and the Future'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> March 22, 2022<br /> <br /> <br /> (Excerpt from Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Daniel Yergin)<br /> <br /> '''''How Energy Markets Are Shaping Putin’s Invasion — and the World'''''<br /> <br /> '''''Gas prices are spiking. The economic historian Daniel Yergin explains what that means for geopolitics, as well as climate change'''''<br /> <br /> ''... Energy policy is foreign policy. It always has been. But it particularly is right now. It’s widely believed that Vladimir Putin timed both his 2014 invasion of Crimea and his 2022 invasion of Ukraine around tight energy markets. It’s thought that he thought, maybe rightly, that he’d have the most leverage to act when Europe was most dependent on Russian oil and gas and when leaders everywhere feared the domestic turmoil that higher energy prices could bring.''<br /> <br /> ''The reverse theory was an operation, too. In a decision that now looks naïve, Germany’s Angela Merkel thought that integrating Russia into Europe through the energy trade might smooth the road to peace, giving Russia too much to lose if it considered doing something like, well, what it’s doing right now. All that is to say, to understand this war, to understand this moment, to understand this world, you need to understand global energy production and global energy markets.<br /> You need to understand why a war in Ukraine raises gasoline prices in California. You need to know why the fact that America produces more energy than it needs, the fact that we got to that much vaunted, much desired energy independence, doesn’t actually make us energy independent. It doesn’t actually protect us from disruptions half a world away. And in the bigger, broader sense, we need to think hard about what all of this domestic sensitivity and turmoil around the price of the pump means for the always looming threat of climate change. How do you decarbonize in a world where people care more about the price of fossil fuels today than about the devastating consequences their use will bring tomorrow?''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Daniel_Yergen_talks_oil-gas-fracking-energy-renewables..._war_and_geopolitics.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/22/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-daniel-yergin.html<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Oil profits and US gas prices.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ''The largest oil and gas companies made a combined $174bn in profits in the first nine months of the year as gasoline prices climbed in the US, according to a new report.''<br /> <br /> ''The bumper profit totals, provided exclusively to the Guardian, show that in the third quarter of 2021 alone, 24 top oil and gas companies made more than $74bn in net income. From January to September, the net income of the group, which includes Exxon, Chevron, Shell and BP, was $174bn.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/dec/06/oil-companies-profits-exxon-chevron-shell-exclusive<br /> <br /> <br /> ················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Global Response to the Invasion of Ukraine'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''Countries across the world work to push back against war in Ukraine'''<br /> <br /> ::'''Humanitarian crisis as political negotiations and diplomacy end'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''It is a new moment in global history, one in which businesses and economic pressure are being enlisted to protect democracy, rather than undermine it.'' <br /> <br /> -- Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, March 3, 2022 <br /> <br /> :* https://substack.com/profile/4875576-heather-cox-richardson<br /> <br /> <br /> :::[[File:UN General Assembly Vote - March 2 2022.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Rebecca Solnit writes of a new context... digital cyberwarfare and disinformation politics'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/02/time-to-confront-trump-putin-network<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''January 29, 2022'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Will Diplomacy Work to find a 'Mutual Security' Solution for Russia, Ukraine, Europe, US, NATO and the World?'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:StratDem Proposed Russia-Ukraine Fix.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''More Than Oil &amp; Gas'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Oil/gas and energy conflicts, petropolitics and the petrodollar, continue to impact environmental and global security <br /> <br /> ''“If we got another storm this year, like Uri in 2021, the grid would go down again,” said Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&amp;M University. “This is still a huge risk for us.”''<br /> <br /> ''Now, a recent study shows that electricity blackouts can be avoided across the nation — perhaps even during intense weather events — by switching to 100 percent clean and renewable energy, such as solar, wind and water energy.''<br /> <br /> ''“Technically and economically, we have 95 percent of the technologies we need to transition everything today,” said Mark Jacobson, lead author of the paper and professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University. Wind, water and solar already account for about one fifth of the nation’s electricity, although a full transition in many areas is slow.''<br /> <br /> ''The study showed a switch to renewables would also lower energy requirements, reduce consumer costs, create millions of new jobs and improve people’s health.''<br /> <br /> ''For years, some have expressed skepticism about the viability of large-scale adoption of renewables, owing it to their costs. But Dessler said that while solar was an expensive energy source 10 years ago, it is one of the cheapest today.''<br /> <br /> ''“A lot of people’s understanding of renewable energy is extremely out of date,” said Dessler, who was not involved in the research.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/02/20/texas-energy-winter-renewable-jacobson-dessler-rogan/<br /> <br /> <br /> ···································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''On the Last Day of 2021'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Ready for 2022? [https://twitter.com/hashtag/ActOnClimate #ActonClimate] Today &amp; Every Day'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:School strike week 176.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ··························································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> :'''One swing vote U.S. Senator attempts to kill the U.S. Climate Plan'''<br /> <br /> :[[File:Manchin, one Senator, acts to kill BBB and US climate plan - Dec 19 2021.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> ···································································<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Waste and Pollution: Global Challenge'''<br /> <br /> ''Approximately 8 million metric tons of plastic waste enters the world's oceans each year. If such practices continue, plastic waste could reach up to 53 million metric tons '''per year''' by the end of the decade.&quot; -- EE News, December 2021''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Plastic_Pollution<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ··································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''November 2021'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Infrastructure Bill and Climate Resilience - A Step Forward.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ···································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:NASA test mission to protect earth from asteroid - Nov 2021.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists, Preserving &amp; Protecting the Home Planet Earth'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: The original Mission Statement of the newly launched U.S. space program spoke of our planet and our responsibilities. GreenPolicy360's founder was fortunate, beginning in the 1960s, to listen to [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr Congressman Brown Congressman George E. Brown] point to the NASA plan and explain how he saw Congress put into action the reality of a multi-year, coordinated, multi-agency program to achieve mission goals. Earth science, measuring and monitoring Earth's life-enabling systems was given highest priority. Landsat's program was set in motion as a decades long, first-ever digital scanning remote satellites data collecting study. An array of satellites began to launch, creating and combining the expanding resources of NASA, USGS, NOAA, and an array of educational and scientific institutions and aeronautics business.<br /> <br /> The overall goal, Representative Brown would continue to explain in his Congressional Science, Space &amp; Technology leadership roles over the decades, was to understand, preserve and protect our planet as we, humanity, develop the science to look beyond the Earth and study 'the heavens'.<br /> <br /> Here's to '''[[George E. Brown Jr]]''' and the many visionaries, thinkers and doers who have carried on '''preserving and protecting''' our home planet.<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Asteroid Watch JPL.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ·····················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''Time to act to make a difference''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:COP26 in GLASGOW - 31 OCT-12 NOV 2021.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''International climate negotiations in Glasgow, Scotland'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://ukcop26.org/ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth Summit 1992.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Remembering the First Earth Summit'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 Siterunner: Thirty years ago and now I'm older and looking back at the first &quot;Earth Summit&quot; that led to the first global 'Conference of the Parties'. My reports to the Environmental News Service (ENS) picked up on the green, environmental platform planks I was also adding to the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Jerry_w_Steve_%2792_pres_campaign_at_the_Dem_plat_hearing_m.jpg '''Platform in Progress'''] for California Governor Jerry Brown's presidential campaign. The first Earth Summit and Governor Brown's energetic efforts both moved a vital, forward-looking vision and both encountered myriad obstacles from powers-that-be and business-as-usual. The obstacles didn't stop before or after 1992. The work continued on and continues to today... November 2021, fifty years on...<br /> <br /> I'm now remembering and picking up and continuing the threads of Representative [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr '''George E. Brown's work] '''to advance climate science, beginning in earnest with the first [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:US_Public_Law_95-367.png '''National Climate Act of 1978'''] and establishment of the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:1977_from_the_Office_of_Science_and_Technology_Policy.jpg '''Office of Science and Technology Policy'''] to push what was called a &quot;big science, earth science&quot; agenda with the first generation of [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Science '''focused earth studies and science'''], [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:You_can_manage_only_what_you_can_measure_Dr_David_Crisp,_OCO-2,_June_2014_m.jpg '''measuring and monitoring'''] [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/The_Commons ''' 'the Commons' '''], [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Atmospheric_Science '''earth's atmosphere'''], natural resources (e.g., [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Landsat_data_users_handbook '''Landsat's start up'''] and a [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Research_from_Space '''deep, multi-decade array of NASA/NOAA/USGS missions'''] that have now continued for half a century.<br /> <br /> A tip of our GreenPolicy360 hat to [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_Citizens '''#PlanetCitizens'''] and [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_Citizens,_Planet_Scientists '''#PlanetCitizensPlanetScientists'''.]<br /> <br /> Here's to '''Opportunity for Citizen Activism''' <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ·····················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:COP26 Climate Summit concludes.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''November 13, 2021'''''<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''At COP26, nations agree to speed climate action, but world remains off target'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Exhausted negotiators from nearly 200 nations struck a deal Saturday intended to propel the world toward more urgent climate action, without offering the transformative breakthrough scientists say must happen if humanity is to avert catastrophic warming.''<br /> <br /> * https://apple.news/ASwRW5wCNRQCW6HrV8a1lUQ<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> : [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Atmospheric_Science '''#AtmosphericScience'''] [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Science '''#EarthScience'''] [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Strategic_Demands '''#StrategicDemands'''] [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Planet_Citizens,_Planet_Scientists '''#PlanetCitizensPlanetScientists'''] <br /> <br /> <br /> :: * https://fb.watch/9bvqr4CFSJ/<br /> <br /> ::: * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Gavin_in_Glasgow_-_Nov_10_2021.png<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Gavin in Glasgow - Nov 10 2021.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''October 2021'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> October 31, 2021<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Time for a Planet Update - Oct 31 2021.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[PlanetCitizen]]<br /> <br /> [[Planet Citizens]]<br /> <br /> [[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> <br /> [[EarthPOV]]<br /> <br /> [[Earth Right Now]]<br /> <br /> [[Earth Science Vital Signs]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ······························································· <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Fossil Fuels Production Soars'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://productiongap.org/2021report/<br /> <br /> * https://www.newstatesman.com/chart-of-the-day/2021/10/how-the-world-is-on-course-for-failure-on-climate-change<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Production Gap - productiongap.org.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Production Gap - fossil fuel production continues soaring - 2021 report.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Production Gap - UN report on fossil fuel production.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Private Equity Funds, Sensing Profit in Tumult, Are Propping Up Oil'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/climate/private-equity-funds-oil-gas-fossil-fuels.html<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ····························································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> October 20, 2021<br /> <br /> NYT<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''How a Single Senator Derailed Biden's Climate Plan'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : ''The Centerpiece of the president's environmental agenda has fallen apart because of the objections of a single senator.''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Manchin kills the Biden climate plan.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ····························································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Does one West Virginia coal-state Senator kill the US plan to confront the #ClimateCrisis'''''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/20/podcasts/the-daily/joe-biden-climate-plan-joe-manchin.html <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Disabling... one week before the start of the international climate summit... the US climate response model intended to provide a guide for global nation-by-nation #ClimateAction''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''History will tell the story of Senator Manchin''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''The 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow on 31 October - 12 November 2021'''''<br /> <br /> * https://ukcop26.org/ <br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Planet Plan B - for Senator Manchin.jpg]]<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/16/climate/democrats-carbon-tax-climate.html<br /> <br /> <br /> ····························································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:ThinBlueLayer - October 13 2021.jpg]]<br /> <br /> : &lt;small&gt;[[Look at how thin our atmosphere is]]&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;''' 'The most profound experience' '''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> -- William Shatner<br /> <br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/13/william-shatner-speech-to-jeff-bezos-after-blue-origin-launch.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/video/2021/10/13/so-important-for-everyone-to-have-this-experience-shatner-says-after-suborbital-space-flight.html<br /> <br /> <br /> Shatner: '' “Everybody in the world needs to do this. Everybody in the world needs to see ... it was unbelievable.”<br /> <br /> ''“I mean, the little things, the weightlessness, and to see the blue color whip by and now you’re staring into blackness. That’s the thing. This covering of blue is this sheet, this blanket, this comforter of blue around that we have around us. We think ‘oh, that’s blue sky’ and suddenly you shoot through it all of a sudden, like you whip a sheet off you when you’re asleep, and you’re looking into blackness – into black ugliness. And you look down, there’s the blue down there, and the black up there, and there is Mother Earth and comfort and – is there death? Is that the way death is?”''<br /> <br /> ''... “It was so moving to me. This experience; it was something unbelievable. Yeah, weightlessness, my stomach went out, this was so weird, but not as weird as the covering of blue – this is what I never expected. It’s one thing to say “oh the sky ... and it’s fragile,” it’s all true. But what isn’t true, what is unknown, until you do [go to space] is this pillow, there’s this soft blue. Look at the beauty of that color. And it’s so thin and you’re through it in an instant. How thick is it? Is it a mile?”''<br /> <br /> ... ''“What you’ve given me is the most profound experience I can imagine. I am so filled with emotion about what just happened. It’s extraordinary. I hope I never recover from this. I hope that I can maintain what I feel now, I don’t want to lose it. It’s so much larger than me and life; it hasn’t got anything to do with the little green and blue orb. It has to do with the enormity and the quickness and the suddenness of life and death. Oh my god, it’s unbelievable.”''<br /> <br /> Bezos: ''“It’s so beautiful.”''<br /> <br /> Shatner: ''“Beautiful, yes, beautiful in it’s way but.”''<br /> <br /> Bezos: ''“No, I mean your words. It’s just amazing.”''<br /> <br /> Shatner: ''“I can’t even begin to express ... what I would love to do is to communicate as much as possible is the jeopardy. The moment you see the vulnerability of everything; it’s so small. This air, which is keeping us alive, is thinner than your skin. It’s a sliver; it’s immeasurably small when you think in terms of the universe. It’s negligible, this air. Mars doesn’t have any, nothing. I mean, when you think of when carbon dioxide changes to oxygen and what is 20% that sustains our life? It’s so thin.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;font color=blue&gt;○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○&lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Green New Deal - Strategic Demands - Oct 1, 2021.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Planet Citizens]]<br /> <br /> [[Look at how thin our atmosphere is]]<br /> <br /> [[New Definitions of National Security]]<br /> <br /> [[Earth Science Vital Signs]]<br /> <br /> [[Green New Deal]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''September 2021'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Landsat 9 Launches - 1.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Landsat 9 Launches - 2.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Landsat band imagery.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Landsat'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Inventing multispectral imaging of Earth<br /> <br /> Creating earth science observations from space<br /> <br /> * http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Landsat_data_users_handbook<br /> <br /> <br /> [[LANDSAT and Virginia Tower Norwood]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Virginia Tower Norwood: Planet Citizen, Earth Science Hero'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/LANDSAT_and_Virginia_Tower_Norwood<br /> <br /> <br /> Landsat was a model for all the following [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Research_from_Space earth science research missions from space] and is now moving into its fifth decade with [http://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/?p=10391 Landsat 9.] <br /> <br /> * https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/landsat-9<br /> <br /> * https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0034425720303382?dgcid=coauthor#f0005<br /> <br /> * https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/landsat-1-3/landsat-1<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Research_from_Space<br /> <br /> <br /> ····························································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:President Joe Biden at the UN - Sept 2021.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''U.S. President speaks of pressing national and global challenges faced by today's generation'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;GreenPolicy360: Our &quot;intergenerational&quot; responsibility begins to be recognized, acknowledged and acted upon&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ''In his first address to the United Nations General Assembly as president, President Joe Biden said the coronavirus pandemic, climate change and other threats present world leaders with a stark choice at &quot;the dawning of what must be a decisive decade for our world.&quot;''<br /> <br /> * https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/sep/21/un-speech-joe-biden-calls-collective-action-climat/<br /> <br /> <br /> ''&quot;We’re challenged by urgent and looming crises, wherein lie enormous opportunities, if we can summon the will and resolve to seize these opportunities,&quot; Biden said Sept. 21.''<br /> <br /> ''Biden addressed protecting the rights of women, nuclear disarmament, expanding individual liberty, and reducing global hunger, casting the U.S. as focused on diplomacy and partnerships.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;We are not seeking a new cold war, or a world divided into rigid blocs,&quot; Biden said. &quot;The United States is ready to work with any nation that steps up and pursues peaceful resolution to shared challenges, even if we have intense disagreement in other areas, because we'll all suffer the consequences of our failure.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''On climate change, &quot;the scientists and experts are telling us we are fast approaching a point of no return.&quot;'''''<br /> <br /> ''Biden’s words about &quot;approaching a point of no return&quot; reflects the broad concern that the world is unlikely to be able to keep global warming to within the 1.5 degrees Celsius target of the Paris Agreement.''<br /> <br /> ''If the Paris Agreement targets are to be met, there may be very few years left for policy makers to start cutting emissions. Here we calculate by what year, at the latest, one has to take action to keep global warming below the 2 K target (relative to pre-industrial levels) at the year 2100 with a 67 % probability; we call this the point of no return (PNR).''<br /> <br /> * https://esd.copernicus.org/articles/9/1085/2018/ <br /> <br /> <br /> ''In a landmark report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released Aug. 9, 234 authors relying on more than 14,000 studies stated that &quot;it is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land.&quot;''<br /> <br /> * https://www.ipcc.ch/assessment-report/ar6/ <br /> <br /> * https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/08/09/ipcc-climate-report-global-warming-greenhouse-gas-effect/<br /> <br /> <br /> ··········································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Got to Get Your Priorities Straight'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''''' &quot;Cutting defense spending in a pandemic and climate change era&quot; '''''<br /> <br /> ''Expert observers of US military spending provide their views on bringing a measure of sanity to the ever-expanding defense budgets'' <br /> <br /> * https://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/0053_defense-comparison<br /> <br /> * https://thebulletin.org/premium/2021-09/introduction-can-we-make-overspending-on-the-military-politically-costly/<br /> <br /> <br /> 1) ''Many of the least usable and most dangerous systems in the US military involve nuclear weapons, whose entire rationale revolves around their not being employed. I spoke with Tom Collina, director of policy at the Ploughshares Fund, about his efforts, in concert with former Defense Secretary William Perry, to eliminate or at least delay the proposed replacement of the US fleet of intercontinental ballistic missiles with a new set of nuclear-tipped missiles known as the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent. It’s a program with a total life-cycle cost that could exceed $260 billion, and many experts feel the new missiles are unneeded to deter other nuclear powers from attacking the United States and are also, in fact, uniquely destabilizing and dangerous. As Collina notes, Congress shows no inclination to rein in the GBSD program or seriously question its utility.''<br /> <br /> 2) ''In the piece for the current Bulletin of Atomic Sciences issue, “The United States needs to cut military spending and shift money to two pressing threats: pandemics and climate change,” Mandy Smithberger of the Project On Government Oversight details a litany of egregious Pentagon spending disasters, some of which were shocking even to me (John Mecklin, Bulletin Editor in Chief), a veteran observer of the many creative ways in which governments waste money. (I guess “spending $46 billion on programs that were ultimately cancelled” will have that effect, no matter how hardened the journalist.) The first line of Smithberger’s article is, I think, a wise statement of the most important lesson of this era: “The last year has made one fact quite clear: Spending huge amounts of money on defense has little to no impact on whether a country will be able to effectively protect its people and its economy from a pandemic.”''<br /> <br /> 5) ''Lawrence Korb knows a thing or two about defense spending; he was an assistant secretary of defense from 1981 through 1985, during which time he administered some 70 percent of the US defense budget. His disappointment with the unrestrained defense budget that President Biden presented this year is detailed and palpable. “The budget President Biden has embraced is higher in real terms than what the United States was spending during the Reagan administration and the Korean and Vietnam wars,” Korb writes. “Although I think it unlikely that Biden will present a defense budget next year that makes him our next liberal president, I certainly hope—at a time when a pandemic and climate change demand American attention and funding—that he does.” ''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Time to Profoundly Shift Our National Security Priorities'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/New_Definitions_of_National_Security<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ··············································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''What Happens in the North Doesn't Stay in the North'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''It's All Connected'''<br /> <br /> '''''Ben See (@ClimateBen) Tweeted:'''''<br /> <br /> '''''Hardly anybody on Earth knows that the Arctic is warming 3 to 4 times faster than the rest of the planet as its sea ice is destroyed during the abrupt climate change event of 20th/21st century capitalism. Radical action is required now in 2021. Nobody will be immune to this.''''' <br /> <br /> * https://t.co/MtYdR0FL47<br /> <br /> * https://twitter.com/ClimateBen/status/1433793113252941827/photo/1<br /> <br /> <br /> ····························<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''August 2021'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ::::[[File:Do we feel lucky.JPG]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Unprecedented report - IPCC Aug-9-2021.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:IPCC report August 9-2021 (1).jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:IPCC report August 9-2021 (2).jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> * https://www.ipcc.ch/ <br /> <br /> * https://bit.ly/IPCCLIVE<br /> <br /> * https://www.ipcc.ch/2021/08/05/press-conference-details-wgi-ar6/<br /> <br /> <br /> ···························································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Gulf Stream in Critical Danger'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Consequences of Gulf Stream Collapse Would Be Catastrophic'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Click on the following PDF for links to Google 'Gulf Stream in Danger' News articles&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* '''https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/Gulf_Stream_in_Critical_Danger.pdf'''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation - Gulf Stream - Aug 2021.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ····························<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::::[[File:Energy Imbalance, Climate Change - Aug 1 2021.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''July 2021'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Space Tourism and emission-climate questions - July 20, 2021.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ::[[File:Space Tourism to Accelerate Climate Change - Nature article Oct 2010.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Article Published / 2010<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Scientists predict that soot from commercial space flight will change global temperatures.'''''<br /> <br /> “There are fundamental limits to how much material human beings can put into orbit without having a significant impact.” <br /> <br /> * https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010GeoRL..3724810R/abstract<br /> <br /> * https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010GeoRL..3724810R/references<br /> <br /> * https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010GeoRL..3724810R/similar<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ··········································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Tesla launches its own virtual power plan'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Linking up Powerwalls to create a power grid'''<br /> <br /> * https://electrek.co/2021/07/16/tesla-launches-virtual-power-plant-powerwalls-help-california-grid<br /> <br /> ''Tesla is launching its own virtual power plant in California to help the state’s grid:''<br /> <br /> :''“The California grid operator forecasts a continued need for Californians to support the grid through 2021. Help create the largest distributed battery system in the world and avoid dependence on the least efficient fossil fuel power plants. Opt-in to the Tesla Virtual Power Plant (VPP), and Tesla will dispatch your Powerwall when the grid needs support while continuing to maintain your energy security.”''<br /> <br /> ''California’s grid is expected to have an exceptionally difficult few months, with record high temperature increasing energy demand on the grid and a significant drought affecting hydropower plants, like the Hoover Dam.''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Historic NASA and European Space Agency Agreement on Climate Science Cooperation'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-esa-partner-in-new-effort-to-address-global-climate-change<br /> <br /> * https://spacenews.com/nasa-and-esa-sign-agreement-on-climate-science-cooperation/<br /> <br /> * https://phys.org/news/2021-07-nasa-european-space-agency-climate.html<br /> <br /> <br /> ''WASHINGTON — NASA and the European Space Agency have agreed to cooperate on future Earth science missions and related activities in an effort to better understand climate change.''<br /> <br /> ''The leaders of the two agencies signed a joint statement of intent in a virtual meeting July 13, declaring their plans to cooperate on Earth science research, particularly involving climate change, ranging from missions to research and applications.''<br /> <br /> ''“Climate change is an all-hands-on deck, global challenge that requires action now,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement about the agreement. “This agreement will set the standard for future international collaboration, providing the information that is so essential for tackling the challenges posed by climate change and helping to answer and address the most pressing questions in Earth science for the benefit of the United States, Europe, and the world.”''<br /> <br /> ''The partnership was formalized through a joint statement of intent, signed Tuesday, which outlines how the agencies will collaborate to ensure continuity of Earth observations; advance understanding of the Earth System, climate change and application of that knowledge; and collaborate on an open data policy that promotes open sharing of data, information, and knowledge within the scientific community and the wider public.''<br /> <br /> ''“Together, NASA and ESA provide most of the world’s Earth science coverage through our Earth-observing satellites,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science. “This transformative agreement will build on that capability, forging a critical international climate science partnership to tackle the most challenging climate questions in an integrated and strategic way. Not only will NASA and ESA work together to deliver unparalleled Earth science observations, research, and applications, but all of our findings will also be free and open for the benefit of the entire world as we work together to combat and mitigate climate change.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''“This is a massive step-up from anything we’ve ever done,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA, told FLORIDA TODAY.''<br /> <br /> ''“It’s more strategic, multi-mission, multi-science as opposed to just mission by mission which is how we’ve worked before.”''<br /> <br /> ''Of particular interest to coastal regions like Florida, at the frontlines of the impacts of sea-level rise, NASA and ESA are planning to extend Earth science research including Sentinel-6, flying two satellites to continue a three-decade record of sea level measurements. The Sentinel monitoring and tracking program includes NASA and ESA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the United States and the European Commission, Eumetsat and French space agency CNES in Europe. NASA launched the first European-built Sentinel-6 satellite in November 2020.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Sea-Level_Rise<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Recently NASA announced that it would pursue a series of missions called the '''Earth System Observatory''', implementing recommendations of the 2018 decadal survey. NASA requested a $250 million increase for Earth science in its 2022 budget proposal and a House bill advanced by an appropriations subcommittee July 12 included the increase.''<br /> <br /> <br /> :::::::[[File:Earth System Observatory.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ······················<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''[[Too Hot]]'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''The &quot;Wet Bulb&quot; Temperature'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://twitter.com/mateosfo/status/1409664424000950277<br /> <br /> * https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1409664424000950277.html<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Dangerous humid heat extremes occurring decades before expected'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Oppressively hot summer days often evoke the expression, “it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.” That sticky, tropical-like air combined with high temperatures is more than unpleasant — it makes extreme heat a greater health risk. <br /> <br /> Climate models project that combinations of heat and humidity could reach deadly thresholds for anyone spending several hours outdoors by the end of the 21st century. However, new research says these extremes are already happening — decades before anticipated — due to global warming to date. <br /> <br /> * https://research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMID/587/ArticleID/2621/Dangerous-humid-heat-extremes-occurring-decades-before-expected<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/19/eaaw1838<br /> <br /> <br /> ······················<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''June 2021'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Devastating News: Climate Change Impacts to Hit Sooner than Predicted'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://phys.org/news/2021-06-climate-impacts-sooner.html<br /> <br /> ''Climate change will fundamentally reshape life on Earth in the coming decades, even if humans can tame planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, according to a landmark draft report from the UN's climate science advisors obtained by AFP.''<br /> <br /> ''Species extinction, more widespread disease, unliveable heat, ecosystem collapse, cities menaced by rising seas—these and other devastating climate impacts are accelerating and bound to become painfully obvious before a child born today turns 30.''<br /> <br /> ''The choices societies make now will determine whether our species thrives or simply survives as the 21st century unfolds, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says in a draft report seen exclusively by AFP.''<br /> <br /> ''But dangerous thresholds are closer than once thought, and dire consequences stemming from decades of unbridled carbon pollution are unavoidable in the short term.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;The worst is yet to come, affecting our children's and grandchildren's lives much more than our own.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Crushing Climate Impacts: Draft UN report'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''PARIS (AFP) / June 23, 2021 - Climate change will fundamentally reshape life on Earth in the coming decades, even if humans can tame planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, according to a landmark draft report from the UN's climate science advisers obtained by Agence France-Presse.''<br /> <br /> ''Species extinction, more widespread disease, unliveable heat, ecosystem collapse, cities menaced by rising seas - these and other devastating climate impacts are accelerating and bound to become painfully obvious before a child born today turns 30.''<br /> <br /> ''The choices societies make now will determine whether our species thrives or simply survives as the 21st century unfolds, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says in a draft report seen exclusively by AFP...''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''&quot;The worst is yet to come, affecting our children's and grandchildren's lives much more than our own,&quot; the report says.''<br /> <br /> ''By far the most comprehensive catalogue ever assembled of how climate change is upending our world, the report reads like a 4,000-page indictment of humanity's stewardship of the planet.''<br /> <br /> ''But the document, designed to influence critical policy decisions, is not scheduled for release until February 2022 - too late for crunch UN summits this year on climate, biodiversity and food systems...''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ················································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :::[[File:Earth trapping unprecedented amount of heat - NASA.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Earth is now trapping an ‘unprecedented’ amount of heat, NASA says'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''New research shows that the amount of heat the planet traps has roughly doubled since 2005, contributing to more rapidly warming oceans, air and land''<br /> <br /> * https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/06/16/earth-heat-imbalance-warming/<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The amount of heat Earth traps has roughly doubled since 2005, contributing to more rapidly warming oceans, air and land, according to [https://www.nasa.gov/feature/langley/joint-nasa-noaa-study-finds-earths-energy-imbalance-has-doubled new research] from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).''<br /> <br /> ''“The magnitude of the increase is unprecedented,” said Norman Loeb, a NASA scientist and lead author of the study, which was [https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2021GL093047 published this week] in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. “The Earth is warming faster than expected.”''<br /> <br /> ''Using satellite data, researchers measured what is known as Earth’s energy imbalance — the difference between how much energy the planet absorbs from the sun, and how much it’s able to shed, or radiate back out into space.''<br /> <br /> ''When there is a positive imbalance — Earth absorbing more heat than it is losing — it is a first step toward global warming, said Stuart Evans, a climate scientist at the University at Buffalo. “It’s a sign the Earth is gaining energy.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> ·································································· <br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Via CBS News / 60 Minutes / June 6, 2021'''''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;The most important job is persuading people that the natural world is complex and wonderful and one of the most precious things we have,&quot; Attenborough said to 60 Minutes in 2002. &quot;And if you're going to do that, then every time you do it, you show the facts, you end up by saying, 'And it's all disappearing and it's all your fault,' people will stop viewing.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;I didn't say anything much about the world being in ecological peril until I was absolutely sure that what I was talking about was correct.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Sir David Attenborough was 28-years-old when he convinced his bosses at the BBC to let him travel the world and document his explorations. He has perpetually been on the road ever since. For nearly 70 years, the knighted Briton and his teams of filmmakers have traveled to some of the most remote places on earth to explore the natural world.''<br /> <br /> ''Attenborough no longer minces words nor leaves his viewers wondering where he stands on the issue of climate change. In the film, he laments Earth's decline and states emphatically, &quot;Our planet is headed for disaster.&quot;'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Despite his stark warning about the planet's peril, Attenborough now says it is not too late to salvage it, if countries work together and societies alter their behavior. The nonagenarian remains hopeful for the future.'' <br /> <br /> ''&quot;There's a huge movement around the world of people from all nations, young people who can see what is happening to the world, and demanding that their government should take action. And that's the best hope that I have.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ·············································· <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:GHG ppt concentrations 1975-2020.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''May 2021'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Big Oil Rocked by News May 27 2021.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Court orders, investor backlash: Big Oil is at a tipping point'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-ruling-could-force-big-change-at-shell-11622131737<br /> <br /> * https://www.npr.org/2021/05/28/1000882311/big-oil-faces-a-reckoning-decades-in-the-making<br /> <br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/27/big-oil-defeats-represent-a-watershed-moment-in-the-climate-battle.html<br /> <br /> * https://grist.org/energy/why-climate-rage-hit-exxon-chevron-and-shell-on-the-same-day/<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/business/legal/big-oil-may-get-more-climate-lawsuits-after-shell-ruling-lawyers-activists-2021-05-28/<br /> <br /> * https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Moodys-Credit-Risk-Is-Growing-For-Big-Oil.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/27/cataclysmic-day-for-oil-companies-sparks-climate-hope<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Climate Action Advocates Win 2 Seats on Exxon’s Board'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/26/business/exxon-mobil-climate-change.html<br /> <br /> ''HOUSTON, TEXAS — Big Oil was knocked down a peg on Wednesday when shareholders of Exxon Mobil dealt the company’s management a stunning defeat by electing at least two board candidates nominated by activist investors who pledged to steer the company away from oil and gas and toward cleaner energy...''<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://engine1.com/<br /> <br /> * https://justcapital.com/news/why-engine-no-1-is-taking-on-exxonmobil-in-arguably-the-biggest-proxy-battle-of-the-season/<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/27/business/dealbook/exxon-mobil-engine-no-1.html<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ····································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''High-flying #PlanetCitizens #WholeEarth'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;[[Overview Effect]]&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;[[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://apnews.com/article/who-is-an-astronaut-private-spaceflight-2cf882f79d189bada008ff8e7e0e2660<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::::::··················································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> ::::::[[File:IEA News 1.jpg]]<br /> <br /> ::::::[[File:IEA News 2.jpg]]<br /> <br /> ::::::[[File:IEA News 3.jpg]]<br /> <br /> ::::::[[File:IEA News 4.jpg]]<br /> <br /> ::::::[[File:IEA News 5.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ·····································<br /> <br /> <br /> From Clearwater, Florida<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 Siterunner:<br /> <br /> Trendlines, we are looking at trendlines today. Data, the data changing as time passes. We need to step back and have perspective. We need to look closely, to 'drill down' and see with detail. [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:You_can_manage_only_what_you_can_measure_Dr_David_Crisp,_OCO-2,_June_2014_m.jpg Measure-to-Manage] NASA says, science advises, GreenPolicy360 recommends as a guide. <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 believes in personal responsibility to manage wisely. We are [http://www.planetcitizens.org planet citizens] and [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Earth_in_Human_Hands.jpg earth is in human hands]. Together we are guiding [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/PlanetCitizen our planet home] into the future. We are delivering a legacy to future generations.<br /> <br /> And we are [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Vital_Signs watching our progress], for good and bad.<br /> <br /> One of GreenPolicy360's great concerns is climate change, as all our readers and sharers know. A recent study of a 'new normal' caught our attention today, a global study and national breakout of data changing over time. And as we are looking at this 'new normal' data, a century of temperatures, we cannot help but think what will happen if the temperature increases continue, a trendline into the future, up and up into the 'unliveable... uninhabitable' temperatures range. 'Cooling technology' will be required and being outdoors will be limited...<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Temperatures New Normal is Not Normal.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> Let's look more closely.<br /> <br /> Let's look at a recent feature news 'wrap up' from a science reporter for the Associated Press.<br /> <br /> Here, look.... Pay attention, recognize the threats, act planet citizens, act ....<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Billions projected to suffer nearly unlivable heat in 2070'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''By Seth Borenstein'' <br /> <br /> ''May 4, 2020'' <br /> <br /> * https://apnews.com/article/asia-pacific-ap-top-news-climate-change-pollution-science-bdcdb1e537c2f23becb3960fbd4a8ed8<br /> <br /> <br /> ''(AP) — In just 50 years, 2 billion to 3.5 billion people, mostly the poor who can’t afford air conditioning, will be living in a climate that historically has been too hot to handle, a new study said.''<br /> <br /> ''With every 1.8 degree (1 degree Celsius) increase in global average annual temperature from man-made climate change, about a billion or so people will end up in areas too warm day-in, day-out to be habitable without cooling technology, according to ecologist Marten Scheffer of Wageningen University in the Netherlands, co-author of the study.''<br /> <br /> 'How many people will end up at risk depends on how much heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions are reduced and how fast the world population grows.''<br /> <br /> ''Under the worst-case scenarios for population growth and for carbon pollution — which many climate scientists say is looking less likely these days — the study in Monday’s journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences predicts about 3.5 billion people will live in extremely hot areas. That’s a third of the projected 2070 population.''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Future of the Human Climate Niche'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.''<br /> <br /> ''May 26, 2020''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Significance''<br /> <br /> ''We show that for thousands of years, humans have concentrated in a surprisingly narrow subset of Earth’s available climates, characterized by mean annual temperatures around ∼13 °C. This distribution likely reflects a human temperature niche related to fundamental constraints. We demonstrate that depending on scenarios of population growth and warming, over the coming 50 y, 1 to 3 billion people are projected to be left outside the climate conditions that have served humanity well over the past 6,000 y. Absent climate mitigation or migration, a substantial part of humanity will be exposed to mean annual temperatures warmer than nearly anywhere today.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Abstract''<br /> <br /> ''All species have an environmental niche, and despite technological advances, humans are unlikely to be an exception. Here, we demonstrate that for millennia, human populations have resided in the same narrow part of the climatic envelope available on the globe, characterized by a major mode around ∼11 °C to 15 °C mean annual temperature (MAT). Supporting the fundamental nature of this temperature niche, current production of crops and livestock is largely limited to the same conditions, and the same optimum has been found for agricultural and nonagricultural economic output of countries through analyses of year-to-year variation. We show that in a business-as-usual climate change scenario, the geographical position of this temperature niche is projected to shift more over the coming 50 y than it has moved since 6000 BP. Populations will not simply track the shifting climate, as adaptation in situ may address some of the challenges, and many other factors affect decisions to migrate. Nevertheless, in the absence of migration, one third of the global population is projected to experience a MAT &gt;29 °C currently found in only 0.8% of the Earth’s land surface, mostly concentrated in the Sahara. As the potentially most affected regions are among the poorest in the world, where adaptive capacity is low, enhancing human development in those areas should be a priority alongside climate mitigation.''<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.pnas.org/content/117/21/11350<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ······················································································· <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Biden Could Be a Climate Change President&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via Georgetown Journal of International Affairs<br /> <br /> May 3, 2021<br /> <br /> * https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2021/05/03/biden-could-be-a-climate-change-president-and-covid-19-is-only-part-of-the-story/<br /> <br /> ''The combination of grassroots activism and broad public support set off a race in the Democratic presidential primary, as candidates released increasingly ambitious climate plans. The first iteration of Biden’s climate plan, though far more ambitious than anything Clinton or Obama had ever put forward, was savaged by climate advocates early in the campaign. He received just 75 out of 200 by the youth-led Sunrise Movement, 72 out of 100 by Greenpeace, and 26 out of 48 from Data for Progress, a progressive polling firm. The Biden campaign team saw this as a problem, and promptly updated his climate agenda for the general election to reflect progressive priorities more closely. In particular, it increased the size of pledged climate spending, adopting a 2035 zero-carbon electricity target and a 2050 whole-of-economy net-zero target.''<br /> <br /> ''Biden’s climate campaign platform promised a “historic investment” of $1.7 trillion over ten years in a “Clean Energy Revolution,” and has already gone a long way towards that goal with the American Jobs Plan (AJP). The AJP would be three times larger than the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of the Obama Administration and include almost ten times as much climate-related spending—seventeen times as much if clean energy tax credits are included. It includes $174 billion for electric vehicles, encouraging both the supply of American-made vehicles and incentives for consumers, $100 billion in a clean electricity grid, and a range of items for clean energy research and development, technology demonstration, and home-grown manufacturing.''<br /> <br /> ''Perhaps just as important as Biden’s elevated climate ambitions, the primary campaign forced him to adopt a new framing of the issue, steering away from environmentalism and towards an economic and social justice lens. Though Biden did not endorse the Green New Deal bill, introduced in 2019, he regularly repeats the refrain that climate change policy is all about “jobs, jobs, jobs.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''April 2021'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Earth Day'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Christina Korp Earth Day and Apollo 8.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''DYK? Yes we do, we remember!'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> December 1968, Apollo 8's 'Earthrise' and then 1969 pro peace Earth work and then our first Earth Day in 1970!<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/1969_beginnings_of_the_modern_environmental_movement.pdf &lt;big&gt;'''Beginnings of the Modern Environmental Movement'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Apollo_8<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Day_Memories_on_the_50th_Anniversary<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Google Earth Timelapse]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Timelapse in Google Earth -1.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Timelapse from Google Earth'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Welcome to Timelapse !<br /> <br /> Rebecca Moore: ''To explore Timelapse in Google Earth, go to g.co/Timelapse — you can use the handy search bar to choose any place on the planet where you want to see time in motion.'' <br /> <br /> Director, Google Earth, Earth Engine &amp; Outreach<br /> <br /> Published Apr 15, 2021<br /> <br /> * http://goo.gle/timelapse<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Timelapse in Google Earth-3.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://earth.app.goo.gl/4vNJ7g <br /> <br /> * https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/15/tech/google-earth-timelapse/index.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/google-introduces-timelapse-to-google-earth/ar-BB1fHw1k<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Timelapse in Google Earth-5.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Rebecca Moore: ''Timelapse has been developed using 24 million satellite images from the past 37 years -- from 1984 to 2020 -- before being compiled into an interactive 4D experience.''<br /> <br /> * https://blog.google/products/earth/timelapse-in-google-earth/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''SJS/GreenPolicy360 Siterunner:'''<br /> <br /> <br /> A tip of our GreenPolicy360 hat to [[George E. Brown Jr]] who envisioned the Landsat's mission and enabled its start up as a science leader in the US Congress, supporting and protecting its earth science mission over the decades.<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Landsat_data_users_handbook<br /> <br /> <br /> and a salute to our [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Bioneers friend and fellow Bioneer], [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&amp;profile=default&amp;search=rebecca+moore&amp;fulltext=Search Rebecca Moore], who first proposed Google Earth Outreach and has led many follow on initiatives, now including Timelapse, utilizing the Landsat database decades of images to bring us an unprecedented vision of earth's changes over time. <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Rebecca Google Outreach.jpg]]<br /> <br /> [[File:G Earth Outreach.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::[https://carbonmapper.org/ &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;u&gt;'''Carbon Mapper'''&lt;/u&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> ::[[File:Planet 4-15-2021 10-22-51 AM.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA), who chairs the U.S. House Science and Technology Committee’s Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics, today welcomed the increased investments in space and aeronautics, research and development, and scientific missions contained in the Biden-Harris Administration’s FY22 budget request.<br /> <br /> ''&quot;The boosted funding for NASA’s Earth sciences mission, one of my top priorities for NASA, is the kind of approach the country needs to support a strong, data-driven response to the climate crisis.&quot;'' <br /> <br /> <br /> Read more at:<br /> <br /> [[Earth Science Research from Space]]<br /> <br /> [[Earth Science Vital Signs]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''March 2021'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EPA website - Climate Change priority - March 2021.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;E.P.A. to Review Attacks on Science Under Trump&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.epa.gov/climate-change<br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/climate/trump-science-epa.html<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ··································································<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Emily Atkin - Climate Journalist - telling it like it is.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> Watch the Congressional Hearing by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, &amp; Technology<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Science and Impacts of the Climate Crisis.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ··································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Survey Finds Overwhelming International Support for Greater Environmental Protection'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''“We live in a time of polarisation, and environmental issues have long embodied the political divisions in society. However, this may be changing. We can see an overwhelming consensus emerging for greater government-led action to protect the environment in major nations.”''<br /> <br /> * https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/COP26survey<br /> <br /> * https://www.ecowatch.com/cop26-environmental-protection-2650859118.html<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :[[File:Renewable Energy potential 2021.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''February 2021'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''What a Storm in Texas '''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> 'Polar Vortex' is here. A warming Arctic releases stratospheric changes and new extreme weather patterns...<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Arctic 'Polar Vortex' Visits Texas'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: <br /> <br /> ''What happens in the Arctic doesn't stay in the Arctic''<br /> <br /> * https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&amp;as_sdt=0,10&amp;qsp=8&amp;q=polar+vortex+extreme+weather&amp;qst=br<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Arctic<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Big Freeze hits hard as some blame, what? Wind farms.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''CNN / Opinion'''''<br /> <br /> ''As winter storm sweeps through US, millions without power in Texas''<br /> <br /> ''Some blame Texas' wind turbines for the outages — but wind accounts for just a tenth of the winter power''<br /> <br /> (GreenPolicy Emphasis added) '''''As some conservatives blame the environmental movement and frozen wind turbines for the power outage disaster in Texas, it's a cold reminder that the path to clean American energy is blocked more by ideology than technology.'''''<br /> <br /> ''Since wind accounts for a tenth of the Lone Star state's winter power and the Permian Basin leaks and flares enough natural gas to heat two million homes a year, it's a bit like blaming your car battery for a stalled engine when you've run out of gas.''<br /> <br /> ''“Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business,” former Governor and Energy Secretary Rick Perry said in an interview posted on House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy's website.<br /> <br /> ''While properly engineered turbines have been proven to work from Alaska to Antarctica, many in Texas did freeze up. But so did pipelines, diesel engines and even the reactor at one of the state's two nuclear power plants.'' <br /> <br /> ''In typical &quot;Don't Mess with Texas&quot; fashion, the state has its own power grid on purpose, which is a major impediment to creating a national '''&quot;smart grid,&quot;''' in which a sunny day in Arizona could power primetime in Boston and vice versa.''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Read more in [[Green Stories of the Day]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''The Task Ahead for President Biden on Climate'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/06/opinion/biden-climate-change-environment.html<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Courtesy of the NY Times / NY Times Editorial Board''<br /> <br /> ''Feb. 6, 2021''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''After four years of scorn, the issue of climate change has risen near the top of the American political agenda, where it deserves to be and where, even accounting for the efforts of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, it had never been.''<br /> <br /> ''That is the happy message contained in the blizzard of executive orders and press briefings emanating from the Biden White House over the past couple of weeks. Put simply, the richest and most powerful nation in the world is back in the fight to rescue the planet from the fires, floods, famines, rising sea levels, human dislocations and other consequences of a warming globe.''<br /> <br /> ''Though less noticed, there was one other uplifting development with important implications for the climate that had little to do with President Biden. That was the announcement from General Motors’ chief executive, Mary Barra, that the company is getting out of the internal combustion game and plans to sell only zero-emission cars and trucks by 2035. The company has already invested $27 billion to introduce 30 electric models in the next four years and will build a plant in Ohio to make the batteries for these vehicles.''<br /> <br /> ''G.M.’s move was in part a competitive response to Volkswagen and other foreign automakers, including ones in China, that have announced fundamental shifts toward electric vehicles. It fits nicely with some of Mr. Biden’s climate goals, including zeroing out greenhouse gas emissions in America by midcentury. Importantly, it is also a reminder of the power of free market forces, without whose constructive engagement — and the private investments necessary to build out clean vehicles and clean energy sources like wind and solar — the climate crisis cannot be solved. No government, however committed, can go it alone.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Mr. Biden’s executive orders on climate were nonetheless important. They do not have the permanence or bipartisan imprimatur of laws, and are subject to reversal by later administrations, but they send powerful policy signals to the federal bureaucracy. One needs only think back to the early Trump days, when a suite of executive orders aimed at delivering on Donald Trump’s boastful promise of “energy independence” — which in fact the country had mostly achieved — consumed various federal agencies for the next few years. This led to weaker regulations on coal-fired power plants and methane emissions, decimated clean water protections, gave over large swaths of public land to oil and gas exploration and shrank two magnificent national monuments designated by Mr. Clinton and Mr. Obama. It is these actions — which, along with Mr. Trump’s contempt for science, cost the country four years in what is essentially a race against time — that Mr. Biden, in his executive orders, is telling his cabinet officers to review and reverse.''<br /> <br /> ''In many cases, that won’t be easy. To take one example, Mr. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency followed a legal path that took more than two years and involved many complex technical studies in order to roll back Mr. Obama’s rule ordering automakers to rapidly increase fuel economy standards, thus reducing tailpipe emissions of carbon dioxide. The same laborious timetable now awaits Mr. Biden’s E.P.A. as it seeks to reinstate the Obama standards. Similar obstacles will complicate efforts to restore rules on methane emissions and the broad protections of the Clean Water Act narrowed by Mr. Trump.''<br /> <br /> ''On the plus side, the president can fairly quickly restore the original boundaries of the shrunken monuments, a matter that lies within presidential jurisdiction, and possibly prevent drilling from proceeding in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Of course, nothing prevents Mr. Biden from acting unilaterally on matters within his powers, as he has in rejoining the Paris Agreement on climate change and canceling a problematical oil pipeline from Canada. The moratorium he announced last month on new oil and gas leasing on public lands and waters is similarly within his writ.''<br /> <br /> ''In the short run, that’s a mere annoyance to the oil companies; only one-fifth of the nation’s oil and gas is produced on public lands and waters, and the industry is sitting on a cache of roughly 13.4 million acres of undeveloped federal leases. It is also a disappointment to environmental groups that remain fixated on ending hydraulic fracturing not tomorrow but yesterday. But it is a welcome first step toward satisfying Mr. Biden’s campaign pledge to transition from fossil fuels, and one of many recent signs — Ms. Barra’s G.M. pledge being another — that fossil fuels’ hegemony is slowly coming to an end.''<br /> <br /> ''One of the president’s first moves was to name John Kerry, a former secretary of state who helped broker negotiations at the Paris climate conference in 2015, as his international climate envoy, charged with restoring America’s credibility on the issue. In part because of Mr. Trump’s intransigence, the United States has struggled to meet its commitment in Paris to reduce emissions by 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025; with the help of the coronavirus pandemic, which disrupted the economy, emissions have dropped by 20 percent, according to Rhodium, a consulting group. But the longer-term trajectory was not encouraging, even with the dramatic drop in the costs of renewable fuels, the closing of many coal-fired power plants and the determined efforts of states and cities to fill the void left by the federal government.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''America is hardly alone. Only a handful of the nearly 200 countries that signed on to the Paris Agreement have met their targets; among big emitters, the nations of the European Union come the closest. But even if every country does meet its targets, it will not be enough, not by a long shot — a scary truth that the Paris negotiators acknowledged at the time and that an alarming 2018 report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirmed. The report warned that to avoid the worst effects of climate change, the world would have to hold increases in atmospheric temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. In practical terms, this means a carbon-emission-free world by 2050, which in turn requires a downward wrench in global emissions by 2030. Some experts believe that for the United States to carry its share of the load, it will have to cut emissions by 40 to 50 percent over the next decade.''<br /> <br /> ''On April 22, Earth Day, the United States will host a Climate Leaders Summit. The expectation is that Mr. Kerry will unveil a different set of targets. Those numbers have to be more than ambitious. They also have to be credible — meaning, as Robert Stavins, a longtime climate scholar at Harvard puts it, “truly achievable given existing and reasonably anticipated policy actions.”''<br /> <br /> ''Rolling back all of Mr. Trump’s rollbacks on fossil fuel emissions, however necessary that is, simply won’t cut it. What might cut it is major new climate legislation that encourages serious investment dollars — in millions of emissions-free vehicles, in hundreds of thousands of new charging stations to service those vehicles, in a reimagined electric grid carrying power from plants that rely not on fossil fuels but on rapidly growing renewable sources, in a cleaner public transportation system and in millions and millions of weatherized homes.''<br /> <br /> ''All that and more was envisioned in a $2 trillion climate plan presented by none other than Mr. Biden in a speech in his home state of Delaware last summer. His problem is therefore not lack of imagination. It is the political reality of a divided Senate that cannot bring itself to approve a plan to help ordinary people and local governments weather the economic storms of the pandemic. If America’s legislators cannot deal with a present emergency, how likely is it that they can be persuaded to address a more remote one?''<br /> <br /> ''The president’s pitch to Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, is that a credible climate plan will create the jobs the pandemic has destroyed, and many more. Let’s hope it works.''<br /> <br /> ''In the meantime, it seems enough to celebrate what, as if in a fairy tale, has appeared in the White House: a president who cares about the climate and other environmental issues, who has gathered around him serious people, who has determined to follow science where it leads and who will try to do good and useful things.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ······························································<br /> <br /> <br /> Via Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists / Yale Climate Connection<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Congress has to fix Trump’s 11th-hour climate rules'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://thebulletin.org/2021/01/congress-has-to-fix-trumps-11th-hour-climate-rules-before-its-too-late/<br /> <br /> * https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2021/climate-environment/biden-climate-environment-actions/<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The Biden/Harris administration’s first 100 days in office reveal about its making climate change a top priority. Those words have flowed both at the this site and many other venues.''<br /> <br /> ''The Washington Post’s January 22 posting of “Tracking Biden’s environmental actions” is notable. Written by Post Pulitzer Prize-winners Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis, with graphics editing by John Muyskens, the piece compiles Trump administration environmental, conservation, and energy regulations and policies that the Biden team hopes to overturn or “unwind.”''<br /> <br /> ''“Biden can overturn some of them with a stroke of a pen,” they write. “Others will take years to undo, and some may never be reversed.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Clock is running for action on eleventh-hour rules'''''<br /> <br /> ''Listing 64 air quality and greenhouse gas initiatives, they count one (stepping back into the Paris Climate Agreement) as having been overturned and another 21 as being “easy” to reverse. They score another 27 Trump actions as “medium”—requiring rewriting a regulation or pursuing a successful court action; and 15 as “difficult”—requiring lengthy rule-making process, legislation, or involved court action.''<br /> <br /> ''It’s no surprise that the Senate majority of the 116th Congress did not exercise its right under the Congressional Review Act to un-do damaging Trump rules. <br /> <br /> ''Even with its 50/50 split in the new Senate, the new 117th Congress is positioned to do so, without fear of having to overcome the 60-vote filibuster threshold. There is now, at least and at last, an opportunity during its first 60 legislative workdays for the Congress to conduct serious oversight of some of the especially offensive and glaring rules finalized in the waning days of the Trump administration and, if it chooses, send nullifying legislation to the new President for signing.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Especially egregious examples were published in the Federal Register literally at the 11th hour:'''''<br /> <br /> ''A January 6, 2021, rule that EPA “give greater consideration to studies where the underlying response data”—frequently involving confidential human health issues protected by HIPAA law being made publicly available. That would knee-cap important health-based rulemaking on many toxic air pollutants and other contaminants as well as the mental health risks from climate change.'' (see below)<br /> <br /> ''A January 7, 2021, EPA rule on the threshold for “significant pollution contributions” that would end application of the Clean Air Act to many non-electric power plants that are sources of important greenhouse gases.''<br /> <br /> ''A January 13, 2021, EPA rule that piggy-backed onto the January 7 rule to bar future greenhouse gas regulations from applying to oil refineries, manufacturing, plants, and other facilities.''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Court Rules Trump Administration’s Censored Science Rule Was Issued Unlawfully'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''A federal district court has ruled that the Trump administration was wrong to issue its Censored Science Rule without following proper procedures, and said that its decision also “casts into significant doubt” whether the rule has any legal basis at all.''<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.edf.org/media/court-rules-trump-administrations-censored-science-rule-was-issued-unlawfully<br /> <br /> <br /> :······························································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt; &lt;big&gt;'''Are Biden's actions on climate change enough to make a difference?&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''Commentary and Interview with Michael E. Mann'''<br /> <br /> : * https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&amp;v=wPDARBhp9d0<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Pres Biden signs climate change executive orders.jpg|link=https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&amp;v=wPDARBhp9d0&amp;feature ]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Biden Inaugurated as U.S. President: Immediately Orders U.S. to Rejoin Paris International Climate Pact'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/biden-rejoins-paris-climate-pact-scientists-hope-best-yet-come-n1255070<br /> <br /> <br /> ···················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Trump leaving a legacy of 'alternative facts' and mis-information'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;30,573&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-fact-checker-tracked-trump-claims/2021/01/23/ad04b69a-5c1d-11eb-a976-bad6431e03e2_story.html ''Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims as president'']<br /> <br /> * https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-fact-checker-tracked-trump-claims/2021/01/23/ad04b69a-5c1d-11eb-a976-bad6431e03e2_story.html<br /> <br /> <br /> ''To be sure, volumes of books are filled with the varied ways presidents of the past disgraced themselves, fought secret wars, undermined their opponents with sketchy tactics... dodged inconvenient truths.''<br /> <br /> ''But the systematic deceptions of the “alternative facts” president were unlike anything before.''<br /> <br /> * https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-capitol-siege-politics-coronavirus-pandemic-elections-69cafecdde291c5211daf9ffd0f2ad05<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :Washington Post Fact-Checker @work <br /> <br /> * https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/?itid=lk_inline_manual_2<br /> <br /> * https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/<br /> <br /> * https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/12/21/most-popular-fact-checks-2020/<br /> <br /> : * https://www.factcheck.org/person/donald-trump/<br /> <br /> : * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjeUoVOoTGM<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;font color=blue&gt;○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ &lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''As terrestrial politics roils, our Planet Earth rolls'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Amazing views from the International Space Station'''<br /> <br /> Watch - https://t.co/3ChuV8X1dL <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;font color=blue&gt;○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ &lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''As a New Year dawns, your GreenPolicy360 siterunner recalls my friend, and mentor, George E. Brown'''<br /> <br /> The past is sometimes called prologue and with George the past was a guide, a guide to use as we make decisions on how best to go forward. George Brown was an engineer by training, and a principled man. He cared deeply about how we can create a better world and in his thirty plus years in the U.S. Congress he became a leader in what was called 'big science'. His legacy is felt today in ways few know.<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;[[George E. Brown Jr]]&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> <br /> George at work, low key, out of the spotlight, getting the job done -- and, this moment in history, I want to point out an Office he proposed and worked to set up, the '''Office of Science and Technology Policy'''. One of this new office's first historic steps was to warn the U.S. president about the danger of climate change (see the link to the letter below)...<br /> <br /> In the following year, 1977-78, George proposed and shepherded the '''National Climate Program''' law through to its passage. This was the first U.S. climate legislation. <br /> <br /> In the following years, until his death in 1999, George initiated and supported a host of scientific programs to study and act on the dangerous coming challenges of climate and global warming.<br /> <br /> Thank you George for your work and your vision. We carry on. Your legacy is real.<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:1977 from the Office of Science and Technology Policy.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:US_Public_Law_95-367.png '''The National Climate Program Act, Public Law 95-367]<br /> <br /> :[http://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/National_Climate_Program_Act_Public_Law_95-367_Sept_1978.pdf '''National Climate Program Act, 1978 / PDF''']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:US Public Law 95-367.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;font color=green&gt;○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○&lt;/font&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;''''' 2020'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth POV from the ISS Cupola-m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> 🌎 &lt;font color=gray&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''December'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> December 18, 2020<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''President-elect Biden’s pick to head U.S. environmental agency, the EPA, heartens scientists'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Veteran environmental regulator Michael Regan will lead the Environmental Protection Agency, joining a team of experienced climate appointees''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03621-6<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Can Joe Biden rebuild the ravaged US Environmental Protection Agency?'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Scientists reveal further details about the damage sustained under Trump — and the challenges for Biden in restoring science’s standing at the agency''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03585-7<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;font color=green&gt;○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○&lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :::[[File:2020 Hottest Year on Record.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;font color=green&gt;○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○&lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[Net Zero Energy Policy]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> A Net Zero [https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-climate-climate-change-latin-america-carbon-neutrality-16f52aa7f8fbcd4ff814ea67a50ff89f ''' 'Explainer' '''] from the Associated Press<br /> <br /> December 11, 2020<br /> <br /> ''More than 100 countries — responsible for about two-thirds of the world’s heat-trapping gases — have announced plans to cut their greenhouse gas emissions to “net zero” in coming decades to help curb man-made climate change.''<br /> <br /> ''The target has also been embraced by companies, states and cities wanting to help stop the planet from getting too hot for human comfort. China made a splash in September promising “carbon neutrality” by 2060, and U.S. President-elect Joe Biden has promised America would be there by 2050.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Time for Green Energy Action that Moves Economies toward [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Eco-nomics Eco-nomics] and Net Zero Energy Policy'''<br /> <br /> <br /> Visit [http://www.netzeropolicy.com '''www.NetZeroPolicy.com'''] @GreenPolicy360.com<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;font color=green&gt;○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○&lt;/font&gt; &lt;font color=blue&gt;○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○&lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Climate Books - 2020.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;font color=gray&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''November'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Special:RecentChanges &lt;font color=gray&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Top of the News @GreenPolicy360'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;]<br /> <br /> :[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_Stories_of_the_Day &lt;font color=green&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''John Kerry Appointed Special Climate Envoy: To Join National Security Council'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;]<br /> <br /> ''John Kerry is getting back into politics. “America will soon have a government that treats the climate crisis as the urgent national security threat it is,” the former secretary of state and former longtime senator from Massachusetts tweeted on Monday after President-elect Joe Biden announced he’ll name Kerry as the incoming administration’s presidential envoy for climate.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360 &amp; Strategic Demands applaud this historic, critically important shift in the U.S. policy and vision'''<br /> <br /> For years GreenPolicy360 and StratDem have advocated Climate Policy become a U.S. National/Global Security priority <br /> <br /> :* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Climate_Policy<br /> :* https://strategicdemands.com/environmental-security/ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ·····························································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''A Legacy of Disaster and Retreat'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Posted on November 16, 2020 | By Strategic Demands Online <br /> <br /> From GreenPolicy360's associate, StratDem<br /> <br /> Today, in one of U.S. President Trump’s 51,282 tweet to his (as of today) 79,517,737 Twitter followers, the president attempted to rescind his acknowledgement yesterday that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Again claiming the November election was ‘rigged’, the president’s attack on the election is a spectacle of denial and threats... <br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/a-legacy-of-disaster-and-retreat/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Crew-1 over New Zealand.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :::: [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Biden-Harris, CNN News Online - Nov 8, 2020.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :::[[File:Updated Nov 5 2020 - 29,508 false or misleading statements.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Looking Back: If re-elected, how'd a second term of the U.S. president likely impact the environment -- and national-global security? '''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via Quartz / Opinion<br /> <br /> <br /> ''This past week, Trump saw one of his key climate promises fulfilled: The US is officially out of the Paris Agreement. But were Trump given a second term, sitting out of a UN forum probably would have been the least of the planet’s US-based worries.''<br /> <br /> ''Trump’s first term saw a cascade of environmental deregulation, attacks on science, and the staffing of key positions with fossil-fuel lobbyists and climate deniers. Although the administration has seen many of its half-baked regulatory rollbacks and executive orders stopped by the courts, a second term would have been a chance to make more of them stick. That could have included relaxing restrictions on methane emissions, opening more federal land and water to oil and gas drilling, limiting the scope of environmental reviews for building projects and pipelines, restricting the ability of California or other states to set their own more-ambitious emissions standards, and blocking the consideration of science and climate benefits in regulatory decisions. He might have even pushed the US Environmental Protection Agency to undo its key 2009 finding that greenhouse gases harm human life, a fundamental starting place for any climate regulation.''<br /> <br /> ''Trump also might have continued to privatize the National Flood Insurance Program, which would have forced climate-vulnerable households into foreclosure. With Republican allies in Congress, he could have allowed key tax credits for wind and solar to expire, and confirmed more judges hostile to environmental regulation. Overall, his administration’s stance on climate would have put the US increasingly at diplomatic odds with allies and ceded the economic advantage on clean energy industries to China.''<br /> <br /> ''Policy changes during Trump’s first term will likely result in nearly 2 billion additional tons of CO2 by 2035, according to a recent analysis. A second term would have put the world on a dangerous trajectory as the clock runs out to avert catastrophic warming—and would have made the job of cleaning up much more difficult and expensive for future presidents.''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Day After the U.S. Election, the U.S. Leaves the International Climate Agreement'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.businessinsider.com/joe-biden-says-rejoin-paris-climate-agreement-on-first-day-2020-11 '''Joe Biden says the United States will rejoin the Paris International Climate Agreement on his first day as President''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/climate/paris-climate-agreement-trump.html '''The U.S. Is Out of the Paris Climate Agreement''']<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''GreenPolicy360 [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_Stories_of_the_Day Story of the Day]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''What are the consequences of a U.S. retreat from cooperative climate action?''' <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Via the Associated Press / November 1, 2020''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The day after the presidential election, the United States formally leaves the 2015 Paris agreement to fight climate change. A year ago, President Donald Trump’s administration notified the United Nations that America is exiting the climate agreement. And because of technicalities in the international pact, Nov. 4 is the earliest a country can withdraw...'' <br /> <br /> ''If the U.S. remains out of the climate pact, today’s children are “going to see big changes that you and I don’t see for ice, coral and weather disasters,” said Stanford University’s Rob Jackson.''<br /> <br /> ''Because the two presidential candidates have starkly different positions on climate change policy, the election could have profound repercussions for the world’s approach to the problem, according to more than a dozen experts.''<br /> <br /> ''“That election could be a make or break point for international climate policy,” said Niklas Hohne, a climate scientist at Wageningen University in Germany.''<br /> <br /> ''In pulling out of the agreement, Trump has questioned climate science and has rolled back environmental initiatives that he called too restrictive in cutting future carbon pollution from power plants and cars.''<br /> <br /> ''American carbon emissions dropped by less than one percent a year from 2016 to 2019, until plunging probably temporarily during the pandemic slowdown, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. More than 60 countries cut emissions by higher percentages than the U.S. in that time period, according to [https://www.globalcarbonproject.org/ international data].''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Eleven years ago, the world was on pace to add about another 5 degrees (2.8 degrees Celsius) of warming. But with emission cut pledges from Paris and afterward, the world is facing only about another 2.2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) of warming if countries do what they promise...''<br /> <br /> ''“If Biden wins, the whole world is going to start reorienting toward stepping up its action,” said the Dean of the University of Michigan’s environment program.''<br /> <br /> ''If the U.S. remains out of Paris, countries trying to cut emissions drastically at potentially high costs to local industry may put “border adjustment” fees on climate laggards like America to even the playing field, said Nigel Purvis, a climate negotiator in the Clinton and second Bush administrations. The European Union is already talking about such fees...''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''[https://climateactiontracker.org/ Climate Action Tracker] ran calculations comparing a continuation of the Trump administration’s current emission trends to what would happen if Biden worked toward net zero emissions... (they) found that in the next 10 years a Trump scenario, which includes a moderate economic bounce-back from the pandemic, would emit 6 billion tons (5.4 billion metric tons) more greenhouse gases than the Biden scenario — an 11% difference.'' <br /> <br /> ''Other nations will do more to limit carbon pollution if the U.S. is doing so and less if America isn’t, said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald. “In terms of leadership, it will make an immense difference,” she said.''<br /> <br /> ''In Paris, the U.S. was crucial in getting the agreement finished. The rest of the world ended up pledging to reduce roughly five tons of carbon pollution for every ton the U.S. promised to cut.''<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-donald-trump-climate-climate-change-paris-e6db5893841465bab91f18d8fde8b800 ''Read the full AP story by science reporter Seth Borenstein'']<br /> <br /> ''Follow Seth on Twitter @borenbears<br /> <br /> ''Read more stories on climate issues by The Associated Press at -- https://www.apnews.com/Climate''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎 &lt;font color=gray&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''October'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Updated Oct 22 2020 - 26,548 false or misleading statements.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Attempting to Setback Science and Environmental Protections'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> ''From The New York Times: The Trump Administration Is Reversing, or Attempting to Reverse, Nearly 100 Environmental Rules.'' <br /> <br /> ''Here’s a [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/climate/trump-environment-rollbacks-list.html List Tracking Trump Environmental Rollbacks]. The White House has dismantled major climate and environmental policies focused on clean air, water, wildlife and toxic chemicals. Here’s how it adds up (as of October 2020).'' <br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/climate/trump-environment-rollbacks-list.html<br /> <br /> <br /> More on Trump Administration environmental rollbacks/reversals/legislative and regulatory actions to end and/or limit environmental protections...<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Environmental Deregulation, Climate Litigation'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> (from GreenPolicy360's Eco-Dashboard) <br /> <br /> <br /> * https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/2018/07/tracking-the-trackers/ | A List of Organizations Tracking US Environmental Rollbacks<br /> * https://www.brookings.edu/interactives/tracking-deregulation-in-the-trump-era/ | Brookings - Deregulatory Tracker <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Environmental_Laws | Category - Environmental Laws<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Climate_Change_Litigation_Databases_Climate_Law.png &lt;big&gt;'''Climate Litigation Database'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> * http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/resources/climate-deregulation-tracker | Climate Deregulation Tracker<br /> * http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/climatechange/ | Columbia Law School - Climate Change Laws <br /> * https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/regulatory-rollback-tracker | Harvard Law School - Envir Law Rollbacks <br /> * http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/resources/silencing-science-tracker/ | 'Silencing Science' Tracker<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:NOAA undergoes political changes - Oct 2020.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Special:RecentChanges &lt;font color=gray&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Top of the News @GreenPolicy360'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> :[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/Climate_emergency.jpg &lt;font color=green&gt;&lt;big&gt;''''''&quot;Climate Emergency&quot;, don't forget the climate crisis even as political chaos and a global coronavirus rage'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Climate emergency.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :·················································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> :::::: [[File:10G internet on the way - Oct 2020.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :·················································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://twitter.com/i/status/1302039862636195840 &lt;font color=black&gt;&lt;big&gt;''Want to Get Away? Good idea. Here's how it could look if you launched from Earth into Space (click full screen)''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Launch into Space.jpg|link=https://twitter.com/i/status/1302039862636195840]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;font color=gray&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''September 2020'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:New Climate Maps for US - 2020.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''In the U.S.... according to new data from the Rhodium Group analyzed by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, warming temperatures and changing rainfall will drive agriculture and temperate climates northward, while sea level rise will consume coastlines and dangerous levels of humidity will swamp the Mississippi River valley.'''<br /> <br /> '''Taken with other recent research showing that the most habitable climate in North America will shift northward and the incidence of large fires will increase across the country, this suggests that the climate crisis will profoundly interrupt the way we live and farm in the United States. See how the North American places where humans have lived for thousands of years will shift and what changes are in store for your local county.''<br /> <br /> ''Check out your local area -- and consider, with care, the coming consequences of climate change...''<br /> <br /> * https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration/<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The latest scientific 'delusion' by the U.S. president'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/2020/09/20/the-president-says-the-climate-is-about-to-get-cooler-editorial/<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> ''' 'Scientific American' Breaks 175 Years Of Tradition, Endorses A Presidential Nominee'''<br /> <br /> National Public Radio / NPR <br /> <br /> * https://www.npr.org/2020/09/17/913881019/scientific-american-breaks-tradition-endorses-a-presidential-candidate<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Scientific American has been in print for nearly two centuries, but it has never endorsed a presidential candidate — until now. This week, the magazine announced its endorsement of Democratic nominee Joe Biden for president.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;We took this decision very seriously. You don't give up 175 years of tradition for nothing,&quot; Laura Helmuth, the magazine's editor-in-chief, said in an interview with NPR's Morning Edition.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;This year, we need to tell what we know about the consequences the Trump administration has had for science, health, the environment, for using evidence, for really understanding and accepting reality, and show that this time the choice is just so important for science.&quot;'' <br /> <br /> ''The magazine's endorsement reads: The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people — because he rejects evidence and science...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ················································<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Global Biodiversity Outlook'''<br /> <br /> ''UN Science Report Evidence of Accelerating Extinction of Species''<br /> <br /> ''Action to Protect and Preserve Life Needs to be a Common, Cooperative Effort''<br /> <br /> * https://www.thenational.ae/world/un-warns-world-is-failing-on-all-targets-set-to-save-nature-1.1078476 <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Extinction<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/15/every-global-target-to-stem-destruction-of-nature-by-2020-missed-un-report-aoe<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Toward the Hothouse.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:We must flatten the curve, yes ... August 2020.jpg]]<br /> <br /> ::::: [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&amp;profile=default&amp;search=mauna+loa&amp;fulltext=Search Earth Science Vital Signs, from Mauna Loa Scripps Observatory]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ·······························<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;font color=gray&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;''August 2020''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''If you missed it, you can watch the NOAA plan for future #EarthObservation / #EarthScience 'satellite architecture' here: <br /> <br /> * https://t.co/LqcRFx7PmD <br /> <br /> * https://t.co/aizTP9P1XR <br /> <br /> <br /> ·············································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''Climate change: New UK law to curb deforestation in supply chains''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''The UK government... introducing a law to ensure that the supply chains of larger companies and the products they sell are free from illegal deforestation.''<br /> <br /> ''Companies would have to ensure that commodities such as palm and soy were produced in line with local laws protecting forests and other natural ecosystems.''<br /> <br /> ''Businesses would have to publish information showing the origins of products or face fines.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;There is a hugely important connection between the products we buy and their wider environmental footprint, which is why the government is consulting today on new measures that would make it illegal for businesses in the UK to use commodities that are not grown in accordance with local laws.&quot;''<br /> <br /> * https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53891421<br /> <br /> <br /> ·············································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Big Data &amp; Climate Science'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Drill down at Colorado State University<br /> <br /> * https://sites.google.com/rams.colostate.edu/barnesresearchgroup/home<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Research of atmospheric dynamics and variability under different climates...<br /> <br /> ~ machine learning for atmospheric and climate research<br /> <br /> ~ explainable AI (XAI) for geoscience<br /> <br /> ~ causal discovery <br /> <br /> ~ large-scale atmospheric dynamics and climate change<br /> <br /> ~ sub-seasonal to seasonal prediction of extreme events, temperature, and precipitation<br /> <br /> ~ tropical-extratropical teleconnections<br /> <br /> ~ eddy-mean flow dynamics (e.g. annular-modes, wave propagation)<br /> <br /> ~ climate change and sustainability<br /> <br /> ~ use of models to understand the general circulation<br /> <br /> <br /> ································<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Skai: Hydrogen-powered aerial mobility'''<br /> <br /> Next-gen design takes off<br /> <br /> * https://inhabitat.com/the-skai-hydrogen-powered-aircraft-produces-zero-emissions/ <br /> <br /> <br /> ································<br /> <br /> <br /> '''From the 1950s and First Model Legislation and Regulations, the Fight Against Air Pollution Continues Being Waged and Clean Air Efforts Are Ramping Up'''<br /> <br /> California was out in front, the World is increasing its air quality monitoring as air pollution grows<br /> <br /> * https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/energy-and-environment/2020/8/12/21361498/climate-change-air-pollution-us-india-china-deaths<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Air_Pollution<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Air_Quality<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/California_out_in_front_in_a_Green_future<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Citizen_Science<br /> <br /> <br /> ································<br /> <br /> <br /> '''The Environmental Magazine: Series of Graphic Charts Tracking Climate Change Data Over Four Decades'''<br /> <br /> * https://emagazine.com/climate-change-in-charts/<br /> <br /> <br /> ································<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Massachusetts Acts: Forward-thinking Climate Policy &amp; Model Legislation'''<br /> <br /> Massachusetts steps it up<br /> <br /> * https://malegislature.gov/Bills/191/S2500<br /> <br /> * https://malegislature.gov/Bills/191/S2477<br /> <br /> <br /> ········································································<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/14/joe-biden-climate-jobs-plan &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Joe Biden unveils aggressive $2tn climate and jobs plan'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> Via The Guardian / U.K.<br /> <br /> U.S. Candidate for President Comes Out Swinging in Fight Against Trump<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Joe Biden has unveiled a new, more aggressive climate and jobs plan which advisers say he would take to Congress “immediately”, if elected president.'''''<br /> <br /> ''The new proposal outlines $2tn for clean energy infrastructure and other climate solutions, to be spent as quickly as possible in the next four years, what would be the Democrat’s first term in office. Last year, he proposed $1.7tn in spending over 10 years.<br /> <br /> ''“Addressing the economic crisis is going to be priority one for a President Biden,” a senior campaign official told reporters. “This will be the legislation he goes up to [Capitol Hill] immediately to get done. The reality is we will be facing a country that will be in dire need of these types of investments that are going to be made here.”''<br /> <br /> ''Two crises are converging: a devastated economy and high unemployment that could drag on for years as the nation struggles to gain control of the coronavirus pandemic, and a rapidly closing window to significantly cut heat-trapping emissions and lead on global climate action.''<br /> <br /> ''Biden unveiled the climate plan, the second part of his “Build Back Better” proposal, in remarks from Delaware on Tuesday afternoon.''<br /> <br /> ''“When Donald Trump thinks about climate change, the only word he can muster is ‘hoax’,” Biden said, referring to Trump’s previous claims that the crisis is fake. “When I think about climate change, the word I think of is ‘jobs’.” In a detailed climate policy speech, Biden said his proposal would create a million jobs in electric vehicle manufacturing, a million in upgrading buildings and a quarter-million cleaning up after extractive industries. Biden said he would give Americans money back for switching to cleaner cars and making their homes more efficient.''<br /> <br /> ''He said he was focusing on his first four years as president because “science tells us we have nine years before the damage is irreversible”.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ······························<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Time Cover Story, October 19, 1987.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Time Cover Story, October 1987'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> ... the year before James Hansen's famous [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Hansen-testimony-1988.jpg climate warning testimony to Congress in June 1988] <br /> <br /> By Michael D. Lemonick <br /> <br /> Oct. 19, 1987 <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Lemonick<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 Siterunner<br /> <br /> ... ten years before Professor Hansen's 1987 U.S. Senate testimony<br /> <br /> Passage of the first Congressional Climate Act<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:US_Public_Law_95-367.png<br /> <br /> <br /> ········································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''July 2020'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;In the U.S. ... Political Priorities Out of Alignment with Progress &amp; Security&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Historic Levels of Stock Buybacks, Depressed Investment'''<br /> <br /> * https://prospect.org/coronavirus/americas-covid-19-failure-corporate-stock-buybacks/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Historic Level of Environmental Protection Rollbacks'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Environmental_Laws<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Trump administration, U.S. federal government, attempts to roll back the National Environmental Policy Act'''<br /> <br /> Environmental Protection Agency takes hit after hit, three + years of attacks continue... setbacks will take years to reverse<br /> <br /> * https://thebulletin.org/2020/07/trump-pushes-to-deliver-on-2016-campaign-pledge-to-essentially-get-rid-of-epa/<br /> <br /> <br /> ················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Remember when 'Futurism' first came into vogue? Here, add this to speculative future thinking:'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''I’m an automation-employment-crisis skeptic. That is, I believe that even if we were – by some impossible-to-imagine means – to produce a general AI tomorrow, we would still have 200-300 years of full employment for every human who wanted a job ahead of us.''<br /> <br /> ''I’m talking about climate change, of course.''<br /> <br /> ''Remediating climate change will involve unimaginably labor-intensive tasks, like relocating every coastal city in the world kilometers inland, building high-speed rail links to replace aviation links, caring for hundreds of millions of traumatized, displaced people, and treating runaway zoontoic and insectborne pandemics.''<br /> <br /> ''These tasks will absorb more than 100% of any labor freed up by automation. Every person whose job is obsolete because of automation will have ten jobs waiting for them, for the entire foreseeable future. This means that even if you indulge in a thought experiment in which a General AI emerges that starts doing stuff humans can do – sometimes better than any human could do them – it would not lead to technological unemployment.''<br /> <br /> <br /> -- Cory Doctorow<br /> <br /> : July 6, 2020<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/<br /> <br /> <br /> ·······················································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;font color=blue&gt;&lt;big&gt;&quot;Thin Blue&quot;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> :&lt;font color=green&gt;Enabling &amp; Protecting Life on Earth&lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> ::[http://www.thinbluelayer.com www.ThinBlueLayer.com]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Life on Exoplanets.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Life_on_Exoplanets.jpg&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:One Year as the Earth Rolls.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''As the Earth Rolls at GreenPolicy360'''<br /> <br /> A monthly photograph of the sunrise from a fixed location, and for a whole year. Shows the effect of the earth's movement around the sun.<br /> <br /> Photo(s) Credit: ZAID ALABBDI<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ················································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Integral Ecology-OFM.org.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''June 2020'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Sahara dust plume crosses the Atlantic.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ·········································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Statement to Restore Science-Based Policy in Government'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Scientists for Science-Based Policy''<br /> <br /> * https://scientistsforsciencebasedpolicy.org/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences'''''<br /> <br /> ''Statement Updated June 2020*''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''In September 2016, over 375 members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) signed an Open Letter calling attention to the dangers of human-induced climate change. The letter warned that U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate accord would have negative consequences for the world’s climate system and for U.S. leadership and credibility.''<br /> <br /> ''In the intervening months, these negative consequences have become more obvious. Human-caused climate disruption is leading to suffering and economic loss. Suffering and loss are not future hypotheticals. They are happening now. Despite these serious negative consequences, the present Administration has fulfilled its threat to initiate U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate accord. The United States is the only nation in the world that has taken this action.'' <br /> <br /> ''The decision to withdraw is symptomatic of a larger problem: the Trump Administration’s denigration of scientific expertise and harassment of scientists. The dismissal of scientific evidence in policy formulation has affected wide areas of the social, biological, environmental and physical sciences. It has been particularly egregious in climate science. A recent instance of this is the intention of the Administration to assemble a “Red Team/Blue Team” to re-litigate all aspects of climate science. Such an exercise seeks to foster the erroneous impression of deep uncertainty concerning the reality and seriousness of anthropogenically driven climate change.''<br /> <br /> ''Scientific evidence and research should be an important component of policymaking. We therefore call on the Federal Government to maintain scientific content on publicly accessible websites, to appoint qualified personnel to positions requiring scientific expertise, to cease censorship and intimidation of Government scientists, and to reverse the decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement.''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''Signed: Over 1,200 National Academy of Sciences signers as of June 2020. The List is updated as others sign.''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> * http://www.nasonline.org/<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Academy_of_Sciences<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/06/most-trump-environmental-rollbacks-will-take-years-to-be-reversed/ &lt;big&gt;'''''Trump Environmental Rollbacks Will Take Years to be Reversed'''''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> ''Via Yale Climate Connections''<br /> <br /> ''A new administration could renew the U.S. commitment to the Paris climate agreement, strengthen air pollution standards, and more. But that will take time.''<br /> <br /> ''The Trump administration, after less than one full first term, has every likelihood of being adjudged the most anti-climate, anti-science, and anti-environment executive branch in U.S. history. With numerous high-level Trump nominees having cut their teeth as lobbyists with major polluting industries, the administration has been steadfast in weakening or eliminating major conservation and environmental regulations and programs.''<br /> <br /> ''The extensive regulatory cutbacks raise questions about how much long-term damage they might pose to air and water quality and to serious efforts to address climate change. With a presidential election now five months away, they also raise “What if…” questions about whether such cutbacks might be sustained or how quickly they might be reversed by a new administration.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ························································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Defend Our Future 6-1-2020.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''May 2020'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Inexhaustible Resource? No. Fresh Water Is an Endangered Vital Resource'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Better start measuring, monitoring, and managing it, than lose it''' <br /> <br /> Guarding Earth’s groundwater from space<br /> <br /> Using drones and tiny satellites to bring some accountability to the world’s biggest user of H20: agriculture<br /> <br /> ''In many parts of the world, consumption of fresh water in homes is metered and billed accordingly. In agriculture, by far the world’s biggest user of water, that doesn’t happen. Most farmers simply pump up groundwater and use it at will; often, the only expense is the fuel required to get it to the surface.''<br /> <br /> ''Given depleting groundwater, and wider concerns over food security, that’s a problem...''<br /> <br /> * https://wired.me/science/environment/heres-one-way-to-protect-earths-groundwater-guard-it-from-space/<br /> <br /> <br /> ································································<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Trump administration continues attack on science and environmental policies'''<br /> <br /> '''Science on the Ballot'''<br /> <br /> People say they care about climate. So why don’t they vote like it?<br /> <br /> Judith Lewis Mernit / Capital &amp; Main<br /> <br /> May 20, 2020<br /> <br /> By Judith Lewis Mernit<br /> <br /> ''In the past three and a half years, officials in the Trump administration have attacked environmental laws and the science that supports them with an unbridled urgency. Rules guiding everything from light bulb efficiency to wildlife protection to fugitive emissions from oil drilling have been thrown out or threatened; “settled science” is no longer. Administration officials have fired experts and stacked advisory panels, such as the EPA’s Science Advisory Board that Zarba headed up before he retired in 2018, with underqualified academics or pro-industry researchers.''<br /> <br /> ''“What we’re seeing under the Trump administration is an unraveling of the scientific fabric that runs through government,” says Gretchen Goldman, research director for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. The Department of Energy forbade climate scientists from even mentioning climate change in emails; former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who left the agency in 2018 amid conflict of interest allegations, went after a national park superintendent for writing a Twitter thread about the effects of intensifying heat on the desert ecosystem. “We’ve talked to hundreds of scientists who have said they’d altered their language to avoid political backlash,” Goldman says.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Environment Deregulation(US), Climate Litigation (US &amp; Global)''' <br /> <br /> Five decades of environmental progress being rolled back by Trump administration<br /> <br /> Over 100 environmental rule roll backs by Trump ... track the deconstruction of environmental protections:<br /> <br /> * Climate Deregulation Tracker - http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/resources/climate-deregulation-tracker <br /> <br /> * Climate Change Law Tracker - http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/climatechange<br /> <br /> * Environmental Laws Rollback Tracker - https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/regulatory-rollback-tracker <br /> <br /> * Silencing Science Tracker - http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/resources/silencing-science-tracker<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ·····················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Anonymous Members of UK Parliament Talk Climate Politics'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> A Writer promises not to name names, if the politicos talk openly and honestly<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.theguardian.com/profile/rebecca-willis By Rebecca Willis]<br /> <br /> Writer for The Guardian, Author of [https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/too-hot-to-handle Too Hot to Handle: The Democratic Challenge of Climate Change]<br /> <br /> <br /> (Ed: Following are clips from a &quot;Long Read&quot; article published on May 21, 2020)<br /> <br /> <br /> ''She had two, conflicting, demands: she wanted urgent action on climate; and she also wanted government support to allow her local industry to continue polluting. She was simultaneously backing and opposing climate action. She was worried that someone – maybe a constituent or the local paper – would point out this glaring contradiction. But so far, no one had. “I thought I might get a bit of pushback,” she told me. “I’ve had absolutely zero.”''<br /> <br /> ''This contradiction sums up the state of climate politics in the UK today. There is strong cross-party support for far-reaching carbon targets. In June last year, the government passed a law to strengthen these targets, committing the UK to end virtually all emissions of carbon and other greenhouse gases within the next 30 years. There was next to no opposition – in fact, Labour and the Liberal Democrats argued for an earlier phase-out date. And yet politicians are oddly reluctant to talk about how we might actually meet these targets. There is very little honest debate about the major changes to our economy and society that will be needed if we are to meet this challenge. Like my interviewee, we’re all in favour of climate action, but we haven’t yet had an honest conversation about the power and the vested interests involved, or the choices that will have to be made if we are to achieve significant reductions in emissions.''<br /> <br /> ''... the dual reality of climate politics. We know that things need to change, and yet we’re embedded in our current lives and our current politics. We exist in both realities at once. Politicians make grand statements about the threat of climate change, then flip straight back into politics-as-usual.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''After the Coronavirus Crisis: Will Things Change?'''<br /> <br /> ''Covid-19 is, understandably, taking up all the political and media attention there is, for now. But the need for fast, radical carbon cuts – and a political strategy that will allow this to happen – has not gone away. Will green investment be prioritised in the economic stimulus packages that are undoubtedly needed? Will people think differently about travel or food security? Will we emerge with a politics that focuses more on a collective approach to global challenges such as climate? Or will we fall back into desperate attempts to rekindle the old economy and the old ways?'' <br /> <br /> ''All the politicians I spoke to accepted the science of climate change. And yet they downplayed the consequences. They showed a reluctance to discuss how climate change would reshape human society. A newly elected MP, talking to me in the House of Commons, told me that climate “terrified” him. “Where we’re sat right now might well be underwater, right next to the Thames. I wouldn’t fancy our chances.”''<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> ''Over the course of the interviews, carried out between 2016 and 2018, I saw a pattern emerge. The way politicians responded to climate didn’t just depend on what they thought about the science. Instead, it became clear to me that there were two main reasons why MPs struggled with the issue: first, because it didn’t fit easily into the culture of political life and their own identity as a parliamentarian; and second, because they worried that public support for climate action was limited, and that, as representatives, they needed to be led by their electorate.''<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> ''I was surprised by the extent to which the MPs I spoke to felt constrained by the social norms of their workplace. In one conversation, my interviewee was deliciously unguarded in her opinions of her colleagues. She said that just a few of her 600 or so fellow parliamentarians took climate seriously as an issue: “You might not get into double figures.” She told me she saw everything through a climate lens, and was, in private, very critical of measures such as tax breaks for oil and gas exploration. And yet she felt that she had to tread carefully: she has to fit in. I asked her what would happen if she tried to intervene in a budget debate, to make the case that fossil fuels should stay in the ground. She replied: “I think they’d just think you were a bit ‘niche’, is the way I’d put it – I say ‘niche’ in quotes, like a bit of a lunatic fringe.”''<br /> <br /> ''One former MP, who had been an active climate campaigner in parliament, said: “I was known as being a freak.” Another told me about how he tried to avoid being seen as a “zealot”. These remarks were common in my conversations with politicians. Some said they avoided any mention of climate for fear that it would put an unhelpful label on them. One confident, outspoken MP who worked on energy policy told me that he did what he could to promote policies that would reduce carbon, but justified his proposals on other grounds, such as reducing fuel bills. “I don’t use climate change as the word because I think it’s just toxic,” he told me. “As is the way in these issues which are contentious, you won’t take people with you politically.”''<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> ''... climate was not something that people factored into their daily lives... people were aware of, and concerned by, climate change, but chose to ignore it. It was an unspoken collective turning away... “How could the possibility of climate change be deeply disturbing and almost completely invisible – simultaneously unimaginable and common knowledge?”'' <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> ''... it is surprisingly difficult for politicians to talk openly about the need to transition away from fossil fuels. Witness Nicola Sturgeon, leader of a progressive Scottish government that champions strong climate commitments, while also supporting continued oil and gas extraction in the North Sea. When challenged, her reply is always the same: the industry “cannot be shut down overnight”. She’s right. But her dismissive response shies away from the science, which tells us very clearly that fossil fuels need to stay in the ground, and that we need a plan to move away from them, and create opportunities and jobs elsewhere – not overnight, but urgently.''<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> ''So far, climate action has focused overwhelmingly on low-carbon solutions such as developing renewable energy or offering grants for electric vehicles. These are very valuable schemes, but all this positive activity masks a deeper problem. Little has been done to curb carbon-intensive activity. New coal mines are opened and new airports built with little discussion of climate impacts. If we are constantly finding new ways to dig up and burn carbon, it won’t be enough just to ramp up renewable energy. Study after study shows that meeting climate goals means phasing out the extraction and use of oil, coal and gas – yet no mainstream political party has a coherent plan to do this.''<br /> <br /> ''Politicians, then, are constrained by the culture of political life. They also feel constrained by the electorate. There was a striking consistency in my interviews: no MP felt that their voters were putting them under particular pressure to act. As one said to me, “I’ve knocked hundreds, literally thousands of doors, and had tens of thousands of conversations with voters … and I just don’t have conversations about climate change.”''<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> ''... climate change requires everyone to do their bit. But this claim is often ignored, because people are understandably caught up with their daily lives and struggles, or feel powerless, cynical or overwhelmed by the scale of the challenge. Some politicians point out the economic or social benefits of climate action, such as jobs in renewable energy. As one told me: “I’m happy to use an economic argument if that means more people will come on side.” Another told me about proposals for a new road in his constituency, which he opposed. If he had used a climate argument, he said, “there would have been a rolling of eyes and saying: ‘Oh, here he goes again.’” Instead, he made the case on economic grounds, saying that investment in public transport was a better option.''<br /> <br /> ''There’s a danger in dampening down the message in this way. If politicians don’t speak out, people don’t feel a sense of urgency. They are less likely to support climate action if they don’t see their politicians leading the way, or offering up a strategy that is as serious as the problem it is designed to address.'' <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> What the pandemic does provide... is the possibility of change. The government has done things in the last few weeks that no one thought possible: paying the wages of millions of private-sector workers; shoring up company finances; involving itself in the lives of individuals in ways that would previously have caused the hackles of even the most radical of politicians to rise. Fundamentally, we are rethinking the relationship between state and citizen. As citizens, we have realised that we need the state to keep us safe from crises, be they immediate, like Covid-19, or longer term, like climate change. Politicians, for their part, have realised that people can rise to the challenge, if they understand what they need to do and why.''<br /> <br /> ''If we are to make the right choice here, as a society, the essential first step is a simple one: speaking out. Politicians, and others, need to speak openly and with unflinching honesty about the significance of climate change. As my conversations with MPs have shown, this is a surprisingly difficult thing to do. The left has made a start, with its idea of a [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_New_Deal Green New Deal]. In the US, politicians led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey put forward a plan aiming for net-zero emissions and 100% renewable energy, including job creation in manufacturing, economic justice and even universal healthcare.''<br /> <br /> ''Following Covid-19, what the Green New Deal now offers is, essentially, a green route to recovery.''<br /> <br /> ''Given a meaningful opportunity to have their say, most people would support action in the face of the climate breakdown that is unfolding in front of us. But our democracies, in their current form, are just not offering people that choice. Politicians and citizens, if they take each other seriously, can turn this around.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ······················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Hope.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ······················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;Conference with Andy Revkin at Council on Foreign Relations&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Science-Based Reporting and Countering Misinformation<br /> <br /> * https://www.cfr.org/conference-calls/science-based-reporting-and-countering-misinformation<br /> <br /> ''Andy, you have a long and incredibly distinguished history of writing about the intersection of politics and science, which is rarely pretty. I remember a story you broke in the mid-2000s, during the George W. Bush administration, about their efforts to silence a top scientist at NASA who was calling for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. So how different is the environment today between the suppression of science and active disinformation? And what do you think are the main drivers of the disinformation you’re seeing on COVID-19? Is it politicians, deep political polarization, wider science denialism than we’ve seen before?''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ···························<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;Identifying and Countering Disinformation, Misinformation&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Techniques of science denialism<br /> <br /> <br /> :::::[[File:FLICC techniques of science denial.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ···························<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Science, Testing, Facts &amp; Evidence -- COVID-19'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> As New York began to rollout plans to reopen, Gov. Andrew Cuomo warned residents to remain cautious. &quot;Phased reopening does not mean the problem has gone away,&quot; Cuomo said. '''&quot;Follow the data, follow the science, follow the facts, follow the metrics.&quot;'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ···························<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://apnews.com/0cd4f7bdfc577e234a2c84fbc0b5e7ee '''Nancy Beck Is Back''']<br /> <br /> After a deeply controversial stint at the EPA, the former chemical industry executive nominated to be the nation’s top consumer safety watchdog is now sidelining <br /> [https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6889330-guidance-for-opening-up-america-again-framework.html ''''detailed guidelines''''] to help communities reopen during the coronavirus pandemic.<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2020/05/14/cdc-guidance-reopening-coronavirus-259565 ''''' 'Scaled-back guidance', brief edited document now being released''''']<br /> <br /> ''The White House ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to revise an earlier draft it deemed &quot;too prescriptive.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''The new CDC guidelines, which appear to be watered down from previously leaked versions, provide brief checklists meant to help key businesses and others operating in public reopen safely. In separate one-page documents, the CDC offers decision-making tools for schools, workplaces, camps, child care programs, mass transit systems, and bars and restaurants.''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :························································································<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :[[File:Trump envir rollbacks - clean car clean air setback.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''April 2020'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :[[Earth Day Memories on the 50th Anniversary]]<br /> <br /> :[[File:Earth Day 50th Golden Anniversary.gif]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Earth Day 2020<br /> 50th Anniversary of first Earth Day &quot;Teach-In&quot; / April 22, 1970&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Original Art by Olivia Schmidt / BY-NC<br /> Creative Commons / Use w/ Attribution + Non-commercial&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;On the 50th Anniversary&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Memories on the Road to the First Earth Day&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> Steven Schmidt / [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/User:Siterunner GreenPolicy360 Siterunner]<br /> <br /> <br /> It started on a Schwinn bike in the mid-1960s. My road to April 22, 1970. The day that would be called the first &quot;Earth Day&quot;...<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Day_Memories_on_the_50th_Anniversary&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Day&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ···························································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The BP America Fire, Oil Blowout and Spill in the Gulf'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> April 16, 2020 / A Decade After<br /> <br /> By Craig Pittman / Florida Phoenix<br /> <br /> * https://www.floridaphoenix.com/2020/04/16/a-decade-after-the-bp-oil-spill-sick-fish-gulf-pollution-and-human-health-problems<br /> <br /> <br /> ''On March 31, 2010, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich visited St. Petersburg’s Vinoy hotel to give a speech where he talked about how safe offshore oil drilling was. He was touting his book, '''Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less'''.''<br /> <br /> ''On that same day, then-President Barack Obama announced he would open a lot of the nation’s coastline to drilling, including two-thirds of the eastern Gulf of Mexico.''<br /> <br /> ''Meanwhile, Florida legislators were considering allowing drilling in state waters just three miles off the coast, figuring that from that distance, the tourists wouldn’t see it, so what could go wrong?''<br /> <br /> ''A decade later, this all seems remarkably stupid because within three weeks, on April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank 5,000 feet beneath the gulf.''<br /> <br /> ''Two days later, on Earth Day, the damaged rig began spewing oil that coated coastlines in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and even Florida, ruining tourism, charter fishing and other industries that depend on clean beaches and uncontaminated water.''<br /> <br /> ''The BP oil continues polluting the gulf even today, according to recently released findings by scientists from the University of South Florida’s College of Marine Sciences. It’s still affecting fish and other marine species...''<br /> <br /> ''After the disaster, Obama appointed a federal commission to investigate what went wrong. The commission’s chief investigator, “Sam” Sankar, said the commission’s recommendations called for imposing strong, clear regulations to ensure safety, evaluating the risks of another spill and making sure the oil industry can be held liable in the event of another disaster.''<br /> <br /> ''Of those recommendations, “none of them have been implemented&quot;...''<br /> <br /> <br /> ··············································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''As the Saudi and Russian Oil Industry Battle'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-08-14/bleak-financial-outlook-for-us-fracking-industry/ US Shale Oil &amp; Gas 'Fracking Independents' Waver]<br /> <br /> Long-term Trends Test the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Fossil_Fuels Fossil Fuels Industry Future]<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Vitol, the world’s largest independent oil trading company, has said that oil demand could slump as much as 20 million barrels per day (BPD) over the next few weeks, which would lead to an annual decline of 5 million BPD. Vitol CEO Russell Hardy said “It’s pretty huge in terms of anything we’ve had to deal with before.”''<br /> <br /> ''Goldman Sachs said it expected March demand to be down 10.5 million BPD, followed by a further decline to 18.7 million BPD in April. The company noted that this deep plunge would be beyond the ability of OPEC to counteract: “A demand shock of this magnitude will overwhelm any supply response including any potential core-Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries output freeze or cut.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> ··············································<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Via HuffingtonPost'' / ''Fracking, a ballyhooed but financially fragile sector, struggled to stay afloat with crude selling at $50 per barrel. If prices stay around $30, or even fall as low as $20, U.S. frackers simply might be unable to keep up.''<br /> <br /> * https://oilprice.com<br /> <br /> * https://www.bloomberg.com/energy<br /> <br /> <br /> ''“It’s a financial bloodbath,” said Clark Williams-Derry, an analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “With oil prices at the current level, there’s a real risk many of them will simply go bankrupt.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''As of the first week in March...''<br /> <br /> ''Occidental Petroleum Corp.’s stock price nearly halved as trading closed on Monday. Debt-burdened firms such as Chesapeake Energy Corp. and Whiting Petroleum Corp. finished the day with stock prices down between 30% and 41%. Even behemoths big enough to weather almost any shock took big hits as Exxon Mobil Corp. fell nearly 12% and Chevron Corp. dropped 15%.''<br /> <br /> ''Forecasters are still determining the extent of the likely effect the price drop will have on the broader economy. But it could also have an effect on politics, which are particularly fraught around fracking, the colloquial term for hydraulic fracturing, a drilling practice that breaks bedrock with high-pressured water and chemicals to release difficult-to-reach fossil fuel reserves.''<br /> <br /> Fracking now makes up 63% of U.S. oil production, the Energy Information Administration estimates. That figure looks set to increase as oil and gas drilling grows faster in the U.S. than any other country, and 90% of that is dependent on fracking, according to a report by scientists at more than a dozen environmental groups.''<br /> <br /> ''Contenders in the 2020 presidential election are currently battling over whether to expand, preserve or entirely phase out an industry whose growth all but guarantees climate catastrophe...'' <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ····················<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''March 2020'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Basalts: Carbon Conversion?'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.carbfix.com<br /> <br /> * https://eos.org/articles/basalts-turn-carbon-into-stone-for-permanent-storage<br /> <br /> <br /> ··············································<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Drilled - Website.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;Drilled - Website&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.criticalfrequency.org/drilled<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;Drilled - Podcasts&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> 31 Episodes | 2018 - 2020<br /> <br /> * https://fanlink.to/drilled<br /> <br /> * https://www.criticalfrequency.org/drilled<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Drilled - Season 1 - Season 2.jpg|link=https://www.criticalfrequency.org/drilled]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Madmen of Climate Denial&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :Apple Podcasts<br /> :Google Play<br /> :Pocket Casts<br /> :RadioPublic<br /> :Stitcher<br /> :Spotify<br /> :TuneIn<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Drilled: A True Crime Podcast about Climate Change'''<br /> <br /> October 21st, 2018 / 2:26<br /> <br /> Launched November 14, 2018, Drilled is a limited series investigative true-crime podcast about the crime of the century: the creation of climate denial.<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ································································· <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Educators, Teachers, Parents Are Increasingly Pushing Back Against False Science Information Online'''<br /> <br /> Facebook, Google-YouTube Algorithms Feed Suggested 'Phony Misinformation' to Students and Children<br /> <br /> * https://www.cbsnews.com/news/flat-earth-climate-change-conspiracies-students-teachers-war-on-science-cbsn-originals/<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Since its launch in 2005, YouTube has amassed an audience of over 2 billion monthly active users. Part of the secret of its success is the personalization algorithm that suggests videos based on viewing habits, a process that can create a feedback loop of misinformation. With just a click or two, students can be drawn into debunked and anti-scientific diatribes about climate change, evolution, and even whether the Earth is flat...'' <br /> <br /> ''Based on recent surveys, children are increasingly likely to rely on YouTube for information. A 2019 report from Common Sense Media found that 56% of kids ages 8 to 12, and 69% of teens ages 13 to 18, watch videos online every day. According to a Pew Research survey of YouTube users, half said they use the platform for education purposes. But many of the videos they may encounter on science topics are not based on established scientific data at all, and instead promote pseudoscience, false claims and conspiracy theories.'' <br /> <br /> ''&quot;If you're already predisposed to be interested in conspiracy theories and you're watching videos on conspiracies, the 'flat Earth' videos are going to be suggested to you. When you search for shapes of the Earth, it's the 'flat Earth' data that's going to be presented to you,&quot; said Asheley Landrum, an assistant professor at Texas Tech University who specializes in science communication.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;You end up in an echo chamber where you're being exposed more to this evidence than the information that would correct the 'flat Earth' views you're talking about.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''YouTube, which is owned by Google, has community guidelines that ban &quot;harmful&quot; content, but there's no specific policy against spreading false or misleading ideas about science.''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Science.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Re: Critical Importance of Science &amp; Facts'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''&quot;You can manage only what you can measure&quot;''' <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Stats_-_Green_Research_%26_Science &lt;big&gt;'''GreenPolicy360: Our Position on the Use of Science'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Good_science_needs_good_data.png Good Science Needs Good Data]<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Stats_-_Green_Research_%26_Science<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Memories of Big Science advocates in the US Congress.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''50th Anniversary of Landsat (2016)'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Landsat 50th anniv Sept 2016.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;'''''https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/'''''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''''''https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Virtual_Earth'''''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''''''http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Landsat_data_users_handbook'''''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 Siterunner: When Rep. George E. Brown drafted originating legislation establishing a '''national climate change research program''' via the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:US_Public_Law_95-367.png National Climate Program Act of 1978], the scientific community and nation were just beginning to awaken to a new national security threat. I remember his concern, our concern. He was trained as a scientist, an engineer, with an ability to see facts and data sets in a way others could not. <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Congressman George E. Brown / Science Committee Leadership at the Front of Climate Action'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/National_Climate_Program_Act_Public_Law_95-367_Sept_1978.pdf '''National Climate Program Act, 1978 / PDF''']<br /> : The first federal program established to study and assess scientifically the issues and risks of human-caused climate change<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:US Public Law 95-367.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''At the Beginning of U.S. Science on Global Warming '''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Data, Strategies &amp; Planning'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/Energy_and_Climate_Report%2C_1977%2C_National_Academy_of_Sciences.pdf '''Energy and Climate Report, 1977, National Academy of Sciences / 175 pp. / PDF via GreenPolicy360''']<br /> <br /> <br /> '''1978, the First Climate Act'''<br /> <br /> '''Congressman Brown was responsible for the drafting and passage in 1977 of the First U.S. Federal Climate Report'''<br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:US_Public_Law_95-367.png '''National Climate Program Act, Public Law 95-367''']<br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/National_Climate_Program_Act_Public_Law_95-367_Sept_1978.pdf '''National Climate Program Act of September 1978''']<br /> <br /> <br /> '''In 1979 came the first follow-on [https://www.nap.edu/read/12181/chapter/1 National Science Academy report]. This study and report of national scientists was [https://phys.org/news/2019-07-charney-years-scientists-accurately-climate.html prescient and accurate in its global warming predictions.]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> Representative Brown, a Congressperson with vision, was out in front of &quot;Big Science&quot;. With decades on the House Science committee, and as an engineer, he knew the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:You_can_manage_only_what_you_can_measure_Dr_David_Crisp,_OCO-2,_June_2014_m.jpg need for good data with which good policy decisions could be made]. He pressed for first-generation earth science satellites and ongoing earth monitoring missions and data sharing. Among his many initiatives, George Brown was a key figure in proposing, establishing, and then saving the [https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/ Landsat program], the [http://www.nytimes.com/1989/03/02/us/last-civilian-photography-satellites-to-shut-down.html uniquely 'open-access' database of Earth Science imaging] when President Reagan attempted to shut Landsat down. Landsat, a model for all the following [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Research_from_Space earth science research missions from space], is now moving into its fifth decade with [http://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/?p=10391 Landsat 9.] <br /> <br /> George's profound accomplishments are especially missed now in the current era as [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_and_Space,_Politics anti-science positioning] in the U.S. Congress threatens national and global security... <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/27/1993-agency-climate-change-abolished-office-technology-assessment '''''The US Office of Technology Assessment should be revived – in 2019 the world will need its expertise more than ever''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 Siterunner: William Westermeyer writes of a science agency that was established thru the work of Congressman George E Brown, Congressman from East LA and a leader of California's initiatives in environmental science. Gingrich disbanded the US Office of Technology Assessment in the 1995, after its [https://ota.fas.org/reports/9338.pdf warning on climate change]. Today, the science office to advise the president, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Science_and_Technology_Policy Office of Science and Technology Policy] also brought into existence by George Brown, is moribund with its science executive positions going unfilled. The president is [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Too_Intelligent_to_Believe_in_Climate_Report.png on record] saying he doesn't need the science... The nation and world head into the future as science is set aside.<br /> <br /> <br /> • https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_News<br /> <br /> • https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:George Brown, Sci Com't.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ··································· <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Gistemp 1979-2019.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ················································<br /> <br /> <br /> '''A 'Wright Brothers Moment' -- the First Commercial e-Plane Flies'''<br /> <br /> BBC's Future Planet Series Highlights Electric Flight<br /> <br /> * https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200211-the-electric-plane-leading-a-revolution<br /> <br /> <br /> '''More on e-Flight'''<br /> <br /> [https://www.cnn.com/travel/amp/airplane-contrails-climate-change-science-study/index.html How changing aircraft altitude could cut flight's climate impact in half]<br /> <br /> <br /> :·········································<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Energy-Production Battlelines'''<br /> <br /> <br /> Australia -- an 'Insane Energy Project'<br /> <br /> * https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/adani-mine-australia-climate-change-848315/<br /> <br /> <br /> Japan -- after Fukushima's meltdown, 22 New Coal Energy Projects<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/climate/japan-coal-fukushima.html<br /> <br /> ''It is one unintended consequence of the Fukushima nuclear disaster almost a decade ago, which forced Japan to all but close its nuclear power program. Japan now plans to build as many as 22 new coal-burning power plants — one of the dirtiest sources of electricity — at 17 different sites in the next five years, just at a time when the world needs to slash carbon dioxide emissions to fight global warming...''<br /> <br /> ''Together the 22 power plants would emit almost as much carbon dioxide annually as all the passenger cars sold each year in the United States. The construction stands in contrast with Japan’s effort to portray this summer’s Olympic Games in Tokyo as one of the greenest ever.''<br /> <br /> <br /> :·······································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Money &amp; Climate Policy'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Mnuchin $.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Why a 17-year-old is a better economist than Steve Mnuchin'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/27/opinion/greta-thunberg-mnuchin.html By Paul Krugman]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ·····························<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''January 2020'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Climate News]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''No 'Planet B' but NOAA cometh with &quot;Climate intervention&quot; - &quot;Geoengineering&quot;?<br /> <br /> * https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/noaa-gets-go-ahead-to-study-controversial-climate-plan-b/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Hottest decade on record.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ························································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:BlackRock CEO says the climate crisis is about to trigger.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> * https://realmoney.thestreet.com/jim-cramer/jim-cramer-once-again-why-fossil-fuels-are-on-the-wrong-side-of-history-15227698<br /> <br /> <br /> ······························<br /> <br /> <br /> '''NEPA Update:'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/02/what-trumps-proposed-nepa-rollback-could-mean-for-the-climate/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Trump administration attacks the 'Magna Carta' of US Environmental Protection, the NEPA Act'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Administration officials say they aim to &quot;modernize and clarify&quot; the 50-year-old [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/National_Environmental_Policy_Act National Environmental Policy Act, NEPA.]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;[[National Environmental Policy Act]]&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.npr.org/2020/01/09/794857523/trump-administration-proposes-major-changes-to-bedrock-environmental-law <br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/climate/trump-nepa-environment.html<br /> <br /> <br /> ''NEPA is often said to be [https://www.nrdc.org/experts/amanda-jahshan/nepa-magna-carta-environmental-law the Magna Carta of the environmental movement...]''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ······························<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Thin Blue difference - approx 12 miles high.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ··········································<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Relational Reality.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ··········································<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;font color=green&gt;A Green Paradigm&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:The Web of Life by Fritjof Capra.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''' December 2019'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''As we look toward a New Year and New Decade, we bring a [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Relational_Reality.jpg &lt;font color=green&gt;green world view&lt;/font&gt;] forward with us'''<br /> <br /> Everything is connected in nature, it is all related<br /> <br /> Looking at the climate and how it is changing... Look to <br /> the physics of interconnected Earth systems<br /> <br /> Here, let Kate Marvel explain:<br /> <br /> * https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/hot-planet/this-was-the-decade-we-knew-we-were-right/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:In nature, nothing exists alone.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :···············································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Tracking the Environmental Rollbacks of the Trump Presidency'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/regulatory-rollback-tracker/<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Environmental &amp; Energy Law Program / Harvard Law School<br /> <br /> ''Real-world legal analysis for today’s environmental and energy challenges<br /> <br /> ''We provide real-world legal analysis for today’s environmental and energy challenges. We promote creative problem solving and productive engagement through rigorous legal research, and outreach to decision-makers, stakeholders, media, and the public. Our work covers the following issue areas:'''''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Environmental Governance: including Tracking Environmental Deregulation and Tracking the Undermining of EPA’s Mission'''''<br /> <br /> '''''Electricity Law and Policy'''''<br /> <br /> '''''Private Sector Governance &amp; Innovation'''''<br /> <br /> '''''State &amp; Local Climate Strategies'''''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Decision-makers in these areas are faced with the challenges of technological advances, restructured markets, and climate change. These challenges require innovative, nimble responses that are grounded in a thoughtful policy framework. The Environment &amp; Energy law project at Harvard works with policymakers, advocacy organizations, industry groups, and other stakeholders, to contribute legal scholarship that has real world impacts.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Science Under Attack'''''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/28/climate/trump-administration-war-on-science.html<br /> <br /> <br /> ''WASHINGTON — In just three years, the Trump administration has diminished the role of science in federal policymaking while halting or disrupting research projects nationwide, marking a transformation of the federal government whose effects, experts say, could reverberate for years.''<br /> <br /> ''Political appointees have shut down government studies, reduced the influence of scientists over regulatory decisions and in some cases pressured researchers not to speak publicly. The administration has particularly challenged scientific findings related to the environment and public health opposed by industries such as oil drilling and coal mining. It has also impeded research around human-caused climate change, which President Trump has dismissed despite a global scientific consensus...''<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Environmental_rollbacks_in_US_by_Trump_administration_as_of_June_2019,_NYT_report.jpg Environmental Rollbacks (as of June 2019) by the Trump administration]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Environmental rollbacks in US by Trump administration as of June 2019, NYT report.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ·····························<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Gathering Storm'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Aerial-storm-by-Santiago-Borja.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''What was achieved at the Climate Summit? Little progress.'''<br /> <br /> * https://amp.theguardian.com/science/2019/dec/15/cop25-un-climate-talks-over-for-another-year-was-anything-achieved<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Climate Summit in Madrid ends without action agenda. More promises to act, few commitments'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2019/12/15/21022674/cop25-madrid-climate-change-greta-thunberg<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Climate Action 25th conf in Madrid.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''In Madrid, world leaders arrive for the 25th UN Climate Change Conference !'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :[https://twitter.com/i/status/1201393341730115584 &lt;big&gt;#TiempoDeActuar ! #TimeforAction !&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;We inherited the planet from our parents, and we need to hand it over to future generations&quot; - @KurtykaMichal formally opens the #ClimateChange gathering before handing over its Presidency to [https://twitter.com/CarolaSchmidtZ @CarolaSchmidtZ] / [http://bit.ly/35SrnCn Webcast]<br /> <br /> Recently a majority of lawmakers in the European Parliament voted to declare &quot;a climate and environmental emergency in Europe and globally.&quot; The European Parliament vote to declare a 'climate emergency' stands in stark contrast to the United States and its president.<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/11/1052251 UN: About the Conference, Things You Need to Know]<br /> <br /> More at [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_News GreenPolicy360 Climate News]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> '''''And from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists'''''<br /> <br /> * https://thebulletin.org/2019/11/bad-climate-news-times-three-plus-some-hope/<br /> <br /> ''This has been a pretty unfortunate few weeks for overall climate news, serving up almost a trifecta of bad reports. Consider: A major new United Nations report issued today (Tuesday, November 26) found that greenhouse gas emissions from the world’s biggest polluters have increased, despite the landmark agreement in Paris four years ago to hold the increase in global temperatures well below 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degree Fahrenheit. “The summary finding is bleak,” the report said, and “…deeper and faster cuts are now required.”''<br /> <br /> ''On a longer time scale, the World Meteorological Organization reported yesterday that levels of heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide have reached another new, record high. “There is no sign of a slowdown, let alone a decline, in greenhouse gases concentration in the atmosphere despite all the commitments under the Paris Agreement on Climate Change,” the organization’s leader, Petteri Taalas, said.''<br /> <br /> ''Meanwhile, evidence has been accumulating that the world is getting closer and closer to what has been called a “hothouse Earth scenario,” in which large chunks of the planet become at least partially uninhabitable, leading 11,000 scientists to publish an open letter on November 5 in the journal BioScience calling for immediate action. The letter said: “The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected. It is more severe than anticipated, threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''November 2019'''''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Drawdown CO2 - Online Education solutions video.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ·························································· <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''&quot;We are running out of air&quot; -- Delhi'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Air Pollution - Air Quality Nov 4, 2019 Delhi.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/11/delhi-air-crisis/601507/<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Air_Quality<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Air_Pollution<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''October 2019'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Thin Blue difference.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Thin Blue difference - approx 12 miles high.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ································································· <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;So they knew...&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://www.theguardian.com/business/video/2019/oct/23/exxon-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-congress-testimony-climate '''''(In 1982) You predicted 415 ppm for 2019? The Fossil Fuels research warned of consequences... ''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Via The Guardian'' / ''House Democrats on Wednesday laid out evidence that the oil behemoth ExxonMobil had known since the 1970s about the potential for a climate crisis and intentionally sowed doubt about it. One of those testifying was Martin Hoffert, a scientist consultant for Exxon Research and Engineering in the 1980s. Responding to the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Hoffert testified that in 1982, Exxon scientists predicted how carbon dioxide levels would rise and heat the planet as humans burned more fossil fuels.''<br /> <br /> ''Exxon sowed doubt about climate crisis, a House of Representatives Committee heard in US Congressional testimony.''<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Fossil_Fuels '''Read about Fossil Fuels and Continuing Emissions Production''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Which countries pollute the most ~2017.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/climate/trump-science-crisis.html ''US Faces 'Crisis' in Science'']<br /> <br /> ''All presidents over the past two decades have nudged science to support their policies, but a [https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/policy-solutions/proposals-reform-volume-ii-national-task-force-rule-law-democracy report] out of N.Y.U. says the Trump administration has driven federal science to a “crisis point.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/01/bad-ancestors-climate-crisis-democracy ''Via The Guardian'']<br /> <br /> '''''Does the Climate Crisis Violate the Rights of Those Yet to be Born?''''' <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''September 2019'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Carbon Budgeting as Financial Planning Budgeting'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> As #PlanetCitizens w/ GreenPolicy360, we turn to our friends at #GlobalCitizen for a deep discussion of a heating Earth, CO2 and a ticking clock'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/what-does-a-carbon-budget-mean/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''&quot;You are failing us&quot;...'''<br /> <br /> [[File:UN General Assembly Climate Summit Day1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://apnews.com/67c8a8c50854447cafef611dc4aa15ea &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''At the UN Climate Summit: Leader after leader promises to do more'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Biggest CO2 emitters in disarray as international cooperation drops away''' <br /> <br /> '''US president/US climate policy push fossil fuels, act to block shift to clean energy'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/22/climate/un-climate-summit-coal.html &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Before the Climate Summit: Limited expectations'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Greta Thunberg at the UN - the eyes of the world will be upon them.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-administration-revokes-californias-authority-to-set-auto-mileage-standards &lt;big&gt;'''Via Fox News / Trump administration revokes California’s authority to set auto mileage standards'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=a26e567b-1894-417d-ac37-68ea9367cf1e Via Los Angeles Times]<br /> <br /> ''Still seething over California’s end run around its plan to roll back fuel economy and greenhouse gas emissions targets on new cars, the Trump administration has launched an antitrust investigation into four automakers that reached an agreement with the state to make their cars run cleaner.''<br /> <br /> ''The administration also sent a letter to California officials warning darkly of “legal consequences” if the state does not abandon the agreement. And it’s considering revoking California’s long-standing authority to set tougher auto pollution standards than those required by the federal government — an authority Congress has provided at least since 1967 in recognition of the state’s own efforts to clean its dirty air.''<br /> <br /> ''This is a blatant attempt to use the power of the federal government to bully companies that disagree with the president. It’s especially galling that the administration would use the threat of a Justice Department investigation to pressure automakers to make cars that are worse for consumers, worse for the environment and worse for a rapidly warming planet...''<br /> <br /> <br /> ·······················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The Democratic presidential candidates are finally getting climate action on the agenda. Next to nuclear blunder, nothing is more important for our future.'' <br /> <br /> -- ''Jerry Brown'' ... ''CLIMATE ACTION IS THE REAL DEAL!!! #ActOnClimate'' <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://truthout.org/articles/sanders-shines-and-biden-crumbles-during-epic-town-hall-on-climate-crisis/ ''Via Truthout / Sept. 5, 2019'']<br /> <br /> ''Adding climate change to school curriculums. Geoengineering. Thorium fuel reactors. A Blue New Deal. The Syrian war was a climate war. Climate distress included in asylum petitions. Food deserts. Climate denial is a literal sin. “Democracy” is a verb.''<br /> <br /> ''For the first time in the history of the country, these topics and others like them were discussed in detail by presidential candidates on live television, and all with the words “Climate Crisis” in huge letters above them on the stage and flashed in chyrons across the screen. Underscoring the gravity of the topic were constant updates on the ruinous progress of Hurricane Dorian, which reclaimed Category 3 status as it clawed its way toward landfall once again...''<br /> <br /> <br /> ················································<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/04/politics/trump-climate-change-policy-rollbacks/index.html ''Trump's climate change policy rollbacks'']<br /> <br /> ''CNN / Regardless of what happens in the 2020 presidential election, critics say Trump has already cemented an environmental legacy that will be felt by generations to come.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;He is locking in permanent, irreversible damage to our environment through his irresponsible environmental policies, including his efforts to block progress on climate change,&quot; said Dr. Michael E. Mann, distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University and director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center. &quot;Once we go beyond key tipping points -- the melting of the major ice sheets -- there is no going back.&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''August 2019'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/trump-epa-methane-emissions-rollback-regulations-oil-gas-industry.amp ''US EPA: Methane regulations? Time for more oil/gas ... Time for more methane. The #TrumpEffect, a legacy...'']<br /> <br /> [https://www.strategicdemands.com/brazils-bolsonaro-trump-effect/ ''Brazil's Bolsonaro and the 'Trump Effect' / Via Strategic Demands'']<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;The Amazon Rainforest Burns&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> • https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Donald_Trump-Jair_Bolsonaro-March_2019.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Infoamazonia-fires-Aug2019.jpg|link=https://infoamazonia.org/en/embed/?p=20082&amp;map_id=3502&amp;width=960&amp;height=480]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ················································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Fossil Fuel 'Silver Bullet'?'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/08/20/business/tech/green-silver-bullet-scientists-boast-way-extract-hydrogen-oil-without-emitting-greenhouse-gases/ ''Extracting Hydrogen from Oil Without Releasing Greenhouse Gases?'']<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/science-and-health/2019/8/19/20812243/trump-epa-climate-plan-ace-cpp-6-things ''Trump's EPA: Gutting the Clean Power Plan, a Primer'']<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''July 2019'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> : [https://www.fridaysforfuture.org/ '''www.fridaysforfuture.org''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:June 2019 - NASA GISS data - hottest on record.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''And What a Record It Is'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.ewg.org/release/trump-touts-fictitious-environmental-record ''July 8, 2019 / Trump touts his fictitious environmental record'']<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''Environmental Working Group: “The spectacle of the president straining to document a positive environmental record should be seen for what it is – utter fantasy.''&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''There has never been a president who has actively pursued an agenda so hostile to the environment and public health at the behest of polluters than Mr. Trump.”''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/08/us/politics/trump-environment-climate-change.html &lt;big&gt;''A Fictitious Speech''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> ''Experts watching [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Trump_touts_himself_as_an_environment_president.jpg the speech] said many of the president’s claims were not based in fact. Those achievements that were real, they said, were the result of actions taken by his predecessors. And they noted the one conspicuous omission from the whole discussion: any mention of climate change, the overarching environmental threat that Mr. Trump has mocked in the past.''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''The US President Continues His Assault on Environmental Laws/Regulations and Policy'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''''GreenPolicy360:''''' ''The record of the president on the big picture security issues is a veritable failure. On two existential issues GreenPolicy continues to sound the alarm about, [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_News climate] and [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Nuclear_Weapons nuclear weapons], the president's record is abysmal by any reasoned accounting. On climate disruption, threats to the global atmosphere, consequences across the nation and globe as a result of environmental impacts to the economy, on biodiversity, life as we know it, the president races to dismantle decades of environmental work even as he attempts to take credit for 'clean air, clean water' work accomplished since the 1960s and 1970s, [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_movement the foundations of the modern environmental movement]. On nuclear weapons, his administration throws out nuclear weapons agreements, abandons nuclear treaties, refuses to enter into nuclear arms control negotiations, speeds up the development of 'usable' nuclear weapons systems, expands the nuclear weapons into space with next generation hyperspace delivery systems, and yet in spite of all of this claims 'he' is 'the answer' to security.''<br /> <br /> ''GreenPolicy360 strongly disagrees with those who are ignoring the gathering dual threats of escalating climate crisis and the current proliferation of nuclear weapons.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''NOAA says... learn the basics to understand climate data'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''@Climate.gov / https://www.climate.gov/maps-data/primer/climate-data-primer''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''June 2019'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''NOAA NEWS / RISING EMISSIONS DRIVE GREENHOUSE GAS INCREASES'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> • https://research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMID/587/ArticleID/2455/RISING-EMISSIONS-DRIVE-GREENHOUSE-GAS-INDEX-INCREASE<br /> <br /> <br /> ''NOAA’s Annual Greenhouse Gas Index tracks the relative climate-forcing influence exerted by carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases since the start of the industrial revolution. This year it rose to a value of 1.43, meaning that the increase in the atmosphere’s heat-trapping capacity attributable to human activity has risen 43 percent since 1990.''<br /> <br /> ''The index, known as the AGGI, is based on hundreds of air samples collected from sites around the world each year from NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network, and carefully analyzed at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado.''<br /> <br /> ''“Greenhouse gas pollution traps heat in the atmosphere, which has consequences,” said James Butler, director of NOAA’s Global Monitoring Division. “There’s no getting around it -- burning fossil fuels is changing the course of our planet’s future. How society deals with that will be a major challenge in coming decades.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> :::::[https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/monthly.html '''''June 2 / NOAA-Scripps Mauna Loa Observatory / 414.28 ppm''''']<br /> <br /> :::::[[File:C02 in atmosphere chart-3.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::::[[File:Denying human-caused climate change.jpg]] <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''84 Environmental Rules on the Way Out Under Trump'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''''Via the NY Times / June 3, 2019'''''<br /> <br /> <br /> • ''https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/climate/trump-environment-rollbacks.html''<br /> <br /> • ''https://twitter.com/nytclimate/status/1136094068914774016''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''A New York Times analysis, based on research from Harvard Law School, Columbia Law School and other sources, counts more than 80 in a Trump administration 'aggressive schedule'...''<br /> <br /> <br /> :::::[[File:Environmental rollbacks in US by Trump administration as of June 2019, NYT report.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''May 2019'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Trump administration escalates war on climate science'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> • ''https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/27/us/politics/trump-climate-science.html''<br /> <br /> <br /> ··················<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''PoliticoPay'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ''How the oil industry and other polluters paid for studies to downplay climate change and give the GOP cover for inaction:''<br /> <br /> ''“You want to understand the climate crisis today? It’s 25 years of corruption in Washington.” -- Elizabeth Warren, campaigning for US president, May 2019''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Oil firms spending on climate lobbying - five companies annual spend.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ····················································<br /> <br /> <br /> '''On April 22, 2019, Earth Day in the US'''<br /> <br /> :- A coal lobbyist runs the EPA <br /> :- An oil lobbyist runs the DOI <br /> :- A Monsanto exec runs US Fish &amp; Wildlife <br /> :- A BP oil attorney is the nation's top enviro lawyer <br /> :- A fossil fuel lobbyist is the EPA's air pollution chief <br /> :- A big energy insider regulates our power grid <br /> <br /> :* Via Public Citizen<br /> <br /> <br /> ······················································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Visit GreenPolicy's [[Climate News]]'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:CO2 since 1751.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Mauna_loa_CO2_record_scripps.png &lt;big&gt;''CO2 Measurements by NOAA/Scripps''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> [https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/05/13/health/carbon-dioxide-world-intl/index.html &lt;big&gt;''Historic CO2 Level / 415.26 / May 11''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ''David Attenborough... “Fifty years ago, we didn’t even realize what the problem was. Maybe thirty years ago we did recognize what the problem was but didn’t know much about it, thinking, That’s way in the future. Now we know that it’s right here ahead of us.”''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Mauna Loa-NOAA-Observatory.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Measuring &amp; Monitoring CO2'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : April 19: 413.86 ppm<br /> : April 18: 413.43 ppm<br /> : April 17: 413.63 ppm<br /> <br /> <br /> :'''https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/index.html'''<br /> :'''https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/monthly.html'''<br /> <br /> <br /> :[https://www.history.com/news/keeling-curve-global-warming-climate-change '''Watching the Keeling Curve, Vital Signs''']<br /> :Keeling's Curve has been called one of the most important scientific works of the 20th century<br /> <br /> :• '''https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Vital_Signs'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Mauna Loa - CO2 - Apr2019.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''March 2019'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;'''''Above and Beyond National Borders'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :* [https://eos.org/ '''''EOS.org / Earth Science News''''']<br /> <br /> :* [https://eos.org/project-updates/earth-science-is-ready-for-preprints '''''Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Scientists: New Research, Old Archives''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> ::::[[File:Above.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''February 2019'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Democrats Now in the Majority in the House of Representatives'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''The State of Climate Science: Committee on Science, Space and Technology''<br /> <br /> <br /> CLIMATE / [https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/stories/1060120481 Via E&amp;E News] <br /> <br /> '''''Democrats praise 'refreshing' change in Science Committee'''''<br /> <br /> ''The Science, Space and Technology Committee kicked off its long-awaited climate hearing this morning by agreeing on one basic fact: Climate change is happening.''<br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> Back in business! After so many years of inaction, a decade, climate science is again in front of the US House of Representatives.<br /> <br /> Climate change is happening. Science-based decisions are needed, resilience is necessary, healthier, more secure communities are the goal.<br /> <br /> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYSfjDSxKK0<br /> <br /> <br /> ·························································<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Antarctica, ominous scientific discovery'''''<br /> <br /> :• http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau3433<br /> :• https://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/climate-change/thwaites-glacier-has-an-enormous-cavity-beneath-it-melted-by-warm-ocean-waters/news-story/d76c01e23593eab1d85324db89c3cd79 <br /> <br /> '''''Scientists Detect an Enormous Cavity Growing Beneath Antarctica'''''<br /> <br /> : ''Researchers say the cavity would once have been large enough to hold some 14 billion tonnes of ice. Even more disturbing, the researchers say it lost most of this ice volume over the last three years alone.''<br /> <br /> : ''&quot;We have suspected for years that Thwaites was not tightly attached to the bedrock beneath it,&quot; says glaciologist Eric Rignot from the University of California, Irvine, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.''<br /> <br /> : ''&quot;Thanks to a new generation of satellites, we can finally see the detail.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Greenland, unprecedented loss of ice'''''<br /> <br /> :• https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/science-environment-46960842<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Arctic Watch'''''<br /> <br /> :• https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Arctic<br /> <br /> <br /> ····································································<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060111657 '''''Via E&amp;E News / Next US President Could Declare National Climate Emergency''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> ''&quot;The reason we care about the changing climate is because it is a threat multiplier,&quot; said Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist and a political science professor at Texas Tech University. &quot;If you think immigration is a problem now, just wait. If you think international competitiveness, or agriculture or water shortages, or the extreme amount of money that is being spent to help cities and regions recover after disasters, if you think any of that is a problem right now, just wait.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''The threat from climate change needs an Oval Office address to communicate its seriousness, said Bob Inglis, a former Republican congressman from South Carolina who once rejected climate science but now tries to engage conservatives on the issue.''<br /> <br /> ''He said neither immigration nor climate change requires a national emergency declaration. Instead, a Republican president could use the backdrop of the Oval Office to explain that America is prepared to lead the world on climate action. He said he envisions a grand speech that echoes President Kennedy in 1961 at Rice University, where he marshaled the nation's best science for a race to the moon.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;Climate change is this huge challenge, it's a worldwide challenge, it's just a call for American greatness to solve the challenge,&quot; Inglis said. &quot;The rest of the world can't solve it. It does warrant that level of attention from a president, and of course that's not what we're getting now.&quot;''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''2018'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/'''2018 / U.S. National Climate Assessment'''] / [https://carbon2018.globalchange.gov/ '''U.S. Carbon Assessment''']<br /> <br /> <br /> ::::[[File:NY Times - Nov 24, 2018.jpg|link=https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/23/climate/us-climate-report.html]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> ○ [http://www.strategicdemands.com ''StrategicDemands.com'']<br /> <br /> ○ [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/New_Definitions_of_National_Security ''New Definitions of National Security'']<br /> <br /> ○ ''&quot;Humanity faces two imminent existential threats: environmental catastrophe and nuclear war. These were virtually ignored in the (US 2018 midterm election) campaign rhetoric and general coverage. There was plenty of criticism of the Trump administration, but scarcely a word about by far the most ominous positions the administration has taken: increasing the already dire threat of nuclear war, and racing to destroy the physical environment that organized human society needs in order to survive. These are the most critical and urgent questions that have arisen in all of human history. The fact that they scarcely arose in the campaign is truly stunning — and carries some important, if unpleasant, lessons about our moral and intellectual culture.&quot; -- ''Truthout, Noam Chomsky, November 2018'' <br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_Quotes &lt;font color=green&gt;''Via Green Quotes''&lt;/font&gt;] <br /> <br /> <br /> ·································<br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Michael Mann-Nov7,2018.png|link=https://mobile.twitter.com/MichaelEMann/status/1060356559811817473]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ''&quot;Restore the credibility of the Science Committee as a place where science is respected and recognized as a crucial input to good policy making.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Nov 6, 2018''<br /> <br /> ''Press Release''<br /> <br /> '''''House Science, Space, and Technology Committee'''''<br /> <br /> ''(Dallas, TX) – Ranking Member Eddie Bernice Johnson’s (D-TX) [https://democrats-science.house.gov/news/press-releases/ranking-member-johnson-statement-election-results-and-seeking-chairmanship statement]''<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://democrats-science.house.gov<br /> <br /> <br /> ::·····················································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Evaluating the Accuracy of Seasonal Climate Predictions'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''An analysis of historical modeling outputs is improving our understanding of seasonal forecasting skills''<br /> <br /> ''Earth &amp; Space Science News from EOS / AGU''<br /> <br /> ''Source: Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres'' <br /> <br /> * https://eos.org/research-spotlights/evaluating-the-accuracy-of-seasonal-climate-predictions<br /> <br /> <br /> :···································································<br /> <br /> <br /> * [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/nasa-climate-mission-trump-tried-kill-moves-forward ''Trump Tries to Kill NASA Climate Mission'']<br /> <br /> * [https://www.facebook.com/yearswaronourfuture/videos/252637772140860/ #WaronOurFuture]<br /> <br /> <br /> :····································································<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/07/us/politics/epa-toxic-chemicals.html '''Chemical Industry Scores a Big Win at the Environmental Protection Agency''']<br /> <br /> ''Nancy B. Beck, the Trump administration’s appointee to help oversee the EPA’s toxic chemical unit, previously worked as an executive at the American Chemistry Council, one of the industry’s main lobbying groups.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ····································································<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/06/opinion/scott-pruitt-resignation-wheeler.html '''Scott Pruitt Resigns as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency''']<br /> <br /> ''Mr. Pruitt faced up to 19 separate investigations into his conduct reflecting a stunning degree of disregard for federal ethics, special-interest and procurement rules. The sheer volume of investigations would be comic but for the harm Mr. Pruitt wrought.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/10/07/this-coal-lobbyist-once-wrote-trump-was-a-bully-now-hes-the-nominee-for-epas-no-2-spot/ '''Andrew Wheeler to Succeed Pruitt at the EPA: Who is Wheeler?''']<br /> <br /> ''Via the Associated Press:'' <br /> <br /> ''Mr. Wheeler's public statements show him to be a skeptic, like Pruitt, about the extent to which coal, oil and gas emissions drive climate change... Wheeler was Senator Jim Inhofe's former chief of staff... Inhofe of Oklahoma is the Senate's most ardent challenger of manmade climate-change. After leaving his work with Inhofe, Wheeler then went to work as a lobbyist for top coal companies and other businesses and interests.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ······················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''&quot;Surviving Victory&quot;: Moving Away from [https://www.amazon.com/Perpetual-War-Peace-How-Hated/dp/156025405X &quot;Perpetual War&quot;]'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''''Shifting from Fossil Fuel Causes of Conflict to Renewable Energy Alternatives'''''<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;<br /> :https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Surviving_Victory:_Security_Priorities<br /> <br /> :https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Surviving-Victory-conference-Washington-DC-2006.pdf<br /> <br /> :https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Surviving_Victory.png<br /> <br /> :https://www.strategicdemands.com/costsofwar/<br /> <br /> <br /> :https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:New_Definitions_of_National_Security.png<br /> <br /> :https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Environmental_Security <br /> <br /> :https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Global_Security<br /> &lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> [[File:Over the Pacific.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:DSCOVR-EPIC-May13,2018.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''May 2018'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Trump’s NASA Chief: 'I Fully Believe and Know the Climate Is Changing''''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''''“I also know that we human beings are contributing to it in a major way”'''''<br /> <br /> [https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/05/trump-nasa-climate-change-bridenstine/560642/ Via The Atlantic]<br /> <br /> <br /> ''“As far as my position on climate change and how it’s evolved, I’ll be very open...” the new administrator of NASA said at a town hall Thursday (May 17) at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.''<br /> <br /> ''“I don’t deny that consensus that the climate is changing,” he said. “In fact, I fully believe and know that the climate is changing. I also know that we humans beings are contributing to it in a major way. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. We’re putting it into the atmosphere in volumes that we haven’t seen, and that greenhouse gas is warming the planet. That is absolutely happening, and we are responsible for it.”''<br /> <br /> ''... whether Bridenstine’s views on climate change have changed or not, the views of his bosses haven’t, and this remains a point of concern for Bridentine’s critics. The Trump White House has proposed cutting or canceling many of nasa’s earth-science missions. So far, they’ve been spared. Republicans don’t have enough seats in the Senate to pass their dream budgets, so they’ve had to negotiate bipartisan budget legislation with Democrats. This setup has preserved most of nasa’s climate funding, but not all. The latest budget deal didn’t specifically mention nasa’s Carbon Monitoring System, a $10-million program to track greenhouse-gas emissions around the world. The Trump administration took that as an opportunity to terminate the program.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/trump-dismantles-nasa-climate-change-program '''''Trump dismantles NASA climate change program''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The Trump administration has cut off funding for a major NASA satellite-based climate change research program, according to the latest issue of Science magazine.''<br /> <br /> ''The [http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/05/trump-white-house-quietly-cancels-nasa-research-verifying-greenhouse-gas-cuts magazine reported] that even though Congress has successfully fended off much of the White House's &quot;broad attack on climate science,&quot; a spending deal signed in March made no mention of NASA's $10-million-a-year Carbon Monitoring System.''<br /> <br /> ''Unlike the satellites that provide the climate data, the research program that uses the data had no private contractor to lobby for it.''<br /> <br /> ''NASA spokesman Steve Cole told Science that existing grants for the program will be allowed to finish but no new research will be supported.''<br /> <br /> ''Phil Duffy, president of the Woods Hole Research Center in Falmouth, Mass., told the magazine the monitoring system is an obvious target for the Trump administration because of its association with the Paris climate change agreement and its work with other nations to help them understand their greenhouse gas emissions.''<br /> <br /> ''Many of the 65 research programs that the system supports are focused on tracking how global CO2 is stored naturally in forests, rivers, and other natural formations.''<br /> <br /> <br /> : '''''AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE / SCIENCE Journal / May 2018'''''<br /> <br /> : ''[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:You_can_manage_only_what_you_can_measure_Dr_David_Crisp,_OCO-2,_June_2014_m.jpg You can't manage what you don't measure]. The adage is especially relevant for climate-warming greenhouse gases, which are crucial to manage—and challenging to measure. In recent years, though, satellite and aircraft instruments have begun monitoring carbon dioxide and methane remotely, and NASA's Carbon Monitoring System (CMS), a $10-million-a-year research line, has helped stitch together observations of sources and sinks into high-resolution models of the planet's flows of carbon. Now, President Donald Trump's administration has quietly killed the CMS, Science has learned.''<br /> <br /> :''The move jeopardizes plans to verify the national emission cuts agreed to in the Paris climate accords, says Kelly Sims Gallagher, director of Tufts University's Center for International Environment and Resource Policy in Medford, Massachusetts. &quot;If you cannot measure emissions reductions, you cannot be confident that countries are adhering to the agreement.&quot;'' <br /> <br /> :''&quot;Canceling the Carbon Monitoring System &quot;is a grave mistake.&quot;''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/OCO-2<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :···························································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth and Moon from Galileo - Dec 16 1992.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''GreenPolicy360's Earth POV'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Research_from_Space Earth Science Research from Space]<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Look_at_how_thin_our_atmosphere_is Look How Thin Our Atmosphere Is]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Micro-satellites<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_Labs_Doves_Fly<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_and_Space,_Politics<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_API<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Imaging-New_Space<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Democratization_of_Space<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Observations<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Vital_Signs<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Right_Now<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/@Earth360<br /> <br /> * http://www.earthpov.com<br /> <br /> * http://www.planetaryawareness.org<br /> <br /> <br /> ···················································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''April 2018'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Bridenstine-swear-in.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;'''Photo credit: NASA'''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> What is there to say about a NASA appointment to the Trump cabinet who in the past has been a climate science denier, even as the NASA mission statement from its beginnings speaks to the necessity of Earth Science as a foremost mission of the agency. Of course, planet Earth has been [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Earth_science_missions_in_space_US_circa2017.jpg studied by NASA for decades], coming out of the initial satellite missions of the 1970s and 1980s until today's first generation of sophisticated data-rich baselines of atmospheric-sea-and terrestrial systems. Yet, rejection of the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Vital_Signs vital missions of NASA] seems to fit with rejection of the vital mission of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Like much of the regression of the Trump administration, the appointment of Jim Bridenstine, over serious objections, demonstrates a policy of deconstruction, a policy that sets aside national security threats and retreats from responsibilities to all citizens in the nation, and a clear U.S. responsibility to cooperate with the international community to envision and achieve common goals as we strive toward attaining a common overarching goal of global security. <br /> <br /> Given the pressing needs, the Green Policy position on the new NASA administrator is to raise warning flags. Our skepticism is deep and our patience and forbearance is stretched as we examine the record of this political figure without a science background. Yes, Mr. Bridenstine was a Navy pilot and served honorably. Apart from his service record, his knowledge and understanding of NASA's challenges and its historic mission remains a core concern of ours. How limited is his view. It seems on inspection of his public statements a dangerously limited view.<br /> <br /> * [https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/james-bridenstine-nasa-climate-change-denier-donald-trump-ignoring-science-terrifying-launch-a8313966.html Trump's new NASA chief Jim Bridenstine a 'climate change denier' who could make 'terrifying' decisions, US senators warn]<br /> <br /> The challenge and risk of climate disruption and the role of NASA's [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Research_from_Space satellite missions] in studying [http://www.thinbluelayer.com Earth's life-enabling atmosphere], [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:You_can_manage_only_what_you_can_measure_Dr_David_Crisp,_OCO-2,_June_2014_m.jpg monitoring and measuring] Earth systems essential for human survival, is NO minor responsibility.<br /> <br /> We will soon find answers to our questions on his vision and capabilities -- if the new administrator has any idea of real world threats and challenges as he takes on his new role.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''The Biggest Cuts Proposed by the Trump Administration to NASA'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''''Earth Science/Atmosphere Monitoring like OCO-3 Proposed for Elimination'''''<br /> <br /> '''''Draconian Cuts to a NASA Original Mission -- to Study Planet Earth'''''<br /> <br /> [https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/03/27/winners-and-losers-in-nasas-budget-for-2018-and-beyond/#7684b92e2ca1 '''''Winners and Losers in the 2018 NASA Budget''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> ''There were five NASA Earth Science missions slated for the chopping block in the President's original proposal. These cuts were to vital satellites, all of which are focused on measuring various aspects of Earth's climate, including reflected and emitted light and energy, cloud cover and behavior, and the detection of long-and-short-term climate trends. If you want to understand how the planet's climate works, to forecast seasonal and environmental trends, and to do medium-to-long-term forecasting, you need these missions. Four of these five missions have had their funding restored:''<br /> <br /> * ''the Plankton; Aerosol; Cloud; ocean Ecosystem (PACE);''<br /> <br /> * ''the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-3 (OCO-3);''<br /> <br /> * ''the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR)'s Earth-viewing instruments;''<br /> <br /> * ''and the Climate Absolute Radiance and Refractivity Observatory (CLARREO) Pathfinder.''<br /> <br /> * ''while a fifth, the Radiation Budget Instrument (RBI), remains cancelled. However, future large missions designed to monitor the Earth's climate have received no official nod of support, threatening their long-term viability.''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Isn't it time.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/OCO-2 The OCO-2 Mission: History-making]<br /> <br /> * [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Research_from_Space Earth Science Research from Space]<br /> <br /> * [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Observations Earth Observations / Category]<br /> <br /> <br /> * [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/You_can_manage_only_what_you_can_measure_Dr_David_Crisp%2C_OCO-2%2C_June_2014_m.jpg &quot;You can manage only what you can measure&quot;]<br /> <br /> * [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Isn%27t_it_time.jpg Isn't It Time to Measure &amp; Monitor 'Externalities'?]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:You can manage only what you can measure Dr David Crisp, OCO-2, June 2014 m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Trump's EPA Continues Assault on Environmental Protection Agency'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://nyti.ms/2JSOHWx '''''Scott Pruitt of the US EPA Goes Far Beyond Environmental Protection''''']<br /> <br /> * [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Pruitt-pol_cartoon-arizona_central.jpg '''''Pressure on Pruitt heats up: Editorial media cartoons eviscerate the performance of the EPA chief''''']<br /> <br /> ''New York Timed Editorial: &quot;Policies aside — and they’re terrible, from an environmental perspective — Mr. Pruitt’s self-aggrandizing and borderline thuggish behavior has disgraced his office and demoralized his employees. We opposed his nomination because he had spent his career as attorney general of Oklahoma suing the federal department he was being asked to lead on behalf of industries he was being asked to regulate. As it turns out, Mr. Pruitt is not just an industry lap dog but also an arrogant and vengeful bully and small-time grifter, bent on chiseling the taxpayer to suit his lifestyle and warm his ego.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;Any other president would have fired him. Mr. Trump praises him. “Scott is doing a great job!” the president tweeted on April 7.'' <br /> <br /> ''&quot;Mr. Trump seems to care not a whit about Mr. Pruitt’s mounting ethical problems, which have lately reached a point where Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly, has reportedly told the president that he should think seriously about letting Mr. Pruitt go...''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;By endless repetition, he has reinforced in the public mind the lie that Republicans have peddled for years and Mr. Trump’s minions peddle now, that environmental rules kill jobs, that limiting carbon dioxide emissions will damage the economy, that the way forward lies not in technology and renewable energy but in digging more coal and punching more holes in the ground in search of oil. And, on the human level, he has been in the forefront of the administration’s shameless effort to delude the nation’s frightened coal miners into thinking coal is coming back, when any comeback is unlikely not because of regulation but because of strong market forces favoring natural gas and renewables.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;The recently confirmed deputy administrator, [https://insideclimatenews.org/news/12042018/epa-andrew-wheeler-senate-confirmation-vote-murray-energy-coal-lobbyist-climate-denial-inhofe-pruitt Andrew Wheeler], is a former coal industry lobbyist who shares Mr. Pruitt’s deregulatory zeal and fealty to the fossil fuels industry. Mr. Wheeler was for many years chief of staff for James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican and long the Senate’s most determined denier of the accepted science on global warming.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''March 2018'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Lamar_Smith_Denial_Offensive.png Rep. Lamar Smith], the chairman of the House science committee, who has announced his retirement from Congress, leaves behind a checkered past.<br /> <br /> A March 2018 op-ed fror Fox News illustrates again that the Congressman from Texas has ranged beyond facts and science as he represents his district and his base of supporters primarily from oil/gas interests.<br /> <br /> FactCheck.org, a project of the [https://www.factcheck.org/about/our-mission/ Annenberg Public Policy Center] at the University of Pennsylvania, takes a point-by-point look at [https://www.factcheck.org/2018/03/smiths-error-filled-climate-op-ed/ Smith’s Error-Filled Climate Op-Ed.]<br /> <br /> <br /> ·································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''A Tale of Two EPAs'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''To what lengths will Scott Pruitt go to undo the good work being done by his agency’s scientists, researchers, and staff''<br /> <br /> https://www.nrdc.org/onearth/tale-two-epas<br /> <br /> ''Sometimes you really do have to stop and wonder what U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt is thinking...''<br /> <br /> <br /> * '''''In the U.S., Conflict Continues as Environmental Protection is Cut'''''<br /> <br /> * Environmental Protection Agency News<br /> <br /> <br /> ·····························<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''February 2018'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Via E &amp; E News / https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060073703 <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Trump seeks big cuts to science across agencies'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Published: Tuesday, February 13, 2018<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The Trump administration wants to eliminate a broad swath of the nation's climate change research infrastructure, including satellites, education programs and science centers.''<br /> <br /> ''Though it has little chance of being enacted, the Trump administration's budget proposal unveiled yesterday targets hundreds of millions of dollars in climate science, renewable energy research and climate mitigation efforts across a variety of federal agencies, including NASA, NOAA, U.S. EPA and the departments of the Interior and Energy.''<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43935.pdf -- The Office of Science and Technology Policy over the past year has undergone deep cuts as the presidential science adviser position goes unappointed and coordinated science and technology leadership is absent. This office has aided presidents understanding and shaping of federal initiatives and programs involving science, research &amp; development, space and technology since the mid 1970s. The current administration has chosen to go without this scientific resource.<br /> <br /> * https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trump-rsquo-s-science-advisor-age-31-has-a-political-science-degree/ -- ''Trump’s top ‘science adviser’ is a 31-year-old with only a political science degree. Michael Kratsios is an ex-Peter Thiel employee and as deputy assistant in the '''Office of Science and Technology Policy''' the nation's federal programs involving science and technology are being &quot;coordinated&quot;, or so it seems. <br /> <br /> : This past year has revealed much regarding the administration and Republican-controlled Congress positions. Science-based policy is under broad challenge and attack. Clearly, based on the record, the president cares little for science advisers and scientific evidence as a basis for federal policy. <br /> <br /> :The [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/12/us/politics/white-house-budget-congress.html newly released 2019 federal budget] reveals priorities as sent up to the U.S. Congress. The human/health/environment/education services face deep cuts. Department of Defense/war operations globally and expanded nuclear weapon systems are in line for hundreds of billions in new spending. A new arms race has commenced. Science across federal agencies continues to be set back. The future of the nation and its standing among nations takes another consequential step.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ''About the Office of Science and Technology Policy''<br /> <br /> ''The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) was established by the National Science and Technology Policy, Organization and Priorities Act of 1976. OSTP's responsibilities include advising the President in policy formulation and budget development on all questions in which S&amp;T are important elements; articulating the President's S&amp;T policies and programs, and fostering strong partnerships among Federal, State and local governments, and the scientific communities in industry and academe. The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP): History and Overview -- https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43935.pdf''<br /> <br /> <br /> (GreenPolicy Siterunner: Congressman George E. Brown was a key drafter and co-sponsor of the original 1976 legislation establishing the Science and Technology office and presidential cabinet level infrastructure coordinating federal science/technology policy and initiatives. Representative Brown, my close friend, was the author of the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:US_Public_Law_95-367.png National Climate Program Act of 1978], the first federal program established to study and assess scientifically the issues and risks of human-caused climate change. George's career, especially on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, is notable for his decades of out-in-front efforts to advance &quot;big science&quot;. More here [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr about George Brown from California].)<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;font color=red&gt;····················································&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Deregulating / Dismantling / Denying'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''As the current U.S. administration attempts to deconstruct decades of scientific endeavors, technology leadership, and national/environmental security policy...'''''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Climate Deregulation Tracker / Columbia Law School'''''<br /> <br /> ''http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/resources/climate-deregulation-tracker/''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''U.S. Climate Change Litigation in the Age of Trump: Year One / Columbia Law School'''''<br /> <br /> ''Posted on February 14th, 2018 / http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/climatechange/2018/02/14/u-s-climate-change-litigation-in-the-age-of-trump-year-one-a-new-sabin-center-working-paper/''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Climate Law Blog'''''<br /> <br /> ''http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/climatechange/''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;font color=red&gt;··················&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''January 2018'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Whatever your politics, whatever your religion or beliefs, wherever on Earth you live, take care to make decisions based on sound science and facts.''<br /> <br /> ''In the United States, many are questioning the state of science. Let's take a look at Science Magazine as all of us on Earth enter 2018.''<br /> <br /> * http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/01/trump-s-first-year-science-advice-sees-marked-decline <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Right_Now<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''On the Anniversary of the Launch of Explorer, January 31, 1958'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''''NASA Reminder of the Beginnings of Earth Science from Space'''''<br /> <br /> :'''''Explorer 1, the first “scientific Earth satellite”<br /> <br /> :'''''Six Decades of Measuring and Monitoring <br /> <br /> :''&quot;NASA has used the vantage point of space to understand and explore our home planet, improve lives and safeguard our future...&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> * '''Even as the importance of #EarthScience grows, there are those who are attempting to block the work of science'''<br /> <br /> : http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/resources/silencing-science-tracker/<br /> <br /> : ''The '''Silencing Science Tracker''' is a database initiative that tracks government attempts to restrict or prohibit scientific research, education or discussion, or the publication or use of scientific information, since the November 2016 election.''<br /> <br /> <br /> *'''GreenPolicy360 &amp; Science'''<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Stats_-_Green_Research_%26_Science GreenPolicy360 &amp; SciencePolicy]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Good_science_needs_good_data.png '''GreenPolicy360: Our Motto -- Good Science Needs Good Data''']<br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;'''''Visit &lt;u&gt;[[Earth Science Research from Space]]&lt;/u&gt;'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;'''''Visit &lt;u&gt;[[Look at how thin our atmosphere is]]&lt;/u&gt;'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;'''''Visit &lt;u&gt;[[Democratization of Space]]&lt;/u&gt;'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;'''''Visit &lt;u&gt;[[Micro-satellites]]&lt;/u&gt;'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''December 2017'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;'''''International Cooperation, Framework Convention on Climate Change '''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ::http://unfccc.int/2860.php<br /> ::https://cop23.unfccc.int/<br /> ::https://cop23.unfccc.int/news/cop23-kicks-off-with-strong-calls-to-hold-to-paris-agreement-path<br /> ::https://cop23.unfccc.int/news/un-climate-change-conference-2017-aims-for-further-faster-ambition-together<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Climate Change Conf Nov 6-17.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> * [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/nov/10/al-gore-donald-trump-climate-change ''''''Can't be educated', but Climate Action goes on''''']<br /> <br /> * [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climatechange-accord-usa/anti-trump-u-s-coalition-tells-u-n-climate-talks-were-still-in-idUSKBN1D92AK '''''Anti-Trump U.S. coalition tells U.N. climate talks: 'we're still in' / Reuters''''']<br /> <br /> ''The “we are still in” coalition of states, cities, universities, faith groups and environmental activists, aims to show delegates from other nations at the Nov. 6-17 U.N. talks that many Americans are working to cut greenhouse gas emissions.''<br /> <br /> ''It says its signatories represent more than 130 million Americans and $6.2 trillion of annual economic output.''<br /> <br /> * [http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-germany-jerry-brown-climate-change-20171108-story.html '''''California Gov. Jerry Brown delivers a blunt climate change message in Germany''''']<br /> <br /> ''Brown has been hailed in German media as the “anti-Trump” for his efforts to keep the United States engaged in the 2015 Paris agreement’s commitments to cut greenhouse emissions...''<br /> <br /> ''“It’s hard to get your mind around something so extensive,” said Brown, who was appointed by Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, the U.N. conference president, to serve as a special advisor for states and regions...''<br /> <br /> ''“Let’s lead the whole world to realize this is not your normal political challenge,” he added. “This is much bigger. This is life itself. It requires courage and imagination.”''<br /> <br /> :* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Governor_Jerry_Brown<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.texastribune.org/2017/11/02/lamar-smith-retiring-congress/ '''''Lamar Smith to Retire?''''']<br /> <br /> : [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&amp;profile=default&amp;search=lamar+smith&amp;fulltext=Search ''Remembering Lamar's Positions on Earth Science &amp; Climate'']<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''October 2017'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :* [http://blog.ucsusa.org/science-blogger/how-pruitt-listens-removing-clean-power-plan-web-resources-undermines-public-engagement &lt;font color=green&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;u&gt;'''''Removing Clean Power Plan Web Resources'''''&lt;/u&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:UCS-EPA-Oct16,2017.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/war-on-the-epa/ &lt;font color=green&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;u&gt;'''''&quot;War on the EPA&quot;'''''&lt;/u&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:War on the EPA in the USA.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''In the military''', the term &quot;beheading&quot; generally refers to battlefield strategy of disrupting the eyes and ears of the enemy, the intelligence communication systems. Here the enemy is us, as the US president moves to disrupt the eyes and ears of NASA earth facing mission monitoring real-time conditions on the home planet. It would be, if the anti-sci caucus in Congress goes along and has their way, a historic mistake. The ability to manage is based on measurement over time and cutting off our overhead earth science research will produce blind spots today and &quot;data gaps&quot; going forward. Read the Sept Jon Gertner 'Going Dark' article to get an idea of what's at stake and some of the consequences of being beheaded.<br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/12/magazine/what-could-we-lose-if-a-nasa-mission-goes-dark.html '''''What Could We Lose if a NASA Climate Mission Goes Dark?'''''] <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Good science needs good data .png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::::&lt;font color=blue&gt;○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○&lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :''&quot;Look at how thin our atmosphere is. This is all there is between humankind and deadly space.&quot;''<br /> ::''-- Astronaut Alexander Gerst @Astro_Alex''<br /> <br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;''''' &quot;Thin Blue&quot;, Life-Enabling Atmosphere '''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:ThinBlue.png]] : [[File:EnvironmentalSecurity ThinBlue.png]] <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::&lt;font color=green&gt;○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○&lt;/font&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Trump,_Limbaugh,_Scott,_Pruitt.png &lt;big&gt;'''''Trump, Limbaugh, Scott and Pruitt deny climate change'''''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> '''''America pays a 'denial price' today and tomorrow'''''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''It’s useless to explain to those who put political dogma before science that when air is warmer, it holds more water vapor. It’s that simple. The Economist notes that the world’s average temperature is about 1.2 degrees higher (Fahrenheit) than it was as recently as 1979. That’s a lot more water in the atmosphere — and it eventually it’s got to come down.'' <br /> <br /> ''To such learned men like Limbaugh, who has a college degree from — well, from nowhere — that just means we get rain from time to time. After all, the weather changes every day, right? Brilliant!''<br /> <br /> ''But to others, who take such matters more intelligently, it means this: Weather-related disasters are increasing dramatically. Data from Munich RE, one of the world’s leading reinsurers, notes big spikes since 1980 in “meteorological events” (storms), “hydrological events” (floods, landslides and avalanches), and “climatological events” (extreme temperatures, droughts, forest fires). Munich’s data underscores what should be obvious to all but the most partisan skeptic: that the frequency, intensity and duration of “weather-related” events is on the rise.''<br /> <br /> ''This is the part where deniers mock “fake news” because it doesn’t jibe with their political beliefs. This is the highest form of ignorance: denying things that have already occurred.''<br /> <br /> ''Speaking of denial, one of the first things Florida Gov. Rick Scott did when he took office in 2011 was to ban official use of the words &quot;climate change,” &quot;global warming” and “sustainability.”'' <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Sea-Level_Rise &lt;big&gt;&lt;u&gt;'''''Sea-Level Rise, Flooding in Florida'''''&lt;/u&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Flood-prevention-rick.png &lt;big&gt;&lt;u&gt;'''''What's to Worry About?'''''&lt;/u&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Such annoying phrases. Granted, Scott has done a good job in the days before and after Hurricane Irma. But we’ll never know how much less damage there might have been to businesses and homeowners had Scott chosen not censorship, but leadership six years ago by acknowledging climate change and facing it head on. Silence doesn’t make a problem like this go away.''<br /> <br /> ''Trump’s actions, meanwhile, have spoken louder than any words, banned or otherwise. He took more money from the coal industry — by far — than anyone else during the 2016 campaign. And as president, he has returned the favor in spades. He famously pulled out of the Paris climate pact — joining only war-ravaged Syria and tiny Nicaragua on the sidelines. He complained about all of Barack Obama’s executive orders, but signed one scrapping Obama’s Clean Power Plan rule designed to curb greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming.'' <br /> <br /> ''Trump has blamed Obama for coal’s decline, but the real reason is lower natural gas prices. Obama became president in 2009, yet between 2000 and 2010, power plants generated 50% more electricity from gas, while coal’s use declined slightly.'' <br /> <br /> ''Obama gave these trends a further nudge, no doubt about it, but the shift from coal to cleaner, cheaper natural gas appears irreversible. I empathize with the coal industry, just as I would have empathized with the horse and buggy crowd in 1908, when Henry Ford’s first Model T spelled their demise. It’s called progress, folks.'' <br /> <br /> ''And no column on energy and climate change would be complete without mentioning '''perhaps the worst Cabinet-rank pick ever made by an American president: Scott Pruitt'''. Pruitt, a climate denier par excellence, has, behind a cloak of secrecy and fear, turned the Environmental Protection Agency into an arm of the fossil fuel industry that has long had him in its pocket.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''August 2017'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Congress takes aim at the Clean Air Act'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ''A push by Republicans to roll back parts of the Clean Air Act would affect California more than any other state...''<br /> <br /> ''The House last month passed a bill fiercely opposed by doctors and public health groups, including the American Lung Assn. and the American Academy of Pediatrics, that would delay for years new anti-pollution standards aimed at ultimately preventing 160,000 childhood asthma attacks and as many as 220 premature deaths in California each year.''<br /> <br /> ''The Trump administration had already tried using regulatory authority to put the standards on hold for a year, but walked back that action Wednesday after California and 14 other states filed suit against the delay.''<br /> <br /> <br /> * http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-smog-republicans-20170803-story.html<br /> <br /> * http://e360.yale.edu/digest/u-s-epa-reverses-decision-to-delay-smog-rule<br /> <br /> <br /> SJS / Siterunner: I can literally remember LA movers and shakers pushing and drafting the first clean air legislation to deal w LA smog/air quality, then pushing the first national legislation, and pushing Nixon to sign on to the establishment of the EPA. The beginnings of the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_movement modern environmental movement], in many ways, signalled a children's health agenda ...<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Air_Quality<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;font color=blue&gt;○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''July 2017'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy's snapshot of Greenland and NASA's IceBridge studies of melting glaciers -- https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Greenland<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.buzzfeed.com/zahrahirji/lamar-smith-tours-the-arctic &lt;big&gt;'''''Lamar Smith Goes to Greenland'''''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/lamar-smith-climate-change-beneficial_us_59765a54e4b0e201d577466d &lt;big&gt;'''''Lamar Smith Returns from Greenland'''''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Don't Believe Lamar's Line'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''WASHINGTON — Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) — who has spent his career cozying up to fossil fuel interests, dismissing the threat of climate change and harassing federal climate scientists — is now arguing that pumping the atmosphere full of carbon dioxide is “beneficial” to global trade, crop production and the lushness of the planet.''<br /> <br /> ''Rather than buying into “hysteria,” Americans should be celebrating the plus sides of a changing climate, Smith argues in an [http://dailysignal.com/2017/07/24/dont-believe-hysteria-carbon-dioxide/ op-ed] published July 24th in The Daily Signal, a news website published by the conservative Heritage Foundation.''<br /> <br /> ''Smith — who has used his power as chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology to push his anti-science views — kicks off his op-ed by claiming Americans’ perception of the phenomenon is “too often determined by their hearing just one side of the story.”''<br /> <br /> ''“The benefits of a changing climate are often ignored and under-researched,” Smith said. “Our climate is too complex and the consequences of misguided policies too harsh to discount the positive effects of carbon enrichment.”''<br /> <br /> ''Increased carbon dioxide, Smith writes, promotes photosynthesis, resulting in a “greater volume of food production and better quality food” and “lush vegetation” that “assists in controlling water runoff, provides more habitats for many animal species, and even aids in climate stabilization, as more vegetation absorbs more carbon dioxide.” Warmer temperatures, he notes, results in longer growing seasons.'' <br /> <br /> ''Smith goes as far as to make a case for why a [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Arctic rapidly melting Arctic], which scientists warn could cost tens of trillions of dollars by the end of this century, is a positive thing.''<br /> <br /> ''“Also, as the Earth warms, we are seeing beneficial changes to the earth’s geography,” he writes. “For instance, Arctic sea ice is decreasing. This development will create new commercial shipping lanes that provide faster, more convenient, and less costly routes between ports in Asia, Europe, and eastern North America. This will increase international trade and strengthen the world economy.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://newrepublic.com/article/143652/end-goal-trumps-war-science &lt;big&gt;'''''Scott Pruitt's War on Science'''''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Climate-change deniers go to great lengths to convince the public that there’s a legitimate scientific debate about whether humans are the main cause of global warming, but the Trump administration took this pathology to another level last week: Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, plans to form a group to question the merits of climate science.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''June 2017'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''The Future of Humanity, or Crime Against'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/June_1,_2017 &lt;big&gt;'''''On the Trump Exit from the Global Climate Agreement'''''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Climate change unique threat to national security.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''&quot;Clear-eyed outlook?&quot; Not'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:DJT - US message to world.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''The Consequences Start Now / [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/June_1,_2017 June 1]'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The US will be judged, this day will be long remembered.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:New_Definitions_of_National_Security.png ''National Security &amp; Global Security are interrelated'']. <br /> <br /> ''He does not see the common security threats. He does not see what our common interests. There's so much he doesn't know &amp; so much he doesn't know that he doesn't know.''<br /> <br /> [https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-just-betrayed-the-world-now-the-world-will-fight-back/2017/06/01/3c0b8026-46e7-11e7-a196-a1bb629f64cb_story.html ''Washington Post / 'Trump just betrayed the world. Now the world will fight back' '']<br /> <br /> [http://www.politico.com/story/2017/05/31/jerry-brown-donald-trump-paris-climate-change-deal-238993 ''Brown: The Rest of the World Is Against Trump''] / [https://www.gov.ca.gov/news.php?id=19817 ''Governor Brown Statement on White House Paris Climate Agreement Announcement''] <br /> <br /> : ''“This current departure from reality in Washington will be very short-lived, that I promise you,” Brown told POLITICO in an interview. “I’ve spoken with Republicans here in the Legislature, and they’re beginning to get very serious about climate action, so the momentum is all the other way. And I think Trump, paradoxically, is giving climate denial such a bad name that he’s actually building the very movement that he is [purporting] to undermine...”''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''May 2017'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Survey of Trump Attack on Environmental Regulations and Laws'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Not in our wildest dreams-Western Energy Alliance-May2017.png|link=https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/business/energy-environment/devon-energy.html]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;u&gt;'''''[[Environmental Rules Rolled Back]]'''''&lt;/u&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''April 2017'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''On Earth Day, as Around the World Planet Citizens &quot;March for Science&quot;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Bill Nye: &quot;Our lawmakers must know and accept that science serves every one of us. Every citizen of every nation in society. Science must shape policy. Science is universal. Science brings out the best in us.&quot; Nye said. &quot;With an informed, optimistic view of the future, we can — dare I say it — save the world!&quot;''<br /> <br /> * http://www.space.com/36577-march-for-science-earth-and-space.html<br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Bill Nye, the Science Guy, speaks at the March for Science-Washington DC 2017.png|link=https://youtu.be/x507ZlDoc-Y]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-hayes-trump-budget-science-20170421-story.html <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Trump's anti-science budget / America ought to own the solar-electric industry. By rights, we ought to be exporting solar technology, not importing it. Our second-tier status, in a field that we once absolutely dominated, is a direct consequence of budget decisions made by President Reagan’s Office of Management and Budget, and a go-along Congress.'' <br /> <br /> ''Science has always been at the heart of America’s progress. Science cleaned up our air and water, conquered polio and invented jet airplanes. Science gave us the Internet, puts food on our tables and helps us avoid pandemics. Science and technology are widely considered by economists to be responsible for at least half of American economic growth since World War II.''<br /> <br /> ''Defunding science is the intellectual equivalent of eating our seed corn.''<br /> <br /> ''On Earth Day — April 22 — I expect millions of Americans to join the March for Science. They will include researchers, teachers, students and people who simply support good sense.''<br /> <br /> ''We will be marching because, if we let politics overtake the search for truth, much of what has made America great will disappear.''<br /> <br /> -- ''LA Times / April 21, 2017 / Dennis Hayes, a founder of [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Earth_Day_Flag.png Earth Day]''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:March for Science-Apr22,2017.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:NRDC re Trump bad stuff.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Damaging the Collection of Data and Intelligence Necessary for National/Global Security'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;u&gt;''[[Earth Science Research from Space]]''&lt;/u&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://eos.org/articles/former-noaa-chief-scientist-warns-of-threats-to-science '''''Former NOAA Chief Scientist Warns of Threats to Science''''']<br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/10/climate/trump-nasa-satellites-global-warming-data.html '''''Scientists Fear Climate Data Gap as Trump Aims at Satellites''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Dr. Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told [http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nasa-global-warming-climate-change-denial-donald-trump-interference-science-a7421416.html the Independent] he and other government scientists are “not going to stand” for any funding cuts or other interference in their work.''<br /> <br /> ''“The point is simple: the climate is changing and you can try to deny it, you can appoint people who don’t care about it into positions of power, but regardless nature has the last vote on this,” Schmidt, told The Independent Thursday. “It’s something we’re going to have to deal with sooner or later, and it’s better sooner rather than later. We don’t have a choice if we’re going to deal with it.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''''18 NASA Earth Science [https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/final_earth_obs_fleet06hw.2100_1920x1080.jpg Missions in Space]'''''<br /> <br /> [https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4558 '''''Visit NASA Earth Science''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:NASA earth observation fleet as of April 2017.jpg|link=https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a004500/a004558/final_earth_obs_fleet06_360p30.mp4]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/04/14/trumps-epa-chief-scott-pruitt-calls-for-an-exit-to-the-paris-climate-agreement/ '''''EPA Chief, Scott Pruitt, Calls for ‘Exit’ from the Paris International Climate Accord''''']<br /> <br /> [http://www.politico.com/story/2017/04/trump-fossil-fuels-g7-tension-237129 '''''More Fossil Fuels, Trump Demands of G7 Nations: They Go 'No' ''''']<br /> <br /> [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/g7-climate-change-rex-tillerson-donald-trump-italy-a7677461.html '''''G7: US Is to Blame for No Joint Statement''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''March 2017'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''US President Trump’s budget director/chief of staff:'''''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> ''Mick Mulvaney: “Regarding the question as to climate change, I think the President was fairly straightforward —''<br /> <br /> ''We’re not spending money on that anymore; we consider that to be a waste of your money to go out and do that.”'' <br /> <br /> <br /> :::[http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2017/03/16/mulvaney_were_not_spending_money_on_climate_change_anymore_waste_of_your_money.html ''We're Not Spending Money On Climate Change Anymore (Video)'']<br /> <br /> :::[[File:Mulvaney March2017-ClimateChangeWaste.png|link=https://youtu.be/l7WGtMtAloo]] <br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :::···················································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''US Retreats from International Agreements, Cooperation &amp; Environmental Protection'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Rejecting Regional &amp; Global Commitments, US Trump Administration Abandons Critical Obligation &amp; Treaties''<br /> <br /> :[http://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/366400-the-white-house-abandoned-the-environment-and-public-health-in '''''The Hill'''''] / [http://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/366400-the-white-house-abandoned-the-environment-and-public-health-in?mode=comments#disqus_thread '''''&quot;Comments&quot;''''']<br /> <br /> :[http://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/366400-the-white-house-abandoned-the-environment-and-public-health-in '''''In 2017, the White House abandoned the environment and public health''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Decades of Progress Setback'''''<br /> <br /> ''Environmental Protection Agency Cut, Regulations Rescinded, Health &amp; Safety Priorities Dropped'' <br /> <br /> <br /> '''''How Scott Pruitt spent the first year at the EPA'''''<br /> <br /> [https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/under-scott-pruitt-a-year-of-tumult-and-transformation-at-epa/2017/12/26/f93d1262-e017-11e7-8679-a9728984779c_story.html?utm_term=.7f495300b386 '''''How Director Pruitt turned the EPA into a Trump tool of deconstruction''''']<br /> <br /> ''In legal maneuvers and executive actions, in public speeches and closed-door meetings with industry groups, the Trump administration has moved to shrink the agency’s reach, alter its focus, and pause or reverse numerous environmental rules. The effect has been to steer the EPA in the direction sought by those being regulated.''<br /> <br /> ''Along the way, Pruitt has begun to dismantle former president Barack Obama’s environmental legacy, halting the agency’s efforts to combat climate change and to shift the nation away from its reliance on fossil fuels.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Tracking Environmental Deregulation, Climate Litigation''''' <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Climate_Change_Litigation_Databases_Climate_Law.png &lt;big&gt;''Climate Litigation Database''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> * http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/resources/climate-deregulation-tracker | Climate Deregulation Tracker<br /> * http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/climatechange/ | Columbia Law School - Climate Change Law <br /> * http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/resources/silencing-science-tracker/ | Silencing Science Tracker<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ········································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Lamar Smith Continues Push to Deny Climate Science'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> :'''House Science Committee Hearing Attacks Climate Change Evidence and Scientific Community'''<br /> ::'''Republican Party Denies Profound Risks, Threats, and Damage to National and Global Security'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Science and Climate Hearing March29,2017.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * '''Watch the March 29th Hearing''' -- '''https://www.facebook.com/TheHill/videos/10154707025269087/'''<br /> <br /> :'''GreenPolicy's response -- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_E._Mann Dr. Michael Mann] tells the committee the facts of the gathering crisis... &quot;dozens of independent lines of evidence come together... to arrive at the same, consistent answer, over and over again.&quot;''' <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Foley on March29,2017.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :'''Attacks on Climate Science''': <br /> <br /> :[http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/311495-court-climate-scientist-can-sue-conservative-writers-over-alleged '''December 2016 / Court: Climate scientist can sue conservative writers over alleged defamation''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Politics and Science in the House un-Science Committee.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> • https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-29/climate-scientist-fires-back-at-house-science-committee-during-hearing<br /> <br /> • https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/03/29/house-science-committee-hearing-lamar-smith-michael-mann-climate-consensus-deniers<br /> <br /> • http://gizmodo.com/todays-congressional-hearing-on-climate-change-was-a-co-1793787320<br /> <br /> • https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/house-science-committee-calls-on-alt-science-to-drive-policy/<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''How climate skeptics are trying to influence 200,000 science teachers'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2017/0330/How-climate-skeptics-are-trying-to-influence-200-000-science-teachers<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Don’t Like The Science -- Make up Your Own Alternative Science'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :https://blogs.agu.org/wildwildscience/2017/03/29/dont-like-science-make-alternative-science/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Climate Change Skeptic Group Seeks to Influence 200,000 Teachers'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/climate-change-skeptic-group-seeks-to-influence-200000-teachers/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Koch-Funded Group Tries to Persuade 200,000 Science Teachers That Climate Change Is Debatable'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :http://www.ecowatch.com/heartland-institute-climate-science-2334892782.html<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Science denial graph.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;font color=green&gt;○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○&lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Undercutting National and Global Security:&lt;/big&gt; <br /> :'''US Administration Moves to Eviscerate Earth Science'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/lamar-smith-unbound-lays-out-political-strategy-climate-doubters-conference '''''Lamar Smith Delivers Meaning to Hubris'''''] as [http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-meaning-of-Pride-always-goes-before-a-fall ''''' 'Pride Goes Before a Fall' '''''] <br /> <br /> '''''Science Magazine / March 24''''' -- ''Representative Lamar Smith (R–TX) rarely expresses his true feelings in public. But speaking yesterday to a like-minded crowd of climate change doubters and skeptics, the chairman of the science committee in the U.S. House of Representatives acknowledged that the committee is now a tool to advance his political agenda rather than a forum to examine important issues facing the U.S. research community.''<br /> <br /> ''“Next week we’re going to have a hearing on our favorite subject of climate change and also on the scientific method, which has been repeatedly ignored by the so-called self-professed climate scientists,” Smith told the Heartland Institute’s 12th annual conference on climate change in Washington, D.C.''<br /> <br /> [https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/02/01/climate-science-denial-group-heartland-institute-fossil-fuel-industry-funding-fred-palmer '''''About the Heartland Institute''''']<br /> <br /> [https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/03/23/heartland-institute-award-winner-compares-work-climate-science-deniers-911-firefighters '''''Heartland Meeting in Washington D.C.''''']<br /> <br /> ''Emboldened by the election of President Donald Trump, Smith appears increasingly comfortable dismissing those who disagree with his stance on any number of issues under the purview of his science committee, from climate research to the use of peer review in assessing research results and grant proposals. And one key element in his strategy appears to be relabeling common terms in hopes of shaping public dialogue.''<br /> <br /> ''“I applaud you for saying you’ll be using the term climate studies, not climate science,” said one audience member. His reference was to Smith’s embrace of a distinction made by a previous speaker, climatologist Patrick Michaels of the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., who argues that most climate scientists don’t deserve to be called “scientists” because they have manipulated their data and ignored contrary results. “But I also urge you to use the term politically correct science.”''<br /> <br /> ''“Good point,” Smith replied.''<br /> <br /> ''Smith also signaled that he plans to turn up the volume on his criticism of federally funded research that doesn’t fit his definition of “sound science.” In particular, he expressed support for writing legislation that would punish scientific journals that publish research that doesn’t fit standards of peer review crafted by Smith and the committee (although he didn’t say how that would be accomplished).''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Lamar Smith / Climate Science Skeptic''':<br /> <br /> • http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/lamar-smith-unbound-lays-out-political-strategy-climate-doubters-conference<br /> <br /> • https://thinkprogress.org/house-honest-act-limit-epa-science-244a132bdee<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Step-by-Step: Damage to the Nation's Security'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://qz.com/928236/the-word-science-has-disappeared-from-the-mission-statement-of-the-epas-office-of-science-and-technology/ '''''Disappearing “Science” from the Core Mission Statement of the EPA Office of Science and Technology''''']<br /> <br /> : [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Pruitt '''''Who Is Scott Pruitt (Wikipedia)''''']<br /> <br /> :[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/video/2017/mar/17/white-house-climate-change-funding-waste-money-video '''''White House Calls Climate Change Funding 'a Waste of Your Money' – Video''''']<br /> <br /> ::[http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-trump-budget-nasa-20170316-story.html '''''Trump Budget Proposal Cuts NASA's Role in Climate Science''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The White House to eliminate NASA’s Office of Education, arguing that it was “performing functions that are duplicative of other parts of the agency.”''<br /> <br /> ''The budget targets the agency’s work on environmental science, cutting funding for Earth science research grants. It eliminates earth science missions that are still in development, including Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem, or PACE, which was was intended to monitor the Earth’s ocean health; the Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3, or OCO-3, an instrument to precisely monitor the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere; and the Climate Absolute Radiance and Refractivity Observatory, or CLARREO, pathfinder, which would have used a solar spectrometer to produce highly accurate climate projections.''<br /> <br /> * [http://grist.org/climate-energy/these-house-republicans-say-climate-change-is-real-and-its-time-to-fight-it/ '''''These House Republicans say climate change is real and it’s time to fight it''''']<br /> <br /> ''On March 14th, [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-14/trump-said-to-drop-climate-change-from-environmental-reviews Bloomberg reported] that President Donald Trump is about to sign an executive order repealing President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, and to order a reconsideration of the government’s use of the “social cost of carbon” metric, which measures potential economic damage related to climate change.''<br /> <br /> ''Last week, meanwhile, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency administator, Scott Pruitt, suggested that carbon emissions have nothing to do with climate change.''<br /> <br /> ''This week, seventeen Republican members of Congress from diverse districts — including representatives from coastal Southeastern states, Nevada, Utah, upstate New York, and Pennsylvania — submitted a resolution in the House acknowledging that “human activities” have had an impact on the global climate and resolving to create and support “economically viable” mitigation efforts.''<br /> <br /> ''The [https://stefanik.house.gov/sites/stefanik.house.gov/files/Climate%20Change%20Resolution.pdf resolution], sponsored by [https://curbelo.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=1374 Reps. Carlos Curbelo of Florida], Elise Stefanik of New York, and Ryan Costello of Pennsylvania, is being submitted in the midst of an unprecedented effort by the most anti-science administration in recent American history to remove climate science studies and data from federal agencies.''<br /> <br /> <br /> • ''https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Climate_Change''<br /> <br /> • ''https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Climate_Policy''<br /> <br /> <br /> :······································································<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/science/donald-trump-data-rescue-science.html &lt;big&gt;'''''Activists Rush to Save Government Science Data'''''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> :''http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/press_releases/2017/publc-records-03-23-2017.php''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Press Release / March 23, 2017'''''<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Scientists Use 'Beetlejuice Provision' to Protect Data From Trump'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''''Records Requests Seek to Preserve Hundreds of Data Sets on Wildlife, Oil Industry, Climate Change, Sea-level Rise'''''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The administration proposing deep budget cuts for government agencies including NASA Earth Sciences, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency have fueled new fears of databases being axed...''<br /> <br /> ''“We’ll probably be saying goodbye to much of the invaluable data housed at the NCEI,” Anne Jefferson, a water hydrology professor at Kent State University, wrote on Twitter Saturday, referring to the National Centers for Environmental Information. “Hope it gets rescued in time.”''<br /> <br /> ''It is illegal to destroy government data, but agencies can make it more difficult to find by revising websites and creating other barriers to the underlying information.''<br /> <br /> : [https://envirodatagov.org/ ''The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative] is an international network of academics and non-profits addressing potential threats to federal environmental and energy policy, and to the scientific research infrastructure built to investigate, inform, and enforce. Dismantling this infrastructure — which ranges from databases to satellites to models for climate, air, and water — could imperil the public’s right to know, the United States’ standing as a scientific leader, corporate accountability, and environmental protection.''<br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> :'''Via Scientific American / E&amp;E News'''<br /> <br /> [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trump-administration-seeks-big-budget-cuts-for-climate-research/ '''''Trump Administration Seeks Big Budget Cuts for Climate Research''''']<br /> <br /> :'''''Targeting of climate science goes beyond the work of NOAA and EPA'''''<br /> <br /> '''''The expected rollback to federal climate science has begun.'''''<br /> <br /> ''In its preliminary budget proposal, the Trump administration has targeted environmental protections and climate change research. And while the cuts are essentially an opening salvo in what promises to be a fight with Congress once the budget requests formally arrive, they also demonstrate the level of hostility many scientists feared their work would face from the White House.''<br /> <br /> ''The administration is seeking a nearly 20 percent cut to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's budget, including to its satellite division, The Washington Post reported. That includes significant cuts to the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service, which has produced research that disproved the notion of a global warming pause. NOAA's satellites provide invaluable data on climate change that are used by researchers throughout the world. The NOAA cuts target the Office of Ocean and Atmospheric Research, which conducts the bulk of the agency's climate research.''<br /> <br /> ''That's on top of proposed reductions to climate research at U.S. EPA, including a 40 percent cut to the Office of Research and Development, which runs much of EPA's major research. The cuts specify work on climate change, air and water quality, and chemical safety. The Trump administration also has proposed 20 percent staffing reduction at EPA.''<br /> <br /> <br /> * [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/us/politics/scott-pruitt-environmental-protection-agency.html '''''E.P.A. Head Stacks Agency With Climate Change Skeptics''''']<br /> <br /> :''Gina McCarthy, who headed the E.P.A. under former President Barack Obama, said she too saw Mr. Pruitt as unique. “It’s fine to have differing opinions on how to meet the mission of the agency. Many Republican administrators have had that,” she said. “But here, for the first time, I see someone who has no commitment to the mission of the agency.”''<br /> <br /> * '''''Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt [http://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/09/epa-chief-scott-pruitt.html said Thursday] (March 8th in a CNBC interview) he does not believe carbon dioxide is a primary contributor to global warming.'''''<br /> <br /> :''&quot;I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there's tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it's a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.&quot; <br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Ben Santer to Pruitt March 2017.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Pruitt talks EPA - CO2.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Clean Air, Clean Water? Healthy Environment? Climate, Sustainable Future?'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''Environmental Issues and the Warnings of Science Are 'No Priority' '''<br /> <br /> • ''http://www.popsci.com/getting-rid-of-the-environmental-protection-agency''<br /> <br /> • ''http://www.popsci.com/pruitt-EPA-confirmation''<br /> <br /> • ''http://www.popsci.com/usda-epa-science-gag-order-government''<br /> <br /> • ''http://www.popsci.com/america-before-epa-photos''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Los-angeles-smog-1970s.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''February 2017&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''''Congress committee lost in space''''' -- ''https://eos.org/articles/focus-nasa-on-mars-and-moon-not-earth-witnesses-tell-hearing''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''January 2017'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * '''''Climate News''''' -- ''https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_News''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Science &amp; Politics in the US Congress: Another Year, More Science Denial on the House Science Committee'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Via E&amp;E News and the Smithsonian Online<br /> : [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/house-science-panel-adds-climate-denying-members/ '''House Science Panel Adds Climate-Denying Members''']<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The Science committee has jurisdiction over $40 billion in federal budgets, and influence on climate research and environmental regulations''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''December 2016'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''The U.S. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology continues its move away from acting to ensure national security''' <br /> <br /> :The story - and gathering danger of ignoring scientific warnings - is expanded here by long-time environmental writer Andy Revkin<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''NASA’s Climate Research, Essential to National &amp; Global Security'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Dec 12, 2016 <br /> <br /> Via Andrew Revkin @ ProPublica) <br /> <br /> https://www.propublica.org/article/will-trump-scrap-nasas-climate-research-mission<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Piers J. Sellers is the director of NASA’s Earth Science division, and the former astronaut is a climate scientist himself. ProPublica spoke with him recently. Sellers declined to discuss the politics surrounding NASA during a presidential transition, but said the agency has a unique position in the world in clarifying global environmental risks and that part of its mission deserves support.''<br /> <br /> ''“We’re doing our best to provide the least dangerous options to getting from here to a safe future,” he said. “That’s our job as U.S. government scientists. NASA has the greatest capability to see what’s going on and has a pretty strong capability to model what’s going on into the future, as well.”''<br /> <br /> ''Some of NASA’s most vital Earth science work has been done at a tiny climate research hub, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The center occupies the upper floors of a century-old building in upper Manhattan best known for Tom’s Restaurant, the cash-only corner diner famed because its façade was featured in the sitcom “Seinfeld.”''<br /> <br /> ''The institute was led for decades by James E. Hansen, the climate scientist who stepped ahead of most peers in the hot summer of 1988, famously telling a Senate panel it was “99 percent certain” that human-generated greenhouse gases were driving global warming. A decade ago, Hansen defied muzzling efforts during the George W. Bush administration and irked defenders of fossil fuels with his warnings of calamitous warming. He retired in 2013 to focus on activism aimed at curbing emissions of greenhouse gases linked to warming.''<br /> <br /> ''The institute has produced one of the four most important records of global temperature trends and, under Hansen’s successor as director, the TED-talking, Twitter-savvy climatologist Gavin A. Schmidt, has continued to refine climate simulations and communicate warnings about unabated warming.''<br /> <br /> ''Schmidt declined to be interviewed for this story, citing what he described as selective quoting in recent coverage of possible threats to Earth science under the Trump administration. But he’s shown no signs of dread in his personal Twitter flow, on Thursday night posting this provocative two-parter:''<br /> <br /> :''https://twitter.com/ClimateOfGavin/status/807043119757791233''<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Revkin-ProPublica-1 Dec12,2016.png]]<br /> <br /> :[[File:Gavin Schmidt TW-Dec8,2016.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;font color=blue&gt;○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○&lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Read More on Vital Security Interests &amp; Earth Science:'''''<br /> <br /> <br /> * [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/02/opinion/earth-the-final-frontier.html '''''Earth, the Final Frontier''''']<br /> <br /> :''NASA critics have long wanted to shut the agency out of research related to climate change. The problem is, not only is earth science a long-running part of NASA’s “prime mission,” but it is uniquely positioned to do it. Without NASA, climate research worldwide would be hobbled.''<br /> <br /> :''NASA’s role in earth science began at its inception: The Space Act of 1958, which created NASA, made the study of our atmosphere one of its top priorities. During the Reagan years, Congress amended the act to make Earth the first of NASA’s nine fundamental missions. Right now there are at least 15 earth-science satellites that NASA helped build, launch and operate; they monitor everything from global rainfall to soil moisture.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> * [http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-nasa-earth-science-thanksnasa-2016-12 '''''Via Business Insider: Scientists around the world are worried about a Trump team proposal to ax NASA's 58-year mission to study the Earth''''']<br /> <br /> * [http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/11/28/under-trump-will-nasas-space-science-include-planet-earth/ '''''Via Dot Earth/NYT: Under Trump, Will NASA’s Space Science Include Planet Earth?'''''] / [http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/after-nine-years-and-2810-posts-a-dot-earth-farewell/ '''''After Nine Years and 2,810 Posts, a Dot Earth Farewell''''']<br /> : ''By Andrew C. Revkin, December 5, 2016''<br /> <br /> * [https://theconversation.com/eyes-in-the-sky-cutting-nasa-earth-observations-would-be-a-costly-mistake-69705 '''''Via the Conversation: Eyes in the sky -- Cutting NASA Earth observations would be a costly mistake''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth science missions in space US circa2017.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;font color=blue&gt;○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○&lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''November 2016'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Trump to scrap Nasa climate research in crackdown on ‘politicized science’'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''''NASA’s Earth Science division is set to be stripped of funding... [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/nov/22/nasa-earth-donald-trump-eliminate-climate-change-research Via The Guardian]'''''<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy: It is painful to acknowledge how slight the attention has been by the US media toward what is, demonstrably, one of the greatest threats rising in the US Congress.<br /> <br /> In the above-linked 'Trump to scrap climate research' article, the UK Guardian looks toward the next US administration and points to warning flags that should be raised -- but have not, while the daily-cycle news and mainstream media focuses elsewhere. <br /> <br /> We/GreenPolicy360 have been warning about a close-and-present threat in the House science committee and now the danger of profoundly flawed decision-making draws closer as Lamar Smith and a science denial caucus looks to continue, with added powers, their efforts to eviscerate the US Earth Science budget and missions. <br /> <br /> The threatened actions of the House Science Committee, in fact, are looming as a serious threat to 'homeland security'. The actions of this science denial group promise to undercuts national/global security. <br /> <br /> Take a closer look at what GreenPolicy360 has been reporting taking place in the people's Congress. It is time to draw attention to the risks -- and consequences -- of a Congress rejecting science. <br /> <br /> Of course in the legislative process, one has to accept consensus science and the scientific method and policy based on best evidence available and the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle 'precautionary principle'.]<br /> <br /> Or, as in the case of the insurance industry, factor in actuarial risks, odds, and a [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_full-cost_accounting full-cost accounting.]<br /> <br /> We will soon find out what actions -- and what legacy -- the American people at the beginning of the 21st century pass forward for future generations.<br /> <br /> The U.S. and this Congress will be judged based on its actions.<br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> :https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/New_Definitions_of_National_Security<br /> <br /> :https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_and_Space,_Politics <br /> <br /> :https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Research_from_Space <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Consider the Existing Earth Science Missions'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :The data and Earth observation/monitoring are the resources our generation is passing forward to future generations<br /> :The goal is to provide the capabilities to make informed decisions and shape intelligent policies to protect and preserve security<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:The A-Train.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''NASA: Earth is warming at a pace 'unprecedented in 1,000 years''''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''''Science / Earth Observations / Continuing to Measure and Monitor'''''<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/30/nasa-climate-change-warning-earth-temperature-warming '''Via The Guardian''']<br /> <br /> ''The planet is warming at a pace not experienced within the past 1,000 years, at least, making it “very unlikely” that the world will stay within a crucial temperature limit agreed by nations just last year, according to Nasa’s top climate scientist.''<br /> <br /> ''“In the last 30 years we’ve really moved into exceptional territory,” ''' Gavin Schmidt, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies''', said. “It’s unprecedented in 1,000 years. There’s no period that has the trend seen in the 20th century in terms of the inclination (of temperatures).”''<br /> <br /> ''This year has already seen scorching heat around the world, with the average global temperature peaking at 1.38C above levels experienced in the 19th century, perilously close to the 1.5C limit agreed in the landmark Paris climate accord. July was the warmest month since modern record keeping began in 1880, with each month since October 2015 setting a new high mark for heat.''<br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> ''“Maintaining temperatures below a 1.5C guardrail requires significant and very rapid cuts in carbon dioxide emissions or co-ordinated geo-engineering.'' <br /> <br /> ''That is very unlikely. We are not even yet making emissions cuts commensurate with keeping warming below 2C.”'' <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Global temp anomaly record NASA-2016.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Space, Earth Science &amp; Climate Change'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/space-climate-change-and-the-real-meaning-of-theory ''By Piers Sellers, August 2016''] <br /> <br /> '''''I used to be an astronaut, a spacewalker on the International Space Station...''''' ''The Station goes around the world in an hour and a half, which means it flies through fifty minutes of day, followed by fifty minutes of night, endlessly repeating. This means that during a seven-hour spacewalk, you may see four sunrises and sunsets. I remember holding onto a handrail on the outside of the Station, which was flying silently up the Atlantic, from south to north, and as we moved toward Europe I could see the terminator—the line between night and day—rolling up over the horizon ahead of us. The white sun sank quickly behind us in a showy flurry of orange, pink, and red horizon bands, and then we were suddenly in twilight, floating into the dark half of the world. The terminator flicked over us, and, in the deeper darkness ahead and below us, I could see a huge lit-up city, glued to the curved Earth, sliding up over the rim of the world to meet me. I could see the structure of the city, with its glowing heart, its network of roads and its halo of suburban lights fading into the dark countryside...'' <br /> <br /> ''The facts of climate change are straightforward: there’s been a warming surge over the past hundred years, with a dramatic uptick in this new century. We are seeing the effects in the shrinking of the summer Arctic sea ice and the melting of the Greenland glaciers. That melt, in turn, has been partly responsible for the three-inch rise in sea levels since 1992. The Earth is warming, the ice is melting, and sea level is rising. These are observed facts.''<br /> <br /> ''Are we humans the cause of these changes? The answer is an emphatic yes. Many climate-research groups around the world have calculated the various contributions to climate change, including those not related to humans, like volcanic ash. It has been shown repeatedly that it is just not possible to explain the recent warming without factoring in the rise in anthropogenic greenhouse gases.''<br /> <br /> ''As a scientist, I would like to think that the political discussion of climate change and how to mitigate its worst effects would be sober and fact-based. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Climate-change deniers in the United States have done a first-class job in spreading confusion and misinformation. As a result, many prominent politicians insist, and get away with insisting, that climate change is a hoax, a mantra that has gained some credibility through sheer repetition. Climate deniers are also fond of saying that global warming is not resolved in science or is “just” a theory. This is a perfect example of Orwellian Newspeak which also flies in the face of three hundred years of scientific progress, in which intellectual argument and conviction must be based on facts and substantiated theories, rather than personal beliefs or biases.''<br /> <br /> ''It is also dangerous.'' <br /> <br /> [http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/space-climate-change-and-the-real-meaning-of-theory '''''Read More''''':]<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Coalition of 25 states, cities and counties / AGs United for Clean Power'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> • http://www.ag.ny.gov/press-release/ag-schneiderman-former-vice-president-al-gore-and-coalition-attorneys-general-across<br /> <br /> <br /> Unprecedented Coalition - Attorneys General From California, Connecticut, District Of Columbia, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Virginia, Vermont, Washington State And The US Virgin Islands Agree To Coordinate Efforts<br /> <br /> A.G. Schneiderman: Climate Change Is The Most Consequential Issue Of Our Time. This Unprecedented State-To-State Coordination Will Use All The Tools At Our Disposal To Fight For Climate Progress<br /> <br /> <br /> Attorneys General go after ExxonMobile <br /> <br /> • http://www.ecowatch.com/how-far-will-elected-officials-go-to-protect-one-of-worlds-biggest-car-1906541036.html<br /> <br /> Attorneys General from 13 states and more than a dozen members of the House Science Committee enter the fray on ExxonMobil's behalf<br /> <br /> :http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/07/06/exxonmobil-may-have-friends-high-places-fraud-not-constitutionally-protected <br /> :http://billmoyers.com/story/exxonmobil-may-friends-high-places-fraud-not-constitutionally-protected/<br /> :http://www.courthousenews.com/2016/09/09/texas-backs-exxonmobil-in-climate-fight.htm<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''ExxonMobile / Climate Politics''''':<br /> <br /> :https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22102015/Exxon-Sowed-Doubt-about-Climate-Science-for-Decades-by-Stressing-Uncertainty<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''US House Committee on Science Update: Lamar Smith Continues on his Merry Way'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> :'''''Scientific Organizations Step Up to Block the Chairman's Politics'''''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Lamar-smith-press 2015.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://blog.ucsusa.org/ken-kimmell/exxonmobile-lamar-smith-first-amendment '''''Letter from President of Union of Concerned Scientists to Lamar Smith, Chair of House Science Com't''''']<br /> <br /> :[http://www.desmogblog.com/2016/04/26/there-no-doubt-exxon-knew-co2-pollution-was-global-threat-late-1970s '''''“There is no doubt”: Exxon Knew CO2 Pollution Was A Global Threat By Late 1970s''''']<br /> <br /> ''Open Letter From Legal Scholars on the (California) [http://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2016/05/legal-scholar-sign-on-letter-SB1161.pdf Climate Science Truth and Accountability Act]''<br /> <br /> ''May 19, 2016''<br /> <br /> ''We, the undersigned legal scholars, are writing to comment on Senate Bill 1161 (Allen), the Climate Science Truth and Accountability Act. As experts in constitutional law, environmental law, corporate law, and securities law, we believe that SB 1161 furthers the protection of consumers from unfair business practices with respect to scientific evidence regarding anthropogenic climate change.'' <br /> <br /> ''''''A growing body of evidence indicates that major fossil fuel companies knew the risks and potentially catastrophic consequences of processing and burning their products for decades, and as early as the 1950s'''''. ''This evidence suggests that certain commercial representations made in the intervening decades by major fossil fuel companies regarding the scientific link between fossil fuels and climate change would constitute a deceptive, misleading, or fraudulent business practice...'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''U.S. Presidential Campaign: Environmental Threats'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [http://desmogblog.com/2016/03/03/warming-accelerates-talk-climate-change-dissipates '''''What Problems, We See No Problems''''']<br /> <br /> '''''Trump v the World: [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/27/us/politics/donald-trump-global-warming-energy-policy.html Announces his Energy policy]''''' <br /> :'''''May 25 / The Republican presidential candidate's position -- Cancel the Paris agreement, More fossil fuels, Less Clean/Renewable Energy'''''<br /> <br /> '''''Trump declares he [http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2016/03/trump-climate-change-washington-post doesn't believe the science] and believes climate change a hoax'''''<br /> <br /> :[http://scorecard.lcv.org/ '''''Environmental Scorecard''''']: '''''Cruz drops out of race. During Texas Senator's term in office, he [http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2016/02/25/3753742/national-environmental-scorecard/ voted against every green bill],''''' <br /> :'''''and opposed every pro-environment, anti-pollution piece of legislation'''''<br /> <br /> :[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/28/us/politics/hillary-clinton-lays-out-climate-change-plan.html '''''Clinton on Climate Change'''''] -- [https://www.hillaryclinton.com/briefing/factsheets/2016/03/06/clinton-will-tackle-climate-change-as-president/ '''''Campaign''''']<br /> <br /> :[http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/12/07/bernie_sanders_climate_plan_calls_for_end_to_nuclear_energy.html '''''Sanders Climate Plan'''''] -- [https://berniesanders.com/press-release/sanders-vs-clinton-on-fracking-and-climate-change-new-tv-ad-up-in-minnesota-colorado/ '''''Campaign''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jan/24/bernie-s/yes-donald-trump-really-did-tweet-climate-change-h/ '''''Does Republican candidate Trump really believe this or not?'''''] <br /> <br /> [[File:Trump on climate change and china 2012.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Reviewing 2015'''''<br /> <br /> ; &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;''Environmental Security, Risks''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''NASA Earth Sciences 2016 Budget No Longer to be Cut $500 Million'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''The final budget bill provides $1.92 billion for Earth Science research, just $20 million less than the President's original budget request. The cut is slight compared to initial GOP budget cuts proposed in the House and Senate which had slashed as much as $500 million from the President's request.''<br /> <br /> ''NASA administrator Charles Bolden [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Environmental_Security argued before Congress this summer and fall] that it was critical to increase the size of NASA's Earth Science programs.''<br /> <br /> ''Under the newly passed Fiscal Year 2016 NASA Budget, virtually all of the agency’s programs benefit with either full or added funding. This national security priority will be jeopardized under Republican revanchist policy. The security, Earth Science work of NASA/NOAA is perceived not as advancing security, but as a threat to business. The security debate heats up and those who consider the science and data continue to step forward looking to changes in how we must perceive national - and global - security. '' -- http://www.universetoday.com/123937/nasa-receives-significant-budget-boost-fiscal-year-2016/<br /> <br /> • https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/New_Definitions_of_National_Security<br /> <br /> • https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Look_at_how_thin_our_atmosphere_is<br /> <br /> • https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Environmental_Security<br /> <br /> • https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Observations<br /> <br /> • https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Research_from_Space<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth Science Research from Space.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Via the New Republic, Dec 15'' <br /> <br /> [https://newrepublic.com/article/125806/paris-climate-deal-gop-candidates-move-nothing-happened '''''What Climate Agreement? GOP Candidates Ignore the International Agreement''''']<br /> <br /> ''Via Strategic Demands, Dec 13'' <br /> <br /> [http://strategicdemands.com/historic-global-accord-to-move-toward-renewable-energy/ '''''Historic global accord to move toward renewable energy''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Democrat presidential candidate debate, November 14, 2015 (LA Times)'' -- ''Sanders was asked whether he still believed, as he had earlier stated, that global warming was the greatest threat to national security. “Absolutely,” Sanders replied, suggesting that “climate change is directly related to the growth of terrorism”, with the fight over natural resources like water possibly leading to even greater international conflict.''<br /> <br /> '''''Syria May Be the First Climate-Change Conflict but It Won't Be the Last''''' ''by Joshua Holland, The Nation, Oct 27, 2015'' --- [http://www.thenation.com/article/syria-may-be-the-first-climate-change-conflict-but-it-wont-be-the-last/ ''Look at Syria more closely...''] <br /> <br /> ''[http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/11/16/3722355/bernie-sanders-climate-change-national-security-paris-climate-talks/ It was what one expert called] perhaps “the worst long-term drought and most severe set of crop failures since agricultural civilizations began in the Fertile Crescent.” It destroyed the livelihoods of 800,000 people and sent vastly more into poverty. The poor and displaced fled to cities, “where poverty, government mismanagement and other factors created unrest that exploded in spring 2011,” the study’s news release explains.''<br /> <br /> [http://climateandsecurity.org/2012/02/29/syria-climate-change-drought-and-social-unrest/ '''''Syria: Climate Change, Drought and Social Unrest''''']<br /> <br /> ''Water crisis in the MidEast'' [http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jul/02/water-key-conflict-iraq-syria-isis] [http://e360.yale.edu/feature/mideast_water_wars_in_iraq_a_battle_for_control_of_water/2796/] [http://www.timesofisrael.com/lack-of-water-sparked-syrias-conflict-and-it-will-make-egypt-more-militant-too/] [http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2643] [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Aquifers]<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://yearsoflivingdangerously.tumblr.com/post/86898140738/this-comic-was-produced-in-partnership-by-years-of '''''Years of Living Dangerously - Syria'''''] <br /> <br /> :[http://yearsoflivingdangerously.com/ '''''Years of Living Dangerously, presented on National Geo channel, Solutions to Climate Change'''''] <br /> <br /> :[http://yearsoflivingdangerously.com/what-we-can-do/ '''''What We Can Do''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:ECC Logo.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/260184-sanders-climate-change-still-greatest-threat-to-national-security ''Climate Change Still Greatest Threat to Security'']<br /> <br /> ''In 2014, the Defense Department released its [http://www.acq.osd.mil/ie/download/CCARprint_wForeword_c.pdf “Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap],” describing the issue not as a long-term concern, but that climate change “poses immediate risks to U.S. national security.”'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''U.S. Congress Science Committee Disputes Climate Science'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ''&quot;The scientific community is telling us if we do not address the global crisis of climate change, transform our energy system away from fossil fuel to sustainable energy, the planet that we're going to be leaving our kids and our grandchildren may well not be habitable.&quot;'' -- ''Bernie Sanders, Oct 2015''<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_News '''''Climate News''''']<br /> <br /> [http://www.vox.com/2015/11/22/9777582/lamar-smith-noaa '''''Lamar Smith Talks of Conspiracy: Dems Fire Back''''']<br /> <br /> [http://www.politico.com/story/2015/11/paris-climate-talks-government-shutdown-collide-216140 '''''Republicans Seek to Strangle Paris Climate Pact'''''] -- ''via Politico / Nov 23''<br /> <br /> [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/federal-eye/wp/2015/11/18/congressional-climate-change-skeptic-threatens-to-subpoena-commerce-secretary-to-get-noaa-documents/ '''''Committee Threatens Subpoenas'''''] -- ''via Washington Post / Nov 18''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/10/23/congressional-skeptic-on-global-warming-demands-records-from-u-s-climate-scientists/ '''''Lamar Smith, Science Committee Chair Escalates Attack on Scientific Studies'''''] / ''Oct 23, 2015''<br /> <br /> ''The congressional committee on science issues subpoenas to the Obama administration over a recent scientific study refuting claims that global warming had “paused” or slowed over the last decade...''<br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.climatecentral.org/news/nasa-tools-co2-19681 '''''NASA Tools Tracking CO2''''']<br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/OCO-2 '''''OCO-2''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://insideclimatenews.org/news/27102015/noaa-house-science-committee-subpoena-global-warming-hiatus-lamar-smith '''''NOAA responds - 'No Lamar'...'''''] <br /> <br /> ''NOAA refuses to turn over scientists’ emails....''<br /> <br /> ''Showdown looms with climate change deniers / Oct 28''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Lamar Smith Denial Offensive.png | link=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ku6rhdmbF4]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;''Earth Science Faces Deep Cuts''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Environmental_Security '''''Undercutting Security, Congress Moves to Eviscerate NASA/NOAA Earth Science Programs''''']<br /> <br /> [http://blog.chron.com/sciguy/2015/04/house-budget-authorization-slashes-500-million-from-nasas-earth-science-programs/ '''''House budget authorization mark-up slashes $500 million from NASA’s Earth science programs''''']<br /> <br /> '''''Potentially a ray of promise in the U.S. Senate on one front in the ongoing debate between an anti-science faction and those urging more science effort be directed at climate change issues and data needed for effective policy -- “The Committee encourages the Secretary to increase funding for academia to perform climate model studies that include the collection and evaluation of atmospheric data sets from satellite observations obtained in cooperation with NASA. Satellite observations of the atmosphere, within the context of the Earth as a global system, provide information that is critical in the interpretation of Earth-based observations. In addition, the Committee encourages the Secretary to allocate 5 percent of the Department’s funds spent on climate change models, studies, or evaluations to create a Red Team, so as to ensure science-based findings.”''''' ''114TH Congress Report -- SENATE 1st Session 114–54 to accompany H.R. 2028''<br /> <br /> *<br /> <br /> '''''From GreenPolicy360: A Congressional faction looking to hobble Earth-Science-research-from-space presents a larger challenge. Climate-change denialists and anti-science partisans do not want to face the data from a new fleet of NASA Earth monitoring satellites. The security threat environment, by most all credible sci, is accelerating fast, yet extreme political voices want to cover the eyes of this generation's reporting of NASA earth observation programs [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Vital_Signs,_Taking_the_Pulse_of_the_Planet_Sept2014.png '''&quot;Earth's Vital Signs&quot;''']. The scientific data tracking Earth systems is long overdue, is essential, and should be continued and expanded not radically cut...'''''<br /> <br /> [http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/10/republicans-outraged-over-nasa-earth-science-programs-that-reagan-began/ '''''Earth Science 'Outrages' Congressional Republicans'''''] / ''October 2015 via Ars Technica'' <br /> <br /> [http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/05/01/house-science-committee-guts-nasa-earth-sciences-budget/ '''''House Science Committee Guts Earth Sciences Budget'''''] / ''May 2015 via Ars Technica''<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Charles Bolden.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''What's at risk in Earth Sciences'''''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> '''''GreenPolicy360: The current debate in the United States Congress is highlighted by voices who would set aside the consensus of the scientific community and cut back budgets for Earth Science studies from space. The recent launches of a fleet of new NASA satellites and related missions to acquire critical data of Earth systems is now threatened by politicians who profess they are &quot;not scientists&quot; and, as a result, cannot speak to the validity of human-caused impacts and threats to natural systems. The vantage point of space offers a unique platform for risk assessment, studying and monitoring Earth's systems over time and, hopefully, better managing the well-being and sustainability of critical systems. Those who undercut the environmental and national security of these missions should be questioned and challenged.'''''<br /> <br /> ''GreenPolicy360 will continue to track the positions and responses of politicians in countries around the globe with an emphasis on those with existing earth-space programs.''<br /> <br /> ''The extreme point of view of a US Senator from Texas and anti-science perspective a newly elected Congress are coming to the fore and threaten to have more impact on the nation's security. Senator Cruz from Texas questions and doubts the need for scientific studies that are confronting a host of challenges to the planet's environmental security and, as a result, the US security. Rather Senator Cruz from Texas brings evangelical zeal and religious beliefs that sharply criticize the science of NASA and its recent Earth-monitoring satellite programs.'' <br /> <br /> [https://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov/projects-supported '''''Projects Supported / Past-Present'''''] <br /> <br /> [https://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov/ '''''Atmospheric Science Data Center''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth science missions in space US circa2017.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [http://www.nationaljournal.com/2016-elections/ted-cruz-tells-nasa-to-stop-worrying-about-climate-change-and-focus-on-space-20150312 '''''Via National Journal''''']<br /> <br /> '''''Cruz versus Bolden'''''<br /> <br /> ''March 12, 2015''<br /> <br /> ''Texas Senator Ted Cruz: &quot;More Space, Less Earth&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''Ted Cruz Tells NASA to Stop Worrying About Climate Change and Focus on Space''<br /> <br /> ''The Texas Republican and likely presidential candidate told NASA’s chief administrator, Charles Bolden, on Thursday to focus on “what inspires little boys and little girls across this country.”''<br /> <br /> ''Ted Cruz and Charles Bolden would probably agree that the core of the Earth is a mass of molten metal as hot as the sun. But as for the core of NASA's mission, the senator from Texas and the former astronaut split ways.<br /> <br /> ''Since taking the chairmanship of the Senate Space, Science, and Competitiveness Subcommittee this year, Cruz has been pushing the agency to adopt a &quot;more space, less Earth&quot; strategy. The Republican lawmaker argues that the Obama administration is wrongfully neglecting the country's space exploration operations—like potential missions to Mars and beyond—in favor of global-warming research. And he wants to know if Bolden, NASA's administrator, thinks so, too.<br /> <br /> ''&quot;I'd like to start by asking a general question,&quot; said Cruz on Thursday during a subcommittee hearing on the president's $18.5 billion budget request for NASA for fiscal 2016, which allocates considerable funding for Earth- and ocean-science projects. &quot;In your judgment, what is the core mission of NASA?&quot;<br /> <br /> ''Bolden said he'd been contemplating that mission over the past few days, and had read over the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, which created the agency. &quot;Our core mission from the very beginning has been to investigate, explore space and the Earth environment, and to help us make this place a better place,&quot; he said, adding that the study of aeronautics is important as well.<br /> <br /> ''Cruz didn't seem pleased with the &quot;Earth environment&quot; part of Bolden's answer. &quot;Almost any American would agree that the core function of NASA is to explore space,&quot; he said. &quot;That's what inspires little boys and little girls across this country ... and you know that I am concerned that NASA in the current environment has lost its full focus on that core mission.&quot;<br /> <br /> ''Cruz then pointed to a chart behind him titled &quot;Focus Inward or Focus Outward? Refocusing NASA's Core Priorities&quot; that compared NASA's budget in 2009 with the current request. He said that since 2009, funding for Earth sciences has seen a 41 percent increase, while funding for exploration and space operations, what Cruz &quot;would consider the core function of NASA,&quot; has seen a 7.6 percent decrease.<br /> <br /> ''&quot;In my judgment, this does not represent a fair or appropriate allocation of resources, that it is shifting resources away from the core functions of NASA to other functions,&quot; Cruz said. &quot;Do you share that assessment?&quot;<br /> <br /> ''Bolden, who decides how to allocate NASA's annual budget, did not. That dip in space exploration funding? That was kind of the whole point. &quot;Mr. Chairman, I am very interested in your chart,&quot; he said. &quot;I will say one thing—it is interesting to note that there is a decrease in exploration and human spaceflight when, in fact, that was somewhat intentional because we were trying to get the cost of exploration down as we reach farther out into the solar system.&quot;<br /> <br /> ''Bolden said the now-defunct space shuttles cost NASA $2 billion a year to maintain whether they flew or not. Today, NASA has a $6.6 billion contract with private companies Boeing and SpaceX that will provide for 16 human spaceflights over a span of three to four years.<br /> <br /> ''&quot;So I think the decrease is actually a little bit of what we're trying to do to get the cost of flying humans into space down,&quot; he told Cruz. &quot;That's what's driving the market, is reducing launch costs.&quot;''<br /> <br /> '''''More money for Earth-science research is a good thing, he continued. &quot;The fact that Earth-science has increased—I'm proud to say that it has enabled us to understand our planet far better than we ever did before,&quot; Bolden said.'''''<br /> <br /> ''The NASA chief distanced himself from Cruz's assessment of spending changes within the agency.<br /> <br /> ''You asked me about your chart. There's a lot of chartsmanship,&quot; Bolden said, chuckling. &quot;I'm not sure what you include in 'exploration,' for example. So, by my statement, I was not acknowledging that I agree with the numbers on the chart. I don't want everyone to say I accept the numbers on the chart.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''The exchange offered a glimpse of NASA under a potential Cruz presidency. Climate-change researchers let out an audible groan when Cruz, who is expected to run in 2016, took the helm of the Senate subcommittee overseeing the federal agency in January. Cruz's views—especially his belief that global warming doesn't exist—are at odds with NASA's extensive climate-science programs, which study solar activity, sea level rise, and oceanic temperatures, to name a few. On Thursday, Bolden appeared to hope the senator's opinions wouldn't get in the way of how NASA spends its money.<br /> <br /> ''&quot;We can't go anywhere if the Kennedy Space Center goes underwater and we don't know it—and that's understanding our environment,&quot; Bolden said, alluding to the risk that climate change poses to the low-elevation state of Florida. &quot;It is absolutely critical that we understand Earth environment because this is the only place that we have to live.&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:You can manage only what you can measure Dr David Crisp, OCO-2, June 2014 m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ''One Texas Oil-State Senator's priorities:''<br /> <br /> [http://www.nationaljournal.com/congress/cruz-s-mission-for-nasa-more-space-less-earth-20150223 '''The Cruz mission: More Space, Less Earth''']<br /> <br /> ... In Cruz's mind, President Obama has spent too much of the agency's resources studying the planet we already inhabit, rather than focusing its missions on the &quot;infinity and beyond&quot; objectives that have the potential to captivate Americans. <br /> <br /> For Cruz to rewrite NASA's objectives, he'd need the approval of his subcommittee, votes in the full Senate and House, and Obama's signature. Even for someone used to fighting long legislative odds, it's likely Cruz's role will be less about principled showdowns over must-pass legislation and more about shining a spotlight on perceived priorities.<br /> <br /> Last year, NASA launched five new missions to study Earth's climate, and Earth science missions currently occupy about 10 percent of NASA's budget. Cruz believes that has come at the expense of &quot;the core mission of NASA, manned space exploration.&quot;<br /> <br /> &quot;There are tremendous opportunities for commercial space,&quot; Cruz says. &quot;One of the very first focuses of the subcommittee will be on expanding those opportunities, expanding how we can allow the private sector to create jobs, to create growth, and how we can explore new frontiers in space.&quot;<br /> <br /> Those in the commercial space industry believe Cruz recognizes their potential. &quot;We're seeing a well-diversified commercial renaissance in Texas. That's something that philosophically the senator feels good about,&quot; said '''NanoRacks''' co-founder Jeffrey Manber. His company contracts with NASA to provide computer-lab space and small satellite launches from ISS.<br /> <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360''': Of course, much of NASA's work is based in Texas and, as the Texas Senator is all too aware, the earth science and exploration work of NASA brings myriad benefits to Texas, manifold economic benefits and incalculable benefits beyond the state of Texas. NASA has led the world's scientific efforts to study space and Earth's unique life-giving systems in space. <br /> <br /> The field of &quot;New Space&quot;, extending beyond first-generation space/earth science and continuing NASA missions with economies, is now building a fast-growing vital industry in cooperation with NASA. New Space extends the mission of the US space program as multiple start-up companies supply NASA missions and launch micro-satellites and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_sensing remote sensing] services and Internet distributed products and information across a wide spectrum of business, natural resources, science and critical environmental fields. Over the past several years, the venture capital market has hurried to support these start-ups, as the international business potential has become evident. One company as an example of many NASA-space, earth-science related companies in Texas is [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Micro-satellites NanoRacks], deploying next-gen satellites from the ISS. The Texas &quot;New Space&quot; NASA-related business focus on deploying earth-facing, earth-science satellites is poised to become a worldwide industry.<br /> <br /> <br /> * [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_Labs_Doves_Fly '''&quot;When Doves Fly, a Look at California's 'New Space' Industry via PlanetLabs''']<br /> <br /> <br /> Visionary space-based, earth-science NASA missions involves billions of dollars in commercial space work grouped around NASA -- the work is essential to diverse, forward-looking Earth Science and 'smart' management of the planet as humankind takes responsibility for the by-products of industrial production and [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Externalities 'externalities'].<br /> <br /> <br /> -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-<br /> <br /> <br /> '''March 12/13/14, 2015'''<br /> <br /> * http://news.sciencemag.org/climate/2015/03/earth-science-not-hard-science-congressional-republicans-declare<br /> <br /> “Virtually all academic planetary scientists are in earth science departments, because the Earth, after all, is a planet,” says Margaret Leinen, president of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and a former head of the National Science Foundation’s geosciences directorate. “Of course the geosciences are part of the hard sciences,” explains Leinen, head of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and vice chancellor for marine sciences at the University of California, San Diego. “They provide us with very fundamental knowledge about the way the planet works, knowledge grounded in the physical sciences.”<br /> <br /> <br /> • http://mashable.com/2015/03/12/ted-cruz-nasa-earth-science-attack/<br /> <br /> • http://sciencepolicy.agu.org/files/2013/07/AGU-letter-to-Sen-Cruz-March-2015.pdf<br /> <br /> • http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/03/13/3633354/ted-cruz-nasa-mission/<br /> <br /> • http://www.ibtimes.com/ted-cruz-wants-nasa-focus-deep-space-missions-instead-studying-earth-1847112<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Joan Vernikos''', member of the Space Studies Board of the National Academy and former director of NASA’s Life Sciences Division:<br /> <br /> Exploration is intrinsic to our nature...<br /> <br /> At what cost? Is there a price to inspiration and creativity? Economic, scientific and technological returns of space exploration have far exceeded the investment. Globally, 43 countries now have their own observing or communication satellites in Earth orbit. '''Observing Earth''' has provided G.P.S., meteorological forecasts, predictions and management of hurricanes and other natural disasters, and global monitoring of the environment, as well as surveillance and intelligence. Satellite communications have changed life and business practices with computer operations, cell phones, global banking, and TV. Studying humans living in the microgravity of space has expanded our understanding of osteoporosis and balance disorders, and has led to new treatments. Wealth-generating medical devices and instrumentation such as digital mammography and outpatient breast biopsy procedures and the application of telemedicine to emergency care are but a few of the social and economic benefits of manned exploration that we take for granted.<br /> <br /> Space exploration is not a drain on the economy; it generates infinitely more than wealth than it spends. Royalties on NASA patents and licenses currently go directly to the U.S. Treasury, not back to NASA. I firmly believe that the '''Life Sciences Research Program''' would be self-supporting if permitted to receive the return on its investment. NASA has done so much with so little that it has generally been assumed to have had a huge budget. In fact, the 2007 NASA budget of $16.3 billion is a minute fraction of the $13 trillion total G.D.P.<br /> <br /> “What’s the hurry?” is a legitimate question. As the late Senator William Proxmire said many years ago, “Mars isn’t going anywhere.” Why should we commit hard-pressed budgets for space exploration when there will always be competing interests? However, as Mercury, Gemini and Apollo did 50 years ago, our future scientific and technological leadership depends on exciting creativity in the younger generations. Nothing does this better than manned space exploration. There is now a national urgency to direct the creative interests of our youth towards careers in science and engineering. We need to keep the flame of manned space exploration alive as China, Russia, India, and other countries forge ahead with substantial investments that challenge U.S. leadership in space. <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Kathleen M. Connell''', a principal of The Connell Whittaker Group, a founding team member of NASA’s Astrobiology Program, and former policy director of the Aerospace States Association:<br /> <br /> In the twenty-first century, what would happen if U.S. manned space programs were managed based upon the contemporary demands of the planet and the American taxpayer? NASA could be rewarded to explore, but with terrestrial returns as a priority. Space exploration crews could conduct global warming research on the International Space Station National Laboratory, while other crews from the public or private sector could rapidly assemble solar energy satellites for clean energy provision to Earth. Lunar settlements could be established to develop new energy sources from rare compounds that are in abundance on the moon. Getting to Mars, to develop a terrestrial lifeboat and to better understand the fate of planets, suddenly takes on new meaning and relevance.<br /> <br /> I have to come the conclusion, after over 20 years in the space industry, that addressing global challenges with space solutions that benefit humanity and American constituents is the key to justifying the cost of manned space exploration. <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Keith Cowing''', founder and editor of NASAWatch.com and former NASA space biologist.<br /> <br /> Right now, all of America’s human space flight programs cost around '''$7 billion a year'''. That’s pennies per person per day. In 2006, according to the USDA, Americans spent more than $154 billion on alcohol. We spend around '''$10 billion a month in Iraq'''. And so on. Are these things more important than human spaceflight because we spend more money on them? Is space exploration less important?<br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Hubble Telescope'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;[http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Hubble '''On the 25th Anniversary''']&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Hubble stars m.jpg | link=http://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/Hubble-2004-b-full_jpg.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''THE NIGHT SKY... You gaze up into history; you stare into the limits of your own understanding.''' <br /> <br /> The past flies toward you at the speed of light. Why are you here? Why are the stars there? Is it even remotely possible that our one, tiny, eggshell world is the only one encrusted with life?<br /> <br /> The Hubble [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Hubble_Ultra_Deep_Field_2014-20140603_NASA-HS201427a-.jpg Ultra Deep Field image] should be in every classroom in the world. It should be on the president’s desk. It should probably be in every church, too.<br /> <br /> “To sense that behind anything that can be experienced,” Einstein once said, “there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness.”<br /> <br /> Whatever we believe in — God, children, nationhood — nothing can be more important than to take a moment every now and then and accept the invitation of the sky: to leave the confines of ourselves and fly off into the hugeness of the universe, to disappear into the inexplicable, the implacable, the reflection of that something our minds cannot grasp.<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Dark sky by Jack Fusco.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Backbone of Night - The Milky Way by Andrew McCarthy 2023.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;''Following the Hubble in 2018 -- the James Webb''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:The James Webb telescope modeled at SXSW 2015.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''''James Webb Space Telescope'''''<br /> <br /> • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope<br /> <br /> • http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasas-webb-strutting-its-stuff-in-new-behind-the-webb-video<br /> <br /> • http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/isim.html<br /> <br /> • http://zenithpress.tumblr.com/post/115125873135/the-universe-through-an-infrared-telescope<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Source - New Space Frontiers''<br /> <br /> https://spacefrontier.org/<br /> <br /> ''The late Douglas Adams, author of '''The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy''', famously wrote, “Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”'' <br /> <br /> ''One day we might be able to explore neighboring star systems, but it will be a while before that happens. All we can do at the moment is crawl slowly across our little solar system. '''Orbiting astronomical instruments will always be crucial to our understanding of the deeper cosmos. For example, the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in April 1990, completely revolutionized our perspective. But what will come next for astronomy?'''''<br /> <br /> ''Expected to launch in 2018 on a European Ariane 5 heavy-lift rocket, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is named in honor of NASA’s chief administrator during the 1960s development of Project Apollo. The core instrument is an infrared telescope with a twenty-one-foot-diameter primary mirror mounted on top of a sunshade the size of a tennis court. The supporting spacecraft, with gyroscopic stabilization systems, communication equipment, and solar power panels, juts out from the bottom of the sunshade.''<br /> <br /> ''“It will be looking for very distant and faint galaxies, and often will pick up no more than a single photon of light per second from a target, so we want to catch as many photons as we can.” This extreme need for sensitivity requires JWST to operate in deep space, far from the interference of Earth’s noise and heat. It will orbit the Sun... while simultaneously making a smaller orbit on a special zone known as Lagrange 2 (L2), about 930,000 miles from Earth.<br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Fifty Years Ago We Were Warned'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''As the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_movement Modern Environmental Movement Begins], the First National Security Warnings are Issued on Climate'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2015/nov/05/scientists-warned-the-president-about-global-warming-50-years-ago-today '''Scientists Met with President Johnson with Warning of Global Warming''']<br /> <br /> ''Via The Guardian / On 5 November 1965 climate scientists summarized the risks associated with rising carbon pollution in a report for Lyndon Baines Johnson''<br /> <br /> ''Fifty years ago today, as the American Association for the Advancement of Science highlighted, US president Lyndon Johnson’s science advisory committee sent him a report entitled Restoring the Quality of Our Environment. The introduction to the report noted:''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Pollutants have altered on a global scale the carbon dioxide content of the air and the lead concentrations in ocean waters and human populations.'''''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The report included a section on atmospheric carbon dioxide and climate change, written by prominent climate scientists Roger Revelle, Wallace Broecker, Charles Keeling, Harmon Craig, and J Smagorisnky. Reviewing the document today, one can’t help but be struck by how well these scientists understood the mechanisms of Earth’s climate change 50 years ago.''<br /> <br /> ''The report noted that within a few years, climate models would be able to reasonably project future global surface temperature changes. In 1974, one of its authors, Wallace Broecker did just that in a paper titled [https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/files/2009/10/broeckerglobalwarming75.pdf Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?.]'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ::························································· <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Following on this initial science study''', Representative George E. Brown from California led the drafting and, in 1978, Congressional adoption of the first National Climate Report and Plan.<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:US_Public_Law_95-367.png<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:US Public Law 95-367.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:George E Brown.jpg]]<br /> <br /> [[George E. Brown Jr]]<br /> <br /> <br /> SJS/GreenPolicy360 Siterunner: As a young political activist, I had the fortune and challenge of entering politics in the 1960s as a result of meeting [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:George_E_Brown.jpg Rep. George E. Brown.] <br /> <br /> George became a leader in Congress over the decades. He was known for earth science initiatives, strategic affairs, NASA programs, climate science, earth and space politics over three decades as a member and Chair of the House Committee for Science and Technology. George was directly responsible for myriad first-generation programs that created today's data and knowledge base of earth observation and environmental security -- from LANDSAT and GPS to the work that established the EPA and Clean Air Act.<br /> <br /> I will never forget how he talked to me of the dangers of nuclear weapons and the need for nuclear weapons control and anti-proliferation treaties. And how the future of children was a foremost concern of his. He had medical studies of how the children of LA (as I was) were being impacted by the worst smog in the world at that time. His efforts to write and pass new clean air laws and regulations in California changed the transportation industry and set standards and a model for the world. <br /> <br /> I was fortunate in my work with him and alongside him in helping to shape a [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_movement modern environmental movement]. In the years following the 1960s, until George's sudden passing in 1999, I've continued attempting, as George always encouraged, creating a new vision of what national and global security should be. We realized that a high risk horizon of environmental and nuclear existential threats is a real and present danger that must be faced.<br /> <br /> The initiatives of science are our tools.<br /> <br /> Our collected great work is to create new visions and new definitions of the challenges, the risks and solutions that are necessary to meet the threat horizon.<br /> <br /> With the memory of George in mind, who was a practical engineer by training and visionary thinker optimistic about humanity's future, we carry on.<br /> <br /> [http://www.planetcitizens.org Planet Citizens], national patriots, engaged and believing each of us can make a positive difference in shaping our future, we persist.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Earth imaging.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::::[[File:New Definitions of National Security.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''National Security, Global Security: Indivisible'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;'''National Interests, Environmental Protection, Global &amp; Indivisible'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/New_Definitions_of_National_Security <br /> <br /> :* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:New_Definitions_of_National_Security<br /> <br /> :* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Environmental_Security <br /> <br /> <br /> : http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Observations <br /> : http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Pale_blue_dot <br /> : http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/HelloEarth <br /> <br /> <br /> : http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Blue_Marble_Collection<br /> : http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/@Earth360 <br /> : http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Blue_Marble_photo_-_Apollo_17.jpg <br /> : http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Apollo.jpg <br /> : http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Whole_Earth <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:National-Security.001.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Visit GreenPolicy's Associate / Strategic Demands'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :* http://strategicdemands.com<br /> :* http://strategicdemands.com/new-definitions-of-security/<br /> :* http://strategicdemands.com/environmental-security/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Thin Blue Layer Sunset Reflection.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Environmental Security &amp; &quot;Thin Blue&quot;'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''&quot;Endangered&quot;, Remember This 1989 Warning...&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> In the Jan. 2, 1989, issue, the editors of Time Magazine named “Endangered Earth” the most important story of the year, replacing the annual “Person of the Year” with a planet, our own. <br /> <br /> The cover of Time, by the artist Christo, showed a 16-in. globe wrapped in plastic and rag rope.<br /> <br /> The Climate Crisis was coming into view. How would we, citizens of Planet Earth act to make a difference?<br /> <br /> <br /> * http://www.planetcitizen.org<br /> <br /> [[File:Planet of the Year Christo-Time.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:'Thin Blue Layer' of Earth's Atmosphere 2.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''&quot;Thin Blue&quot;'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [http://www.thinbluelayer.com ThinBlueLayer.com]<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:ThinBlueLayer ThinBlueLayer.com] <br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Thin_Blue_Layer A Thin Blue Layer Protecting the Home Planet] <br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/How_thin_is_earth%27s_atmosphere.jpg How Thin is the Thin Blue Layer Protecting Earth?]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Earth Science, Environmental Security'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> • http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/New_Definitions_of_National_Security<br /> <br /> • http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Vital_Signs<br /> <br /> • http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Right_Now<br /> <br /> • http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Democratization_of_Space<br /> <br /> • http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_API<br /> <br /> • http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Observations<br /> <br /> • http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/OCO-2<br /> <br /> • http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Micro-satellites<br /> <br /> • http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_Labs_Doves_Fly<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Earth Information Center'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://earth.gov/ <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth-Thin Blue Atmosphere-Moon image - NASA.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Air Quality]]<br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Atmospheric Science]]<br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:Citizen Science]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Countries]]<br /> [[Category:Democracy]]<br /> [[Category:Democratization of Space]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Rights]]<br /> [[Category:Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Earth360]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Art]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Day]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Imaging]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Law]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Observations]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth System Science]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-ethics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-nomics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Energy Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Full-cost Accounting]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Laws]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Movement]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Protection]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Security]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Security, National Security]]<br /> [[Category:ESA]]<br /> [[Category:Externalities]]<br /> [[Category:Fact Checking]]<br /> [[Category:Fossil Fuels]]<br /> [[Category:Global Security]]<br /> [[Category:Global Warming]]<br /> [[Category:Green Best Practices]]<br /> [[Category:Green Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Money in Politics]]<br /> [[Category:NASA]]<br /> [[Category:NOAA]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resources]]<br /> [[Category:New Definitions of National Security]]<br /> [[Category:New Space]]<br /> [[Category:Oceans]]<br /> [[Category:Ocean Science]]<br /> [[Category:Orbital Perspective]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Scientist]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Planetary Science]]<br /> [[Category:Pollution]] <br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Sea-Level Rise &amp; Mitigation]]<br /> [[Category:Renewable Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Soil]]<br /> [[Category:Solar Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Space Science and Space Physics]]<br /> [[Category:Strategic Demands]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability Policies]]<br /> [[Category:ThinBlueLayer]]<br /> [[Category:Threat Multiplier]]<br /> [[Category:Toxics and Pollution‏‎]]<br /> [[Category:Transportation]]<br /> [[Category:United Nations]]<br /> [[Category:US Environmental Protection Agency]]<br /> [[Category:Water Quality]]<br /> [[Category:Whole Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Wind Energy]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]<br /> [[Category:Youth]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Earth_and_Space,_Politics&diff=138357 2026-10-05T20:16:36Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div>__notoc__<br /> <br /> [[File:Signals from the home planet.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> [http://www.planetcitizen.org www.planetcitizen.org]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;GreenPolicy360 journeys across 50+ years of the modern environmental movement&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;Connecting &amp; sharing world changing stories&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> [[The Modern Environmental Movement]] | [[National Climate Plans]] <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;'''[[Earth Science Vital Signs]] | [[Pale blue dot]] | [[Earth Science Research from Space]] | [[Planet Citizen Action]]'''&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;'''[[Planet Citizen Vision of Living Earth]] | [[@Earth360]] | [[New Space]] | [[Micro-satellites]] | [[Planet API]] | [[Virtual Earth]]'''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Himawari Earth water vapor dynamics.png]]<br /> <br /> Water/Life<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Earth Image via European Space Agency.png]] <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> The Home Planet<br /> <br /> [[File:Your Place in Space.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :::::::[[File:A Planet Citizen.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Living Earth, a Generational Challenge.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''2026 Onward'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''October 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Clean Energy Development, Production and Expansion Have Made a Huge Positive Difference'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : The Naysayers Who Say Nay and Nah Bring Nothing to the Table<br /> <br /> * https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/what-if-the-world-hadnt-built-wind<br /> <br /> <br /> Zeke Hausfather: I often see people argue that clean energy is not reducing emissions, because it just adds to rather than replaces fossil fuels. This argument is deeply misguided – clean energy built since 2005 has displaced 23 billion tons... Clean energy has been wildly successful. Non-hydro renewables (primarily solar and wind) have increased from near-zero in 2005 to producing 22% of global electricity...<br /> <br /> But despite this rapid growth fossil fuel generation continues to set new records, though it has slowed down substantially compared to the rate of fossil fuel growth in the 1990s and 2000s. This leads some to argue that clean energy isn't actually reducing emissions... In a world without solar and wind, electricity demand would still have increased rapidly – driven by increased industrial output, air conditioning/heating, vehicle electrification, and data centers.<br /> <br /> Indeed, in many cases increased electricity use is a good thing – to effectively meet net zero goals we need to largely electrify transportation, industrial processes, building heating and cooling, and the ~70% of energy coming from non-electricity fossil fuel combustion today... We also see countries where rapid growth of solar and wind has played a key role in absolutely reducing power sector emissions, not just meeting new demand. The US has seen power sector emissions fall 37%, the EU by 55%, and the UK by 75% since 2005: Globally around 75% of new demand has been met by clean energy since 2005, with 99% being met by solar and wind in 2025. The globe may be on the brink of absolute emissions reductions in the power sector, with clean energy growing faster than demand.<br /> <br /> So the next time someone tells you that clean energy is not reducing emissions, just meeting new demand, ask them what would have happened if we hadn't built it. Solar panels do not create demand, and without them we'd have been burning a lot more fossil fuels.<br /> <br /> * https://x.com/hausfath/status/2107146330850103330<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''September 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Potential for a 'Cascade of Progress' and/or Setbacks of a Retro U.S. Administration'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : History will tell the story, as a Modern Environmental Movement keeps on keeping on<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Exeter Report-Global Systems Institute (2026) Re How to trigger 'Cascade of Progress'.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Exeter_Report-Global_Systems_Institute_(2026)_Re_How_to_trigger_%27Cascade_of_Progress%27.png<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Tracking_science_policy_across_the_Trump_administration.png<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Daniel Ellsberg, On the Threat of Nuclear Weapons'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;strong&gt;A message from beyond, words of warning from an old friend of ours, Dan Ellsberg&lt;/strong&gt;<br /> <br /> Listen in to words of wisdom, even as a US president postures to be anti-nuke, and proposes nuclear weapons funding at all time highs...<br /> <br /> In fact, nuclear funding and Trump administration nuclear weapons development and 'usable' delivery platforms have spurred an out of control Nuclear Arms Race between the US, Russia and now China.<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/nuclear-arms-race-3-0/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:An Ordinary Insanity, a Nuclear Movie.png]]<br /> <br /> Released 06/2026<br /> <br /> <br /> In this 29-minute documentary, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xofgctP2hTY '''now on YouTube'''], renowned whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, near the end of his life, provides a powerful &lt;strong&gt;wakeup call&lt;/strong&gt; about the global threat of nuclear weapons and advocates how to dramatically reduce &lt;strong&gt;real and present dangers of nuclear annihilation&lt;/strong&gt;.<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xofgctP2hTY<br /> <br /> <br /> Before he released the top secret Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, Ellsberg was a nuclear war planner with access to classified information on U.S. nuclear strategy.<br /> <br /> <br /> “We’re continuing year-by-year deliberately with a posture and a policy and threats that make a significant risk of near extinction possible.”<br /> <br /> — Daniel Ellsberg in &quot;An Ordinary Insanity&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://www.anordinaryinsanity.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> Dan Ellsberg @ GreenPolicy360's associate, Strategic Demands<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/?s=daniel+ellsberg<br /> <br /> <br /> The &quot;Ordinary Insanity&quot; documentary was filmed one year before his death at age 92 and Ellsberg speaks with insider knowledge, clarity and urgency about nuclear weapons, the risks of use, and the 'beyond words' devastation that would come to humanity in the event of nuclear war.<br /> <br /> Over decades Daniel Ellsberg, as a 'nuclear weapons planning insider', led anti-nuclear efforts and now, near the end of his life, he speaks out for a last time in this documentary, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;An Ordinary Insanity&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;.<br /> <br /> &lt;strong&gt;&quot;I’ve long said that to my last breath I will be doing what I can to postpone and avert the risk of nuclear war.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;<br /> <br /> With ongoing conflicts heightening nuclear tensions, and with the recent end of the New START treaty potentially triggering a renewed arms race, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;An Ordinary Insanity&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; is a profoundly important film that aims to mobilize broad public concern and action for arms control and nuclear disarmament.<br /> <br /> &lt;strong&gt;The clock is ticking...&lt;/strong&gt;.<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Nuclear symbol .png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Read More about Dan Ellsberg<br /> <br /> : At GreenPolicy360 &amp;amp; Strategic Demands<br /> <br /> <br /> StrategicDemands.com<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/180px-Truth_and_Consequence_-_Dan_Ellsberg.png<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?search=dan+ellsberg&amp;amp;title=Special%3ASearch&amp;amp;profile=advanced&amp;amp;fulltext=1&amp;amp;ns0=1&amp;amp;ns6=1&amp;amp;ns14=1<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Truth_and_Consequence_-_Dan_Ellsberg.png<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Nuclear_Weapons<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Updated at [[Earthviews]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?search=landsat&amp;title=Special%3ASearch &lt;big&gt;'''Earthviews from Landsat Mission Satellites'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Landsat band imagery2.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Day before Earth Day, April 21, 2015.png]]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Category:Earth<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Earth Sharing Observation Resources / NASA'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[Earth Observation Portal]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''Satellite Missions Database''' <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth Observation - Resources.png]]<br /> <br /> (Introduced in 2015 at GreenPolicy360)<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Earth_Observation_-_Resources.png<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Earth Observations Portal'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://directory.eoportal.org/web/eoportal/home<br /> <br /> * https://directory.eoportal.org/web/eoportal/satellite-missions<br /> <br /> * https://directory.eoportal.org/web/eoportal/kramer<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Update:'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> September 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Now that we/humanity, with open source data compiled in databases from 50+ years of satellite Earth Imaging (beginning w/ decades of US-initiated 'planet earth', first-generation Earth Science/NASA missions), it's time to 'work the data' <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Introducing 'Worldviews' '''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> First, for digital screens, schools, education and knowledge across the world, look at NASA's updated ''''Worldview'''' and ''''World Monitor'''' projects<br /> <br /> Add in NASA's Earthdata publicly available Earth Science Data System (ESDS) and Earth Observing System (EOS) <br /> <br /> * https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/about<br /> * https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/about/esdis/eosdis<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The Earth Observing System (EOS) is a program of NASA comprising a series of artificial satellite missions and scientific instruments in Earth orbit designed for long-term global observations of the land surface, biosphere, atmosphere, and oceans. Since the early 1970s, NASA has been developing its Earth Observing System, launching a series of Landsat satellites ... Following the launch of various satellite missions, the conception of the program began in the late 1980s and expanded rapidly through the 1990s.[2] Since the inception of the program, it has continued to develop, including; land, sea, radiation and atmosphere.[1] Collected in a system known as EOSDIS, NASA uses this data in order to study the progression and changes in the biosphere of Earth. The main focus of this data collection surrounds climatic science. The program is the centerpiece of NASA's Earth Science Enterprise.''<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Observing_System<br /> <br /> <br /> SJS: With their/our real-time capabilities, we are now talking navigating and knowing our world like never before ...<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Find Earthdata at EOS Data and Information System - NASA.png]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Find_Earthdata_at_EOS_Data_and_Information_System_-_NASA.png&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> April 2025<br /> <br /> <br /> The following 9 GreenPolicy360 pages use this file:<br /> <br /> : Earth Day Memories on the 50th Anniversary<br /> : Earth Observation System Data and Information System - NASA EOS<br /> : Earth Science Research from Space<br /> : George E. Brown Jr<br /> : Planet Earth Perspective<br /> : Stats - Green Research &amp; Science<br /> : File:EOS - Earth Science Data Operations.png<br /> : File:Science Guides.jpeg<br /> : Category:NASA<br /> <br /> <br /> SJS / GreenPolicy360 founder/siterunner: From envisioning to reality, first principles to development, proof-of-concept to prototypes, engineering models, testing, launching, managing, monitoring, gathering, sharing ... distribution and use ... sometimes it's good to be older and to see the story arc roll out ... a tip of our Green cap to the visionaries, the dreamers and doers, those who made it all happen -- <br /> <br /> * https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/<br /> <br /> * https://github.com/nasa-gibs/worldview<br /> <br /> * https://www.worldmonitor.app/<br /> <br /> * https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/about<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> SJS / GreenPolicy360: Journeying across 50+ years of the modern environmental movement<br /> <br /> From '''[[Earthrise]]''' to becoming a 'participant-observer' over the first three decades of a new Earth Science movement<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[The Modern Environmental Movement]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Thank you for the ride, Rep. George E. Brown, your three decades of vision, effort, oversight and managing of US Earth Science / Atmospheric Science, a foundation for humanity to build on, continues to be shared globally, open-source, as you/we hoped, even though there are forces in opposition<br /> <br /> Onward we go!<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Earth Observation System Data and Information System - NASA EOS]]'''<br /> <br /> ''NASA's Earth Observation System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) comprises elements including Distributed Active Archive Centers, Science Investigator-led Processing Systems, and web infrastructure.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''NASA's Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) is a key core capability in the Earth Science Data Systems (ESDS) Program. It provides end-to-end capabilities for managing NASA Earth science data from various sources — satellites, aircraft, field measurements, and various other programs.'' <br /> <br /> ''For the EOS satellite missions, EOSDIS provides capabilities for command and control, scheduling, data capture and initial processing. These capabilities, constituting the '''EOSDIS Mission Operations''', are managed by NASA's Earth Science Mission Operations (ESMO) Project. NASA network capabilities transport the data to the science operations facilities.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/about/esdis/eosdis<br /> <br /> <br /> Update: See the Web Unification Project -- <br /> <br /> * https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/about/web-unification-project<br /> <br /> <br /> The Earth Observation System (EOS) is continuing to be updated with Earth Science Data Systems (ESDS) <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EarthScience Missions via the EOS - 2022.png]]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:EarthScience_Missions_via_the_EOS_-_2022.png<br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:EOS EarthSats s.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:You can manage only what you can measure Dr David Crisp, OCO-2, June 2014 m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:You_can_manage_only_what_you_can_measure_Dr_David_Crisp,_OCO-2,_June_2014_m.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[HelloEarth]]<br /> <br /> '''Visit GreenPolicy360's story of Earth Science research from our decades of research, eco-activism and #PlanetCitizens education.'''<br /> <br /> Our GreenPolicy360 [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Category:EOS_eco_Operating_System eco Operating System (eOS)] includes:<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Category:Earth360 '''Earth360''']<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Category:Earth_Observations '''Earth Observations''']<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Category:NASA '''NASA''']<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Strategic_Demands '''Strategic Demands''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Planet Earth Perspective]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[EarthPOV]]<br /> <br /> [[Earth and Space, Politics]]<br /> <br /> [[Look at how thin our atmosphere is]]<br /> <br /> [[New Definitions of National Security]] - <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Earth Imaging-New Space]]<br /> <br /> [[Planet API]]<br /> <br /> [[Micro-satellites]]<br /> <br /> [[Democratization of Space]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Earth Right Now]]<br /> <br /> [[Earth Science Vital Signs]]<br /> <br /> [[The Commons]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Virtual Earth]]<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''A Whole Earth Vision'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Whole_Earth<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earthrise Planetary Awareness.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Hmmm.....<br /> <br /> September 1, 2026<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Time to Publish the Dark Experiment Results Is (Are?) Now'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Search for dark matter particle interactions in an extended nuclear recoil energy window with the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Weakly Inter-acting Massive Particles (WIMPs) are among the best-<br /> motivated candidates for dark matter, arising naturally<br /> in many theories beyond the Standard Model...<br /> <br /> * https://lz.lbl.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2026/08/LZ_Preprint_260901_Dark_Matter_EFT_Nuclear_Recoil_Search_at_Higher_Energies.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Scientists Hunting Dark Matter Found Something Strange'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Dark matter has evaded direct detection for decades because it does not emit, absorb or reflect any light. It is as pervasive as it is inaccessible, making up 85 percent of the matter in our universe, a tease for the particle physicists keen on deciphering its nature...<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/01/science/dark-matter.html?unlocked_article_code=1.91A.Y09A.CEzD8GWampij&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> The+LUX-ZEPLIN+experiment+observed+a+particle+interaction+that+could+be+interpreted+as+a+signal+from+WIMPs,+a+dark+matter+candidate+—+but+researchers+will+need+more+data+to+confirm.+<br /> <br /> * https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2026/09/01/lz-sees-surprising-result-in-search-for-dark-matter/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''August 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Venture Capital Gets the Picture (Why Doesn't the Current US Administration?)<br /> <br /> What will electricity in the US look like in the coming decades?<br /> <br /> <br /> From Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z) <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Base Power, Home Power, &amp; the Future of Electricity'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : ''''Electricity is a commodity, and the best electron is the cheapest electron''''<br /> <br /> :* https://www.a16z.news/p/base-power-and-the-future-of-electricity<br /> <br /> <br /> a16z News<br /> <br /> August 4, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> In 2018, Zach Dell was a summer analyst at Blackstone studying the utility-scale battery opportunity. “One thing became really clear to me,” he recalls. “The marginal cost of solar plus storage was going to fall below the marginal cost of coal and natural gas.”<br /> <br /> He was right. Solar is now the fastest-growing source of electricity in history, and the price of a lithium-ion battery pack has fallen more than 90% since 2010...<br /> <br /> Cheaper batteries could help fix our aging grid infrastructure because a battery and transmission line essentially do the same job: both move power from where it’s worth less to where it’s worth more. A transmission line does it through space, carrying power from where it’s made cheaply, like a solar farm in Arizona, to customers hundreds of miles away. A battery does it through time, storing power at noon when solar is flooding the grid and releasing it in the evening when everyone is home, the sun is down, and power is expensive.<br /> <br /> The only problem was that the way incumbents were deploying battery storage was too slow, and the batteries weren’t where the grid needed them. “Ninety-nine percent of storage on the grid is utility-scale storage...&quot;<br /> <br /> The grid has been called the largest machine in the world – building it took decades, millions of workers, and hundreds of billions of dollars – and fixing it is an almost impossibly ambitious task. But in 2023, Justin Lopas and Zach Dell founded Base Power to try anyway, and it turned out that a lot of talented people wanted to work on this problem too. The engineer who got Starlink’s laser mesh network working joined to lead their software. A Tesla veteran who’d spent thirteen years on everything from the original Roadster to the Powerwall joined to build their battery. And investors have since bet billions of dollars that they’re onto something...<br /> <br /> Within three years of founding, Base has grown its battery fleet to over 500 megawatt-hours and expanded beyond Texas into Illinois. In October of last year, it raised a $1 billion Series C and converted an abandoned newspaper factory in downtown Austin into a fully functioning battery factory in eight months. This week it announced a $1 billion Series D alongside the launch of the Base Core battery, which is now in production there. The factory turns out thousands of systems a month, and the plan is to manufacture four gigawatt-hours of batteries a year, with over 10 at the next facility. “It is so critical to bring manufacturing back to the U.S., especially for critical infrastructure.&quot; ...<br /> <br /> America will need more than cheap electrons. China accounted for over 80% of battery cell production in 2025, and its share of every stage of solar panel manufacturing (polysilicon, ingots, wafers, cells, and modules) exceeds 80%. Washington has responded to this supply chain risk with tariffs, which pushes energy prices higher still. <br /> <br /> [Ed: Here's the green solution in the mix] Base wants to help solve this by building more factories and vertically integrating further over time.<br /> <br /> <br /> So: Go Alternative Energy, Clean Energy, Renewable Energy <br /> <br /> Making a future-looking case 'on the merits'... <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:A16z (1).png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:A16z (2).png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:A16z (3).png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:A16z (4) Base Power.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:A16z (5).png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:A16z (6).png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:A16z (7).png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:A16z (8).png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2026/08/04/base-power-launches-39-2-kwh-u-s-made-base-core-home-battery-secures-1-billion-in-new-funding/<br /> <br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/03/base-power-raises-another-1b-to-save-the-grid-using-backyard-batteries/<br /> <br /> * https://fortune.com/2026/08/06/michael-dell-son-built-home-battery-business/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''July 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''American Nero: Why Trump is trying to burn down the National Academy of Sciences'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> '''Via the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists'''<br /> <br /> * https://thebulletin.org/2026/07/american-nero-why-trump-is-trying-to-burn-down-the-national-academy-of-sciences/<br /> <br /> <br /> In a post on Truth Social earlier this month, Trump claimed that the National Academy of Sciences published “fraudulent, biased, and misleading Manuals on climate change.” <br /> <br /> He has now ordered “Federal Suspension and Debarment Officials” to review the organization’s conduct.<br /> <br /> Although he referred to multiple “Manuals,” the president’s Truth Social screed is really about a single manual: the Federal Judicial Center’s Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence. The Reference Manual serves “as a go-to document judges can use when they deal with issues involving scientific testimony.” For the first time, the most recent version of the manual contains a climate science chapter. It describes the hard scientific evidence that fossil fuel burning is influencing extreme weather events. This science is anathema to the oil industry and to its conservative supporters, including the president, and they have responded by attacking the manual and its authors.<br /> <br /> The Federal Judicial Center caved to a request by 27 Republican state attorneys general to remove the climate chapter from the Reference Manual, but it is still publicly available on the website of the National Academy of Sciences. This open defiance of overt political pressure is causing problems for the National Academies...<br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://thebulletin.org/2026/03/im-not-a-scientist-why-judges-need-the-climate-chapter-in-the-reference-manual-on-scientific-evidence/<br /> <br /> * https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/26919/chapter/21<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''As the World Races toward Electric Vehicles, the United States Risks becoming the Cuba of Gas Cars'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Left Behind with Outdated Guzzlers<br /> <br /> <br /> Via Atmos<br /> <br /> * https://atmos.earth/climate-solutions/america-built-the-ev-dream-now-china-is-driving-it/<br /> <br /> <br /> When it comes to cars, American exceptionalism is large, loud, and gassy. While much of the rest of the world is racing toward electric vehicles, the United States is driving down a very different road—one clogged with gasoline-devouring pickup trucks and oversized SUVs.<br /> <br /> One in four cars sold globally last year was electric, setting a new record. This year, that share is set to be one-third. China is fast-becoming the home of electric mobility, with more than half of new cars sold in 2025 carrying a large battery instead of a fuel tank. In other countries, gasoline vehicles are already starting to look like outmoded relics—something closer to a Sony Walkman than an iPhone. In January, just seven gas-powered cars were sold in the whole of Norway...<br /> <br /> And it’s not just Europe and China. In countries as varied as Brazil, Mexico, and Thailand, electric car sales are exploding. Soaring oil costs, driven higher by the U.S. and Israel’s attack on Iran, and the latter’s subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, have only added urgency to this transition. “I want everything to be electric,” Indonesia’s president, Prabowo Subianto, vowed while outlining a plan to phase out gas-powered cars entirely.<br /> <br /> ...<br /> <br /> But in the U.S., the EV revolution has stalled. Sales of new electric cars actually fell last year, driven by high prices and by the political turn under Donald Trump’s administration that rolled back climate and fuel-efficiency rules, scrapped a tax credit for new EV buyers, and embraced a broader pro-fossil-fuel agenda, summed up by the slogan “drill, baby, drill.” Automakers took the hint: Ford, General Motors, Honda, and Volvo all scaled back or scrapped electric car models and related manufacturing plants.<br /> <br /> “I’m concerned,” said Loren McDonald, an electric car analyst and chief executive of Chargeonomics. “The auto makers just don’t have a long-term vision to say they are going electric; the plan seems to be huge gas-guzzling trucks because they sell well and have massive margins. I hate to compare this situation to what happened with Blackberry and Kodak. But the concern is that we will give yet another industry to China.”<br /> <br /> China’s growing dominance in EVs came into sharper focus earlier this year, when Shenzhen-based BYD — short for Build Your Dreams — overtook Tesla to become the world’s largest EV seller. Its cars are already on the streets in Mexico and, following a recent trade deal, to a limited extent in Canada. The U.S. increasingly finds itself surrounded by a world going electric...<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Category:Transportation<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The United States Government under the Trump Administration Acts to Threaten the Security of Countries around the World'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://substack.com/home/post/p-206435711<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The UN agencies that track climate risk — the World Food Programme, the International Organisation for Migration, UNHCR, UNDP — have all quietly reduced how often they use the words “climate change” in their strategic documents. The Independent tracked the numbers. WFP country strategies for Rwanda, Iraq, and Guatemala mentioned “climate” 31, 23, and 41 times respectively in their Biden-era plans. Under Trump, those numbers dropped to 2, 1, and zero. The reason is not scientific. It is financial. The United States was the largest donor to these agencies. It cut that funding. Agencies need to survive. So the language shifted.<br /> <br /> ''This is how power exports its priorities. Not always with troops. Sometimes with a budget line.''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tracking science policy across the Trump administration.png]]<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Tracking_science_policy_across_the_Trump_administration.png<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''June 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Lee Zeldin, with Trump's Mandate, Acts to Slash the EPA'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Lee Zeldin E&amp;E News.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EPA Cuts Office of Research and Development.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''How the Trump Administration Ended Independent Science at the E.P.A.'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''The agency’s prestigious research office spent decades doing scientific work insulated from political pressure. Now it’s being dismantled.'''<br /> <br /> <br /> For more than a half-century, a prestigious scientific arm of the federal government did groundbreaking research aimed at saving American lives. It studied fertility, asthma, wildfires, drinking water, climate change and myriad other health threats.<br /> <br /> In just one year, it has been almost completely dismantled.<br /> <br /> One scientist, a doctor and expert in lung health, has recently been reassigned to a finance office. Another, an epidemiologist, has been told she has a new job issuing permits to handle hazardous waste. A toxicologist researching so-called forever chemicals on the East Coast has been asked to move to Dallas and hasn’t been told whether the research project will continue.<br /> <br /> They are among more than 1,500 biologists, chemists and other experts at the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development who have been laid off, reassigned or pressured to retire. Today, only 124 researchers remain, and this month they must decide whether to remain employed they will abandon their work and move to different parts of the agency, or the country.<br /> <br /> Those who stay will no longer serve in an independent unit designed to be free from political interference. Instead, they will be overseen by Trump appointees or in a new unit directly under the administrator, Lee Zeldin. An internal memo in one office reviewed by The New York Times says its future research must “align with agency and administration priorities.”<br /> <br /> Critics said the moves are part of the administration’s deregulatory fervor: Without independent science, they said, there can be few new limits on pollution or toxic chemicals.<br /> <br /> <br /> Read More: (Free to share article) -- https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/27/climate/epa-science-trump-cuts.html?unlocked_article_code=1.t1A.TNeb.TVaLrnuMBM_-&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Government-wide... What's Next on the Cutting Block?'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Russell Vought, OMB Director, with Trump's Direction, Acts to Politicize Department Hiring and Decision-making'''<br /> <br /> : '''U.S. Cuts of Personnel, Budgets and Programs Deepen'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Trump and OMB Director Vought.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tracking science policy across the Trump administration.png]]<br /> <br /> Read more about OMB Director Russell Vought, Project 2025, and Associates<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Trump_and_OMB_Director_Vought.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Tracking_science_policy_across_the_Trump_administration.png<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Huge U.S. Cuts in Science, Science, Elecro-tech and Renewable Energy '''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''Billions of Spending on Another Mideast War Deliver Deep Setbacks to U.S. International Relations and Cooperation''' <br /> <br /> :: '''China Moves Forward with Economic Development across the World'''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:China electrostate benefits from efx of Mideast war.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:US Reliability Falls in Europe.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::'''U.S. Pushes Fossil Fuels, Trump Policy Priorities'''<br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Trump-Vought Science Cuts and Costs.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Trump-Vought Science Cuts and Costs''' <br /> <br /> : Grants and Programs from Health to Environment, Education to Energy <br /> <br /> :: Budgets for Basic and Applied Research &amp; Development Are Deeply Set Back<br /> <br /> ::: Russell Vought of the Office of Management and Budget Attempts to Implement [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?search=project+2025&amp;title=Special%3ASearch&amp;profile=advanced&amp;fulltext=1&amp;ns0=1&amp;ns6=1&amp;ns14=1 '''Project 2025'''] <br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2026/04/19/science-research-funding-cuts-trump/<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/04/business/dealbook/trump-brain-drain-academia.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-026-00088-9/index.html<br /> <br /> * https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5835619-future-nsf-research-limbo/<br /> <br /> * https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/harms-federal-funding-freeze-science<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''May 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;&quot;We are children of the Earth&quot; -- [https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/richard-feynman Richard Feynman], Physicist/Educator&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''A Feynman Project'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> We are revisiting the work, the words, the teaching and the learned life lessons of a professor, a genius, an environmentalist (in the deep meaning of ecology), a true character and 'planet citizen' of our era. Say quantum, picture diagrams scribbled on a green chalkboard, listen to a Nobel prize winner perform before a Caltech class being led into wonderment and waves of insight -- say '''Richard Feynman'''.<br /> <br /> We had a chance to visit elements of his [https://collections.archives.caltech.edu/repositories/2/resources/168 '''personal collection''']. His work needs to be scanned and digitized, and made available online as a Special Collection.<br /> <br /> We're making this a project.<br /> <br /> It is time.<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''April 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Earthrise to Earthset.png]]<br /> <br /> :&lt;small&gt;&lt;small&gt;* https://greenpolicy360.net/images/1969_beginnings_of_the_modern_environmental_movement.pdf&lt;/small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> : '''[[The Modern Environmental Movement]]'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/amf-art002e009287/<br /> <br /> * https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/art002e009288/<br /> <br /> * https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/amf-art002e009289/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth from Artemis II.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> Reflecting on the Rise of a Modern Environmental Movement<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''Earthrise' to 'Earth Day' and Far Beyond....'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earthrise, the way Anders saw it.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earthrise '''&quot;Earthrise&quot;, Our Home Planet, December 24, 1968''']<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Earthrise<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> '''Earthrise &gt; Earth Day, April 22, 1970''' ... [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Day &lt;big&gt;''' 'Earth Day' '''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[Planet Earth Perspective]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Planet_Earth_Perspective<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth &lt;big&gt;&lt;font color=green&gt;'''On Earth'''&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/big&gt;] | [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_and_Space,_Politics &lt;big&gt;&lt;font color=green&gt;'''Earth, Science &amp; Politics'''&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> * http://www.planetcitizen.org <br /> <br /> * http://www.planetcitizens.org <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Earth_in_Human_Hands.jpg &lt;big&gt;'''Earth Is in Y/our Hands'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> : '''[[Planet Citizen Vision of Living Earth]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Living Earth.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''March 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> As Artemis II prepares to send humans into deep space for the first time in decades, we recall NASA's original Mission Statement that guided the Apollo missions and produced the first-ever full-color images of the home planet ...<br /> <br /> NASA planned for the Moon and delivered visionary and inspiring images of Earth, the famed 'Earthrise' photo in 1968 followed in 1972 by the iconic 'Blue Marble'.<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Earthrise<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Blue_Marble_Collection<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earthrise - December 24, 1968.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue Marble photo - Apollo 17.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:NASA's continuing vision and mission - as of 2005.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''February 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Physics of Climate Change as Measured &amp; Monitored'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Facts of Atmospheric, Climate, Earth Science, Guides for Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Climate data 2.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''January 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''United States Congress Disagrees with Trump/Vought-OMB Proposed Science Cuts'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : As Science, Energy, Education, NASA/NOAA/EPA... Cuts continue and expand, Congress adds language to legislation requiring the administration to spend appropriated funding<br /> <br /> * https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/14/climate/noaa-nasa-funding-congress-trump-climate<br /> <br /> * https://www.planetary.org/articles/advocacy-success-fy2026-nasa-budget<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The United States Continues to Step Away'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> The Trump administration says it’s going to depart 66 international organizations, nearly half them affiliated with the United Nations<br /> <br /> Here are the latest round of global organizations the Trump administration is leaving -- <br /> <br /> * https://apnews.com/article/trump-administration-global-organizations-un-daaa4c9f459d7a492536a1a4e3b7697c?utm_source=Email&amp;utm_medium=share<br /> <br /> * https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/un-chief-says-the-u-s-has-legal-obligation-to-fund-agencies-after-trumps-withdrawal-order<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Trump withdraws US from key climate treaty and dozens of other groups'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp80ln97py5o<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> As 2025 recedes... a New Years rolls in with a horizon of threats <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''December 2025'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Nominated Administrator of US NASA Promises Senate Committee that He Will Not Eviscerate NASA Science Programs&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : The Trump administration 2026 NASA budget calling for cuts of ~50% is rejected<br /> <br /> <br /> Jared Isaacman: “Anything suggesting that I am anti-science or want to outsource that responsibility is simply untrue.”<br /> <br /> * https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/03/science/nasa-jared-isaacman-confirmation-hearing<br /> <br /> <br /> -- The White House seeks to eliminate most federal spending on climate and ecological research and proposes cutting NASA’s science budget by more than half.<br /> <br /> * https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/04/trump-white-house-budget-proposal-eviscerates-science-funding-at-nasa/<br /> <br /> <br /> At GreenPolicy360, read more on [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:NASA '''NASA'''], its mission statement, its programs to study Planet Earth and pioneer Atmospheric Science, Earth Science, Earth System Science...<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science<br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Thin_Blue_Layer<br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_Earth_Perspective<br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_Politics_with_GreenPolicy360<br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Science_from_Space<br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/NASA_EarthSciences,_Challenges_Public_to_Join_In<br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Observation_System_Data_and_Information_System_-_NASA_EOS<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''AI Data Centers Produce Environmental Costs'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Cornell researchers have used advanced data analytics – and some AI too – to create a state-by-state look at that environmental impact. The team found that, by 2030, the current rate of AI growth would annually put 24 to 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the emissions equivalent of adding 5 to 10 million cars to U.S. roadways. It would also drain 731 to 1,125 million cubic meters of water per year – equal to the annual household water usage of 6 to 10 million Americans. The cumulative effect would put the AI industry’s net-zero emissions targets out of reach...<br /> <br /> On the upside, the study also outlines an actionable roadmap that would use smart siting, faster grid decarbonization and operational efficiency to cut these impacts by approximately 73% (carbon dioxide) and 86% (water) compared with worst-case scenarios.<br /> <br /> * https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/11/roadmap-shows-environmental-impact-ai-data-center-boom<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''A Race to Deliver Next Generation Technology for Energy Efficiencies, Global Competitiveness &amp; Productivity'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : China in front, the US falls behind as Geopolitical shifts favor forward-looking engineering<br /> <br /> Review the data, the trends, the electric technologies... E-transportation, E-scooters, E-bikes, E-robots, E-across the world ... China is far out in front on the electrification and as the US retreats from EVs and solar and renewable energy tech under Trump's oil &amp; gas policies and deletarious cuts to renewable, competitively advantageous, security-enhancing technologies, China takes competitive advantage across their nation and across the world... <br /> <br /> [[File:Electric Vehicle Demand - China, EU, US 2024-2030.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''November 2025'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Science Guides.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> November 10, 2025<br /> <br /> Via The Guardian<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/environment/live/2025/nov/10/cop30-climate-talks-brazil-belem-latest-news-updates<br /> <br /> <br /> ''(T)hese are climate talks with a difference. Brazil is refusing to countenance the standard form of tortuous negotiations that have characterised the last 30 years of nearly annual “conferences of the parties” (Cops) under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the parent treaty to the Paris climate agreement, that was signed in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro.''<br /> <br /> ''Those were characterised by long and bitter sessions, often stretching late into the night, where negotiators re-stated entrenched positions for days on end before finally – sometimes – reaching a compromise conclusion that some present would frequently seek to back track on immediately afterwards.''<br /> <br /> ''Instead, Brazil insists, this will be “the Cop of implementation”. That means the real world impact of measures to combat the climate crisis today will take precedence over longwinged discussions of future promises.''<br /> <br /> ''“Negotiations need consensus,” said Andre Correa do Lago, president of Cop30. “But implementation is countries choosing what they want to do and executing what they have said they are going to do.” ...''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The main outcomes of this Cop, instead of being a list of pledges as has become usual, are more likely to be a collection of “roadmaps” covering the key issues: a roadmap on finance, which has already been published; a roadmap on how to transition away from fossil fuels; a roadmap on how to scale up low-carbon energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in line with the target of limiting global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. ...''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The problem Cop exists to solve could scarcely be more urgent: scientists are warning that, as temperatures rise faster than at any point in at least 24,000 years, the world stands on the brink of a series of “tipping points” that could pitch us into greatly accelerated heating and unstoppable climate catastrophe.''<br /> <br /> ''But one question will dominate overall: the question of whether the collective will to solve this problem exists. Can the world come together, despite geopolitical headwinds and open conflict, despite the forces of division fanned by populism, despite the global tide of climate disinformation, despite influential voices claiming the climate somehow matters less than it did before the populists took over – and show the unity, mutual respect and spirit of cooperation that are desperately needed, if we are to face this existential threat?''<br /> <br /> <br /> More @GreenPolicy360<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Change_Summit_Paris<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:INDC<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_News<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''National Climate / Adaptation Plans'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/National_Climate_Plans '''National Climate Plans (Permalink)''']<br /> ::[https://greenpolicy360.net '''Via GreenPolicy360 - eOS''']<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/National_Climate_Plans<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Science, Research &amp; the Net'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: It's not common knowledge that the Internet came into existence due to 'government funding' and 'liberal universities', not due to 'big business', but if we look back at what was called [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET ''' 'Arpanet' '''] there we see the fundamental foundation of today's Internet. 'The Net' was envisioned and made possible by US science spending and research grants to universities with names like (wait for it) -- the University of California at Berkeley. <br /> <br /> The best-in-the-world California College/University system of the 1950s/60s was at the center of, to be matter-of-fact, the beginnings of today's American-led computer/digital technology revolution, of 'Silicon Valley' and US leadership. <br /> <br /> Today, we are reminding of this top- and bottom-line reality, even as the current US political direction shifts away from support for higher education.<br /> <br /> Let's consider the cuts proposed by the Trump administration to college/university basic science and research projects and programs. The damage will be immediate and accumulative. <br /> <br /> We have said it before here at GreenPolicy360 and we'll say it again -- the future is in our hands.<br /> <br /> Act wisely, act with facts, support science.<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Best Practices check2.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''US Government Research Grants Must Be Protected'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via Nature Journal<br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03474-x<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Under President Donald Trump, the US government is gutting scientific research. The National Institutes of Health has cut almost US$2 billion of grants that were already approved, and the National Science Foundation has terminated more than 1,400 grants. And the president has even bigger plans to eviscerate science. His proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 would cut non-defence-related research and development by 36%.''<br /> <br /> ''“They have cancelled wholesale a wide variety of research efforts in midstream,” says John Holdren at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was the science adviser to former president Barack Obama during both his terms. “They intend to now solidify it with cuts in the budgets.”''<br /> <br /> ''The cancelled and threatened research is a mixture of ‘applied’ work that has stated applications, which can be commercial in nature, and ‘basic’ or ‘blue skies’ research, intended to develop new knowledge.''<br /> <br /> ''Basic research is easily mocked because it can seem impractical, but, in fact, it is a major driver of economic growth. “The return on investment in basic research — the return to society — is very high, typically multiple dollars back per dollar invested,” says Holdren.''<br /> <br /> ''The US funding cuts will hit basic research particularly hard because the government has historically been the prime supporter of fundamental research. The private sector will never invest enough in such research, says Holdren. “The timescale for returns is too long and the ability of the funder to capture those returns too uncertain,” he says. “That’s the reason that the funding of fundamental research is, at its base, a responsibility of government.”''<br /> <br /> ''Although it’s impossible to estimate how the reductions in federal support might limit future discoveries, scientists point to a long list of findings that emerged out of fundamental research and went on to change the world....''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''October 2025'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> October 1, 2025<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Trump Banned Words List Continues to Expand'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''The Energy Department has added “climate change,” “green” and “decarbonization” to its growing “list of words to avoid” at its Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, according to an email issued Friday and obtained by POLITICO.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/28/energy-department-climate-change-emissions-banned-words-00583649?utm_source=semafor<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Previous word 'bannings'...<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:War on Words, an Executive Order in Effect, US 2025.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:War_on_Words,_an_Executive_Order_in_Effect,_US_2025.jpeg<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''September 2025'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:This Climate Change.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''August 2025'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''What Future Does Science Have in the Trump Administration'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Another look at the chopping of science -- and rejection of the accomplishments of basic and applied science that brought the US unequalled success with educational excellence and economic achievements.<br /> <br /> As GreenPolicy360 has documented in our stories of the beginnings of US NASA Earth Science, NOAA, USGS, the National Weather Service, GPS (with its attendant spin offs/tech transfers), the innumerable breakthroughs in science (ask yourself why and where what became today's Internet was first envisioned). The legislation, funding, programs and management that a first generation in the US acted to create were great visions being turned into productive reality. When GreenPolicy360 recalls [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr '''Rep. George E. Brown'''] telling our project founder that a new Office of Science &amp; Technology was needed to be set up to help guide the President's Office with all science-related policy, George Brown went to work on drafting of the legislation to get the Office established. For half a century presidents, until the current president, have valued and consulted science. The current state of affairs, of rejection of science and rejection of scientific expertise and knowledge across the administration, is more than costly. The lost opportunities, 'opportunity costs', are rising and multiplying. The old word for such mistaken choices is 'hubris', pride. Let us hope that there will come a correction of course, a reconnection with the full value of science, before there's a fall deeper and more lasting than what the nation -- and world -- can readily recover. It is time to consider the full price that comes with the rejection of science.<br /> <br /> <br /> (NYT article excerpt on the subject of science and current Trump administration, August 31, 2025)<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/31/science/trump-science-autocrats.html<br /> <br /> <br /> ''On Feb. 19, weeks after taking office, Mr. Trump signed an executive order that called for the downsizing and elimination of the advisory panels. The order affected panels that oversaw vaccines, astrophysics, fisheries, mathematics, space, the geosciences, the environment and artificial intelligence.''<br /> <br /> ''Next, in March, amid budget cuts and growing protests by scientists, Mr. Trump unveiled an overall science policy that echoed the autocrats in emphasizing technological spinoffs, such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing. In a public letter, the president called for securing the nation’s status “as the unrivaled world leader in critical and emerging technologies.”''<br /> <br /> ''Then in May, the administration made public its proposed cuts to next year’s federal science budget. Independent experts found that the category of basic research would fall to $30 billion from $45 billion, a drop of roughly 34 percent.''<br /> <br /> ''On the chopping block were studies focused on nursing, clean energy, climate change, air and water quality, chemical safety, minority health disparities, green aviation, the global carbon cycle, the atmosphere of Mars, the planet Jupiter, and the boundary in outer space where the solar system meets the cosmos, among other subjects.''<br /> <br /> ''“The cuts are justified,” said Terence Kealey, a scholar at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. Decades of lavish funding have dulled America’s exploratory edge, he argued.''<br /> <br /> ''Finally, later in May, Mr. Trump laid out his reform agenda. It called for a “gold standard” that would revitalize science research. But critics, including Nobel laureates, saw it as paving the way for state-controlled science.<br /> <br /> ''Officially, the job of defending Mr. Trump’s agenda falls to his science adviser, Michael Kratsios. He has no degrees in science or engineering but held key technology and military posts during Mr. Trump’s first term and helped speed the rise of artificial intelligence.''<br /> <br /> ''Over weeks, multiple requests for an interview with Mr. Kratsios were made to officials in the White House '''Office of Science and Technology Policy'''. Possible dates were discussed, but Mr. Kratsios was never made available.''<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Then Along Comes Donald Trump'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Historian Richardson Explains<br /> <br /> <br /> August 30, 2025<br /> <br /> HEATHER COX RICHARDSON<br /> <br /> * https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/august-30-2025<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Just days before Labor Day, a holiday designed to celebrate the importance and power of American workers in the United States, the Transportation Department cancelled $679 million in funding for offshore wind projects, and the Department of Energy announced it is withdrawing a $716 million loan guarantee to complete infrastructure for an offshore wind project in New Jersey.''<br /> <br /> ''These cancellations reflect President Donald J. Trump’s apparent determination to kill off wind and solar power initiatives and to force the United States to depend on fossil fuels. He refers to climate change as a “hoax,” says that windmills cause cancer, and falsely claims that renewable energy is more expensive than other ways to generate power. Former president Joe Biden made investing in clean energy a central pillar of his administration; Trump often seems to construct policies mostly to erase the legacies of his predecessors.''<br /> <br /> ''Reversing the shift toward renewable energy not only attacks attempts to address the crisis of climate change and boosts the fossil fuel industry on which some of Trump’s apparent allies depend, but also undermines a society based on the independence of American workers. In 2023, about 3.5 million Americans worked in jobs related to the renewable energy sector, and jobs in that sector grew at more than twice the rate of those in other sectors in what was a strong U.S. labor market. The production of coal, which Trump often points to as an ideal for American jobs, peaked in 2008. Between then and 2021, employment in coal mining fell by almost 60% in the East and almost 40% in the West, leaving a total of about 40,000 employees.''<br /> <br /> ''Another cut last week sums up the repercussions of the administration’s attack on renewable energy.''<br /> <br /> ''On August 22 the Interior Department suddenly and without explanation stopped construction of a wind farm off the coast of Connecticut and Rhode Island that was 80% complete and was set to be finished early next year.''<br /> <br /> ''As Matthew Daly of the Associated Press noted yesterday, Revolution Wind was the region’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm. It was designed to power more than 350,000 homes, provide jobs in Connecticut and Rhode Island, and enable Rhode Island to meet its goal of 100% renewable energy by 2033.''<br /> <br /> ''The Board of Directors of the Chamber of Commerce of Eastern Connecticut expressed their dismay at the decision, noting that Revolution Wind employed more than 1,000 local union workers and is part of a $20 billion investment in “American energy generation, port infrastructure, supply chain, and domestic shipbuilding and manufacturing across over 40 states” by Ørsted, a Danish multinational company.''<br /> <br /> ''“Stopping this fully permitted, important project without a clear stated reason not only seriously undermines the state’s efforts to work towards a carbon neutral energy supply but equally important it sends a message to investors from all over the world that they may want to rethink investing in America. The message resulting from the President’s action is a lack of trust, uncertainty, and lack of predictability,” they wrote.''<br /> <br /> ''Connecticut governor Ned Lamont and Rhode Island governor Dan McKee, both Democrats, are working together to save the project. In a statement, Lamont said: “We are working closely with Rhode Island to save this project because it represents exactly the kind of investment that reduces energy costs, strengthens regional production, and builds a more secure energy future—the very goals President Trump claims to support but undermines with this decision.”''<br /> <br /> ''“It’s an attack on our jobs,” McKee said. “It’s an attack on our energy. It’s an attack on our families and their ability to pay the bills.”'''<br /> <br /> ''The Trump administration launched this attack on renewable energy at a time when electricity prices are bouncing upward. According to Ari Natter and Naureen S. Malik of Bloomberg, electricity prices jumped about 10% between January and May and are projected to rise another 5.8% next year. Trump has tried to blame those rising costs on renewable energy, but in the country’s largest grid, which stretches from Virginia to Illinois, nearly all the electricity comes from natural gas, coal, and nuclear reactors.''<br /> <br /> ''More to the point is that the region also has the world’s highest concentration of AI data centers, driving power demand—and costs—upward. At the same time, according to Natter and Malik, the infrastructure for transmission is too outdated to handle the amounts of electricity the data centers will need.''<br /> <br /> ''Trump’s cuts are adding stress to this already overburdened system. Over the next decade, they are projected to reduce additions to the electric grid by half compared to projections from before his cuts. In July, Ella Nilsen of CNN reported that cuts to renewable power generation, as well as to the tax credits that encouraged the development of more renewable power projects, are exacerbating the electrical shortage and driving prices up.''<br /> <br /> ''The Trump administration claims that relying on fossil fuels will jump-start the economy, but higher costs for electricity are already fueling inflation, and in the longer term, more expensive power will slow economic growth. In contrast, China has leaped ahead to dominate the global clean energy industry.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> Speaking of Wind Energy<br /> <br /> Via [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360 '''GreenPolicy360''']<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Venturing On with Best Green Ideas'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Block_Island_Wind_Farm<br /> <br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;''''''Going Green''''''&lt;/big&gt; [[File:Best Practices check sm.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;font color=green&gt;○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○&lt;/font&gt; &lt;font color=blue&gt;○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○&lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''First Offshore Wind Farm in the US'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;'''Beginning of an Energy Revolution'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> * '''https://www.gerenewableenergy.com/'''<br /> <br /> * '''http://dwwind.com/project/block-island-wind-farm/'''<br /> <br /> * '''https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_Island_Wind_Farm'''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''December 2016:'''<br /> <br /> [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/science/wind-power-block-island.html '''America’s First Offshore Wind Farm Spins to Life''']<br /> <br /> [http://www.blockislandtimes.com/site-bit/bi-wind-farm '''Local News: Wind Farm to power Block Island by April 2017''']<br /> <br /> <br /> Photos courtesy of Dr. Tony Affigne<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Block-island-wind-farm 1.jpg]]<br /> <br /> [[File:Block-island-wind-farm 2.jpg]]<br /> <br /> [[File:Block-island-wind-farm 4.jpg]]<br /> <br /> [[File:Block-island-wind-farm 4-a.jpg]]<br /> <br /> [[File:Block-island-wind-farm 5.jpg]]<br /> <br /> [[File:Block-island-wind-farm 6.jpg]]<br /> <br /> [[File:Block-island-wind-farm 7.jpg]]<br /> <br /> [[File:Block-island-wind-farm 8.jpg]]<br /> <br /> [[File:Block-island-wind-farm 9.jpg]]<br /> <br /> [[File:Block-island-wind-farm 10.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''US Solar Energy Hit by Trump Administration'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:US Solar Energy Hit by Trump Administration.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.semafor.com/article/08/05/2025/trumps-tax-bill-triggered-a-solar-gold-rush&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Coming Cuts to Solar Credits Bring Rush to Buy Solar Panels and Power'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> US companies are rushing to buy solar panels ahead of the Trump administration’s early phaseout of tax credits in a frenzy that could stretch into mid-2026, the head of a top solar hardware marketplace told Semafor. Ultimately, the phaseout could end up helping the same Chinese manufacturers the White House wants to combat...<br /> <br /> Cutting off tax credits and access to foreign suppliers will drive up solar costs and cut into adoption. A Wood Mackenzie analysis published today forecast that US residential solar adoption by 2030 will be 46% lower now than it would have been prior to (the Trump cuts).<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Trump and his Interior Department are &quot;no friend to offshore wind&quot;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> As he continues to push his feelings about 'windmills' being threats, with a litany of his personal beliefs that are far from fact, the US president continues a public tirade against renewable energy.<br /> <br /> Independent media organizations, with [https://www.canarymedia.com/ '''Canary'''] leading on the wind energy beat, continue tracking the sordid tale of a man who has made wind energy his enemy.<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/offshore-wind/trump-interior-revokes-leasing-areas&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> Trump 2026 Budget Proposes Deep Cuts to Science and Earth Science Programs at NASA/NOAA/NWS and a Host of Missions .....<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Tracking_science_policy_across_the_Trump_administration.png&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''' 'Measure to Manage' ''' &lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:You can manage only what you can measure Dr David Crisp, OCO-2, June 2014 m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;small&gt;* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:You_can_manage_only_what_you_can_measure_Dr_David_Crisp,_OCO-2,_June_2014_m.jpg&lt;/small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/about/our-mission&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> NOAA's National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS), provides secure and timely access to global environmental data and information from satellites and other sources to promote and protect the nation's security, environment, economy, and quality of life.<br /> <br /> The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) mission is to understand and predict changes in climate, weather, oceans, and coasts, to share that knowledge and information with others, and to conserve and manage coastal and marine ecosystems and resources as the Nation’s authoritative environmental intelligence agency.<br /> <br /> <br /> Office of Satellite and Product Operations<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/our-satellites/related-information/history-of-noaa-satellites&lt;/small&gt;<br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/products/ocean/sst.html&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> History of NOAA Satellites<br /> <br /> ''The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has a rich history of successfully operating geostationary operational satellites (GOES) and polar-orbiting environmental satellites (POES).''<br /> <br /> For more than 50 years, the organization’s satellite program has been indispensable for life-saving weather and climate forecasts for the United States and our partners around the world. However, these satellites have also evolved to gather environmental data used for a wide array of applications pertaining to the oceans, coastal regions, agriculture, the atmosphere, fires and volcanic ash, as well as the space environment.<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Special:Search&amp;profile=images&amp;search=noaa%20nasa%20earth%20satellites&amp;fulltext=1&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> More 'measure to manage' data sets ...<br /> <br /> NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory<br /> <br /> * https://psl.noaa.gov/data/othersources/<br /> <br /> <br /> NOAA Coastwatch<br /> <br /> * https://oceanwatch.noaa.gov/cwn/product-families/sea-surface-temperature.html<br /> <br /> <br /> Sea Surface Temperature (SST) ... 1981/09 to 2025/08<br /> <br /> * https://www.psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.noaa.oisst.v2.highres.html<br /> <br /> <br /> National Weather Service, Climate Prediction Center<br /> * https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/MJO/enso.shtml <br /> <br /> <br /> Climate.gov<br /> <br /> * https://www.climate.gov/maps-data/data-snapshots/data-source/sst-sea-surface-temperature<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''July 2025'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Climate 'Carbon Budget' Is Not Academic, It's Real Life Today'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''At our current rate of emissions, Earth has less than three years before it exhausts the remaining [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_budget '''carbon budget'''] that offers even a coin-flip chance of staying below (a global temperature increase of) 1.5° C. Not decades — three years. This isn’t some activist’s blog. This is the verdict of the latest [https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/17/2641/2025/ '''Indicators of Global Climate Change (IGCC) report'''] — a collaborative autopsy by over 60 of the world’s top climate scientists, including former IPCC authors, filling the gap between the IPCC’s sixth assessment (AR6) in 2021 and the seventh assessment, expected in 2028. It confirms what frontline communities already know in their bones: we’re not just brushing up against the 1.5°C threshold — we are barreling toward it.'' - Ricky Lanusse<br /> <br /> * https://globalcarbonbudget.org/<br /> * https://globalcarbonbudget.org/about/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:The biggest science cut in NASA history.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> Atmospheric science, Climate Science, Earth Science eviscerated in Trump administration's budget proposal, as he rails about a &quot;Green scam&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:The_biggest_science_cut_in_NASA_history.jpg<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Tracking_science_policy_across_the_Trump_administration.png<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Meanwhile ... as a backward looking US president pushes a retro-line ... a real national security threat spikes up and up'''<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/New_Definitions_of_National_Security '''We need 'New Definitions of National (Local &amp; Global ) Security''']<br /> <br /> [[File:CO2 is adding up, and up.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> Our World in Data: ''Since 1751 the world has emitted over 1.5 trillion tonnes of CO2.'' <br /> <br /> ''To reach our climate goal of limiting average temperature rise to 2°C, the world needs to urgently reduce emissions.'' <br /> <br /> * https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''July 5, 2025'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Trumps signs the Republican Party 'big' H.R. 1 legislative package'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Inside Climate News begins to describe the misnomer of a bill's deep and lasting destructive consequences:<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Trump’s legislation will hurt clean energy, boost fossil fuels and end investment in environmental justice. Climate advocates vow to continue the fight''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The $4 trillion One Big Beautiful Bill Act is now ready to reach across the U.S. economy, slicing into every aspect of the national effort to address climate change and environmental injustice...''<br /> <br /> ''The 887-page legislation largely erases the landmark investment in cleaner energy, jobs and communities that a Democratic-led Congress made only three years ago in the Inflation Reduction Act.'' <br /> <br /> ''It stomps out incentives for purchasing electric vehicles and efficient appliances. It phases out tax credits for wind and solar energy. It opens up federal land and water for oil and gas drilling and increases its profitability, while creating new federal support for coal. It ends the historic investment in poor and minority communities that bear a disproportionate pollution burden—money that the Trump administration was already refusing to spend. It wipes out any spending on greening the federal government.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''More'''<br /> <br /> ''New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote Friday (July 4) about how H.R. 1 will effectively &quot;kneecap America’s renewable energy industry&quot; and give China a monopoly on the renewable energy industry for decades. One of the major components of the law is the stripping of billions of dollars in subsidies and tax credits for solar, battery and wind energy. This comes at the same time China is rapidly restructuring its energy grid to include larger portions of electricity from renewable sources. Friedman wrote that Chinese President Xi Jinping likely views July 4 as &quot;American Electricity Dependence Day.&quot;''<br /> <br /> Friedman goes on to explain: <br /> <br /> ''&quot;The Chinese simply can’t believe their luck: that at the dawn of the electricity-guzzling era of artificial intelligence, the U.S. president and his party have decided to engage in one of the greatest acts of strategic self-harm imaginable.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;(The) giant bill, among other craziness, deliberately undermines America’s ability to generate electricity through renewables,&quot; he continued. &quot;And why? Because they view those as 'liberal' energy sources, even though today they are the quickest and cheapest ways to boost our electricity grid to meet the explosion of demand from AI data centers.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''Friedman also cited a study from the research firm Energy Innovation, which found that Trump's law would &quot;cause wholesale electric power prices to increase roughly 50% by 2035,&quot; while &quot;cumulative annual consumer energy costs will increase more than $16 billion by 2030.&quot; The law would also reportedly eliminate 830,000 estimated renewable energy jobs by the end of the decade.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/03/opinion/trump-bill-clean-energy-china.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Tk8.Y_zH.nNl8ZeQo4Oj9&amp;smid=tw-share<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''June'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Global Tipping Points - Conference 2025.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Global Tipping Points - About.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Global Tipping Points.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Global Tipping Points - Program.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:The Trump EPA Becomes a Deep Threat to Environmental Protection.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> A Message from GreenPolicy360: Amid national, regional, religious and worldwide conflict, war, disruption and rising extreme politics, do not forget the physics of Earth's living, changing systems. Life is changing and the trendlines that science has brought into the light, the local and global dynamics of our planet, are 'in our hands'.<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Record-shattering Extreme Heat'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Carbon Brief Talks of the Climate Change Physics in Your Neighborhood<br /> <br /> * https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-why-is-climate-change-causing-record-shattering-extreme-heat/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:The Sunset Cafe, Sundown Bell.jpg|<br /> link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Too_Hot]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Too_Hot &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;font color=orange&gt;'''🥵 When it gets too hot'''&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> :: &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''&lt;font color=orange&gt;Even your news is hot ....'''&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''How Hot? Check the Data from 1940 on... Visit the Copernicus project'''<br /> <br /> * https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/datasets/reanalysis-era5-single-levels-monthly-means?tab=download<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Globally-averaged temps thru 2015 via NASA Goddard.gif]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Planet Earth temperature taking - a recent history.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ::[[File:Toles - Dali - Climate.jpg]]<br /> <br /> ::&lt;small&gt;* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weather_records&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_News &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;font color=orange&gt;'''Climate Change News'''&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''May'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Two Scientific Groups Say They’ll Keep Working on U.S. Climate Assessment'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''The organizations said they planned to publish the assessment even after the Trump administration’s decision to dismiss all authors on the project''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/02/climate/national-climate-assessment-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.EE8.dNo4.N6NQTsfPCZMC&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society said they would publish the work, known as the National Climate Assessment, as originally planned.''<br /> <br /> ''“It’s incumbent on us to ensure our communities, our neighbors, our children are all protected and prepared for the mounting risks of climate change,” Brandon Jones, the president of the union and a program director with the National Science Foundation, said in the statement. “This collaboration provides a critical pathway for a wide range of researchers to come together and provide the science needed to support the global enterprise pursuing solutions to climate change.”''<br /> <br /> ''The National Climate Assessment is a comprehensive review of the latest climate science that gauges how climate change is affecting the country and what can be done to adapt and mitigate its effects. There have been five published since 2000. The sixth edition was scheduled to be published in early 2028.''<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''April'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Trump dismisses scientists writing the National Climate Assessment&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> ''Via E&amp;E News / April 29, 2025''<br /> <br /> * https://www.eenews.net/articles/trump-dismisses-scientists-writing-the-national-climate-assessment/<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The Trump administration on Monday dismissed all of the scientists working on the newest version of the National Climate Assessment, a sweeping report that outlines the growing dangers of rising temperatures for lawmakers, policy experts and the public.''<br /> <br /> ''The sixth installment of the congressionally mandated report, which was due to come out by 2028, has typically been put together by about 400 researchers, many of whom are top scientists at universities who volunteer their time. The assessment is used to craft environmental rules, legislation and infrastructure project planning. It seen by experts as the definitive body of research about how global warming is transforming the country.'' ...<br /> <br /> ''White House budget director Russ Vought... has urged the Trump administration to toss out all work on the assessment that began under former President Joe Biden. Vought wants to help pick a new group of researchers to issue a report that reflects the administration’s claims that climate change is not a serious threat. That report might focus on how climate change “benefits” the U.S., according to a plan he outlined in Project 2025, the conservative policy proposal produced by the Heritage Foundation.''<br /> <br /> ''Earlier this month, the administration defunded the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which supports the assessment. The program, which coordinated the work of 13 federal agencies, had existed for 35 years through Republican and Democratic presidencies, including Trump’s first term.''<br /> <br /> ''Trump officials were caught by surprise by the timing of the fourth National Climate Assessment as it was being prepared for release in 2018. Some wanted to withhold the report and fire the scientists who worked on it, but that plan was scuttled. Instead, the White House tried to downplay the report by releasing it the day after Thanksgiving, but that only increased the attention it received.''<br /> <br /> ''It’s unclear whom Vought would try to recruit for the next assessment, if there is one.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Read More:<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Global_Change_Research_Program<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_Change_Science_Program<br /> <br /> * https://web.archive.org/web/20090513054002/http://www.climatescience.gov/images/cccst-orgchart.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Earth Day / April 22nd. 2025'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth Day 2025.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Earth_Day_2025.jpeg<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;Eco-informational Resources &amp; Earth Day&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 recalls proposing/planning of the first Earth Day event... and on and on <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth Day Year-Round.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;small&gt;* https://www.ebsco.com/blogs/ebscopost/earth-day-activities-library-using-science-research-databases-for-learning-engagement&lt;/small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360: Thanks to EBSCO for its recommendation that Earth Day activities should be 'year-round'.'''<br /> <br /> '''We agree full-heartedly!'''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Day_Is_Every_Day &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Earth Day Is Every Day and... Every Day Is Earth Day'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Living Earth.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Earth Day Memories on the 50th Anniversary]] (1970-2020)''' &lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Day_Memories_on_the_50th_Anniversary<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Earth-Day.png<br /> <br /> :[[File: Earth-Day.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360's Siterunner... Earth Day organizing in 1970 and onward...'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Day<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth Day - Green Policy.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tracking science policy across the Trump administration.png]]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Tracking_science_policy_across_the_Trump_administration.png<br /> <br /> <br /> A Collapse (Again) of Scientific/Environmental/Health &amp; Education Endeavors under a Trump Presidency<br /> <br /> : The current U.S. administration has taken an array of actions with far-reaching consequences for Earth and space scientists.<br /> <br /> <br /> Organizations tracking moves to setback/undercut &amp; eliminate earth science, health science, environmental protection and national security:<br /> <br /> * https://eos.org/research-and-developments/tracking-science-policy-across-the-trump-administration<br /> <br /> <br /> Follow the week-to-week Trump rollbacks here:<br /> <br /> Trump 2.0 Science Policy Tracker<br /> <br /> * https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/22712702/<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> [[File:Trump's 2025 plan to cut NOAA and Earth Science.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Copernicus Sentinel over Europe.png]]<br /> <br /> The European Space Agency (ESA) continues on...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Tipping Points.png]]<br /> <br /> Scientists in the US warn of dire consequences<br /> <br /> as the Trump administration cuts national security science...<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''March 2025'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''DOGE says feds could save $164,391 by cutting off this historic research site'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> (Save $164K with devastating effect on the collection of data over 6+ decades of atmospheric/climate science)<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> :[[File:C02 in atmosphere chart-3.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> Via USA Today<br /> <br /> * https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/03/19/doge-cuts-climate-research-noaa-hawaii/82517874007/<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency is considering terminating the lease of a tiny office that supports a huge climate science experiment - one that's been ongoing for 67 years.''<br /> <br /> ''Just eight people work in suite 102 at the Kilauea Financial Plaza in Hilo, on the big island of Hawaii.''<br /> <br /> ''Once a week or so, one of them takes a short helicopter ride to the northern slope of the Mauna Loa volcano – necessary because in 2022 an eruption buried more than a mile of the road in 30 feet of lava.''<br /> <br /> ''There, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) staffers tend to the intricate, delicate scientific instruments at the Mauna Loa Observatory that measure multiple important atmospheric conditions.''<br /> <br /> ''The best known – in fact world-famous – of these measurements is the site's almost 60 years tracking carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. These provided the first significant evidence that the earth's CO2 levels were steadily rising.''<br /> <br /> ''But that program could end if the support staff's office is shuttered.''<br /> <br /> ''Earlier this month the Hilo office appeared on a list of planned office closures as part of DOGE efforts to slash federal spending.''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> [[File:Mauna Loa-NOAA-Observatory.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Mauna_Loa-NOAA-Observatory.jpg<br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Vital_Signs<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> [[File:Mauna Loa-NOAA-Keeling Curve data at risk.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> [[File:Keeling Curve 2024.png]]<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Special:Search&amp;profile=images&amp;search=keeling%20curve&amp;fulltext=1<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''A Rising War on Access to Science, Science Facts &amp; Data'''<br /> <br /> Between February 7 and February 11, 2025, the landing page for the 2024 Climate Literacy Guide on Climate.gov became inaccessible. Around this time other webpages about this guide also were removed from Climate.gov. These now either display a “Page Not Found” or “Access Denied” banner. Pages removed include:<br /> <br /> The main page for the guide, titled “Essential Principles for Understanding and Addressing Climate Change,” which contained most of the guide’s content<br /> The “About the Climate Literacy Guide” page, which contained additional information about the artworks in the guide<br /> <br /> In addition to these removals, sometime between February 3 and March 7, the downloadable PDF version of this guide was also removed from the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) website. The URL to the guide’s PDF now directs to an error page with an “Access Denied” message.<br /> <br /> Links that led to this guide have been removed from other federal websites, including on the Climate Program Office’s “Climate Resources and Partners” webpage.<br /> <br /> * https://envirodatagov.org/noaa-removes-the-2024-climate-literacy-guide-from-its-website/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :::[[File:Global Warming Fact of the Day - March 22, 2025.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Author and Activist Bill McKibben on Climate Progress in the Age of Trump 2.0'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''The administration is “rejecting flat-out the science,” he says, “about the single most dangerous thing that’s ever happened.”'''<br /> <br /> <br /> By [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Kolbert Elizabeth Kolbert]<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Activist Bill McKibben says Americans upset by the Trump administration’s gutting of U.S. climate efforts need to move beyond despair. In an interview with e360, he talks about rethinking the role of protest, the global push on clean energy, and why he sees reason for hope.''<br /> <br /> ''In the first six weeks of the new Trump administration, it’s become clear that the president intends to undo not just Joe Biden’s environmental legacy, but an entire generation’s worth of action on climate change. The administration has announced it is withdrawing from the Paris Agreement. It has frozen Inflation Reduction Act grants, stopped issuing permits for offshore wind development, and declared an “energy emergency” to boost fossil fuel production. The White House appears to be preparing to go after the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 “endangerment finding,” which undergirds EPA regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, while cutting EPA spending by 65 percent.''<br /> <br /> ''How should environmentalists respond? Activist and author Bill McKibben has been a leading voice on climate change since 1989, when he published The End of Nature, the first book on the subject aimed at a general audience. McKibben spoke to e360 contributing writer Elizabeth Kolbert about the urgency of the moment, the role of protest, the future of clean energy, and where he sees glimmers of hope.''<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://e360.yale.edu/features/bill-mckibben-interview '''Read the Interview'''] between Elizabeth Kolbert and Bill McKibben<br /> <br /> * https://e360.yale.edu/features/bill-mckibben-interview<br /> <br /> * https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/03/author-activist-bill-mckibben-elizabeth-kolbert-interview-climate-progress-second-trump-administration/<br /> <br /> <br /> More from [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?search=elizabeth+kolbert&amp;title=Special%3ASearch&amp;profile=advanced&amp;fulltext=1&amp;ns0=1 Elizabeth Kolbert @ GreenPolicy 360]<br /> <br /> More from [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?search=Bill+McKibben&amp;title=Special%3ASearch&amp;profile=advanced&amp;fulltext=1&amp;ns0=1 Bill McKibben @ GreenPolicy360]<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎 <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:NASA Earth temp and sea level data, 2024.jpeg|link=https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/sea-levels-rose-more-than-expected-in-2024-according-to-a-nasa-analysis-180986256/]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''As Last Year's Scientific Data Is Gathered, Analyzed &amp; Reported'''<br /> <br /> : Trending ... Earth Science Is Being Cut in the US, Meanwhile the Facts ....<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Trump Administration Aims to Eliminate E.P.A.’s Scientific Research Arm'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''More than 1,000 chemists, biologists and other scientists could be laid off under a plan to dismantle the Office of Research and Development''<br /> <br /> ''The Environmental Protection Agency plans to eliminate its scientific research arm, firing as many as 1,155 chemists, biologists, toxicologists and other scientists...''<br /> <br /> ''Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the E.P.A., has said he wants to eliminate 65 percent of the agency’s budget.''<br /> <br /> ''Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, said that the Office of Research and Development was created by congressional statute and that dissolving it would be illegal.''<br /> <br /> ''Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, the top Democrat on the science committee, said that without the Office of Research and Development, the E.P.A. would not be able to meet its legal obligation to use the “best available science” when writing regulations and considering policy. She also said that the office was created by congressional statute and that dissolving it would be illegal.''<br /> <br /> ''“Every decision E.P.A. makes must be in furtherance of protecting human health and the environment, and that just can’t happen if you gut E.P.A. science,” Ms. Lofgren said in a statement. She said that the first Trump administration had weakened the agency’s scientific research in order to relax regulations against polluting industries. “Now this is their attempt to kill it for good,” she said.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/climate/trump-eliminates-epa-science.html<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Trump has severely damaged the government’s ability to fight climate change, upending American environmental policy with moves that could have lasting implications for the country, and the planet...'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/02/climate/trump-us-climate-policy-changes.html?unlocked_article_code=1.004.6VNm.cGo6BRhFfnHt&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> ''With a flurry of actions that have stretched the limits of presidential power, Mr. Trump has gutted federal climate efforts, rolled back regulations aimed at limiting pollution and given a major boost to the fossil fuel industry.''<br /> <br /> ''He is abandoning efforts to reduce global warming, even as the world has reached record levels of heat that scientists say is driven largely by the burning of fossil fuels. Every corner of the world is now experiencing the effects of these rising temperatures in the form of deadlier hurricanes, floods, wildfires and droughts, as well as species extinction.''<br /> <br /> ''To achieve such a wholesale overhaul of the country’s climate policies in such a short time, the Trump administration has reneged on federal grants, fired workers en masse and attacked longstanding environmental regulations.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ~ <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Trump 2.0: an assault on science anywhere is an assault on science everywhere'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Almost immediately after being sworn in as president on 20 January, Trump put his signature to piles of executive orders cancelling or freezing tens of billions of dollars in funding for research and international assistance, and putting the seal on thousands of lay-offs. Orwellian restrictions have been placed on research, including bans on studies that mention particular words relating to sex and gender, race, disability and other protected characteristics.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00562-w<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''BILLIONAIRE CLIMATE CHAMPIONS HAVE GONE QUIET'''<br /> <br /> 'Events are moving so quickly' many are complaining as they take a 'wait and see what happens' approach to the new Trump administration<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/11/climate/trump-climate-change-billionaires.html<br /> <br /> <br /> (In the first Trump administration, 2017, billionaires spoke up soon into the first term)<br /> <br /> ''“Withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement is bad for the environment, bad for the economy, and it puts our children’s future at risk,” Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a post on Facebook.''<br /> <br /> ''Tim Cook, the Apple chief executive, wrote on Twitter in 2017 that the “decision to withdraw from the #ParisAgreeement was wrong for our planet.”''<br /> <br /> ''And Sundar Pichai, the Google chief executive, wrote on Twitterthat he was “disappointed” with the decision to withdraw.''<br /> <br /> ''Even Elon Musk opposed the move. “Climate change is real,” he wrote on Twitter in 2017. “Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.”''<br /> <br /> ''This time around, Zuckerberg, Cook, Pichai and Bezos attended Trump’s inauguration. Musk is working closely with Trump to slash the federal work force, and Trump has put the Environmental Protection Agency in his cross hairs.''<br /> <br /> ''In the days before Trump was sworn in for his second term, Gates dined with the then president-elect at Mar-a-Lago and declared himself “impressed” in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.''<br /> <br /> ''Also before the inauguration, Powell Jobs held a “Demo Day” event showcasing some of her charitable endeavors, but steered clear of politics.''<br /> <br /> ''It is unclear what, if anything, will cause executives and companies to speak out. During the first Trump administration, there were episodic flare-ups...''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> ----<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Context:&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> The 'Earth, Science &amp; Politics' content on this page, and the links &amp; shared resources presented here @GreenPolicy360, are intended to provide a vision of an ongoing journey -- a modern-day environmental movement.<br /> <br /> We start with a personal point of view, that of a young student on the road to learning what the now famed &quot;Earthrise&quot; image he saw on the cover of Life Magazine in January 1969 was revealing to all of us. We are planet citizens traveling on planet Earth.<br /> <br /> '''[[Planet Citizens]]'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_Citizens<br /> <br /> <br /> Some would later call this time in the 1960s and the 1970s a &quot;cognitive shift.&quot; We begin to see ourselves together [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Living_Earth.png '''On a Living Earth'''] as wayfarers with profound responsibilities.... <br /> <br /> '''[[Overview Effect]]'''<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Overview_Effect<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Generation Green]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt; / &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Going Green]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/1969_beginnings_of_the_modern_environmental_movement.pdf<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Going_Green<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://greenpolicy360.net/images/1969_beginnings_of_the_modern_environmental_movement.pdf &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Beginnings of the Modern Environmental Movement'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/images/1969_beginnings_of_the_modern_environmental_movement.pdf<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Planetary Awareness'''<br /> <br /> ::The way we saw ourselves and our planet changed....<br /> <br /> ::* https://www.planetaryawareness.org<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earthrise book cover (2008).jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Systems of Life, It's All Connected, It's All Related'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/It%27s_All_Related <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> We start at the beginning of new ways of seeing humanity's home planet. Those of us who were there, in December/January 1968-1969, witnessed the first-ever, full-color images taken from space of our Whole Earth. What we knew about our world, our place in space, changed in an instant. Some would later call this a &quot;cognitive shift&quot;. Our GreenPolicy360 founder described the feelings later in the 1970s to a writer, Jerzy Kosinski, in NY City. Jerzy was the &quot;Being There&quot; author and we talked about the Apollo astronauts who took the picture of Earth that went onto the cover of Life Magazine. I talked about a friend, Barbara Baker, a photo editor at Life and I told Jerzy more about NASA and a man named George. Like Chauncey, Jerzy's protagonist in his Being There novel, [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:George_Brown,_Sci_Com%27t.jpg '''Congressman George Brown'''] was a gardener in his own right. George was planting and nurturing in a new field that was being created, Earth observation science. The result? An &quot;Earth Observing&quot; leap forward, a Congress-led science, technology and space enterprise, a constellation of satellites and public-private-education institution partnerships was launched to provide essential data and knowledge.<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:You_can_manage_only_what_you_can_measure_Dr_David_Crisp,_OCO-2,_June_2014_m.jpg &lt;big&gt;'''NASA: Measure to Manage'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> The first generation of Earth Science was called &quot;Earth System Science&quot; by leaders like Representative George E. Brown who, as a Congressperson, went on to oversee three decades of initiatives, ventures, projects and missions we now know for their exploring, mapping, and delivering to humanity the first years of environmental science -- seeing, really seeing, Planet Earth. When George was proposing then tending to the [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Landsat_data_users_handbook '''Landsat program'''], one of the many ventures George Brown gardened, he was speaking of a blue-green home planet. <br /> <br /> Today we are, as we go onward nation-by-nation, community-by-community, responsible for tending to the Earth. A tip of our green hat to George Brown from East Los Angeles and to all of those, generation-to-generation, who choose to tend to our 'garden', our living planet Earth.<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :::&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''&quot;Earthrise&quot; into the 21st Century'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :::: '''Earth Science and a Whole Earth Generation'''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :::[[File:Apollo.jpg]]<br /> <br /> :::'Earthrise' (1968)<br /> <br /> <br /> :::[[File:Apollo 8, Life Jan10,1969.png]]<br /> <br /> :::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Apollo_8,_Life_Jan10,1969.png Apollo 8 photos in Life Magazine, January 1969]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :::::[[File:Earth-Day.png]]<br /> <br /> ::::::&lt;big&gt;'''[[Earth Day]]''' (1970)&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :::::: Being there, organizing<br /> <br /> ::::::* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Day<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::::[[File:Goodall on the power of the young.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :::[https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Goodall_on_the_power_of_the_young.png '''Youth-energy'''] joined with 'Teach-ins' and events across the nation<br /> <br /> ::: * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Day<br /> <br /> <br /> :::Being there, as a vision of the first Earth Day grew into reality<br /> <br /> ::: * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Day_Memories_on_the_50th_Anniversary<br /> <br /> ::::* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Earth_Day_50th_Golden_Anniversary.gif<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::::&lt;big&gt;'''We were looking to protect our 'Living Earth' '''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ::::[[File:Living Earth.png]]<br /> <br /> ::::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_Citizen_Vision_of_Living_Earth '''Our Living Earth'''] <br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Planet Citizen Vision of Living Earth]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : 🔘 [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Right_Now &lt;big&gt;Earth Right Now&lt;/big&gt;] / [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/EarthPOV &lt;big&gt;EarthPOV&lt;/big&gt;] / [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Observations &lt;big&gt;Earth Observations&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: The following Earth and Space, Politics page is presented in two parts: 1) first an introduction to Earth and Climate science, and how we have watched and participated in this 'first generation' work over the years. We give special attention to the original NASA Mission Statement as a key to understanding how science/imaging/data from Landsat and successive generation of satellite programs were pushed forward to [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:You_can_manage_only_what_you_can_measure_Dr_David_Crisp,_OCO-2,_June_2014_m.jpg ''''measure, monitor and manage''''] Earth's living and changing systems. Read the story of a unique Congressional leader, [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr '''visionary 'Big Science' George E. Brown'''] and linked Earth Science source material offered throughout GreenPolicy360. Experience through our eyes how a generation first became aware of environmental issues, the climate crisis, and then worked over decades to understand and protect Planet Earth; 2) then, as you continue here, take some to consider our highlights of latest Planet Citizen news, stories, and events arranged yearly and monthly. We're all riding together here on Planet Earth, partners! <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue Marble photo taken by the crew of Apollo 17 (1972).jpg]]<br /> <br /> 'Blue Marble' (1972)<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :::[[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:NASA's continuing vision and mission - as of 2005.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_System_Science &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Earth System Science&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;] | [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Whole_Earth &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Earth Living Systems&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;''']<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Original Mission Statement of NASA'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Highlight of NASA's Mission -- “To understand and protect our home planet...&quot;''' <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:The Original Mission Statement of NASA.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360 continues its campaign to restore the original Earth Sciences mission language into today's operating NASA Mission Statement.'''<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:The_Original_Mission_Statement_of_NASA.png<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &quot;When you look at the Earth from the space station, it's absolutely magical. You're not that far away, so you still have a relatively close-up view. But you can see the curvature and you see the atmosphere. It glows in blue. It is absolutely breathtaking the first time you see it. It's the most beautiful scenery you could possibly imagine.'' <br /> <br /> ''When you're on the Earth, you feel that everything is so vast, everything is endless. You have a hard time understanding how limited we are. Then, when you take a step back and you see the Earth in its entirety, you suddenly understand that we live in an oasis in the cosmos. All around us is nothing, no life, blackness, emptiness, absolutely nothing -- apart from this blue ball with everything we need to sustain human life, and life in general, which is absolutely fragile.''<br /> <br /> ''It makes you want to cherish the Earth and protect it, the more you see it from space.''<br /> <br /> -- [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Thomas_Pesquet_-_International_Space_Station_-_View_from_the_Cupola.jpg ''Astronaut Pesquet]: <br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Preserving &amp; Protecting the Home Planet Earth'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;[[Earth Science Vital Signs]]&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt; @&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;GreenPolicy360 and StrategicDemands&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:New Definitions of National Security.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Thin Blue.jpg]]<br /> <br /> * http://www.thinblue.com<br /> <br /> <br /> :[http://www.planetcitizen.org '''PlanetCitizen.org'''] / [http://www.planetcitizens.org '''PlanetCitizens.org''']<br /> <br /> :[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/New_Definitions_of_National_Security '''New Definitions of National Security''']<br /> <br /> :[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Look_at_how_thin_our_atmosphere_is '''ThinBlueLayer.com''']<br /> <br /> :[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Environmental_Security '''Environmental Security''']<br /> <br /> :[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Observations '''Earth Observations''']<br /> <br /> :[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Environmental_Security,_National_Security '''Environmental Security, National Security''']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Strait of Gibraltar - NASA-ISS.png]]<br /> <br /> International Space Station, Over the Strait of Gibraltar<br /> <br /> NASA<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :::::'''[[Earth from NASA]]'''<br /> <br /> :::::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_from_NASA Watching Planet Earth Roll Thru Space]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::::::[[File:Earth Flag-1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::::::[http://www.EarthPOV.com '''EarthPOV.com''']<br /> <br /> ::::::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_Citizens,_Planet_Scientists '''Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists''']<br /> <br /> ::::::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Research_from_Space '''Earth Science Research from Space''']<br /> <br /> ::::::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Science_from_Space '''Measuring &amp; Monitoring Planet Earth Now''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Global Fossil CO2 Emissions 1960-2024.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [http://www.thinblue.com ''' 'Thin Blue' ''']: '''Look at how thin the Earth's atmosphere is...'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Thin Blue Layer 768x432.jpg]]<br /> <br /> NASA - Astronaut Reid Wiseman <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.thephoblographer.com/2014/09/10/nasa-astronaut-reid-wiseman-best-space-photographer-time/&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://greenpolicy360.net/images/Reid_Wiseman_thinbluelayer_m.jpg&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BuDZa8ZCEAAJzmd.jpg:large&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/OCO-2 &lt;big&gt;'''Monitoring CO2 in Earth's Atmosphere'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth System Observatory.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Carbon Mapper - Launch - April 2021.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Carbon Mapper'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://carbonmapper.org/<br /> <br /> :* https://carbonmapper.org/our-mission/#overview<br /> <br /> ::* https://carbonmapper.org/about-us/#partner-team-leads<br /> <br /> :::* https://carbonmapper.org/carbon-mapper-launches-satellite-program-to-pinpoint-methane-and-co2-super-emitters/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Planet 4-15-2021 10-22-51 AM.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Annual CO2 emissions.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Who emits the most CO2.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Per capita CO2 emissions - to 2020.png]] <br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> '''Have you ever wondered about the emissions, i.e. [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Externalities 'externalities'], being injected into Earth's atmosphere?'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Elevated Levels of Global Warming Greenhouse Gases'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribution_of_recent_climate_change<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Efforts to scientifically ascertain and attribute mechanisms responsible for recent global warming and related climate changes on Earth have found that the main driver is elevated levels of greenhouse gases produced by human activities...''<br /> <br /> ''According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2021, it is &quot;unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land since pre-industrial times.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''Studies on attribution have focused on changes observed during the period of instrumental temperature record, particularly in the last 50 years. This is the period when human activity has grown fastest and observations of the atmosphere above the surface have become available.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:ThinBlueLayer.com-Wiseman-2014.png|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Look_at_how_thin_our_atmosphere_is]]<br /> <br /> [http://thinbluelayer.com '''Thinbluelayer.com'''] <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Thin Blue Earth Atmosphere - @AstroSamantha.jpg]]<br /> <br /> ::Photo via @AstroSamantha<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:CO2 photo.JPG]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :&lt;small&gt;''' &quot;We have to identify the problem, then act in many ways to solve the problem. Global warming is the threat of our times.&quot;''' &lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> ::&lt;small&gt;-- [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Governor_Jerry_Brown '''Jerry Brown, California Governor''']&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;small&gt;''' &quot;We’re going to need to use every tool in the toolbox if we’re going to solve this problem.&quot; '''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> ::&lt;small&gt;-- [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Michael_E_Mann_--_act_with_hope_not_fear.jpg '''Michael E. Mann''']&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :: [[File:MethaneSat - 1.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :: [[File:MethaneSat - 2.PNG]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :: [[File:MethaneSat - 3.PNG]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;[http://www.planetcitizen.org PlanetCitizen.org] | [http://www.planetcitizens.org PlanetCitizens.org]&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Michael_E_Mann_--_act_with_hope_not_fear.jpg<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:The_New_Climate_War_-_Irish_Times_review_2021.jpg<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Climate_Policy<br /> <br /> * http://www.greenlaw360.com <br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;[[Each of us can make a positive difference]] ....&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth in Human Hands.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Planet Citizen Action]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Climate Problems, Climate Solutions]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Pressuring Nations to Step Up, Cooperate, and Make a Positive Difference'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) Tracking&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Measuring and Monitoring Climate Plans &amp; Climate Actions<br /> <br /> :: 'Talking the Talk and/or Walking the Walk'<br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Earth Emoji 2.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> As of 2024, On the Road and echoes of the first [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:US_Public_Law_95-367.png '''National Climate Act in 1978''']<br /> <br /> Congressman George E. Brown and the initial decades of US Earth Science from Space<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth Observing System - fleet of satellites.png]]<br /> <br /> '''&quot;Earth Observing System&quot;:'''<br /> <br /> Decades of Earth/Atmospheric &amp; Climate Science Data Now Accessible for Planet Citizen Action<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:EarthRightNow Earth Science satellite fleet circa 2015 m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Earth_Observing_System_-_fleet_of_satellites.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Research_from_Space<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[National Climate Plans]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/National_Climate_Plans<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''GreenPolicy360's Campaign to 'Turn National Climate Promises &amp; Pledges into Reality' (2021)'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Our Climate Plans Enforcement Initiative continues as the next Global Climate Conference approaches, November's Conference of the Parties (COP27)<br /> <br /> :: Drawing from the database of Earth Science resulting from decades of space-based missions designed to provide us with actionable 'Earth-system and Climate-related data'<br /> <br /> ::: Measuring and Monitoring to better manage Earth's Living, Dynamic and Changing Systems, Local, National and Global<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Methods_to_enforce_climate_pledges-NDCs_-_Dec_2021.png ''Methods to Enforce Climate Plan Pledges'']<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Plans_Enforcement_-_Resources ''GreenPolicy360: Climate Plans Enforcement Initiative'']<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:INDC ''Pressuring Nations to Step Up, Cooperate, and Act Now'']<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Environmental_Laws ''Environmental Laws, Regs, Rules... Lawsuits &amp; Legal Actions'']<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Glasgow_Climate_Summit_-_Pledges,_Promises,_Declarations_-_What%27s_Next_Up ''Glasgow (2021) &amp; Paris (2015) Summits: Int'l Climate Plan Pledges &amp; Promises (INDCs-NDCs)'']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Data Tracking the Climate Actions of Nations, 2015 on...'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement/nationally-determined-contributions-ndcs/nationally-determined-contributions-ndcs<br /> <br /> * https://www.wri.org/ndcs/tracking-progress<br /> <br /> * https://www.climatewatchdata.org/2020-ndc-tracker<br /> <br /> * https://climateactiontracker.org/<br /> <br /> * https://carbon-pulse.com/ndcs/<br /> <br /> * https://www.carbonbrief.org/paris-2015-tracking-country-climate-pledges (2015)<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/INDCs<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Countries with Largest CO2 Emissions'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emissions <br /> <br /> * https://www.statista.com/statistics/271748/the-largest-emitters-of-co2-in-the-world/<br /> <br /> * https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.KT?view=map<br /> <br /> * https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC<br /> <br /> * https://carbonpricingdashboard.worldbank.org/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Earth, Science &amp; Politics:'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Thin Blue Atmosphere.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;''Driving Up There, From Down Here''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :[http://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/How_thin_is_earth%27s_atmosphere.jpg '''Look, &quot;a twelve-minute drive&quot; to the top of the Troposphere...'''] <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Thin Blue difference - approx 12 miles high.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:How thin is earth's atmosphere.jpg]] <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Thin Blue difference.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Atmosphere Science.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;NASA&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;'''Troposphere''' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troposphere&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> :&lt;small&gt;'''Stratosphere''' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratosphere&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> ::&lt;small&gt;'''Kármán line''' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n_line&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> :::&lt;small&gt;'''Earth's Atmospheric Layers''' - https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/science/atmosphere-layers2.html<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Thin Blue Layer - Earth's Limb Horizon - Nov 2020.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Atmospheric Experiment of Humanity.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Our Biggest Experiment - by Alice Bell.jpg]]<br /> <br /> : '''GreenPolicy360: <br /> :: Covering 50+ Years of Climate Science''' <br /> <br /> <br /> '''SJS/GreenPolicy360: The science is saying that humanity is facing a #ClimateCrisis'''. <br /> <br /> : NOW is the time to act to make a difference in our common future. &quot;Each of us can make a positive difference by stepping up &amp; doing our best.&quot;'''<br /> <br /> : * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> : * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:US_Public_Law_95-367.png<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Memories of Big Science advocates in the US Congress.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ·····················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''' &quot;There is a near-linear relationship between cumulative anthropogenic CO2 emissions and the global warming they cause.&quot; '''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> ::: * https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-18/the-climate-science-you-missed <br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Global temperature change 1901-2000.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Climate News]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ::[https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/ NASA Climate Change Vital Signs - Carbon Dioxide - Global Temperature - Arctic Sea Ice Minimum Ice Sheets - Sea Level] <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth Information Center - NASA.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Global climate dashboard-www.climate.gov.jpg|link=https://www.climate.gov/maps-data#global-climate-dashboard]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Copernicus Programme''' - [https://climate.copernicus.eu/ '''Climate Change Service''']<br /> <br /> ''Authoritative information about the past, present and future climate, as well as tools to enable climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies by policy makers and businesses.''<br /> <br /> * https://climate.copernicus.eu/about-us<br /> <br /> * https://climate.copernicus.eu/climate-bulletins<br /> <br /> * https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/#!/home<br /> <br /> * https://climate.copernicus.eu/data-action<br /> <br /> * https://climate.copernicus.eu/ESOTC/2019<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : ······························································· <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Good science needs good data .png|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:You_can_manage_only_what_you_can_measure_Dr_David_Crisp,_OCO-2,_June_2014_m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:You_can_manage_only_what_you_can_measure_Dr_David_Crisp,_OCO-2,_June_2014_m.jpg &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Measure-to-Manage'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> *&lt;small&gt; https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Good_science_needs_good_data_.png | GreenPolicy360, Facts &amp; Data<br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Stats_-_Green_Research_%26_Science | GreenPolicy360, Our Policy on Science<br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Change_-_Global_Warming_Keyword-Terms | Global Climate Keywords&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ·····································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Facts Count'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;[[Green Education]]&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;[[Environmental Studies Online]]&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;[[Planet Citizens]]&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;[[Citizen Science]]&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;[[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''GreenPolicy360: We're Into Earth Science'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''We believe in 'critical thinking skills''''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Good_science_needs_good_data_.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Stats_-_Green_Research_%26_Science<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Digital_Citizen<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenLinks<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GTN_GreenLinks_Trending_News<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Climate of Deception: How Viral Misinformation Fuels the Climate Emergency'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/facebook_climate_misinformation/<br /> <br /> * https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/disinfo_hub/<br /> <br /> <br /> * &lt;small&gt;https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Merchants_of_Doubt | Merchants of Doubt<br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Science_denial_graph.jpg | Techniques of Science Denial (Graph)<br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:FLICC_techniques_of_science_denial.png | Techniques of Science Denial (Video)<br /> * http://www.nature.com/news/wikipedia-shapes-language-in-science-papers-1.22656 | Wiki Community Science&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :::::[https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/09/the-evidence-is-compelling-on-human-activity-as-the-principal-cause-of-global-warming/ &lt;font color=gray&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Those Climate Facts, They're There, Deal with It, Now'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> :::::[[File:Science on climate change.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :::::&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Fact Checking]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :::::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Good_science_needs_good_data_.png GreenPolicy360, Facts &amp; Data]<br /> <br /> :::::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Stats_-_Green_Research_%26_Science GreenPolicy360, Our Policy on Science]<br /> <br /> :::::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Vital_Signs Earth Science, Vital Signs]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Set in Motion with &quot;Measure-to-Manage&quot; Earth Science Missions in the 1970s'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Good_science_needs_good_data_.png &quot;Good science needs good data&quot;]<br /> <br /> <br /> Good data and accurate facts, [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:You_can_manage_only_what_you_can_measure_Dr_David_Crisp,_OCO-2,_June_2014_m.jpg '''measuring and monitoring, and sound science'''] are the way to go -- if one expects to get to where one is intending to go. <br /> <br /> The facts of #EarthScience ... data, measurements and monitoring ... and a climate action agenda by #PlanetCitizens making a positive difference<br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Earth System Observatory-1.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Earth System Observatory-2.jpg]] <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''We all play a role in the unfolding story'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''GreenPolicy360: We are now putting forward a proposal to restore the Earth Science provisions to the Mission Statement of NASA'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &gt;'''“To understand and protect our home planet;''' to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers ...”<br /> <br /> &gt;In February 2006, the phrase &quot;to understand and protect the home planet&quot; was quietly removed from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)'s official mission statement.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''In a way we are 'bit players' in a larger game-on-earth...'''<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Advancing an Intergenerational Science Mission'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:US_Public_Law_95-367.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Research_from_Space<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Landsat_data_users_handbook<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Vital_Signs<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌍<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Environmental protection]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Day &quot;Your Moment on Earth Planet Citizen&quot;]<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:On_the_road_sjs.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌍<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''31 Vital Earth Signs'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '' 'Virtual signs' worsening''<br /> <br /> ''Tipping points, deepening disaster''<br /> <br /> * https://phys.org/news/2021-07-earth-vital-worsening-humanity-impact.html<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Researchers, part of a group of more than 14,000 scientists who have signed on to an initiative declaring a worldwide climate emergency, said that governments had consistently failed to address the root cause of climate change: &quot;the overexploitation of the Earth&quot;.'' <br /> <br /> ''Of 31 &quot;vital signs&quot;—key metrics of planetary health that include greenhouse gas emissions, glacier thickness, sea-ice extent and deforestation—they found that 18 hit record highs or lows.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '' &quot;Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth...'' <br /> <br /> ''Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.&quot; ''<br /> <br /> ''-- Carl Sagan, Cosmos''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:A View of the Earth and Moon from Mars.jpg]]<br /> <br /> NASA, A View of the Earth and Moon from Mars<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ----<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Continue scrolling through a chronology of featured 'Earth, Science &amp; Politics' content at GreenPolicy360'''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''On to 2025!'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''February 2025'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Washington, D.C., February 6, 2025 - In the first two weeks of President Donald Trump’s second term, the administration has begun to scrub critical environmental resources and datasets from federal agency websites. To combat this effort to suppress and censor public data, the National Security Archive’s Climate Change Transparency Project today publishes a selection of materials on climate change and environmental justice that have been deleted from agency web pages and spotlights the environmental and archivist organizations working to identify, scrape, and preserve these critical data.''<br /> <br /> ''During President Trump’s first term, organizations like the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) documented the administration’s widespread campaign to suppress climate and environmental data, like when it deleted all webpages, fact sheets, and emissions and financial incentives calculators related to President Obama’s 2015 Clean Power Plan. Since the 2024 presidential election, EDGI and environmental advocacy organizations alike have anticipated the targeting of federal environmental and climate data and have been archiving datasets and preparing to rebuild public access to web tools.''<br /> <br /> ''So far, one of the most glaring deletions from the current administration has been the removal of the White House pages on the Council of Environmental Quality (CEQ) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), divisions within the Executive Office of the President that coordinate federal environmental and scientific efforts and work closely with federal agencies and other White House offices on environmental energy policies and initiatives.'' <br /> <br /> Read more: <br /> <br /> * https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/climate-change-transparency-project-foia/2025-02-06/disappearing-data-trump<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Trump Era Enviro-Rollbacks (2016-20)<br /> <br /> *https://www.brookings.edu/interactives/tracking-deregulation-in-the-trump-era/ | Brookings - Deregulatory Tracker <br /> *https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/12/15/the-trump-administrations-major-environmental-deregulations/ | Brookings on Trump's Environmental Dereg. Record<br /> *https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Climate_Change_Litigation_Databases_Climate_Law.png | Climate Litigation Database <br /> *http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/resources/climate-deregulation-tracker | Climate Deregulation Tracker<br /> *http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/climatechange/ | Columbia Law School - Climate Change Blog<br /> *https://climate.law.columbia.edu/content/energy-law | Columbia Law - Energy Law<br /> *https://climate.law.columbia.edu/content/environmental-land-use-law | Columbia Law - Environmental, Land Use Law<br /> *http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/resources/silencing-science-tracker/ | Columbia Law - 'Silencing Science' Tracker<br /> *https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/2018/07/tracking-the-trackers/ | Harvard Law - List of Organizations Tracking US Environmental 2016-2020 Rollbacks<br /> *https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/climate/trump-environment-rollbacks-list.html | NYT - Trump Envir Rollbacks<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ........................................................................................................................<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Is the US Environmental Protection Agency on the Chopping Block?'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://thebulletin.org/2025/02/a-former-epa-assistant-administrator-on-the-future-of-us-environmental-regulations/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''January'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :::[[File:NDCs 2025.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::::&lt;big&gt;'''More on Climate Action Plans @GRN360'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :::: '''[[National Climate Plans]]'''<br /> :::: [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_Laws_and_Modern_Environmental_Movement '''Environmental Laws &amp; Environmental Movement''']<br /> :::: [[:Category:Climate Change|'''Climate Change''']]<br /> :::: [[:Category:Climate Policy|'''Climate Policy''']]<br /> :::: [https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Change_-_Global_Warming_Keyword-Terms '''Climate Change Terms''']<br /> :::: [[Too Hot|Too Hot]]<br /> :::: [[Apocalyptic Thinking|Hotter 'n Hotter]]<br /> :::: [[Climate Problems, Climate Solutions]]<br /> :::: [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:INDC '''INDC Pledges &amp; Promises''']<br /> :::: [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:You_can_manage_only_what_you_can_measure_Dr_David_Crisp,_OCO-2,_June_2014_m.jpg '''Measure to Manage''']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Climate Science Research Studies Featured from 2024.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Global economy could face 50% loss in GDP between 2070 and 2090 from climate shocks'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''''Actuarial experts say previous assessments ignored severe effects of climate crisis'''''<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jan/16/economic-growth-could-fall-50-over-20-years-from-climate-shocks-say-actuaries<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ...................................................................................<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Before the President Ordered Solar Panels for the White House Roof'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> By Steve Schmidt, Founder/Siterunner GreenPolicy360<br /> <br /> January 1, 2025<br /> <br /> <br /> This past week the nation heard of the death of President Jimmy Carter. He was a 100 years old, a president from the South, from Plains, Georgia, who passed away after a long life distinguished by his rise from peanut farmer to the White House.<br /> <br /> Here at GreenPolicy360 in our terrestrial location along Tampa Bay, we reminisced about the man who first took up the challenge of changing the way the U.S. viewed energy and the future. At that time I was living in New York City and, in my free time away from my publishing position and graduate school work, assisting the first Jerry Brown for president campaign. <br /> Jimmy sort of came out from nowhere into the '76 campaign mix. I soon learned that he had done his homework. I would later learn, after Jimmy Carter became president, that he was being called a 'micromanager', that is he was a systems engineer who brought a nuclear background where detail were a matter of life and death -- literally. <br /> Personally, I thought back to the politics of those days in the 1970s, when the Democratic Party was losing the Southern vote as the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s saw Dixiecrats abandon the old party and move toward the Republican Party &quot;Southern Strategy&quot;. <br /> <br /> Jimmy Carter faced the impacts of civil rights, the costs of the Vietnam War, and the Middle East oil/gas crisis. He inherited a Democratic Party that was fracturing and attempting to put together new rules for state parties, electoral participation, the national party direction and procedures for nominating presidential candidates, then went on to use the new rules of the Presidential Nominating Convention. <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ''&quot;I opened up the doors of the Democratic Party, and 20 million people walked out.&quot;''<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGovern%E2%80%93Fraser_Commission<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> The departure of Old South Dixiecrats from the Democratic party came about first in 1964, then 1968 at the Chicago convention. A different Democratic Party rose, and new nominating rules took the place of the old ways and old rules.<br /> <br /> Leaders of the Democratic Party in the South, who had in general opposed the Republican Party since the Civil War, would now lose their white-control of a Dixie South. <br /> <br /> New rule #1: The Dixiecrats could no longer handpick the convention delegates in secret.<br /> <br /> Other rules followed. Majority votes in party meetings could no longer bind a dissenting minority to vote in accordance with the wishes of the majority. <br /> <br /> A unit rule was replaced by a similar winner-takes-all system that began at the county level and allowed the majority to override the minorities, but this was not enough to satisfy the old guard.<br /> Quotas, when introduced, were seen as discrimination as making it &quot;too easy for inexperienced amateurs to take over a national convention.<br /> Jimmy Carter was watching all of this, closely. As was I, who had worked on the Senate Committee on Nutrition and Human needs, chaired by Senator McGovern. I watched his staff, including Gary Hart, become key players in writing the new rules for the Democratic Party. I didn't know that Jimmy Carter was also closely watching, and involved in the drafting of the new rules. <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_Select_Committee_on_Nutrition_and_Human_Needs<br /> <br /> <br /> In the midst of the Democratic Party's upheaval over civil rights change and carnage of war in Vietnam, the politics at home revolved around the southern states of what was called the &quot;Old South&quot;.<br /> <br /> <br /> Jimmy Carter, after a distinguished military career, had returned home to the deep Old South in rural, small town Georgia to take over the family farm when his father passed away. <br /> <br /> Lietenant Jimmy Carter won election to the Georgia Senate in 1961 and becamegovernor of Georgia in 1971. The presidency of the U.S., it turned out was in his sights soon thereafter, as he realized the Democrats needed its own &quot;Southern Strategy&quot;, given the lay of the electoral vote landscape, and who better to step up then a real Southern man. He knew how to make it happen as he monitored the new rules and started his path to the White House. <br /> <br /> The mandatory book for presidential aspirants followed, as originally published in 1975 and republished in 1976, '''Why Not the Best?: The First 50 Years'''.<br /> <br /> Described by the Publisher: This campaign autobiography was begun in late 1974 when Georgia governor Jimmy Carter's presidential ambitions were being undervalued by the national media. It was received by the public as a welcome affirmation of one candidate's bedrock faith in old-fashioned public service based on duty, honor, competence, and honesty.<br /> <br /> <br /> So, now let's cut to the chase, we'll return to how Carter got to the White House, but there in the White House, elected as the 39th President of the United States, James Earl Carter Jr., born in October 2024, looks around and says, like in the movie &quot;The Candidate&quot; by Jeremy Larner, &quot;What do we do know?&quot; In other words, it's one things to win, it's another to govern. Jimmy won with his Southern Strategy, now what? How would he govern as President of the United States?<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Candidate_(1972_film)<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter<br /> <br /> <br /> Back to those of us who were getting ready....<br /> <br /> George Brown had been planning for this day. Nixon had Watergate and had left the White House under a cloud. The short time Gerald Ford had as president was an attempt to find a new direction, but the presidential pardon and the legacy of Dick NIxon had left its mark and Jimmy Carter, the good man from Georgia, with his faith and good intentions, was a man for the moment.<br /> In the eyes of young Americans, we saw a man of good will, science, reason, of service who cared about the future of the nation.<br /> Those of us involved in the 'start-up' of a new environmental movement, a George Brown, Jerry Brown, California contingent, got going with our agenda, science being at the top of the list. Jerry Brown, the Governor of California, had put his marker on the table, forward-looking policies, and Congressman Brown, he of the EPA, Clean Air Act and emerging advanced technologies and vision of Earth Science jumped in. First up, for the new president, was a new vision based on best-in-the-world science, education, health and prosperity. The environmental movement, a new politics, was ready to roll out and we rolled...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Office of Science and Technology Policy'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/<br /> <br /> <br /> In 1976, Congress established the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to provide the President and Executive branch of government with advice on scientific, engineering, and technological aspects of the economy, national security, homeland security, health, foreign relations, and the environment...<br /> <br /> OSTP was established by the National Science and Technology Policy, Organization, and Priorities Act of 1976. Prior to OSTP, presidents dating back to at least Franklin D. Roosevelt had various configurations of science advisors, committees of external science advisors, and White House offices dedicated to science and technology.<br /> <br /> One of the first work products of the new OSTP was a 1977 letter to the president, a call to action pushed by Representative George Brown. Frank Press, the first director of the office, spoke of &quot;catastrophic climate change&quot; and urged President Carter to address climate change and climate disruption.<br /> <br /> Representative George E. Brown from East LA/Monterey Park was a first-generation green activist in his own way. Elected as a populist and 'get the job done' liberal-conservative, he led Congressional efforts for environmental protection, the establishment of the EPA, first air quality acts, and prophetically, put forward the first climate act by the U.S. government. He was a global thinker, an environmental visionary and engineer by trade. He believed in 'big science', the need for advanced study and scientific knowledge, and doing what was needed to advance political progress. His environmental record of accomplishments in Congress over decades of leadership is unprecedented. George's purposeful work put in place a foundation on which we are building.<br /> <br /> George advanced legislation to establish the Office of Science and Technology Policy in 1975-76, as he continued to pull ideas to his committee from the Academy of National Science. His goals needed, he explained, the very best science minds cooperating, networking through educational institutions and business, government and non-government organizations, non-profits and for profits. He cast a wide net in his work.<br /> <br /> His approach, as we would see over decades, produced a foundation of laws, an environmental platform of originating legal protections and precedents, including the first federal climate program, Public Law 95-367, the National Climate Program Act / 1978.<br /> <br /> <br /> Here's to those who were brave enough to stand up, step forward and, against the odds, create new ways of seeing and understanding our world. Here's to George and how George thought that the new president needed a new office in the Executive Department to bring together the best of the best in scientific thought.<br /> <br /> <br /> Here's to the resulting accomplishments, political reality, not Pied Piper, but everyday reality, turning 'vision into reality': <br /> <br /> <br /> Beginning of U.S. Science on Global Warming, Strategies &amp; Planning Energy and Climate Report, 1977, National Academy of Sciences / 175 pp. / PDF via GreenPolicy360<br /> <br /> <br /> National Climate Program Act, 1978 / PDF<br /> <br /> The first federal program is established to initiate and coordinate federal studies; scientifically assess issues and risks of human-caused climate change, propose action and responses.<br /> <br /> <br /> The First Climate Act followed the First U.S. Academy of Sciences Climate Change Report.<br /> <br /> <br /> National Climate Program Act of September 1978<br /> <br /> National Climate Program Act, Public Law 95-367<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:US Public Law 95-367.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> In 1979 came a first follow-on National Science Academy climate report that was a 'Charney study' that was prescient and accurate in its global warming predictions. <br /> <br /> <br /> Here's to Jimmy Carter, seeing the future, and putting a pilot project forward on the roof of the White House.<br /> <br /> <br /> I'll hand here to GreenPolicy360's former advisor, Bill McKibben, as he speaks too of Jimmy up on the roof of the White House.<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''A Green-Energy Visionary'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Bill McKibben<br /> <br /> <br /> On June 20, 1979, President Jimmy Carter—sporting a bushy haircut and a wide necktie—invited dignitaries and reporters onto the roof of the White House to watch the installation of thirty-two solar water-heating panels. “A generation from now,” he told them, “this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.”<br /> <br /> A generation later, one of those panels showed up in a private museum in the offices of an entrepreneur named Huang Ming, in the city of Dezhou, China. In the spring of 2010, I interviewed Ming, who was building a vast fortune by installing pretty much the same solar water heaters across the country. If you’re flying into a Chinese city, look down and you might see one of the devices on every other roof; even back then there were places where ninety-five per cent of homes sported a panel. Ming had built a truly remarkable headquarters—the so-called Sun-Moon Mansion looked like something out of “The Jetsons,” with two sweeping horseshoes of solar panels that resembled the rings of Saturn cut in half. Ming described Carter as a visionary, and shook his head a little ruefully at the path America hadn’t followed.<br /> <br /> * https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/jimmy-carter-green-energy-visionary<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Up on the Roof'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/jimmy-carter-green-energy-visionary<br /> <br /> * https://www.axios.com/local/atlanta/2024/12/30/president-jimmy-carter-solar-panels-white-house-climate-change<br /> <br /> * https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/12/31/solar-panels-and-saving-energy-jimmy-carter-will-be-remembered-as-americas-first-green-pre<br /> <br /> * https://www.latimes.com/environment/newsletter/2024-12-31/boiling-point-jimmy-carter-vs-the-oil-industry-boiling-point<br /> <br /> * https://interestingengineering.com/culture/jimmy-carter-vision-lives-on<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:President Carter Sends a Solar Message - 2.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''December 2024'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> December 30, 2024<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''As 2025 (or ?) Approaches, Does Anyone Really Know What Time It Is...'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Whatever, Hold On, Here We Go, Another Year Around Our Planet's Star<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Earth<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Another Climate Warning, Another After Another After Another'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : This from US Media Co Axios'''<br /> <br /> :: GreenPolicy360: Decades of Warnings<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Another climate warning, another after another.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ...................................................................................<br /> <br /> <br /> As 2025 approaches and a political wave in the US threatens to accelerate climate change with a flood of politics, it's time to watch the [http://www.thinbluelayer.com '''ThinBlueLayer'''] that protects and enables life on Earth.<br /> <br /> The Keeling Curve is a key to unlocking the Earth Science metrics that we, '''[[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]''', are tracking to measure and monitor atmospheric warming.<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:C02 in atmosphere chart-3.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:You can manage only what you can measure Dr David Crisp, OCO-2, June 2014 m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> Zoom in to know the facts, the data, the reality of how and why humanity is producing a consequential legacy ... Learn how to manage our Living Earth inheritance.<br /> <br /> <br /> #EarthIsInOurHands<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:OCO-2 to measure CO2.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Keeling Curve 2024.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''November'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''November 6, 2024'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Donald Trump Elected US President: Election Will Bring Far-Reaching Change'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ············································································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Beyond the U.S. politics and the presidential election on the fifth of November, a day that will be remembered, is the physics of nature, the dynamic, changing interactions between human systems and natural systems. Planet Earth as it moves in space and time will be around long after politics... and yes, remember, now and in the immediate future, 'Earth is in human hands'...'''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth in Human Hands Intro.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> '''November 4, 2024'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Special:Search&amp;profile=images&amp;search=michael%20e%20mann&amp;fulltext=1 Michael E. Mann], as quoted in a Forbes interview on ''what’s at stake in the U.S. election''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''How significant is the outcome of the presidential election for the climate?'''''<br /> <br /> I'll be blunt. This upcoming election is a critical juncture where Americans will choose one of two paths, and the difference between those two paths couldn't be more stark. One of those paths, represented by Donald Trump and the Republican Party, involves basically abandoning the efforts that we've already made here in the United States to tackle the climate crisis. That includes dismantling the EPA, getting rid of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, which of course runs the National Hurricane Center and the hurricane hunters that make the measurements fly, take their lives, put their lives at risk of flying into hurricanes to make critical measurements that are fed into our models so we can better predict the intensification and the paths of these dangerous storms. It would abandon all that.''<br /> <br /> ''But fundamentally it would abandon our commitment to the rest of the world to lead on this issue, to reduce our carbon emissions, to incentivize a shift away from fossil fuels, it would seek to, for example, deactivate the Inflation Reduction Act, which was landmark legislation passed by the Biden Administration, or signed by Joe Biden passed by Congress, the provisions of which have the potential to lower our carbon emissions here in the United States by 40% by 2030. It's not enough. We need to do even more. We need to build on that, but it puts us on the right path.<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''What are the international implications?'''''<br /> <br /> ''You have on the one hand a Republican party and their presidential nominee Donald Trump, who would in essence end any US leadership on climate. And in the absence of US leadership, we are the world's largest legacy carbon polluter. We have to display moral leadership if we can expect the rest of the world to come to the table, other industrializing nations, China, India, etcetera. And what we know is that when we do take leadership, as we did during the Obama administration and again during the Biden administration, then those other countries come to the table and we begin to forge a path forward to truly take the actions necessary to avert catastrophic warming.''<br /> <br /> ''We're at 1.2 [degrees] Celsius warming now. At 1.5 Celsius, 3 Fahrenheit, we will start to see far worse consequences than those that we're already seeing, and we're already seeing dangerous climate change. Just in the last month or so with Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton, these are storms that were amplified. They were more intense. They produced greater amounts of flooding rains that in one case killed hundreds of people. We are witnessing the devastating consequences of human-caused climate change. And if we don't take action now and prevent warming of 1.5 [degrees] Celsius, we're already at 1.2. There isn't a whole lot of wiggle room. What it basically means is we've got to ramp carbon emissions down dramatically over the next decade, and bring them down to zero mid-century. The only hope to do that would be to build on the policies that were put in place by the Biden administration.''<br /> <br /> ''So that's where we stand. We have a monumental choice before us. It's not getting, in my view, as much coverage as it ought to in the US media because wow, there are so many crises. We face public health crises, international security, crises, wars, et cetera. If we don't act now on the climate crisis, there's no going back. We lock in truly dangerous and deadly consequences for decades to come. And so that's where we are at this very critical juncture.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''October'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Outcome of the US 2024 Election -- and Potential for a Planetary Threat'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Planetary-Scale Threat.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * <br /> https://thebulletin.org/2024/08/project-2025-the-right-wing-conspiracy-to-torpedo-global-climate-action/<br /> <br /> <br /> Michael E. Mann<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Republican_Party_2024_Climate_Strategy.png '''''Project 2025'''''].... ''would put an end to US climate action at this critical moment.''<br /> <br /> ''The energy and environmental provisions of Project 2025 were effectively written by polluters, with front groups such as the Koch-funded “Competitive Enterprise Institute” and “Heartland Institute” playing a key role in drafting the report. They are seeking to dismantle climate policy in the US through a combination of executive actions, such as the elimination of federal agencies with oversight over energy and environmental policy, and legislative actions.<br /> <br /> ''Project 2025 would gut the EPA, which is responsible for enforcement of environmental policies, and it would reverse the EPA’s 2009 “endangerment finding” that classified carbon dioxide as a pollutant to be regulated under the Clean Air Act. It would eliminate the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which monitors changes in our atmosphere, oceans and climate. Project 2025 would eliminate clean energy loan programs at the Department of Energy and remove climate change—one of the greatest national security threats we face—from the National Security Council agenda. It supports more oil drilling in the environmentally sensitive Arctic and asserts that the government has an “obligation to develop vast oil and gas and coal resources.”''<br /> <br /> ''Perhaps most problematic, Project 2025 would repeal the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the single most substantial piece of climate legislation in US history. Passed with a tie-breaking vote from current Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris and 50 Senate democrats but not a single Republican, the IRA provides $370 billion of investment in clean energy infrastructure. Independent experts have estimated that it will greatly accelerate the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, leading to an estimated 40 percent reduction in US carbon emissions by 2030.''<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: The message here of Dr. Mann, the presidential distinguished professor and director of the Center for Science, Sustainability and Media at The University of Pennsylvania should be at the forefront of Us presidential and congressional election. The choice being made is one that will directly and lastingly effect all in the nation and quality of life across the planet. The challenge is a generational challenge. The science is a guide. The choice of direction taken is in human hands. <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Hurricane Milton, Measured &amp; Monitored, in Memory of a Hurricane Hunter'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> In the Gulf of Mexico the Climate-Induced Warming Waters Supercharge Hurricanes, NOAA Knows<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Peter Dodge's Final Flight.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Hurricane Helene Devastates Southeast, Impacts NOAA NCEI Headquarters'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''National Centers for Environmental Information'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/<br /> <br /> * https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/about-us<br /> <br /> * https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/sites/g/files/anmtlf171/files/2024-06/FY24-FY28%20NCEI%20Strategic%20Plan.pdf<br /> <br /> * https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/node/6696<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> NCEI headquarters in Asheville, NC, has been severely impacted by Hurricane Helene. First and foremost, we’re grateful to report that all of our employees and staff have been accounted for. All data holdings–including paper and film records–are also safe.<br /> <br /> The scale of destruction and impact Helene has had across the Southeast, especially on its people, has been massive, and we stand in solidarity with all who are suffering. We also want to express our deepest gratitude towards those who have reached out with support, and encourage all to keep expressing their support now and in the future. The road to recovery for the entire region will be a long one, and one we will be traveling as well, both as people and as an international data center focused on meeting the data information needs of those we serve.<br /> <br /> All of the employees located at the North Carolina NCEI site also express how proud of and thankful we are for the 300 NCEI employees in Colorado, Maryland, Mississippi and around the country for their care, support and professionalism helping us recover. Our team is truly unmatched.<br /> <br /> Now to more formal updates on NCEI’s functionality–here is what we know:<br /> <br /> NCEI’s network service provider has limited functionality and there is no definitive timeline for when it will be fully operational.<br /> <br /> All archived data at NCEI is currently inaccessible, and limited new data is being ingested. We are working with our partners to minimize the risk of any potential data loss; however, Helene has made many key products and services unavailable at this time.<br /> <br /> Products impacted include access to NCEI’s weather and climate data. NCEI’s monthly State of the Climate reports and data will be be delayed until services are restored, which means the September 2024 U.S. and global climate reports, originally scheduled to be released on October 8 and 10 respectively, will be unable to meet this deadline. At this time, we do not have more specifics on when they might be available.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''September'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Diplomacy Watch: Russian media in eye of the storm | Responsible Statecraft'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://responsiblestatecraft.org/rt-meta-ban/<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp owner Meta said that it was going to ban a number of Russian state media outlets, including RT (formerly Russia Today).''<br /> <br /> ''“After careful consideration, we expanded our ongoing enforcement against Russian state media outlets: Rossiya Segodnya, RT and other related entities are now banned from our apps globally for foreign interference activity,” Meta saidin a statement.''<br /> <br /> ''This occurs just days after the Biden administration announced sanctionsagainst RT. United States Secretary of State, Antony Blinken said that Russian media entities “are no longer merely fire hoses of Russian propaganda and disinformation. They are engaged in covert influence activities aimed at undermining American elections and democracies, functioning like a de facto arm of Russia’s intelligence apparatus.”''<br /> <br /> ''In its own statement, the State Department said “The United States supports the free flow of information. We are not taking action against these entities and individuals for the content of their reporting, or even the disinformation they create and spread publicly. We are taking action against them for their covert influence activities.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> More re: Geopolitics, Democracy, Networking, Media, Internet, Disinformation, Fact Checking<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/In_Defense_of_Democracy_and_Freedom<br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Democracy<br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Internet<br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Media<br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Networking<br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Fact_Checking,_Facts_Count<br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Fact_Checking<br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Disinformation_-_Online_-_Dangerous<br /> <br /> <br /> Visit GreenPolicy360's associate, Strategic Demands / StratDem<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''August'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The coming era of unlimited — and free — clean energy'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via The Washington Post<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/3Z6pMbe<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Futurist Ray Kurzweil notes that solar power has been doubling every two years for the past 30 years — as costs have been dropping. He says solar energy is only six doublings — or less than 14 years — away from meeting 100 percent of today’s energy needs. Energy usage will keep increasing, so this is a moving target. But, by Kurzweil’s estimates, inexpensive renewable sources will provide more energy than the world needs in less than 20 years. Even then, we will be using only one part in 10,000 of the sunlight that falls on the Earth.'' ...<br /> <br /> ''We are surely heading into the era of abundance that [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Diamandis '''Peter Diamandis'''] has written about — the era when the basic needs of humanity are met through advancing technologies. The challenge for mankind will be to share this abundance, ensuring that these technologies make the world a better place.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.diamandis.com/about<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ·········································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Mapping the Forests from Satellites'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''Turning the Data into Actionable Forest Management &amp; Repleneshment'''<br /> <br /> ::'''Yes, Planting Trees Is a Smart Eco-Strategy for Now &amp; Tomorrow'''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Global Forest Watch]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Global_Forest_Watch<br /> <br /> <br /> ''''' 'Nature Climate Change Journal' '''''<br /> <br /> ''Scientific study suggests that reforestation in developing countries can '''sequester up to ten times more carbon at lower costs than previously estimated.'' '''<br /> <br /> ''The research advocates for a balanced approach using both natural regeneration and tree planting to optimize carbon capture. Economic incentives like carbon payments and timber sales can further enhance the viability of these reforestation efforts.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Beyond Expectations: Reforestation Can Remove 10x More CO2 From the Atmosphere Than Previously Estimated...'''''<br /> <br /> * https://scitechdaily.com/beyond-expectations-reforestation-can-remove-10x-more-co2-from-the-atmosphere-than-previously-estimated/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''July'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''U.S. Senators Move to Pass Legislation Clarifying Executive Agencies Powers to Regulate Congressional Laws'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> SCOTUS activism to limit scope of EPA and other agencies, forcing legislative committee reworking of statute drafting and bill 'specifics' now meets political gridlock<br /> <br /> Senate rules, blocking maneuvers, filibustering, need for increased committee markups, timelines and budgets (i.e. SCOTUS-ordered lawmaking process changes) now all come into play <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Republicans and Democrats are pushing competing legislation as a result of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn thee &quot;Chevron&quot; case deference earlier this month.''<br /> <br /> ''Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) became the latest GOP lawmaker seeking to compel the Biden administration to rein in its rulemaking, while Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is leading an effort that would codify the high court’s previous decades-old precedent.''<br /> <br /> ''The new bills, released Tuesday, are part of among members of both parties in response to the ruling. A majority of justices said courts no longer had to give agencies deference when interpreting ambiguous laws.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.eenews.net/articles/senators-float-dueling-bills-in-response-to-chevron-ruling/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''DSCOVR:EPIC'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: &quot;Moon Transit&quot; as rendered by NASA's DSCOVR:EPIC. There we are and the Earth's moon in a sequence of images scanned from space, then digitally delivered into a database to have its numbers, pixels, 'crunched'. <br /> <br /> Today, this DSCOVR:EPIC process is bringing to mind another deep imaging, a scanning and scraping system that's referred to as Large Language Model (LLM) deep learning.<br /> <br /> Who's being observed? We are... yes, our site's been imaged and captured by remote scanning bots and our 50+ years of Earth and Space, Politics and our network of pages and content ranging over the history of the environmental movement are now in databases worldwide.<br /> <br /> We're open access creative commons and so, as we've rolled, we've been freely sharing since AI came along and began arriving to take us up. Now, we're being 'repackaged' and delivered to digital systems 360. We're sort of an extension to online ChatGPTs <br /> <br /> We think of our curated contributions as '''[[Green Education]]''' with verve.<br /> <br /> What a journey it's been, what a tech trip it is ;-<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Dscovr_epic_moontransit.gif<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Earthrise]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> June 7, 2024 ... '''In Memory of Astronaut William Anders''' <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Anders<br /> <br /> <br /> Associated Press / '''''Former astronaut William Anders, who took iconic Earthrise photo, killed in Washington plane crash'''''<br /> <br /> * https://apnews.com/article/plane-crash-san-juan-islands-washington-6d3800130ef4e67d761f96b328f7c263<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;'''Apollo 8 Earthrise Photos'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ::'''December 1968<br /> <br /> :::• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthrise<br /> <br /> <br /> :::::[[File:Apollo 8, Life Jan10,1969.png]]<br /> <br /> :::::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Apollo_8,_Life_Jan10,1969.png Apollo 8 photos in Life Magazine, January 1969]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Earthrise_100_Photographs_That_Changed_the_World_.jpg &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Earthrise'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;'''Apollo 8's View of Earth on December 24, 1968'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> December 21, 1968 ... Apollo 8 launches from the Kennedy Space Center, the first humans on the way to the Moon --- and a vision looking back at home that empowered the modern environmental movement.<br /> <br /> Apollo's mission? To explore the Moon in preparation for a Moon landing. A surprise comes into view as the spaceship circles the Moon. A window view, Whole Earth awareness of ourselves as #PlanetCitizens. &quot;Earthrise&quot; ... a profound image, first by human hands taken of our home planet. We see our #PlanetEarth with new born eyes ... <br /> <br /> :[http://www.ibhanet.org/resources/documents/newsletters/spierearthrisephoto.pdf The Earthrise photo history]<br /> <br /> : [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Earthrise_100_Photographs_That_Changed_the_World_.jpg 100 Photographs That Changed the World]<br /> <br /> :[http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/nasa-releases-new-earthrise-simulation-video/#.VNO2cC744Rk NASA simulation video of Earthrise on the 45th anniversary]<br /> <br /> <br /> • http://www.youtube.com/embed/dE-vOscpiNc <br /> <br /> • http://www.abc.net.au/science/moon/earthrise.htm<br /> <br /> • http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Apollo_8,_Life_Jan10,1969.png<br /> <br /> <br /> ::'''Aboard Apollo''', December 24, 1968...'''<br /> <br /> ::[[File:Earthrise, the way Anders saw it.jpg]]<br /> <br /> ::&lt;small&gt;http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Apollo_8&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> As the spaceship swings around the Moon... <br /> <br /> unexpectedly the Earth rises in the Apollo ship's window and the astronauts are amazed at what is coming into view...<br /> <br /> <br /> Astronaut [https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimclash/2015/04/17/bill-anders-recalls-famous-earthrise-photo-he-took-from-moon/#1ae7ffe9527a Bill Anders is the first to see the Earth...] <br /> <br /> <br /> ·········································································<br /> <br /> <br /> Anders: ''&quot;Oh, my God, look at that picture over there,&quot; he can be heard saying. &quot;There's the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> What happened next will sound familiar to anyone who remembers the days before digital cameras:<br /> <br /> <br /> Anders (to astronaut Jim Lovell): ''&quot;You got a color film, Jim? Hand me a roll of color, quick, would you?&quot;''<br /> <br /> Lovell: ''&quot;Oh, man, that's great! Where is it?&quot;''<br /> <br /> Anders: ''&quot;Hurry. Quick.&quot;''<br /> <br /> Lovell: ''&quot;Down here?&quot;''<br /> <br /> Anders: ''&quot;Just grab me a color. A color exterior. Hurry up. Got one?&quot;''<br /> <br /> Lovell: ''&quot;Yeah, I'm lookin' for one. C368.&quot;''<br /> <br /> Anders: ''&quot;Anything quick.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> Lovell hands him the film just as Anders is heard saying, ''&quot;I think we missed it.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> But within seconds, Lovell sees the shot again in another window of the command module. He asks for the camera from Anders, who seems a bit defensive at having his role as mission photographer usurped.<br /> <br /> <br /> Anders: ''&quot;Wait a minute, just let me get the right setting here now, just calm down. Calm down, Lovell!&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> Anders then gets the shot that has been reproduced innumerable times all over the world... <br /> <br /> <br /> Changing forever humanity's vision of ourselves, of who we are <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.planetcitizens.org &lt;small&gt; #PlanetCitizens&lt;/small&gt;]<br /> <br /> [[File:Earthrise 100 Photographs That Changed the World .jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;🌎&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''May'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Greening Our Blue Planet]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Going_Green<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Environmental protection]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Day_Is_Every_Day &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Earth Day is every day... &amp; every day is Earth Day'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> [[File: Earth-Day.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''April 22, 2024'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Personal Memories on the Road to the First Earth Day'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Day_Memories_on_the_50th_Anniversary<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Earth-Day.png<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:ThinBlue-3 iss030e031276.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/ThinBlue_iss030e031276.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/PlanetCitizen PlanetCitizen.org] / [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_and_Space,_Politics Earth System Science] / [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Vital_Signs Measuring &quot;Vital Signs&quot;]&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;🌎&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Intended to Determined, INDCs to NDCs'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''Determined to Enforced<br /> <br /> :: Making National Climate Plans Reality<br /> <br /> :::* http://unfccc.int/focus/indc_portal/items/8766.php<br /> <br /> :::* http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Intended_Nationally_Determined_Contributions<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :::[[File:Green Branching Out.jpg | link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenLinks]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Climate Plans Enforcement - Resources - GreenPolicy.png]]<br /> <br /> : https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Climate_Change<br /> <br /> : https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Climate_Policy<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''We Are Generation Green, Going Green (and It's No Easy Ride)'''<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[Generation Green]] | [[Going Green]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''February 2024'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''How the U.S. Became the World’s Biggest Gas Supplier'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via the NY Times<br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/02/03/climate/us-lng-natural-gas-leader.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Sk0.vSJF.n9S8r11vmjsK&amp;bgrp=t&amp;smid=url-share '''Article, unlocked''']<br /> <br /> ''In just eight years, the United States has rocketed from barely selling any gas overseas to becoming the world’s No. 1 supplier, a remarkable shift that has profited oil and gas companies and strengthened American influence abroad...'' <br /> <br /> ''America’s gas export boom initially caught many policymakers by surprise. In the early 2000s, natural gas was relatively scarce at home, and companies were spending billions of dollars to build terminals to import gas from places like Qatar and Australia.''<br /> <br /> ''Fracking changed all that. In the mid-2000s, U.S. drillers perfected methods to unlock vast reserves of cheap natural gas from shale rock. At the same time, natural gas prices began spiking elsewhere in the world, especially after Japan shut down its nuclear plants in the wake of the Fukushima reactor meltdown in 2011 and began demanding more fuel.''<br /> <br /> ''That led to a stunning reversal. American companies, led by Cheniere Energy, began spending billions more to convert import terminals into export terminals, and shipments of U.S. gas to other countries began to surge.''<br /> <br /> ''“It comes down to economics,” said Kenneth Medlock, senior director at the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University. “Production just keeps growing in the United States, which keeps prices low. And then we keep seeing major demand growth in the rest of the world.”''<br /> <br /> ''The export boom has transformed America’s role in energy geopolitics.''<br /> <br /> ''Europe has become the biggest importer of American gas in recent years, enabling the continent to slash by more than half its reliance on Russian gas since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.''<br /> <br /> ''In the future, Europe is expected to curb its appetite for gas by adding more renewable energy sources like wind and solar power. The main growth markets for natural gas are expected to be fast-growing Asian countries such as China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Vietnam that want to use the fuel for electricity, heating or industrial purposes.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''January 2024'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Green Solutions for Businesses with a [[Net Zero Energy Policy]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://greenfuturessolutions.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Managing to Avoid 'Tipping Points' '''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Harmful tipping points in the natural world pose some of the gravest threats faced by humanity. Their triggering will severely damage our planet’s life-support systems and threaten the stability of our societies.''<br /> <br /> * https://global-tipping-points.org/<br /> <br /> * https://news.exeter.ac.uk/faculty-of-environment-science-and-economy/exeter-research-in-carbon-briefs-top-media-papers-of-2023/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_Citizen_Vision_of_Living_Earth &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Planet Citizen Vision of Living Earth'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Highlights &lt;big&gt;'''GreenPolicy360 Page Highlights'''&lt;/big&gt;] <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earths two lungs.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;font color=green&gt;'''''Planet Citizens'''''&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''Time for [[Planet Citizen Action]]''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> '''A Call to Action to Preserve &amp; Protect Life on Earth'''<br /> <br /> It's your time to become a Planet Citizen<br /> <br /> We believe 'Each of us can make a positive difference by stepping up &amp; doing our best&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:To be fully alive is to work for the common good.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth 4 eOS.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;🌎&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Earth System Science Is Green360'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Follow Planet and '''[[Planet API]]'''<br /> <br /> Follow GreenPolicy360, look back at 50+ years of Plant Citizen Earth Science<br /> <br /> [[Earth Science Research from Space]]<br /> <br /> <br /> Planet (PlanetLabs) continues to democratize space and deliver 'mission' data...<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Democratization_of_Space<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Planet and plan for an Earthdata platform.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;2023&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''December'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Facts count'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Democracy<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Battle for Democracy.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> : December 21, 2023<br /> <br /> : '''''Washington Post Editorial Board:''''' <br /> <br /> : '' “The world’s democracies should create a system to fight back that can speak plainly and consistently about the inherent advantages of democratic systems, while admitting the imperfections, and use creative ways to illuminate the flaws and depredations of authoritarian regimes.” ''<br /> <br /> : * https://wapo.st/3TyP9iU<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''It been said that the US &quot;Inflation Reduction Act&quot; is a &quot;[[Green New Deal]]&quot;'''<br /> <br /> ''The world is facing a “pivotal moment” in the climate crisis, Kamala Harris has told the Cop28 summit after the US vowed to phase out coal plants and slash methane emissions, but also came under attack for meagre assistance to developing countries and for its own booming oil and gas extraction industry.''<br /> <br /> ''The US vice-president, deputising for Joe Biden – who skipped the UN climate talks – said Biden’s administration had made the “largest climate investment in the history of our country, and some have said the world” via the '''Inflation Reduction Act.'''''<br /> <br /> ''The world is badly off track in efforts to slow the climate crisis, however, and Harris warned of the dangers posed by opponents of climate action, which could be seen as a reference to Donald Trump, who is likely to be Biden and Harris’s electoral opponent next year.''<br /> <br /> ''“This is a pivotal moment – our action collectively, or worse our inaction, will impact billions of people for decades to come,” Harris told delegates, including dozens of world leaders, at the summit in the United Arab Emirates. “Around the world there are those who seek to slow or stop our progress. Leaders who deny climate science, delay climate action and spread misinformation&quot; ...''<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/02/kamala-harris-addresses-cop28-amid-mixed-reaction-to-us-climate-pledges<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''November'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Circa 2023, the 'Musk Controversy' Continues'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''''Elon Musk was once an environmental hero: is he still a rare green billionaire?'''''<br /> <br /> :* https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/20/elon-musk-green-credentials-clean-energy-climate-deniers<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Newly Selected Speaker of the US House of Representatives Mike Johnson (R - Louisiana) moves His Agenda and His Party's Messaging'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> In &quot;Letters from an American&quot;, the historian [https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/ '''Heather Cox Richardson'''] provides accounts and analysis of the state of US politics, focusing her work largely on democracy - and dangers to the Republic as the US is roiled by political forces. Today's online column by Richardson includes the following report on the new House leader's agenda, and clearly makes Green News for the Day:<br /> <br /> :''In the last two days, for example, the House has voted to slash 39% of the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and 13% of the budget of the National Park Service. It voted to require the Biden administration to advance oil drilling off the Alaska coast. It has voted on reducing the salary of the EPA administrator, the director of the Bureau of Land Management, and the Secretary of the Interior to $1 each.''<br /> <br /> :''Yesterday, Johnson told reporters he considers extremists Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) close friends and said “I don’t disagree with them on many issues and principles.”''<br /> <br /> :''To direct his communications team, Johnson has tapped Raj Shah, a former executive from the Fox News Corporation, who was a key player in promoting the lie that Trump won the 2020 presidential election. As the head of the “Brand Protection Unit,” Shah demanded that the Fox News Channel continue to lie to viewers who would leave the station if it told the truth. Johnson has hired Shah to be his deputy chief of staff for communications and, according to Alex Isenstadt of Politico, “help run messaging for House Republicans.” ''<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:IEA energy chart - 2023.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Carl Sagan, 1985.PNG]]<br /> <br /> Dr. Carl Sagan, 1985<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Carl_Sagan,_1985.PNG&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Remembering the early day of Earth/Climate Science<br /> <br /> 'Climate Change' used to be called 'Global Warming'<br /> <br /> <br /> Global Warming -- from Steve Schmidt, GreenPolicy360, writing about the initial days of climate research, environmental laws, and activism: <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Global_Warming<br /> <br /> <br /> In the mid-1960s, a man who was trained in science and physics, and who was an engineer who became a politician in East Los Angeles, California, explained to me that the health impacts of LA's smog was dire, especially for children. He went on to explain the air quality was not just a local problem that needed to be 'fixed' (the air pollution in Southern California was considered among the urban areas worst in the world), but that the larger questions of industrial pollution needed to be addressed. He said we needed science, a major scientific mobilization to provide the atmospheric science. Tools to use, data to guide our solutions to the adverse human impacts on the atmosphere essential to health and life. The man's name was George E. Brown. We became friends, then colleagues in our work. Our paths and politics intertwined, and our stories reveal elements of the green first generation environmental movement in action. George Brown played historic roles in advancing Earth science, climate change science, and Earth system, atmospheric science, coordinating and overseeing Earth science research from space with a constellation of NASA missions until George passed away in Washington DC in 1999. <br /> <br /> Let's start here -- with George's life and work.<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[George E. Brown Jr]]'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Vital_Signs<br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_Citizens,_Planet_Scientists<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Advancing an Intergenerational Science Mission'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:US_Public_Law_95-367.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Climate_Policy<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Research_from_Space<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Landsat_data_users_handbook<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Earth Right Now -- the Earth System Observatory'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Right_Now<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth System Observatory-1.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:You can manage only what you can measure Dr David Crisp, OCO-2, June 2014 m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''September'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''As the G20 Meets, the United Nations 'Urges' the &quot;Top Economic Powers&quot; of Our Planet's Economy to Change Direction'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> NEW DELHI (International News Services) -- ''U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres on Friday urged the Group of 20 top economic powers, which are responsible for more than 80% of the emissions that cause global warming, to use their weekend summit to send a strong message on climate change.''<br /> <br /> ''Guterres said all licensing or funding for new fossil fuel projects should be stopped and that the G20 must keep the “1.5-degree goal alive,” referring to the 2015 Paris climate agreement that set 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) as a global guardrail in atmospheric warming, with countries pledging to try to prevent that much long-term warming if possible.''<br /> <br /> ''Earlier this year, the U.N. weather agency had said that there’s a two-out-of-three chance that the world will temporarily hit a key warming limit within the next five years.''<br /> <br /> ''July 2023 was Earth’s hottest month on record by a wide margin...''<br /> <br /> <br /> 'Radical' Changes Needed Now<br /> <br /> * https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66753909.amp<br /> <br /> ''This means that every aspect of our societies needs to change to rein in rising temperatures.''<br /> <br /> ''This includes the way we make energy, the way we travel, work and produce food. Experts say this type of change needs governments to take the initiative and make sure that their climate actions aren't immediately nullified by other policies and investments.<br /> <br /> ''&quot;One could also see the call for system transformations as a recognition that, while we still can, we should take our destiny in our own hands,&quot; said Dr Richard Klein from the Stockholm Environment Institute, who was involved in the initial stages of the stocktake.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;Either we transform society in a way that avoids the worst of climate change, or climate change will transform society for us...&quot;''<br /> <br /> * https://news.yahoo.com/un-global-stocktake-climate-change-191618644.html<br /> * https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/what-is-worlds-first-global-stocktake-climate-change-2023-09-08/<br /> * https://www.msn.com/en-xl/news/other/what-is-the-un-global-stocktake-and-how-will-it-help-countries-limit-global-warming/ar-AA1gjMxo<br /> * https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-un-global-stocktake/<br /> * https://indianexpress.com/article/india/as-g20-drags-feet-uns-global-climate-stocktake-flags-large-deficits-8931143/<br /> * https://www.rte.ie/news/world/2023/0909/1404345-world-leaders-gather-in-new-delhi-as-g20-summit-begins/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''August 2023'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Uh-Oh. Now What? Are We Acquiring the Data to Understand the Situation?'''''<br /> <br /> ''14 August 2023''<br /> <br /> ''James Hansen, Makiko Sato, Reto Ruedy''<br /> <br /> ''Abstract. Global temperature in June and July shot far above the prior records for those months for the 140 years of good instrumental data. Early indications are that warming exceeds expectation based on only the long-term trend due to increasing greenhouse gases (GHGs) plus the emerging El Nino. Three additional mechanisms will have a near-term effect, with a result that the 12-month mean global temperature likely will pierce the 1.5°C warming level before this time next year. Uncertainties in present analyses draw attention to the inadequacy of and the precarious state of crucial global observations...''<br /> <br /> * https://mailchi.mp/caa/uh-oh-now-what-are-we-acquiring-the-data-to-understand-the-situation?e=371c3fd991<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 Siterunner: I tried/[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr '''we tried'''] to graph the data back in the 1970s and 80s, hiring numerous scientists including from the National Labs, in Sandia/Los Alamos and Livermore/Berkeley, physicists, engineers who began the original Earth Science missions to study, measure and monitor Earth's systems and 'vital signs'... A central task was digitize the data, 'quantify it', 'dynamically' over time, as if I had to teach it to young students (ala a famed CalTech professor, Richard Feynman)... the results of first-gen Earth Science/Envirionmental activistm fed into Federal science, space and technololgy com't work and educational institutions, NASA/NOAA/USGS data banks, and more... In the mid 1980s a Senate hearing hit the news with Jim Hansen and Carl Sagan's warnings standing out among media stories that brought public awareness of the Greenhouse Effect and global warming...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Hansen-testimony-1988.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:What happens next is ... the Greenhouse Effect - explained by Carl Sagan, 1985.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''July 2023'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''July 24'''<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: &quot;It's a wild world&quot; and when we sort through the news (however we get it), every day seems to get wilder and wilder...<br /> <br /> Start here - with the latest from our TOO HOT page...<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Too_Hot<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''We are living through Earth’s hottest month on record, scientists say'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/07/20/earth-hottest-month-july-climate/<br /> <br /> ''It’s not just a record-hot day or two, unprecedented heat waves or abnormally warm ocean waters: All indications are that this will be the hottest single month on Earth on record, and possibly in more than 100,000 years.<br /> Every day this month has set records for average global annual temperatures, and already, 17 days in July have been hotter than any others in more than 40 years of global observations, climate scientists said.''<br /> <br /> ''Not even three weeks into the month, scientists’ declarations of an already assured monthly global record serve to punctuate what has been an onslaught of recent weather extremes.''<br /> <br /> <br /> Then there's this -- hotter... <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''The next United Nations international conference on climate change, COP28, will be held in Expo City, Dubai''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''The President-Designate of the conference will be Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, the CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC).''<br /> <br /> ''The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company or ADNOC is the state-owned oil company of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).''<br /> <br /> ''It is the world's 12th largest oil company by production. As of 2021, the company has an oil production capacity exceeding 4 million bpd with plans to increase to 5 million bpd by 2030. It is the United Arab Emirate's largest oil company.''<br /> <br /> ''As of November 2019, the UAE holds the sixth-largest proven reserves of oil in the world at 105 billion barrels.[14] Most of these reserves are located in Abu Dhabi.''<br /> <br /> ''ADNOC is one of the world's largest energy companies measured by both reserves and production. ADNOC has 16 subsidiary companies in upstream, midstream, and downstream stages of production. ADNOC develops both onshore and offshore gas fields. The company operates two oil refineries, Ruwais Refinery and Umm Al Nar. ADNOC exports natural gas in the form of liquefied natural gas (LNG) in addition to producing supplies for local electricity and water utilities, to other domestic industries including petrochemicals plants, and for re-injection into reservoirs.<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Dhabi_National_Oil_Company<br /> <br /> <br /> and then there's this ominous bit of news from an expert on climate (and a &quot;former head of the UN climate body&quot;)...<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''World will miss 1.5C warming limit'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Professor Sir Bob Watson, former head of the UN climate body, told the BBC's Today programme he was &quot;pessimistic&quot;.''<br /> <br /> ''His warning comes amidst a summer of extreme heat for Europe, China and the US...''<br /> <br /> ''In the interview aired on Thursday he said: &quot;I think most people fear that if we give up on the 1.5 [Celsius limit] which I do not believe we will achieve, in fact I'm very pessimistic about achieving even 2C, that if we allow the target to become looser and looser, higher and higher, governments will do even less in the future.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''Based on current government commitments to cutting greenhouse gas emissions, Climate Action Tracker predicts that global temperatures will rise to 2.7C.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66256101<br /> <br /> <br /> and to 'sum up' (dire global warming science, climate change news [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr '''we've been waving-as-a-warning since 1977-78)''']...<br /> <br /> Let's visit an old friend and early 2000's advisor to our Global/GreenPolicy work -- Bill McKibben<br /> <br /> It's not a conspiracy we're talking 'bout, it's right out in the open...<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Blackrock Bails on its Climate-related Pledges'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''So, in case you missed it, here’s the biggest thing that happened in the world last week: while our planet was experiencing its hottest month of all time, the earth’s biggest pile of cash (the asset manager Blackrock, with $8.59 trillion dollars under management) named to its board of directors the CEO of the world’s largest oil company, Saudi Aramco, which has produced more carbon emissions than any firm on earth.'' ...<br /> <br /> ''... think of what it means. It is the ultimate signal that the world’s financial community has decided to essentially give up on even the modest commitments they made a couple of years ago in Glasgow [https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/cop26 '''(at the international climate conference/COP26''')], where they said they would work to decarbonize their portfolios.'' <br /> <br /> ''Two things have happened since they made those big pledges (Blackrock’s Larry Fink said at the time, “we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance” to deal with the climate crisis). First, the war in Ukraine produced huge profits for the oil industry, as their old pal Vladimir Putin (who once hung a medal around the neck of Exxon’s CEO) pushed the price of petroleum into the stratosphere. And second, the oil industry’s bought-and-paid-for politicians in red-state America wrote nasty letters about “ESG investing” and threatened to break ties with the Wall Street firms that were “going woke.” Those two developments were more than enough to persuade barons like Fink to walk back their professed concern with a planet on fire. He is clearly a go-along get-along guy, and where we’re going is—well, if not hell then someplace with a similar temperature.''<br /> <br /> <br /> Stop -- and peruse McKibben's reflection and further explanation for this turn...<br /> <br /> <br /> ''BlackRock made a name for itself, and many conservative enemies, in recent years by publicly embracing environmental, social and corporate governance considerations — known as E.S.G. — in its decisions, and arguing that other companies should do the same.''<br /> <br /> ''So the investment giant’s decision on Monday to name Amin Nasser, the C.E.O. of Saudi Arabia’s oil company Aramco, to its board feels like a major reversal, despite its claims that the move doesn’t contradict its E.S.G. commitments.''<br /> <br /> ''Nasser leads the world’s biggest oil producer, with Aramco having produced 13.6 million barrels of oil equivalent per day last year. He will succeed Bader Alsaad, the director general of the Arab Fund for Economic &amp; Social Development, on BlackRock’s board.''<br /> <br /> <br /> Yes, it's a wild, wild world out there. <br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/18/business/dealbook/blackrock-aramco-nasser-board.html<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎 <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Record tumble - climate change.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Via the United Kingdom | British Broadcasting'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''A series of climate records on temperature, ocean heat, and Antarctic sea ice have alarmed some scientists who say their speed and timing is unprecedented.''<br /> <br /> ''Dangerous heatwaves in Europe could break further records, the UN says.''<br /> <br /> ''It is hard to immediately link these events to climate change because weather - and oceans - are so complex.''<br /> <br /> ''Studies are under way, but scientists already fear some worst-case scenarios are unfolding.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;I'm not aware of a similar period when all parts of the climate system were in record-breaking or abnormal territory,&quot; Thomas Smith, an environmental geographer at London School of Economics, says.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;The Earth is in uncharted territory&quot; now due to global warming from burning fossil fuels, as well as heat from the first El Niño - a warming natural weather system - since 2018, says Imperial College London climate science lecturer Dr Paulo Ceppi...''<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66229065<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎 <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''June 2023'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Time for an exercise in critical thinking skills. Time to examine the US Supreme Court and its recent decisions subsequent to the appointment and confirmation of three new 'lifetime' SCOTUS judges. Let's look at the use of a new theory that has now become a tool for interpreting the legislative intent of the US Congress.<br /> <br /> First, read this -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_questions_doctrine<br /> <br /> Then 'compare and contrast' the consequences of three recent 'major question' decisions as determined by opinions and votes of the three new judges.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''May 2023'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Bi-Partisanship in Congress with Earth Science Legislation Passed'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via the Washington Post<br /> <br /> ''The House on Tuesday (May 9) passed two bipartisan bills aimed at bolstering the federal government's research on climate modeling and climate impacts.''<br /> <br /> ''The Coastal Communities Ocean Acidification Act, which passed by a vote of 351-58, calls on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to study how coastal communities can best address ocean acidification, which is caused by warming ocean temperatures fueled by climate change. It was introduced by Reps. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) and Michael Waltz (R-Fla.), whose states are home to robust fishing industries. The bill would also ensure that NOAA collaborates with historically underserved and rural communities that are already facing the challenges that come with changing oceans.''<br /> <br /> ''The House also passed the Advanced Weather Model Computing Development Act by a vote of 356-50. The legislation, which passed the House Science, Space and Technology Committee in March and was introduced by Rep. Max L. Miller (R-Ohio), would direct the Energy Department and NOAA to conduct joint research on how to improve the nation’s weather and climate forecasting system. It calls for developing new modeling or simulation methods via artificial intelligence and increasing data sharing between federal agencies and universities. ''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''April 2023'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> The recent IPCC report, the 6th consensus, synthesis, assessment of climate change disruption was an exercise not just of science but of inside politics in action. Varied lobbying industries with influence, e.g. the meat industry continue to punch, as the saying goes, 'above their weight'. While the global scientific community meets to do climate science, the lobbyists act as if they are at a trade show and they're selling products and services with a public relations flair. 'Business-as-usual' as 'pay-to-play' politics is often called... <br /> <br /> Let's take a look. First, here are reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. <br /> <br /> * https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-cycle/<br /> <br /> * https://www.ipcc.ch/ar6-syr/<br /> <br /> * https://www.ipcc.ch/about/<br /> <br /> <br /> Here is how one news organization, Quartz qz., revealed the 'success' of meat industry influencers to have their way. The big players do throw their weight around... <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Sins of Omission'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :''The meat industry blocked the IPCC’s attempt to recommend a plant-based diet''<br /> <br /> * https://qz.com/ipcc-report-on-climate-change-meat-industry-1850261179<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''A leaked draft revealed how the meat industry is obstructing efforts to curb climate change'''''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''It’s no secret that climate change discourse is shrouded in obfuscation, disinformation, greenwashing and lies, both outright and of omission. But a recent leak of a draft of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released on March 20 has been particularly enlightening when it comes to just how much how delegations negotiate, watered down, and delete scientists’ findings.''<br /> <br /> ''Micheal Thomas, who writes the climate newsletter Distilled, outlined the shift in wording driven by Brazil and Argentina, countries with large and influential beef industries. As Thomas points out, the IPCC report’s authors initially recommended a shift to plant-based diets, stating that “plant-based diets can reduce GHG emissions by up to 50% compared to the average emission-intensive Western diet,” according to a draft leaked by Scientist Rebellion.''<br /> <br /> ''In the published report, the line was changed to “balanced, sustainable healthy diets acknowledging nutritional needs,” skirting a direct mention of beef and dairy, what a sustainable diet actually looks like, or any reference to the Western and largely wealthy countries that should most urgently start eating less meat.''<br /> <br /> ''While Monday’s (March 20th) IPCC report was the result of synthesizing years of research, Brazil and Argentina have been diligently pushing to delete references to “plant-based diets,” meat as a “high-carbon” food, and “Meatless Mondays” for years, according to a previous draft leaked in 2021 and analyzed by Unearthed, Greenpeace’s investigative outlet.''<br /> <br /> ''Climate action within the meat and dairy industries faces substantial economic and political headwinds. The global beef industry was estimated at about $400 billion in 2022, and Brazil and Argentina both have long-standing, powerful beef lobbies who have held positions in government and influenced important climate policy...''<br /> <br /> <br /> And so the beat goes on... money talks. PR is at work... politics and earth-related realities are everyday struggles in an arena of facts -- and spin. <br /> <br /> Call the spin &quot;obfuscation, disinformation, greenwashing and lies&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> More on the 'spin' industry here:<br /> <br /> '''[[Disinformation - Online - Dangerous]]'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Disinformation_-_Online_-_Dangerous<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Fact_Checking<br /> <br /> * https://reporterslab.org/fact-checkers-extend-their-global-reach-with-391-outlets-but-growth-has-slowed/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Nations Agree on Language for Historic Treaty to Protect Ocean Life'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''The United Nations agreement is a significant step toward protecting biodiversity under growing threat from climate change, overfishing and seabed mining''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:High Seas Treaty agreement - March 4 2023.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> March 4, 2023<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/04/climate/united-nations-treaty-oceans-biodiversity.html<br /> <br /> * https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/03/1134157<br /> <br /> <br /> ''After two decades of planning and talks that culminated in a grueling race over the past few days in New York, a significant majority of nations agreed on language for a historic United Nations treaty that would protect ocean biodiversity.''<br /> <br /> ''As marine life faces threats from climate change, overfishing, the possibility of seabed mining and other dangers, the treaty would make it possible to create marine-protected areas and enact other conservation measures on the “high seas,” the immense expanse of ocean covering almost half the world.''<br /> <br /> ''“Today the world came together to protect the ocean for the benefit of our children and grandchildren,” said Monica Medina, an assistant secretary of state. “We leave here with the ability to create protected areas in the high seas and achieve the ambitious goal of conserving 30 percent of the ocean by 2030.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Nations Agree on Language for Historic Treaty to Protect Ocean Life'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: This is historic and a foundation of legal agreement to build on... The text of the High Seas agreement comes after decades of geopolitical negotiating over ocean resources, rights and responsibilities of nations to the protection of oceans and ocean life, and now moves on to the realities of legal enforcement of promises/pledges that have now been memorialized<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Nations agree on ‘world-changing’ deal to protect ocean life'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''More than 190 countries have reached a landmark deal for protecting the biodiversity of the world’s oceans, agreeing for the first time on a common framework for establishing new protected areas in international waters.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/03/05/un-ocean-treaty-high-seas/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Via the Associated Press<br /> <br /> Nichola Clark: “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to protect the oceans — a major win for biodiversity.”<br /> <br /> * https://apnews.com/article/un-oceans-biodiversity-treaty-0b024fa07e8c1947236d8b8491ebf92c<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The treaty will create a new body to manage conservation of ocean life and establish marine protected areas in the high seas. Clark said that’s critical to achieve the U.N. Biodiversity Conference’s recent pledge to protect 30% of the planet’s waters, as well as its land, for conservation.''<br /> <br /> ''Treaty negotiations initially were anticipated to conclude Friday (March 3), but stretched through the night and deep into Saturday. The crafting of the treaty, which at times looked in jeopardy, represents “a historic and overwhelming success for international marine protection,” said Steffi Lemke, Germany’s environment minister.''<br /> <br /> <br /> (Note from GreenPolicy360: Lemke is a member of the German Green Party and one of the co-founders of the Green Party in the GDR in 1989... see more about the Greens, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen who hold a number of top positions in the current German government -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_90/The_Greens)<br /> <br /> <br /> ''“For the first time, we are getting a binding agreement for the high seas, which until now have hardly been protected,” Lemke said. “Comprehensive protection of endangered species and habitats is now finally possible on more than 40% of the Earth’s surface.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The question now is how well the ambitious treaty will be implemented.''<br /> <br /> ''Formal adoption also remains outstanding, with numerous conservationists and environmental groups vowing to watch closely.''<br /> <br /> ''The high seas have long suffered exploitation due to commercial fishing and mining, as well as pollution from chemicals and plastics. The new agreement is about “acknowledging that the ocean is not a limitless resource, and it requires global cooperation to use the ocean sustainably...”''<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/05/high-seas-treaty-agreement-to-protect-international-waters-finally-reached-at-un<br /> <br /> * https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-64839763<br /> <br /> <br /> Via ICUN.org<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''International Union for Conservation of Nature'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''We congratulate the President of the Intergovernmental Conference on Marine Biodiversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction, the secretariat of the UN, and all the state delegates for their efforts.''<br /> <br /> ''“The High Seas Treaty opens the path for humankind to finally provide protection to marine life across vast swathes of the ocean. Its adoption will close a significant gap in international law and offer a framework for governments to work together to protect global ocean heath, climate resilience, and the socioeconomic wellbeing and food security of billions of people. We stand ready to support its implementation,” says IUCN Director General, Dr Bruno Oberle.''<br /> <br /> ''Although more ambitious measures will be needed, this legally-binding agreement marks an important step towards protecting the two-thirds of the ocean that lies beyond national jurisdiction.''<br /> <br /> ''IUCN particularly applauds the alignment of the Treaty with other international commitments including the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, and the creation of a special fund to finance the rehabilitation and ecological restoration of marine biodiversity.''<br /> <br /> ''IUCN and its Members have been advocating for such an agreement for two decades and have been providing scientific and legal advice to negotiators since the start of the formal negotiations (in 2018), in particular on provisions concerning area-based management tools, especially marine protected areas. Commitments must now be implemented in ways that help address climate change and the many threats to marine ecosystems, and guarantee the critical benefits marine ecosystems provide to people.''<br /> <br /> ''IUCN is calling for adoption and ratification to be fast-tracked, to bring the High Seas Treaty into force. The Union is offering its continued support to Parties and stakeholders to lay the foundation for a rapid, effective, and equitable implementation.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''GreenPolicy360: Environmental Law Takes Precedent-Setting Legal Step after Decades of Negotiations'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Future generations will look back this High Seas Treaty and ask why it took so long <br /> <br /> We ask it's time 'to get to work' with enforcement, there is no time for delay<br /> <br /> <br /> The agreement comes 41 years after Ambassador Tommy Koh served as President of the Third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea (known as resolution 2340 (XXII) of 18 December 1967), which led to the United Nations Convention on the Laws of the Sea and now another Singapore Ambassador, Rena Lee, has presided over successful negotiations on the UN high seas treaty.<br /> <br /> <br /> Here are links to the legal documents: '''''Intergovernmental conference on an international legally binding instrument under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction'''''<br /> <br /> '''''Fifth session'''''<br /> <br /> ''New York, 20 February – 3 March 2023''<br /> <br /> ''Further refreshed draft text of an agreement under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction''<br /> <br /> * https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/LTD/N23/057/74/PDF/N2305774.pdf?OpenElement<br /> <br /> * https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N22/467/94/PDF/N2246794.pdf?OpenElement<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''''UN Secretary General António Guterres said on the landmark treaty:'''''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;Our ocean has been under pressure for decades. We can no longer ignore the ocean emergency. In adopting a robust and ambitious agreement at this meeting, you can take an important step forward in countering these destructive trends and advancing ocean health for generations to come. This treaty can ensure the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of over two-thirds of our life-sustaining ocean space.&quot;''<br /> <br /> '''''UN Ambassador for the Oceans and Law of the Sea Issues Rena Lee said:''''' <br /> <br /> ''&quot;Yesterday I mentioned the way forward, we have finish the text of the agreement. We will run through the text for technical edits. The text will then be translated into all six language versions and time to be specified. We will then formally adopt the text in all six official languages of the United Nations.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.jurist.org/news/2023/03/un-high-seas-treaty-agreed-to-by-member-states-to-protect-vast-swathes-of-planets-oceans/<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/nations-secure-un-global-high-seas-biodiversity-pact-2023-03-05/<br /> <br /> * https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/about/news-room/press-releases-and-statements/2023/03/05/pew-welcomes-completion-of-high-seas-treaty<br /> <br /> * https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/04/world/un-oceans-treaty-biodiversity-climate-intl/index.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/what-are-the-high-seas-a-look-at-the-historic-un-ocean-treaty-and-why-it-matters<br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.org/en-us/newsroom/new-high-seas-treaty/<br /> <br /> * https://phys.org/news/2023-03-states-historic-high-seas.html<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.highseasalliance.org/2021/07/21/the-high-seas-treaty-for-life-beyond-the-law/ '''Via the High Seas Alliance''']<br /> <br /> ''There are five main elements to the High Seas Treaty:''<br /> <br /> ''''''Marine Protected Areas (MPAs)'''''<br /> <br /> ''High seas ecosystems, critical to the continuation of life in the ocean, are conserved by the establishment of fully protected, well-managed networks of marine protected areas.<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs)'''''<br /> <br /> ''Any proposed activity on the high seas that may negatively affect marine life is prematurely evaluated by scientists and relevant stakeholders.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Access &amp; Benefit Sharing of Marine Genetic Resources'''''<br /> <br /> ''Developing nations have access to, and are able to benefit from, biological genetic materials discovered on the high seas.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Capacity-Building &amp; Marine Technology Transfer'''''<br /> <br /> ''Developing nations have the capacity, technology, and educational/research opportunities necessary to participate in deep sea science.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Cross-cutting Issues'''''<br /> <br /> ''These are issues that affect a number of elements and are integrated throughout the new agreement.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''ChatGPT talks of 'fighting climate denialism'<br /> <br /> AI/Artificial Intelligence at work here, so the attached is uncredited<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:ChatGPT talks of fighting climate denialism.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;2022&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''December 2022''' &lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Generation Green]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Going Green&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :* https://twitter.com/wonderofscience/status/1603725165375823872<br /> <br /> [[File:Aurora Green 2022.png|link=https://twitter.com/wonderofscience/status/1603725165375823872]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''November 2022''' &lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Another Global Climate Conference, 27th Version'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via Strategic Demands (GreenPolicy360 associate @StrategicDemands.com)<br /> <br /> November 13, 2022<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/another-global-climate-conference-27th-version/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Time Nov 10 2022 COP27.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Climate Summit / COP27 Updates - November 11, 2022'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via NY Times Reporters/Live - On Location<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/11/11/climate/cop27-climate-summit<br /> <br /> * https://time.com/6232753/bad-news-for-the-planet-as-global-carbon-emissions-continue-to-increase/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Global climate conferences and GHG increases.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Time for Planet Citizen Action and a &quot;CEOS&quot;, a Committee on Earth Observation Satellites'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 welcomes the arrival of a global science mission, a &quot;Global Stocktake&quot;, a collection of earth science data to be made available to the community of nations, to planet citizen activists and scientists, educational institutions, non-profits, NGOs, young and old to become tools for legal enforcement of national climate plans &amp; pledges.<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Global Stocktake, the first GST.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Global_Stocktake,_the_first_GST.jpg&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''See GreenPolicy 2021 initiative for Legally Enforcing National Climate Plans'''<br /> <br /> Visit GreenPolicy360's &quot;Climate Plans Enforcement&quot; (Project-in-Dev 2021-2022)<br /> : &quot;Turning National Climate Pledges &amp; Promises into Reality&quot;<br /> <br /> :* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Plans_Enforcement_-_Resources<br /> <br /> :* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Methods_to_enforce_climate_pledges-NDCs_-_Dec_2021.png<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> As the nations of the world send their delegations to the 27th global conference on climate change, COP27, Conference of the Parties gathering in Egypt, and activists/citizens and planet citizens/NGOs and non-profit organizations/public interest groups/educational institutions/media and academics prepare, we at GreenPolicy360 renew our Initiative to 'Turn National Climate Plan Promises &amp; Pledges into Reality'. <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 focuses on using the tools of science and the law, the sharing of 'green best practices' using databases and online networking, to accelerate a full-range of problem identification and effective solutions. <br /> <br /> The broader GreenPolicy360 goal is to work within all political systems, all nations and communities. GreenPolicy360 sees a broad-based approach to problem solving employing the latest technologies and deep funding/financing to empower public and private climate-related and clean energy solutions. We believe a multi-thread approach that is adaptable locally/nationally/culturally will act, in effect, as a [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_New_Deal '''Global Green New Deal''')], providing a critically needed and vital toolkit for [http://www.planetcitizens.org Planet Citizens].<br /> <br /> Now is the time for [http://www.planetcitizen.org '''Planet Citizen'''] climate action.<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Planet Citizen Action]]'''<br /> <br /> '''[[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]'''<br /> <br /> '''[[Climate Problems, Climate Solutions]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎 <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''GreenPolicy360's Campaign to 'Turn National Climate Promises &amp; Pledges into Reality' '''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Our 2021 Climate Plans Enforcement Initiative continues as the 2022 Global Climate Conference approaches, November's Conference of the Parties (COP27)<br /> <br /> :: Drawing from the database of Earth Science resulting from decades of space-based missions designed to provide us with actionable 'Earth-system and Climate-related data'<br /> <br /> ::: Measuring and Monitoring to better manage Earth's Living, Dynamic and Changing Systems, Local, National and Global<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Methods_to_enforce_climate_pledges-NDCs_-_Dec_2021.png ''Methods to Enforce Climate Plan Pledges'']<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Plans_Enforcement_-_Resources ''GreenPolicy360: Climate Plans Enforcement Initiative'']<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:INDC ''Pressuring Nations to Step Up, Cooperate, and Act Now'']<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Environmental_Laws ''Environmental Laws, Regs, Rules... Lawsuits &amp; Legal Actions'']<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Glasgow_Climate_Summit_-_Pledges,_Promises,_Declarations_-_What%27s_Next_Up ''Glasgow (2021) &amp; Paris (2015) Summits: Int'l Climate Plan Pledges &amp; Promises (INDCs-NDCs)'']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth Observing System - fleet of satellites.png]]<br /> <br /> &quot;Earth Observing System&quot;: Decades of Earth Science/Climate Science Data Accessible for Planet Citizen Action<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:EarthRightNow Earth Science satellite fleet circa 2015 m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Earth_Observing_System_-_fleet_of_satellites.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Research_from_Space<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Methane hot spots we're coming to find you, identify you, act to stop you and enforce climate laws''' <br /> <br /> '''&quot;Super emitters&quot;, we have a message for you, you can't hide....'''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''* https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/methane-super-emitters-mapped-by-nasa-s-new-earth-space-mission'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:NASA_has_a_new_mission..._against_Methane.png '''Tracking Methane Emissions by Using Satellite Imaging''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:NASA has a new mission... against Methane.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''October 2022''' &lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;After Hurricane Ian, New Methods of Earth Science to Map Damage and Respond to Disaster and Future Risks -- #DRR&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://theconversation.com/new-satellite-mapping-with-ai-can-quickly-pinpoint-hurricane-damage-across-an-entire-state-to-spot-where-people-may-be-trapped-192078<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:E9731160-8940-4336-88FC-A73490CF3E63.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''September 2022''' &lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Climate News]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''There are 'no easy fixes' in Florida. But could Hurricane Ian's havoc bring a call for better planning?'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via USA Today<br /> <br /> ''Researchers who study flooding, development and climate change were horrified by the emerging images but not surprised. For years, they have warned that sprawling development in Florida and other coastal states wasn't sustainable, especially with the warming climate supercharging hurricane rainfall.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;This is kind of what we had expected for days in advance, and it's still heartbreaking to see so many people stranded,&quot; said Kevin Reed, associate professor in atmospheric science at Stony Brook University...''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;None of this is surprising,&quot; said Linda Shi, an assistant professor in Cornell University's city and regional planning department. &quot;How much does it take for us to want to make a change? Our policies and our choices have led us to this point.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''Reed and colleagues recently published a study looking at all hurricanes during the 2020 season and concluded climate change was adding up to 10% more rain to today's hurricanes. On Thursday, they used the same models to compare Ian's rainfall and concluded it was at least 10% higher than it would have been without the warming climate.'' <br /> <br /> ''&quot;This is one of the clearest indicators of how climate change is impacting storms,&quot; Reed said. It may not seem like a lot, but 2 inches on top of an already large amount of rainfall makes an enormous impact.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> '''''What can Florida learn from Hurricane Ian?'''''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;Mother Nature keeps telling us homes don't belong where we built them, yet we continue to build homes where they don't belong.&quot;'' <br /> <br /> ''&quot;We can’t stop cyclone events or stop the rain from falling, but we can build communities that are better able to withstand these events,” says John Dickson, president of the national Aon Edge Insurance Company. &quot;We need to think about more resilient structure, and we need to make a plan to handle the water and move it away from our people and our families and our property.''<br /> <br /> ''Whether a storm water system is designed for rain that could occur once every 25 years or a rainfall event every 100 years, the system probably would be overwhelmed with rain like Ian's, said Chad Berginnis, executive director for the Association of State Floodplain Managers.''<br /> <br /> ''The state may have to accept the fact that developers will have to build at higher elevations.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ···················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Re: Florida's Flood and Property Insurance Crisis'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — ''As hurricane season approaches, it’s not an understatement to say that water is heading to Florida. However, in addition to the rain and storms coming to the Sunshine State, residents are also likely to see higher flood insurance costs in 2022.''<br /> <br /> Florida has 8,436 miles (13,576 km) of coastline, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the second highest number of shore miles in the U.S. by distance.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ~ The terms “coastline” and “shoreline” are often used interchangeably, but they have different meanings. The coastline of a place is defined as the boundary between the coast and the shore. In other words, a coastline is a big-picture view of the approximate line between the land and the sea. A shoreline is an ever-changing line that marks the specific place where the water and shore meet...<br /> <br /> <br /> TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — ''Halloween isn’t the only scary thing coming up in October for Florida residents. More immediately, the state is going to see rate hikes on flood insurance as the Federal Emergency Management Agency implements a new risk rating system on Oct. 1.''<br /> <br /> ''Flood insurance is a yearly cost to homeowners who use it, and it covers homes in danger of water damage, particularly during storms. For Florida, that’s all year but particularly in hurricane season.''<br /> <br /> Starting on Oct. 1, FEMA is implementing a program update it calls Risk Rating 2.0, which will change the way that flood insurance rates are calculated and charged and could lead to price increases for thousands of homeowners with waterfront properties. The changes coming through the system update are part of FEMA’s 2018-2022 Strategic Plan.''<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://coast.noaa.gov/states/florida.html <br /> <br /> * https://www.wfla.com/news/florida/88-of-florida-homeowners-to-see-higher-flood-insurance-rates/<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Living_coastline<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Ian threatens Florida's already unstable insurance market'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/ian-threatens-floridas-unstable-insurance-market-90658469<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Six Florida property insurance companies were declared insolvent this year, and others are canceling or not renewing policies''''' <br /> <br /> * https://www.axios.com/local/miami/2022/10/03/florida-property-insurance-crisis-litigation<br /> <br /> <br /> ··············<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;More Climate Data:&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''A new federal summary of the globe's climate ... 2021 &quot;State of the Climate&quot; report released Wednesday (Sept. 28).''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;The data presented in this report are clear... compelling scientific evidence that climate change has global impacts and shows no sign of slowing,” said Rick Spinrad, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The report is prepared by NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information, with contributions from scientists around the world.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ~ The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's [https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/ '''6th IPCC'''] report is a &quot;dire warning about the consequences of inaction&quot; on climate change.<br /> <br /> ~ It's not just ecosystems and weather being affected by warming: People are suffering and dying, experts say.<br /> <br /> ~ In North America, human life, safety and livelihood will be at risk from sea-level rise, severe storms and hurricanes, especially in coastal areas.<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/09/30/hurricane-ian-flooded-florida-climate-change/8125673001/<br /> <br /> * https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2022/09/01/report-weather-extremes-climate-change-no-slowing/7949934001/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ·····················<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''August'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''August 24, 2022'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Democrats Designed the Climate Law to Be a Game Changer'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via the NY Times | 08/22/2022<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/22/climate/epa-supreme-court-pollution.html<br /> <br /> <br /> ················································<br /> <br /> <br /> Via E&amp;E News | CLIMATEWIRE <br /> <br /> 08/24/2022 <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''CO2 as a Pollutant'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''''Climate legislation signed into law this month by President Joe Biden bolsters EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases'''''<br /> <br /> '''''In a first, climate law defines CO2 as air pollutant'''''<br /> <br /> ''In enacting a sweeping climate measure, analysts said Biden and congressional Democrats signaled a desire for EPA to tackle greenhouse gas emissions. Firming up EPA’s legal footing also is a boost for an agency that has faced court challenges from conservatives who question EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. That authority rests on '''Massachusetts v. EPA''', a 2007 Supreme Court decision that found the agency is required to regulate CO2 as a pollutant dangerous to public health.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ····························<br /> <br /> <br /> WEEKLY PLANET<br /> <br /> 08/24/2022 / Via The Atlantic<br /> <br /> by Robinson Meyer <br /> <br /> ''While it’s true that [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act_of_2022 the IRA] itself consists almost only of carrots, that is not true of the broader structure of American climate law. There is, in fact, a big “stick” for tackling carbon pollution already on the books in the United States, as well as an agency tasked with wielding that stick. I’m talking about the Clean Air Act and the EPA. And the IRA, by design, strengthens the government’s ability to wield that stick.''<br /> <br /> ''It does this in at least two ways. The first is that the IRA confirms that carbon dioxide is a type of air pollution covered by the Clean Air Act, as initially reported by The New York Times earlier this week.''<br /> <br /> ''This has broader consequences than it might seem. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts v. EPA that carbon dioxide counted as an air pollutant, and that, if the EPA decided that CO2 harmed human health and the environment, it could regulate CO2 under the Clean Air Act. That ruling—and the EPA’s official determination, a few years later, that CO2 is dangerous—has anchored the agency’s climate regulations on cars and trucks, and its proposed rules for the power grid.''<br /> <br /> ''But then in June, the Court circumscribed some of the EPA’s authority over the power grid. Conservative justices have harped on the fact that Congress has never clearly delegated the power to regulate greenhouse gases to the EPA.''<br /> <br /> ''Now it has. The IRA repeatedly defines greenhouse gas as a form of air pollution. It amends several sections of the Clean Air Act to define “greenhouse gas” as encompassing “the air pollutants carbon dioxide, hydrofluorocarbons, methane, nitrous oxide, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride.” In another section, it grants money under the Clean Air Act for any project that “reduces or avoids greenhouse gas emissions and other forms of air pollution.”''<br /> <br /> ''Congress has now clearly spoken: Carbon dioxide is a form of air pollution. And though this will not undo this year’s ruling, it buttresses the EPA’s underlying legal authority to regulate climate pollution.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ············································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''The EPA Just Quietly Got Stronger'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/the-epa-just-quietly-got-stronger/ar-AA112B16<br /> <br /> <br /> ·················································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_greenhouse_gases_under_the_Clean_Air_Act More on CO2 and Greenhouse Gases as Pollutants to be Regulated under Law]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ··················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Your GreenPolicy360 Founder/Siterunner's thoughts:'''<br /> <br /> To the Supreme Court: Here is the exacting and specific language about CO2 and air 'pollutants'<br /> <br /> Over the years, and on our GreenPolicy360 site, I have shared my knowledge of the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air Act, the first era of environmental protection legislation and the first National Climate Act. My long time friend Congressman George E Brown, a principal drafter of enabling legislation during the 1970s/80s/90s, and activist member and a chair of the House of Representative oversight committee of science, technology, and earth science/atmosphereic science space programs, was a mover and shaker who shared with me many of his thoughts and initiatives. Over the years, until his passing in 1999, I learned about the legislation and *the intent* of the legislation that he and his colleagues were drafting. His/their language, for example, the definitions of pollutants, was intended to be broad and expansive. The definition of air pollution in the Clean Air Act, for example, addressed health and safety, and protection of life ... They knew that the science of the day would become more empirically defined as atmospheric and earth science they were setting in motion w NASA/NOAA and USGS missions was supported, funded, launched and reported. The empirical data, as they planned, was collected and analyzed over the years and decades and the scientific case became clearer and clearer. CO2 and other greenhouse gases were impacting air quality and atmospheric disruption was forcing climate change. The U.S. Supreme Court, unfortunately for years, was unable to accept the intent and language of the legislators on this critically important work. Recently, with the '''Massachusetts v. EPA''' 2007 Supreme Court decision and now with the signing of clarifying 2022 legislative language, the climate action work will gather scope and speed at the federal agencies, especially at the EPA.<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:US_Public_Law_95-367.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Environmental_Laws<br /> <br /> <br /> When Congressman Brown drafted originating legislation establishing a '''national climate change research program''' via the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:US_Public_Law_95-367.png National Climate Program Act of 1978], the scientific community and nation were just beginning to awaken to a new national security threat. I remember his concern, our concern. He was trained as a scientist, an engineer, with an ability to see facts and data sets in a way others could not. <br /> <br /> Representative Brown was out in front of &quot;Big Science&quot;. In his decades on the House Science, Space &amp; Technology Committee, he worked to expand the reach of science. He knew that [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:You_can_manage_only_what_you_can_measure_Dr_David_Crisp,_OCO-2,_June_2014_m.jpg good data enabled good policy decisions]. He pressed for first-generation earth science satellites and ongoing earth monitoring missions and data sharing.<br /> <br /> Among his many initiatives, George Brown was a key figure in proposing, establishing, and then saving the [https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/ Landsat program] and its [http://www.nytimes.com/1989/03/02/us/last-civilian-photography-satellites-to-shut-down.html unique 'open-access' database of Earth Science imaging] when President Reagan attempted to shut Landsat down. Landsat was a model for all the following [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Research_from_Space earth science research missions from space] and is now moving into its fifth decade with [http://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/?p=10391 Landsat 9.] <br /> <br /> <br /> Rep. George E. Brown, an activist member and for many years chair of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology<br /> <br /> * https://www.congress.gov/member/george-brown/B000918 (1963-1999)<br /> <br /> * https://science.house.gov/<br /> <br /> * https://science.house.gov/about/history-and-jurisdiction<br /> <br /> <br /> At the beginning of the 'space race', the House Committee on Science and Aeronautics was created by the 85th Congress in 1957 to oversee the newly-created National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The Science and Aeronautics Committee was the first committee since 1892 to be established for an entirely new area of jurisdiction. The committee’s jurisdiction over the years has expanded to include most civilian non-medical scientific research throughout the government, including National space policy, Earth remote sensing policy; Space commercialization, including commercial space activities relating to the Department of Transportation and the Department of Commerce, the National Science Foundation, the Energy Department, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), EPA, NOAA and the Department of Homeland Security. (Informally known as the Science committee, the committee's name was change to the &quot;Committee on Science and Technology&quot; in 1974. At that time, the Committee’s jurisdiction was expanded to include legislation related to energy, the environment, the atmosphere, civil aviation research and development, and the National Weather Service. The Committee on Science and Technology was also given a &quot;special oversight&quot; function providing for exclusive responsibility among all Congressional Standing Committees to review and study, on a continuing basis, all laws, programs and government activities involving Federal non-military research and development. In its early years, the Committee was an important partner in the Apollo Program that led to a man landing on the moon and strengthening science education and scientific research. After the Committee’s role expanded, the Committee has played an important role in much of the legislation Congress has considered dealing with domestic and international science, technology, standards, and competitiveness. In the 112th Congress, Chairman Hall changed the Committee's name to the &quot;Committee on Science, Space and Technology.&quot;<br /> <br /> ''Via Wikipedia / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Brown_Jr.''<br /> <br /> ''Brown was known as a champion for science. He left behind a deep and expansive legacy that has shaped science and science policy in America. Among some of his many accomplishments during his service on the House Science Committee:''<br /> <br /> • ''Established the first federal climate change research program in the [https://www.congress.gov/bill/95th-congress/house-bill/06669 Federal Climate Program Act of 1978]''<br /> <br /> • ''Established the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Science_and_Technology_Policy Office of Science and Technology Policy]''<br /> <br /> • ''Established the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Environmental_Protection_Agency Environmental Protection Agency]''<br /> <br /> • ''Established the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessment Office of Technology Assessment]''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> • http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_movement<br /> <br /> • [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/Can_our_environment_be_saved_George_Brown-Omnibus_Environmental_Bill_1969.pdf George Brown on the Omnibus Environmental Bill, 1969] <br /> <br /> • https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Ethics_and_Climate_Change<br /> <br /> • [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Env_policy_laws_US_'the_beginning'_of_env_era.jpg @GreenPolicy360, 'The beginning of the modern environmental era']<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Env policy laws US 'the beginning' of env era.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Sweeping climate bill pushes American energy to go green'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://apnews.com/article/technology-science-congress-climate-and-environment-f084d23d61ebb068068d4aa92c82fdbb<br /> <br /> Associated Press / August 2022 / Seth Borenstein<br /> <br /> <br /> ''WASHINGTON (AP) — After decades of inaction in the face of escalating natural disasters and sustained global warming, Congress hopes to make clean energy so cheap in all aspects of life that it’s nearly irresistible. The House is poised to pass a transformative bill Friday that would provide the most spending to fight climate change by any one nation ever in a single push...''<br /> <br /> ''The crux of the long-delayed bill, singularly pushed by Democrats in a closely divided Congress, is to use incentives to spur investors to accelerate the expansion of clean energy such as wind and solar power, speeding the transition away from the oil, coal and gas that largely cause climate change.''<br /> <br /> ''The United States has put the most heat-trapping gases into the air, burning more inexpensive dirty fuels than any other country. But the nearly $375 billion in climate incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act are designed to make the already plummeting costs of renewable energy substantially lower at home, on the highways and in the factory. Together these could help shrink U.S. carbon emissions by about two-fifths by 2030 and should chop emissions from electricity by as much as 80%.'' <br /> <br /> ''“This legislation is a true game-changer. It will create jobs, lower costs, increase U.S. competitiveness, reduce air pollution,” said former Vice President Al Gore, who held his first global warming hearing 40 years ago. “The momentum that will come out of this legislation, cannot be underestimated.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The U.S. action could spur other nations to do more — especially China and India, the two largest carbon emitters along with the U.S. That in turn could lower prices for renewable energy globally, experts said.''<br /> <br /> ''Because of the specific legislative process in which this compromise was formed, which limits it to budget-related actions, the bill does not regulate greenhouse gas emissions, but deals mainly in spending, most of it through tax credits as well as rebates to industry, consumers and utilities.''<br /> <br /> ''Investments work better at fostering clean energy than regulations, said Leah Stokes, an environmental policy professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The climate bill is likely to spur billions in private investment, she said: “That’s what’s going to be so transformative.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The bill promotes vital technologies such as battery storage. Clean energy manufacturing gets a big boost. It will be cheaper for consumers to make climate-friendly purchasing decisions. There are tax credits to make electric cars more affordable, help for low-income people making energy-efficiency upgrades and incentives for rooftop solar and heat pumps.''<br /> <br /> ''There are also incentives for nuclear power and projects that aim to capture and remove carbon from the atmosphere...''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The Rhodium Group research firm estimates the bill would dramatically change the arc of future U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, cutting them by 31% to 44% in 2030, compared to what had been shaping up to be 24% to 35% by 2005 without the bill, said Rhodium partner John Larsen. Clean power on the grid, an upcoming Rhodium report says, would jump from under 40% now to between 60% and 81% by 2030, he said.''<br /> <br /> ''“It’s not as big as I want, but it’s also bigger than anything we’ve ever done,″ said Sen. Brian Schatz, a Hawaii Democrat who leads the Senate climate caucus. “A 40% emissions reduction is nothing the U.S. has ever come close to before.″''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''As decisive a change as it is for U.S. policy and emissions, it still does not reach the official U.S. goal of cutting carbon pollution roughly in half by 2030 to achieve net-zero carbon emissions across the economy by 2050.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Republicans, who unanimously opposed the bill in the Senate, say it would add to consumers’ energy costs, with House GOP Whip Steve Scalise claiming it “wastes billions of dollars in Green New Deal slush funds.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''“It’s a mark of shame that it took this long for our political system to react,” said Bill McKibben, a long-time climate activist, adding that it leaves the fossil fuel industry with too much power. “But this will help catalyze action elsewhere in the world; it’s a declaration that hydrocarbons are finally in decline and clean energy ascendant, and that the climate movement is finally at least something of a match for Big Oil.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.congress.gov/117/bills/hr5376/BILLS-117hr5376eas.pdf '''The 730-page bill is here''']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''50+ Years Earlier, Let's take a personal journey to the 1960s and 'Beginnings of Environmental Protection &amp; Climate Science'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;'''&quot;My friend George&quot;'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ::'''[[George E. Brown Jr]]'''<br /> <br /> ::* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/User:Siterunner '''By Steven Schmidt / GreenPolicy360 Siterunner'''] <br /> <br /> As a high school student, I met George Brown in the mid-1960s and we began to work, purposefully and closely, to make [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_protection '''environmental protection'''] a political reality. He changed the direction of my life and was integral to the founding of [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Day_Memories_on_the_50th_Anniversary '''Earth Day in 1971'''] as he helped to set in motion my lifetime of environmental activism. George was looking forward to the 21st century, and especially to the challenges of [https://strategicdemands.com/earth-system-observatory/ '''environmental and earth science programs'''] that he led in Congress for decades, until suddenly he passed away in 1999. George was an amazing man, a visionary who was a mover in the U.S. Congress for four decades, beginning in the 1960s when we began our friendship and work together on a political journey. Let me dedicate this [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr '''GreenPolicy360 page'''] to George E. Brown as both a biography and memorial. George will always be an influencer for me and his work and legacy is key to understanding my generation... <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/1969_beginnings_of_the_modern_environmental_movement.pdf &lt;big&gt;'''Beginnings of the Modern Environmental Movement'''&lt;/big&gt;] <br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:US_Public_Law_95-367.png<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Update: 2022'''<br /> <br /> <br /> :: [[File:US Senate passes 430 billion climate bill.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senate-democrats-fend-off-amendments-430-bln-climate-drug-bill-2022-08-07/&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''August 7, 2022'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Steve Schmidt / GreenPolicy360''': It took 45+ yrs to pass real climate action called for in the 1970s with the first National Climate Act. Our #GreenPolicy360 network thanks Rep George E. Brown, a main mover at the beginning, who'd be smiling now if he were here ... <br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:US_Public_Law_95-367.png <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Five Decades in the Making: Why It Took Congress So Long to Act on Climate'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/07/climate/senate-climate-law.html<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Bookmark Climate Policy @GreenPolicy360'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> * http://bit.ly/GreenPolicy360Climate<br /> <br /> <br /> '''The 2022 'Earth and Politics' US Legislation Carries Forward a Large Vision and Agenda'''<br /> <br /> (Via Axios)<br /> <br /> ''The bill invests roughly $370 billion into initiatives to promote clean energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, likely becoming the most important climate bill in U.S. history.''<br /> <br /> ''It gives tax credits to clean energy technologies, like existing nuclear power plants and advanced nuclear technologies, clean hydrogen, carbon capture and storage as well as wind and solar power.''<br /> <br /> ''It gives buyers who purchase North American-built electric vehicles a up to $7,500 in federal tax credits to encourage the adoption of electric vehicles while jump-starting America's electric vehicle industry.''<br /> <br /> ''It creates a methane fee program to fine corporations that emit the powerful greenhouse gas above federal limits.''<br /> <br /> ''Democrats have said the bill's climate provisions put the U.S. on a path to reduce its carbon emissions by up to 40% based on 2005 levels by 2030.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Oh, Dr. Volts, What's the Latest?'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Recently, there’s been a lot of talk in the energy world about the minerals needed by clean-energy technologies and whether mineral supply problems might pose a threat to the clean-energy transition. <br /> <br /> To hold warming beneath 1.5°C over pre-industrial levels, the world must cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050. To do that, it must radically ramp up production of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, electric vehicles (EVs), electrolyzers for hydrogen, and power lines.<br /> <br /> David (Dr. Volts) Roberts: Volts is a podcast about leaving fossil fuels behind. I've been reporting on and explaining clean-energy topics for almost 20 years<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Minerals used in clean energy technologies ....''' <br /> <br /> * https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions<br /> <br /> <br /> The IEA estimates that a 'concerted effort to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement (2015) would mean a quadrupling of mineral requirements for clean energy technologies by 2040. An even faster transition, to hit [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Net_Zero_Energy_Policy '''net-zero'''] globally by 2050, would require six times more mineral inputs in 2040 than today.'<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Net Zero Energy Policy]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.volts.wtf/p/minerals-and-the-clean-energy-transition<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Minerals used in clean energy technology - circa 2022.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Today, oil giants ExxonMobil and Chevron reported historic profits from the last three months. Exxon made $17.9 billion (not a typo) last quarter, up 273% from the same time last year, while Chevron made $11.6 billion. Exxon’s rate of income was $2,245.62 every second of every day for the past 92 days; Chevron made $1,462.11 per second.''''' <br /> <br /> '''''Together, BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies are expected to announce $60 billion in profits for the past three months. They plan to spend much of the profit not on reinvesting in their businesses, but on stock buybacks, which drives up the price of the stock. (HCR-July 30, 2022)'''''<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Since 2021, Big Oil Has Spent Over $200 Million to Sabotage Climate Action'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/07/28/2021-big-oil-has-spent-over-200-million-sabotage-climate-action-analysis<br /> <br /> July 28, 2022<br /> <br /> ''The oil and gas industry, one of the most powerful corporate forces in American politics, has spent more than $200 million over the past year and a half to stop Congress from slashing carbon emissions as evidence of their catastrophic impact—from deadly heatwaves to massive wildfires—continues to accumulate in stunning fashion.''<br /> <br /> ''That topline estimate of the fossil fuel industry's lobbying outlays and congressional election spending in the U.S. was calculated by Climate Power, which provided its findings exclusively to Common Dreams.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;Democrats took their biggest step ever towards showing that politicians who protect profiteers fleecing Americans at the pump are on the wrong side of history.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''Nearly 80% of the industry's campaign donations during the time period examined went to Republican candidates, according to Climate Power, whose analysis draws on data from OpenSecrets.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ······························································ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Space Stations News'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/the-international-space-station-minus-russia/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Space stations - July 26 2022.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ··························································································································· <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Rhodium Group Report'''<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Has the US Supreme Court Blocked the Path to the 2030 Climate Target?&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> July 1, 2022<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Yesterday, in a 6-to-3 decision in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Supreme Court ruled that EPA does not have the authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions from the power sector through a system-wide mandate to shift from coal-fired power generation toward cleaner sources. The ruling constrains one of the most powerful regulatory tools from the executive branch’s toolbox of regulations to help reduce US greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In light of the decision and amid stalled climate action in Congress, many are now questioning what climate policy options are still left on the table, and whether the US still has the ability to achieve its 2030 climate target of reducing emissions by 50-52% below 2005 levels.''<br /> <br /> ''We find that the Supreme Court’s ruling does not change the game by much. Last fall, Rhodium Group published Pathways to Paris, a comprehensive assessment of a portfolio of federal legislation, regulations, and other actions across all levels of government, which together could put the 2030 target within reach. In this note, we revisit that list of actions and assess the implications of the Supreme Court ruling for the pathway to the 2030 climate target. We find that while the ruling certainly makes the pathway rockier, it hasn’t necessarily put the target out of reach. The silver lining of the ruling is that it has cleared up ambiguities that have plagued power sector GHG emissions regulations for a decade. Going forward, EPA may have more legal certainty and can still leverage other regulatory tools that could drive significant emissions cuts in the power sector and other sectors. However, EPA needs to move fast in order to help achieve the target. Without swift progress on all fronts—including in Congress and across other levels of government—the 2030 target is in jeopardy.''<br /> <br /> '''''What West Virginia v. EPA does and doesn’t do'''''<br /> <br /> ''The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in West Virginia v. EPA rules that EPA does not have the authority under section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act to regulate emissions from the power sector at a system-wide level. While the ruling certainly limits regulatory pathways to reducing emissions and removes one of the more efficient and low-cost regulatory options, the decision was also not the worst-case scenario for EPA’s ability to regulate emissions that many had feared. The ruling does not entirely revoke EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, nor does it state that EPA can’t regulate GHG emissions from power plants. EPA still has the authority to regulate emissions at the point source or individual power plant level—what’s often referred to as “inside the fence line” of the facility, as opposed to “outside the fence line” or a systems-based approach, which is now off-limits under the ruling.''<br /> <br /> ''One consolation from the ruling is that it potentially clears up legal ambiguities that have plagued power sector emissions regulations for a decade. EPA may have more certainty about the rules of the regulatory road and how to regulate emissions from point sources. The Supreme Court made it clear that if EPA wants to regulate emissions from point sources, it can only consider emissions-control measures at the source. This is the same approach that EPA has used for an array of other pollutants over the 50+ year history of the Clean Air Act. Indeed, it’s the same approach EPA has used in setting GHG standards for new power plants as well as one of the three building blocks in the Obama EPA’s Clean Power Plan. While the ruling means that some regulatory options are now off-limits, it also means that EPA now knows that it can leverage existing emissions-control technologies to drive significant emissions cuts in the power sector, such as carbon capture and fuel blending. Some of these options may cost more than a system-wide approach and may result in fewer co-benefits like reduced local air pollution, but all of that will depend on how EPA ultimately chooses to exercise its clarified authority and what other conventional pollutant regulations it pursues.''<br /> <br /> '''''What the ruling means for the 2030 climate target'''''<br /> <br /> ''In light of the ruling, and especially as federal climate legislation is currently stalled in Congress, many are now questioning what regulatory options and other climate policy options are still left on the table, and whether the US still has the ability to achieve its 2030 climate target of reducing emissions by 50-52% below 2005 levels.''<br /> <br /> ''In order to answer those questions, we revisit '''Pathways to Paris'''...''' ''(see the updated June 2022 Pathway report linked below)'' <br /> <br /> <br /> Read the full July 1, 2022 Rhodium Group report analyzing the impacts of the Supreme Court's West Virginia v. EPA decision<br /> <br /> * https://rhg.com/research/supreme-court-2030-climate-target/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> _________________________________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Progress on the Pathway to Paris?'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> June 2022<br /> <br /> <br /> ''It’s been nearly a year and a half since President Biden entered office and made addressing climate change one of his administration’s top priorities. Pledging to take a whole-of-government approach to the problem, Biden built out a climate team inside the White House and promptly set an ambitious target to reduce US greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to 50-52% below 2005 levels by 2030. Congress also prioritized addressing climate change, first with key infrastructure investments and then with the House of Representatives passing over $500 billion in climate and clean energy spending through budget reconciliation. In addition, 24 states have adopted the same 2030 target or have comparable targets in place.''<br /> <br /> ''Last fall, Rhodium Group published Pathways to Paris, a comprehensive assessment of a portfolio of policy actions that the US can take to put the 2030 climate target within reach. In that report, we found that no single action taken by any single part of the US federal system is sufficient. Instead, joint action consisting of a steady stream of legislation, regulations, and other activities across all levels of government can put the 2030 target within reach. In this note, we revisit the list of actions we considered and assess progress on each. We find that while some movement has occurred on some fronts, most big-ticket items have yet to get started or are still under deliberation in Congress. Without ramped-up action across the board in the very near future, it will be increasingly difficult to envision a pathway to the 2030 target.''<br /> <br /> '''''Nearly 18 months of a whole-of-government approach to climate change'''''<br /> <br /> ''When President Biden entered office, he made climate change a top priority, more so than any other president before him. Coming after the Trump administration’s systematic dismantling of climate and clean energy initiatives, the Biden administration has taken hundreds of actions to undo the damage and reverse regulatory rollbacks. The high-caliber appointments of Gina McCarthy and John Kerry as the first-ever National Climate Advisor and Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, respectively, sent a strong signal that the President was taking the climate challenge seriously. With unified government, there was hope of ambitious and swift congressional action on investments in decarbonization.''<br /> <br /> ''Now, nearly 18 months in, the administration has set ambitious goals on everything from offshore wind deployment to ramping up electric vehicle sales, cutting global methane emissions, and achieving a 100% clean electricity grid. Regulatory actions to rein in greenhouse gasses are moving forward in a few key sectors. Congress passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) which contained several multi-billion dollar investments in emerging clean technologies and clean infrastructure. The administration has also taken key steps to help achieve long-term decarbonization goals, including standing up a Buy Clean Task Force to use the federal government’s purchasing power to help clean up heavy industry, and committing the federal government to increased sustainability targets. Critically, the administration has emphasized environmental justice across agencies and started initiatives to address disproportionate climate and environmental impacts in disadvantaged communities.''<br /> <br /> ''Subnational actions also have the potential to accelerate and amplify emission reductions catalyzed by federal actions and, in some instances, deliver tons that the federal government can’t easily reach. States have kept a steady drumbeat setting ambitious climate targets to help do their part to achieve climate targets, especially during the federal inaction of the Trump administration. And we’ve seen several states step up climate action in key sectors in recent months as well.''<br /> <br /> ''However, at the same time, the $555 billion in climate spending in the Build Back Better Act (BBBA) that passed the House in November remains in Senate deliberation limbo. Congress, states and the White House aren’t tackling climate change in a vacuum but instead are dealing with a host of other challenges. The country is in the midst of the ongoing pandemic, once-in-a-generation inflation, sky-high energy prices, a war in Europe, and ongoing supply chain disruptions—all of which at best distract from additional climate action and at worst may lead to actions that could run counter to long-term climate goals.''<br /> <br /> ''In '''Pathways to Paris''', we found that without any new climate action, the US is not on track to meet its 2030 target of reducing emissions 50-52% below 2005 levels. With no additional action, emissions stay roughly flat, getting to 17-25% below 2005 levels in 2030 (reflecting the uncertainty around energy prices, technology costs, and carbon removal from natural and working lands). This leaves an emissions gap of 1.7-2.3 billion metric tons between current policy and the 2030 target. To fill that gap, we developed a “joint action” scenario— congressional passage of the IIJA and BBBA, alongside regulations and other executive branch actions and supplemented with subnational action in climate-leader states. All together, this scenario would achieve an emission reduction of 45-51% below 2005 levels—putting the 2030 target of a 50-52% reduction within reach...''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Read the full Rhodium Group report on US climate promises kept and unkept, a follow on to the international Paris climate agreement of 2015.<br /> <br /> * https://rhg.com/research/progress-on-the-pathway-to-paris/<br /> <br /> <br /> ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS News re West Virginia v EPA Decision.pdf]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/SCOTUS_News_re_West_Virginia_v_EPA_Decision.pdf &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''West Virginia v EPA'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> : Click [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/SCOTUS_News_re_West_Virginia_v_EPA_Decision.pdf '''Here'''] for a scan of news/commentary and opinion re the June 30, 2022 decision<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:ClimateNews 360.jpg]] <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:SCOTUS EPA decision - June 30 2022.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/SCOTUS_News_re_West_Virginia_v_EPA_Decision.pdf]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎 <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Environmental laws in US - Supreme Court votes soon.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:WV v EPA SCOTUS poll - June 27 2022 before court decision.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Republican Drive to Tilt Courts Against Climate Action'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Court Picks, Leonard Leo, Federalist Society, Political Action Committee Money, Concord Fund, Republican Attorneys General Association Combination'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''A U.S. Supreme Court environmental case being decided this month is the product of a coordinated, multiyear strategy by Republican attorneys general and conservative allies'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/19/climate/supreme-court-climate-epa.html<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ·························································································································· <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> June 2022 / Global Climate Action - Oceans are key to cliamte policy planning<br /> <br /> ::::[[File:Oceans and Climate Change - DeCaprio July 2022.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ······················<br /> <br /> <br /> May 20, 2022<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''HSBC's Stuart Kirk: &quot;Why investors need not worry about climate risk&quot;'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Last week, the global head of responsible investments for HSBC Asset Management, Stuart Kirk, made a provocative presentation titled “Why investors need not worry about climate risk” at a Financial Times event in London.''<br /> <br /> ''Describing climate risk as a problem in the far-off future, Mr. Kirk said, “Climate change is not a financial risk that we need to worry about,” adding, “Who cares if Miami is six meters underwater in 100 years?”''<br /> <br /> ''Subsequently, Kirk is shown the door...''<br /> <br /> <br /> Watch: <br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfNamRmje-s<br /> <br /> <br /> '''More from Kirk'''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;What bothers me about this one [climate change] is the amount of work here people make me do … the amount of regulation coming down the pipes, the number of people in my team and at HBSC dealing with the financial risk from climate change.&quot;'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ''“I don’t doubt the science.”'' <br /> <br /> ''&quot;To bend the arc of fossil fuels down and the arrow of renewables up, we need to follow the activists who are imploring us to elect leaders that will enact improved regulation.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''&quot;For most companies with stranded assets, and even for tech, their valuation does not take into effect anything after 20 years.&quot; The &quot;average loan length [at HSBC] is six years,&quot; he continued. &quot;What happens in year seven is irrelevant to our loan book.&quot;''<br /> <br /> (Ed: Noting that, according to the New York Stock Exchange, the average holding period of shares is measured in months, down from a peak of eight years in the late 1950s. Clearly, investors’ time horizons don’t match planetary boundaries (nor do their discount rates). The mid- and long-term horizon is critical to the next generation, but not to today's investors.)<br /> <br /> <br /> Comments:<br /> <br /> 'Let's just adapt - Not'<br /> <br /> * https://www.professionaladviser.com/news/4050172/moral-money-editor-pa-sister-title-hits-kirk-climate-risk-speech<br /> <br /> <br /> 'From Pensions &amp; Investments | Re: ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance movement)<br /> <br /> * https://www.pionline.com/esg/hsbcs-suspended-banker-taken-task-key-architect-esg <br /> <br /> <br /> 'NY Times Business'<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/23/business/stuart-kirk-hsbc-climate-change.html<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ····························································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Brazil Amazon deforestation - circa 2022.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ··························<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''April 22, 2022'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Earth Day'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[Planet Citizens]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[EarthPOV]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth Day 2022 - Act up.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> • https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Day_Memories_on_the_50th_Anniversary<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ······························································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:ESA Living Planet Symposium - May 2022.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:National Climate Pledges Must Be Enforced.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''GreenPolicy360: Climate Plans Enforcement Project'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Plans_Enforcement_-_Resources<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ·······························································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''New Record CO2 Highs'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Mauna Loa CO2 - April 2022.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::·························································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Daniel Yergen talks oil-gas-fracking-energy-renewables... war and geopolitics.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''War, Security Policy, Energy, Oil/Gas and the Future'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> March 22, 2022<br /> <br /> <br /> (Excerpt from Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Daniel Yergin)<br /> <br /> '''''How Energy Markets Are Shaping Putin’s Invasion — and the World'''''<br /> <br /> '''''Gas prices are spiking. The economic historian Daniel Yergin explains what that means for geopolitics, as well as climate change'''''<br /> <br /> ''... Energy policy is foreign policy. It always has been. But it particularly is right now. It’s widely believed that Vladimir Putin timed both his 2014 invasion of Crimea and his 2022 invasion of Ukraine around tight energy markets. It’s thought that he thought, maybe rightly, that he’d have the most leverage to act when Europe was most dependent on Russian oil and gas and when leaders everywhere feared the domestic turmoil that higher energy prices could bring.''<br /> <br /> ''The reverse theory was an operation, too. In a decision that now looks naïve, Germany’s Angela Merkel thought that integrating Russia into Europe through the energy trade might smooth the road to peace, giving Russia too much to lose if it considered doing something like, well, what it’s doing right now. All that is to say, to understand this war, to understand this moment, to understand this world, you need to understand global energy production and global energy markets.<br /> You need to understand why a war in Ukraine raises gasoline prices in California. You need to know why the fact that America produces more energy than it needs, the fact that we got to that much vaunted, much desired energy independence, doesn’t actually make us energy independent. It doesn’t actually protect us from disruptions half a world away. And in the bigger, broader sense, we need to think hard about what all of this domestic sensitivity and turmoil around the price of the pump means for the always looming threat of climate change. How do you decarbonize in a world where people care more about the price of fossil fuels today than about the devastating consequences their use will bring tomorrow?''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Daniel_Yergen_talks_oil-gas-fracking-energy-renewables..._war_and_geopolitics.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/22/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-daniel-yergin.html<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Oil profits and US gas prices.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ''The largest oil and gas companies made a combined $174bn in profits in the first nine months of the year as gasoline prices climbed in the US, according to a new report.''<br /> <br /> ''The bumper profit totals, provided exclusively to the Guardian, show that in the third quarter of 2021 alone, 24 top oil and gas companies made more than $74bn in net income. From January to September, the net income of the group, which includes Exxon, Chevron, Shell and BP, was $174bn.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/dec/06/oil-companies-profits-exxon-chevron-shell-exclusive<br /> <br /> <br /> ················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Global Response to the Invasion of Ukraine'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''Countries across the world work to push back against war in Ukraine'''<br /> <br /> ::'''Humanitarian crisis as political negotiations and diplomacy end'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''It is a new moment in global history, one in which businesses and economic pressure are being enlisted to protect democracy, rather than undermine it.'' <br /> <br /> -- Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, March 3, 2022 <br /> <br /> :* https://substack.com/profile/4875576-heather-cox-richardson<br /> <br /> <br /> :::[[File:UN General Assembly Vote - March 2 2022.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Rebecca Solnit writes of a new context... digital cyberwarfare and disinformation politics'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/02/time-to-confront-trump-putin-network<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''January 29, 2022'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Will Diplomacy Work to find a 'Mutual Security' Solution for Russia, Ukraine, Europe, US, NATO and the World?'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:StratDem Proposed Russia-Ukraine Fix.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''More Than Oil &amp; Gas'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Oil/gas and energy conflicts, petropolitics and the petrodollar, continue to impact environmental and global security <br /> <br /> ''“If we got another storm this year, like Uri in 2021, the grid would go down again,” said Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&amp;M University. “This is still a huge risk for us.”''<br /> <br /> ''Now, a recent study shows that electricity blackouts can be avoided across the nation — perhaps even during intense weather events — by switching to 100 percent clean and renewable energy, such as solar, wind and water energy.''<br /> <br /> ''“Technically and economically, we have 95 percent of the technologies we need to transition everything today,” said Mark Jacobson, lead author of the paper and professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University. Wind, water and solar already account for about one fifth of the nation’s electricity, although a full transition in many areas is slow.''<br /> <br /> ''The study showed a switch to renewables would also lower energy requirements, reduce consumer costs, create millions of new jobs and improve people’s health.''<br /> <br /> ''For years, some have expressed skepticism about the viability of large-scale adoption of renewables, owing it to their costs. But Dessler said that while solar was an expensive energy source 10 years ago, it is one of the cheapest today.''<br /> <br /> ''“A lot of people’s understanding of renewable energy is extremely out of date,” said Dessler, who was not involved in the research.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/02/20/texas-energy-winter-renewable-jacobson-dessler-rogan/<br /> <br /> <br /> ···································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''On the Last Day of 2021'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Ready for 2022? [https://twitter.com/hashtag/ActOnClimate #ActonClimate] Today &amp; Every Day'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:School strike week 176.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ··························································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> :'''One swing vote U.S. Senator attempts to kill the U.S. Climate Plan'''<br /> <br /> :[[File:Manchin, one Senator, acts to kill BBB and US climate plan - Dec 19 2021.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> <br /> ···································································<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Waste and Pollution: Global Challenge'''<br /> <br /> ''Approximately 8 million metric tons of plastic waste enters the world's oceans each year. If such practices continue, plastic waste could reach up to 53 million metric tons '''per year''' by the end of the decade.&quot; -- EE News, December 2021''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Plastic_Pollution<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ··································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''November 2021'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Infrastructure Bill and Climate Resilience - A Step Forward.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ···································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:NASA test mission to protect earth from asteroid - Nov 2021.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists, Preserving &amp; Protecting the Home Planet Earth'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: The original Mission Statement of the newly launched U.S. space program spoke of our planet and our responsibilities. GreenPolicy360's founder was fortunate, beginning in the 1960s, to listen to [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr Congressman Brown Congressman George E. Brown] point to the NASA plan and explain how he saw Congress put into action the reality of a multi-year, coordinated, multi-agency program to achieve mission goals. Earth science, measuring and monitoring Earth's life-enabling systems was given highest priority. Landsat's program was set in motion as a decades long, first-ever digital scanning remote satellites data collecting study. An array of satellites began to launch, creating and combining the expanding resources of NASA, USGS, NOAA, and an array of educational and scientific institutions and aeronautics business.<br /> <br /> The overall goal, Representative Brown would continue to explain in his Congressional Science, Space &amp; Technology leadership roles over the decades, was to understand, preserve and protect our planet as we, humanity, develop the science to look beyond the Earth and study 'the heavens'.<br /> <br /> Here's to '''[[George E. Brown Jr]]''' and the many visionaries, thinkers and doers who have carried on '''preserving and protecting''' our home planet.<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Asteroid Watch JPL.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ·····················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''Time to act to make a difference''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:COP26 in GLASGOW - 31 OCT-12 NOV 2021.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''International climate negotiations in Glasgow, Scotland'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://ukcop26.org/ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth Summit 1992.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Remembering the First Earth Summit'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 Siterunner: Thirty years ago and now I'm older and looking back at the first &quot;Earth Summit&quot; that led to the first global 'Conference of the Parties'. My reports to the Environmental News Service (ENS) picked up on the green, environmental platform planks I was also adding to the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Jerry_w_Steve_%2792_pres_campaign_at_the_Dem_plat_hearing_m.jpg '''Platform in Progress'''] for California Governor Jerry Brown's presidential campaign. The first Earth Summit and Governor Brown's energetic efforts both moved a vital, forward-looking vision and both encountered myriad obstacles from powers-that-be and business-as-usual. The obstacles didn't stop before or after 1992. The work continued on and continues to today... November 2021, fifty years on...<br /> <br /> I'm now remembering and picking up and continuing the threads of Representative [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr '''George E. Brown's work] '''to advance climate science, beginning in earnest with the first [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:US_Public_Law_95-367.png '''National Climate Act of 1978'''] and establishment of the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:1977_from_the_Office_of_Science_and_Technology_Policy.jpg '''Office of Science and Technology Policy'''] to push what was called a &quot;big science, earth science&quot; agenda with the first generation of [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Science '''focused earth studies and science'''], [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:You_can_manage_only_what_you_can_measure_Dr_David_Crisp,_OCO-2,_June_2014_m.jpg '''measuring and monitoring'''] [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/The_Commons ''' 'the Commons' '''], [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Atmospheric_Science '''earth's atmosphere'''], natural resources (e.g., [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Landsat_data_users_handbook '''Landsat's start up'''] and a [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Research_from_Space '''deep, multi-decade array of NASA/NOAA/USGS missions'''] that have now continued for half a century.<br /> <br /> A tip of our GreenPolicy360 hat to [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_Citizens '''#PlanetCitizens'''] and [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_Citizens,_Planet_Scientists '''#PlanetCitizensPlanetScientists'''.]<br /> <br /> Here's to '''Opportunity for Citizen Activism''' <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ·····················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:COP26 Climate Summit concludes.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''November 13, 2021'''''<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''At COP26, nations agree to speed climate action, but world remains off target'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Exhausted negotiators from nearly 200 nations struck a deal Saturday intended to propel the world toward more urgent climate action, without offering the transformative breakthrough scientists say must happen if humanity is to avert catastrophic warming.''<br /> <br /> * https://apple.news/ASwRW5wCNRQCW6HrV8a1lUQ<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> : [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Atmospheric_Science '''#AtmosphericScience'''] [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Science '''#EarthScience'''] [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Strategic_Demands '''#StrategicDemands'''] [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Planet_Citizens,_Planet_Scientists '''#PlanetCitizensPlanetScientists'''] <br /> <br /> <br /> :: * https://fb.watch/9bvqr4CFSJ/<br /> <br /> ::: * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Gavin_in_Glasgow_-_Nov_10_2021.png<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Gavin in Glasgow - Nov 10 2021.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''October 2021'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> October 31, 2021<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Time for a Planet Update - Oct 31 2021.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[PlanetCitizen]]<br /> <br /> [[Planet Citizens]]<br /> <br /> [[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> <br /> [[EarthPOV]]<br /> <br /> [[Earth Right Now]]<br /> <br /> [[Earth Science Vital Signs]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ······························································· <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Fossil Fuels Production Soars'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://productiongap.org/2021report/<br /> <br /> * https://www.newstatesman.com/chart-of-the-day/2021/10/how-the-world-is-on-course-for-failure-on-climate-change<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Production Gap - productiongap.org.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Production Gap - fossil fuel production continues soaring - 2021 report.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Production Gap - UN report on fossil fuel production.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Private Equity Funds, Sensing Profit in Tumult, Are Propping Up Oil'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/climate/private-equity-funds-oil-gas-fossil-fuels.html<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ····························································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> October 20, 2021<br /> <br /> NYT<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''How a Single Senator Derailed Biden's Climate Plan'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : ''The Centerpiece of the president's environmental agenda has fallen apart because of the objections of a single senator.''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Manchin kills the Biden climate plan.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ····························································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Does one West Virginia coal-state Senator kill the US plan to confront the #ClimateCrisis'''''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/20/podcasts/the-daily/joe-biden-climate-plan-joe-manchin.html <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Disabling... one week before the start of the international climate summit... the US climate response model intended to provide a guide for global nation-by-nation #ClimateAction''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''History will tell the story of Senator Manchin''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''The 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow on 31 October - 12 November 2021'''''<br /> <br /> * https://ukcop26.org/ <br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Planet Plan B - for Senator Manchin.jpg]]<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/16/climate/democrats-carbon-tax-climate.html<br /> <br /> <br /> ····························································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:ThinBlueLayer - October 13 2021.jpg]]<br /> <br /> : &lt;small&gt;[[Look at how thin our atmosphere is]]&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;''' 'The most profound experience' '''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> -- William Shatner<br /> <br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/13/william-shatner-speech-to-jeff-bezos-after-blue-origin-launch.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/video/2021/10/13/so-important-for-everyone-to-have-this-experience-shatner-says-after-suborbital-space-flight.html<br /> <br /> <br /> Shatner: '' “Everybody in the world needs to do this. Everybody in the world needs to see ... it was unbelievable.”<br /> <br /> ''“I mean, the little things, the weightlessness, and to see the blue color whip by and now you’re staring into blackness. That’s the thing. This covering of blue is this sheet, this blanket, this comforter of blue around that we have around us. We think ‘oh, that’s blue sky’ and suddenly you shoot through it all of a sudden, like you whip a sheet off you when you’re asleep, and you’re looking into blackness – into black ugliness. And you look down, there’s the blue down there, and the black up there, and there is Mother Earth and comfort and – is there death? Is that the way death is?”''<br /> <br /> ''... “It was so moving to me. This experience; it was something unbelievable. Yeah, weightlessness, my stomach went out, this was so weird, but not as weird as the covering of blue – this is what I never expected. It’s one thing to say “oh the sky ... and it’s fragile,” it’s all true. But what isn’t true, what is unknown, until you do [go to space] is this pillow, there’s this soft blue. Look at the beauty of that color. And it’s so thin and you’re through it in an instant. How thick is it? Is it a mile?”''<br /> <br /> ... ''“What you’ve given me is the most profound experience I can imagine. I am so filled with emotion about what just happened. It’s extraordinary. I hope I never recover from this. I hope that I can maintain what I feel now, I don’t want to lose it. It’s so much larger than me and life; it hasn’t got anything to do with the little green and blue orb. It has to do with the enormity and the quickness and the suddenness of life and death. Oh my god, it’s unbelievable.”''<br /> <br /> Bezos: ''“It’s so beautiful.”''<br /> <br /> Shatner: ''“Beautiful, yes, beautiful in it’s way but.”''<br /> <br /> Bezos: ''“No, I mean your words. It’s just amazing.”''<br /> <br /> Shatner: ''“I can’t even begin to express ... what I would love to do is to communicate as much as possible is the jeopardy. The moment you see the vulnerability of everything; it’s so small. This air, which is keeping us alive, is thinner than your skin. It’s a sliver; it’s immeasurably small when you think in terms of the universe. It’s negligible, this air. Mars doesn’t have any, nothing. I mean, when you think of when carbon dioxide changes to oxygen and what is 20% that sustains our life? It’s so thin.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;font color=blue&gt;○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○&lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Green New Deal - Strategic Demands - Oct 1, 2021.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Planet Citizens]]<br /> <br /> [[Look at how thin our atmosphere is]]<br /> <br /> [[New Definitions of National Security]]<br /> <br /> [[Earth Science Vital Signs]]<br /> <br /> [[Green New Deal]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''September 2021'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Landsat 9 Launches - 1.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Landsat 9 Launches - 2.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Landsat band imagery.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Landsat'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Inventing multispectral imaging of Earth<br /> <br /> Creating earth science observations from space<br /> <br /> * http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Landsat_data_users_handbook<br /> <br /> <br /> [[LANDSAT and Virginia Tower Norwood]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Virginia Tower Norwood: Planet Citizen, Earth Science Hero'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/LANDSAT_and_Virginia_Tower_Norwood<br /> <br /> <br /> Landsat was a model for all the following [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Research_from_Space earth science research missions from space] and is now moving into its fifth decade with [http://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/?p=10391 Landsat 9.] <br /> <br /> * https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/landsat-9<br /> <br /> * https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0034425720303382?dgcid=coauthor#f0005<br /> <br /> * https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/landsat-1-3/landsat-1<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Research_from_Space<br /> <br /> <br /> ····························································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:President Joe Biden at the UN - Sept 2021.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''U.S. President speaks of pressing national and global challenges faced by today's generation'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;GreenPolicy360: Our &quot;intergenerational&quot; responsibility begins to be recognized, acknowledged and acted upon&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ''In his first address to the United Nations General Assembly as president, President Joe Biden said the coronavirus pandemic, climate change and other threats present world leaders with a stark choice at &quot;the dawning of what must be a decisive decade for our world.&quot;''<br /> <br /> * https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/sep/21/un-speech-joe-biden-calls-collective-action-climat/<br /> <br /> <br /> ''&quot;We’re challenged by urgent and looming crises, wherein lie enormous opportunities, if we can summon the will and resolve to seize these opportunities,&quot; Biden said Sept. 21.''<br /> <br /> ''Biden addressed protecting the rights of women, nuclear disarmament, expanding individual liberty, and reducing global hunger, casting the U.S. as focused on diplomacy and partnerships.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;We are not seeking a new cold war, or a world divided into rigid blocs,&quot; Biden said. &quot;The United States is ready to work with any nation that steps up and pursues peaceful resolution to shared challenges, even if we have intense disagreement in other areas, because we'll all suffer the consequences of our failure.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''On climate change, &quot;the scientists and experts are telling us we are fast approaching a point of no return.&quot;'''''<br /> <br /> ''Biden’s words about &quot;approaching a point of no return&quot; reflects the broad concern that the world is unlikely to be able to keep global warming to within the 1.5 degrees Celsius target of the Paris Agreement.''<br /> <br /> ''If the Paris Agreement targets are to be met, there may be very few years left for policy makers to start cutting emissions. Here we calculate by what year, at the latest, one has to take action to keep global warming below the 2 K target (relative to pre-industrial levels) at the year 2100 with a 67 % probability; we call this the point of no return (PNR).''<br /> <br /> * https://esd.copernicus.org/articles/9/1085/2018/ <br /> <br /> <br /> ''In a landmark report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released Aug. 9, 234 authors relying on more than 14,000 studies stated that &quot;it is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land.&quot;''<br /> <br /> * https://www.ipcc.ch/assessment-report/ar6/ <br /> <br /> * https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/08/09/ipcc-climate-report-global-warming-greenhouse-gas-effect/<br /> <br /> <br /> ··········································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Got to Get Your Priorities Straight'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''''' &quot;Cutting defense spending in a pandemic and climate change era&quot; '''''<br /> <br /> ''Expert observers of US military spending provide their views on bringing a measure of sanity to the ever-expanding defense budgets'' <br /> <br /> * https://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/0053_defense-comparison<br /> <br /> * https://thebulletin.org/premium/2021-09/introduction-can-we-make-overspending-on-the-military-politically-costly/<br /> <br /> <br /> 1) ''Many of the least usable and most dangerous systems in the US military involve nuclear weapons, whose entire rationale revolves around their not being employed. I spoke with Tom Collina, director of policy at the Ploughshares Fund, about his efforts, in concert with former Defense Secretary William Perry, to eliminate or at least delay the proposed replacement of the US fleet of intercontinental ballistic missiles with a new set of nuclear-tipped missiles known as the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent. It’s a program with a total life-cycle cost that could exceed $260 billion, and many experts feel the new missiles are unneeded to deter other nuclear powers from attacking the United States and are also, in fact, uniquely destabilizing and dangerous. As Collina notes, Congress shows no inclination to rein in the GBSD program or seriously question its utility.''<br /> <br /> 2) ''In the piece for the current Bulletin of Atomic Sciences issue, “The United States needs to cut military spending and shift money to two pressing threats: pandemics and climate change,” Mandy Smithberger of the Project On Government Oversight details a litany of egregious Pentagon spending disasters, some of which were shocking even to me (John Mecklin, Bulletin Editor in Chief), a veteran observer of the many creative ways in which governments waste money. (I guess “spending $46 billion on programs that were ultimately cancelled” will have that effect, no matter how hardened the journalist.) The first line of Smithberger’s article is, I think, a wise statement of the most important lesson of this era: “The last year has made one fact quite clear: Spending huge amounts of money on defense has little to no impact on whether a country will be able to effectively protect its people and its economy from a pandemic.”''<br /> <br /> 5) ''Lawrence Korb knows a thing or two about defense spending; he was an assistant secretary of defense from 1981 through 1985, during which time he administered some 70 percent of the US defense budget. His disappointment with the unrestrained defense budget that President Biden presented this year is detailed and palpable. “The budget President Biden has embraced is higher in real terms than what the United States was spending during the Reagan administration and the Korean and Vietnam wars,” Korb writes. “Although I think it unlikely that Biden will present a defense budget next year that makes him our next liberal president, I certainly hope—at a time when a pandemic and climate change demand American attention and funding—that he does.” ''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Time to Profoundly Shift Our National Security Priorities'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/New_Definitions_of_National_Security<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ··············································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''What Happens in the North Doesn't Stay in the North'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''It's All Connected'''<br /> <br /> '''''Ben See (@ClimateBen) Tweeted:'''''<br /> <br /> '''''Hardly anybody on Earth knows that the Arctic is warming 3 to 4 times faster than the rest of the planet as its sea ice is destroyed during the abrupt climate change event of 20th/21st century capitalism. Radical action is required now in 2021. Nobody will be immune to this.''''' <br /> <br /> * https://t.co/MtYdR0FL47<br /> <br /> * https://twitter.com/ClimateBen/status/1433793113252941827/photo/1<br /> <br /> <br /> ····························<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''August 2021'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ::::[[File:Do we feel lucky.JPG]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Unprecedented report - IPCC Aug-9-2021.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:IPCC report August 9-2021 (1).jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:IPCC report August 9-2021 (2).jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> * https://www.ipcc.ch/ <br /> <br /> * https://bit.ly/IPCCLIVE<br /> <br /> * https://www.ipcc.ch/2021/08/05/press-conference-details-wgi-ar6/<br /> <br /> <br /> ···························································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Gulf Stream in Critical Danger'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Consequences of Gulf Stream Collapse Would Be Catastrophic'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Click on the following PDF for links to Google 'Gulf Stream in Danger' News articles&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* '''https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/Gulf_Stream_in_Critical_Danger.pdf'''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation - Gulf Stream - Aug 2021.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ····························<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::::[[File:Energy Imbalance, Climate Change - Aug 1 2021.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''July 2021'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Space Tourism and emission-climate questions - July 20, 2021.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ::[[File:Space Tourism to Accelerate Climate Change - Nature article Oct 2010.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Article Published / 2010<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Scientists predict that soot from commercial space flight will change global temperatures.'''''<br /> <br /> “There are fundamental limits to how much material human beings can put into orbit without having a significant impact.” <br /> <br /> * https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010GeoRL..3724810R/abstract<br /> <br /> * https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010GeoRL..3724810R/references<br /> <br /> * https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010GeoRL..3724810R/similar<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ··········································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Tesla launches its own virtual power plan'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Linking up Powerwalls to create a power grid'''<br /> <br /> * https://electrek.co/2021/07/16/tesla-launches-virtual-power-plant-powerwalls-help-california-grid<br /> <br /> ''Tesla is launching its own virtual power plant in California to help the state’s grid:''<br /> <br /> :''“The California grid operator forecasts a continued need for Californians to support the grid through 2021. Help create the largest distributed battery system in the world and avoid dependence on the least efficient fossil fuel power plants. Opt-in to the Tesla Virtual Power Plant (VPP), and Tesla will dispatch your Powerwall when the grid needs support while continuing to maintain your energy security.”''<br /> <br /> ''California’s grid is expected to have an exceptionally difficult few months, with record high temperature increasing energy demand on the grid and a significant drought affecting hydropower plants, like the Hoover Dam.''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Historic NASA and European Space Agency Agreement on Climate Science Cooperation'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-esa-partner-in-new-effort-to-address-global-climate-change<br /> <br /> * https://spacenews.com/nasa-and-esa-sign-agreement-on-climate-science-cooperation/<br /> <br /> * https://phys.org/news/2021-07-nasa-european-space-agency-climate.html<br /> <br /> <br /> ''WASHINGTON — NASA and the European Space Agency have agreed to cooperate on future Earth science missions and related activities in an effort to better understand climate change.''<br /> <br /> ''The leaders of the two agencies signed a joint statement of intent in a virtual meeting July 13, declaring their plans to cooperate on Earth science research, particularly involving climate change, ranging from missions to research and applications.''<br /> <br /> ''“Climate change is an all-hands-on deck, global challenge that requires action now,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement about the agreement. “This agreement will set the standard for future international collaboration, providing the information that is so essential for tackling the challenges posed by climate change and helping to answer and address the most pressing questions in Earth science for the benefit of the United States, Europe, and the world.”''<br /> <br /> ''The partnership was formalized through a joint statement of intent, signed Tuesday, which outlines how the agencies will collaborate to ensure continuity of Earth observations; advance understanding of the Earth System, climate change and application of that knowledge; and collaborate on an open data policy that promotes open sharing of data, information, and knowledge within the scientific community and the wider public.''<br /> <br /> ''“Together, NASA and ESA provide most of the world’s Earth science coverage through our Earth-observing satellites,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science. “This transformative agreement will build on that capability, forging a critical international climate science partnership to tackle the most challenging climate questions in an integrated and strategic way. Not only will NASA and ESA work together to deliver unparalleled Earth science observations, research, and applications, but all of our findings will also be free and open for the benefit of the entire world as we work together to combat and mitigate climate change.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''“This is a massive step-up from anything we’ve ever done,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA, told FLORIDA TODAY.''<br /> <br /> ''“It’s more strategic, multi-mission, multi-science as opposed to just mission by mission which is how we’ve worked before.”''<br /> <br /> ''Of particular interest to coastal regions like Florida, at the frontlines of the impacts of sea-level rise, NASA and ESA are planning to extend Earth science research including Sentinel-6, flying two satellites to continue a three-decade record of sea level measurements. The Sentinel monitoring and tracking program includes NASA and ESA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the United States and the European Commission, Eumetsat and French space agency CNES in Europe. NASA launched the first European-built Sentinel-6 satellite in November 2020.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Sea-Level_Rise<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Recently NASA announced that it would pursue a series of missions called the '''Earth System Observatory''', implementing recommendations of the 2018 decadal survey. NASA requested a $250 million increase for Earth science in its 2022 budget proposal and a House bill advanced by an appropriations subcommittee July 12 included the increase.''<br /> <br /> <br /> :::::::[[File:Earth System Observatory.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ······················<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''[[Too Hot]]'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''The &quot;Wet Bulb&quot; Temperature'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://twitter.com/mateosfo/status/1409664424000950277<br /> <br /> * https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1409664424000950277.html<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Dangerous humid heat extremes occurring decades before expected'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Oppressively hot summer days often evoke the expression, “it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.” That sticky, tropical-like air combined with high temperatures is more than unpleasant — it makes extreme heat a greater health risk. <br /> <br /> Climate models project that combinations of heat and humidity could reach deadly thresholds for anyone spending several hours outdoors by the end of the 21st century. However, new research says these extremes are already happening — decades before anticipated — due to global warming to date. <br /> <br /> * https://research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMID/587/ArticleID/2621/Dangerous-humid-heat-extremes-occurring-decades-before-expected<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/19/eaaw1838<br /> <br /> <br /> ······················<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''June 2021'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Devastating News: Climate Change Impacts to Hit Sooner than Predicted'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://phys.org/news/2021-06-climate-impacts-sooner.html<br /> <br /> ''Climate change will fundamentally reshape life on Earth in the coming decades, even if humans can tame planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, according to a landmark draft report from the UN's climate science advisors obtained by AFP.''<br /> <br /> ''Species extinction, more widespread disease, unliveable heat, ecosystem collapse, cities menaced by rising seas—these and other devastating climate impacts are accelerating and bound to become painfully obvious before a child born today turns 30.''<br /> <br /> ''The choices societies make now will determine whether our species thrives or simply survives as the 21st century unfolds, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says in a draft report seen exclusively by AFP.''<br /> <br /> ''But dangerous thresholds are closer than once thought, and dire consequences stemming from decades of unbridled carbon pollution are unavoidable in the short term.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;The worst is yet to come, affecting our children's and grandchildren's lives much more than our own.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Crushing Climate Impacts: Draft UN report'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''PARIS (AFP) / June 23, 2021 - Climate change will fundamentally reshape life on Earth in the coming decades, even if humans can tame planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, according to a landmark draft report from the UN's climate science advisers obtained by Agence France-Presse.''<br /> <br /> ''Species extinction, more widespread disease, unliveable heat, ecosystem collapse, cities menaced by rising seas - these and other devastating climate impacts are accelerating and bound to become painfully obvious before a child born today turns 30.''<br /> <br /> ''The choices societies make now will determine whether our species thrives or simply survives as the 21st century unfolds, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says in a draft report seen exclusively by AFP...''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''&quot;The worst is yet to come, affecting our children's and grandchildren's lives much more than our own,&quot; the report says.''<br /> <br /> ''By far the most comprehensive catalogue ever assembled of how climate change is upending our world, the report reads like a 4,000-page indictment of humanity's stewardship of the planet.''<br /> <br /> ''But the document, designed to influence critical policy decisions, is not scheduled for release until February 2022 - too late for crunch UN summits this year on climate, biodiversity and food systems...''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ················································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :::[[File:Earth trapping unprecedented amount of heat - NASA.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Earth is now trapping an ‘unprecedented’ amount of heat, NASA says'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''New research shows that the amount of heat the planet traps has roughly doubled since 2005, contributing to more rapidly warming oceans, air and land''<br /> <br /> * https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/06/16/earth-heat-imbalance-warming/<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The amount of heat Earth traps has roughly doubled since 2005, contributing to more rapidly warming oceans, air and land, according to [https://www.nasa.gov/feature/langley/joint-nasa-noaa-study-finds-earths-energy-imbalance-has-doubled new research] from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).''<br /> <br /> ''“The magnitude of the increase is unprecedented,” said Norman Loeb, a NASA scientist and lead author of the study, which was [https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2021GL093047 published this week] in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. “The Earth is warming faster than expected.”''<br /> <br /> ''Using satellite data, researchers measured what is known as Earth’s energy imbalance — the difference between how much energy the planet absorbs from the sun, and how much it’s able to shed, or radiate back out into space.''<br /> <br /> ''When there is a positive imbalance — Earth absorbing more heat than it is losing — it is a first step toward global warming, said Stuart Evans, a climate scientist at the University at Buffalo. “It’s a sign the Earth is gaining energy.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> ·································································· <br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Via CBS News / 60 Minutes / June 6, 2021'''''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;The most important job is persuading people that the natural world is complex and wonderful and one of the most precious things we have,&quot; Attenborough said to 60 Minutes in 2002. &quot;And if you're going to do that, then every time you do it, you show the facts, you end up by saying, 'And it's all disappearing and it's all your fault,' people will stop viewing.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;I didn't say anything much about the world being in ecological peril until I was absolutely sure that what I was talking about was correct.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Sir David Attenborough was 28-years-old when he convinced his bosses at the BBC to let him travel the world and document his explorations. He has perpetually been on the road ever since. For nearly 70 years, the knighted Briton and his teams of filmmakers have traveled to some of the most remote places on earth to explore the natural world.''<br /> <br /> ''Attenborough no longer minces words nor leaves his viewers wondering where he stands on the issue of climate change. In the film, he laments Earth's decline and states emphatically, &quot;Our planet is headed for disaster.&quot;'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Despite his stark warning about the planet's peril, Attenborough now says it is not too late to salvage it, if countries work together and societies alter their behavior. The nonagenarian remains hopeful for the future.'' <br /> <br /> ''&quot;There's a huge movement around the world of people from all nations, young people who can see what is happening to the world, and demanding that their government should take action. And that's the best hope that I have.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ·············································· <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:GHG ppt concentrations 1975-2020.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''May 2021'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Big Oil Rocked by News May 27 2021.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Court orders, investor backlash: Big Oil is at a tipping point'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-ruling-could-force-big-change-at-shell-11622131737<br /> <br /> * https://www.npr.org/2021/05/28/1000882311/big-oil-faces-a-reckoning-decades-in-the-making<br /> <br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/27/big-oil-defeats-represent-a-watershed-moment-in-the-climate-battle.html<br /> <br /> * https://grist.org/energy/why-climate-rage-hit-exxon-chevron-and-shell-on-the-same-day/<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/business/legal/big-oil-may-get-more-climate-lawsuits-after-shell-ruling-lawyers-activists-2021-05-28/<br /> <br /> * https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Moodys-Credit-Risk-Is-Growing-For-Big-Oil.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/27/cataclysmic-day-for-oil-companies-sparks-climate-hope<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Climate Action Advocates Win 2 Seats on Exxon’s Board'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/26/business/exxon-mobil-climate-change.html<br /> <br /> ''HOUSTON, TEXAS — Big Oil was knocked down a peg on Wednesday when shareholders of Exxon Mobil dealt the company’s management a stunning defeat by electing at least two board candidates nominated by activist investors who pledged to steer the company away from oil and gas and toward cleaner energy...''<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://engine1.com/<br /> <br /> * https://justcapital.com/news/why-engine-no-1-is-taking-on-exxonmobil-in-arguably-the-biggest-proxy-battle-of-the-season/<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/27/business/dealbook/exxon-mobil-engine-no-1.html<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ····································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''High-flying #PlanetCitizens #WholeEarth'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;[[Overview Effect]]&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;[[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://apnews.com/article/who-is-an-astronaut-private-spaceflight-2cf882f79d189bada008ff8e7e0e2660<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::::::··················································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> ::::::[[File:IEA News 1.jpg]]<br /> <br /> ::::::[[File:IEA News 2.jpg]]<br /> <br /> ::::::[[File:IEA News 3.jpg]]<br /> <br /> ::::::[[File:IEA News 4.jpg]]<br /> <br /> ::::::[[File:IEA News 5.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ·····································<br /> <br /> <br /> From Clearwater, Florida<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 Siterunner:<br /> <br /> Trendlines, we are looking at trendlines today. Data, the data changing as time passes. We need to step back and have perspective. We need to look closely, to 'drill down' and see with detail. [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:You_can_manage_only_what_you_can_measure_Dr_David_Crisp,_OCO-2,_June_2014_m.jpg Measure-to-Manage] NASA says, science advises, GreenPolicy360 recommends as a guide. <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 believes in personal responsibility to manage wisely. We are [http://www.planetcitizens.org planet citizens] and [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Earth_in_Human_Hands.jpg earth is in human hands]. Together we are guiding [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/PlanetCitizen our planet home] into the future. We are delivering a legacy to future generations.<br /> <br /> And we are [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Vital_Signs watching our progress], for good and bad.<br /> <br /> One of GreenPolicy360's great concerns is climate change, as all our readers and sharers know. A recent study of a 'new normal' caught our attention today, a global study and national breakout of data changing over time. And as we are looking at this 'new normal' data, a century of temperatures, we cannot help but think what will happen if the temperature increases continue, a trendline into the future, up and up into the 'unliveable... uninhabitable' temperatures range. 'Cooling technology' will be required and being outdoors will be limited...<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Temperatures New Normal is Not Normal.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> Let's look more closely.<br /> <br /> Let's look at a recent feature news 'wrap up' from a science reporter for the Associated Press.<br /> <br /> Here, look.... Pay attention, recognize the threats, act planet citizens, act ....<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Billions projected to suffer nearly unlivable heat in 2070'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''By Seth Borenstein'' <br /> <br /> ''May 4, 2020'' <br /> <br /> * https://apnews.com/article/asia-pacific-ap-top-news-climate-change-pollution-science-bdcdb1e537c2f23becb3960fbd4a8ed8<br /> <br /> <br /> ''(AP) — In just 50 years, 2 billion to 3.5 billion people, mostly the poor who can’t afford air conditioning, will be living in a climate that historically has been too hot to handle, a new study said.''<br /> <br /> ''With every 1.8 degree (1 degree Celsius) increase in global average annual temperature from man-made climate change, about a billion or so people will end up in areas too warm day-in, day-out to be habitable without cooling technology, according to ecologist Marten Scheffer of Wageningen University in the Netherlands, co-author of the study.''<br /> <br /> 'How many people will end up at risk depends on how much heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions are reduced and how fast the world population grows.''<br /> <br /> ''Under the worst-case scenarios for population growth and for carbon pollution — which many climate scientists say is looking less likely these days — the study in Monday’s journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences predicts about 3.5 billion people will live in extremely hot areas. That’s a third of the projected 2070 population.''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Future of the Human Climate Niche'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.''<br /> <br /> ''May 26, 2020''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Significance''<br /> <br /> ''We show that for thousands of years, humans have concentrated in a surprisingly narrow subset of Earth’s available climates, characterized by mean annual temperatures around ∼13 °C. This distribution likely reflects a human temperature niche related to fundamental constraints. We demonstrate that depending on scenarios of population growth and warming, over the coming 50 y, 1 to 3 billion people are projected to be left outside the climate conditions that have served humanity well over the past 6,000 y. Absent climate mitigation or migration, a substantial part of humanity will be exposed to mean annual temperatures warmer than nearly anywhere today.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Abstract''<br /> <br /> ''All species have an environmental niche, and despite technological advances, humans are unlikely to be an exception. Here, we demonstrate that for millennia, human populations have resided in the same narrow part of the climatic envelope available on the globe, characterized by a major mode around ∼11 °C to 15 °C mean annual temperature (MAT). Supporting the fundamental nature of this temperature niche, current production of crops and livestock is largely limited to the same conditions, and the same optimum has been found for agricultural and nonagricultural economic output of countries through analyses of year-to-year variation. We show that in a business-as-usual climate change scenario, the geographical position of this temperature niche is projected to shift more over the coming 50 y than it has moved since 6000 BP. Populations will not simply track the shifting climate, as adaptation in situ may address some of the challenges, and many other factors affect decisions to migrate. Nevertheless, in the absence of migration, one third of the global population is projected to experience a MAT &gt;29 °C currently found in only 0.8% of the Earth’s land surface, mostly concentrated in the Sahara. As the potentially most affected regions are among the poorest in the world, where adaptive capacity is low, enhancing human development in those areas should be a priority alongside climate mitigation.''<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.pnas.org/content/117/21/11350<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ······················································································· <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Biden Could Be a Climate Change President&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via Georgetown Journal of International Affairs<br /> <br /> May 3, 2021<br /> <br /> * https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2021/05/03/biden-could-be-a-climate-change-president-and-covid-19-is-only-part-of-the-story/<br /> <br /> ''The combination of grassroots activism and broad public support set off a race in the Democratic presidential primary, as candidates released increasingly ambitious climate plans. The first iteration of Biden’s climate plan, though far more ambitious than anything Clinton or Obama had ever put forward, was savaged by climate advocates early in the campaign. He received just 75 out of 200 by the youth-led Sunrise Movement, 72 out of 100 by Greenpeace, and 26 out of 48 from Data for Progress, a progressive polling firm. The Biden campaign team saw this as a problem, and promptly updated his climate agenda for the general election to reflect progressive priorities more closely. In particular, it increased the size of pledged climate spending, adopting a 2035 zero-carbon electricity target and a 2050 whole-of-economy net-zero target.''<br /> <br /> ''Biden’s climate campaign platform promised a “historic investment” of $1.7 trillion over ten years in a “Clean Energy Revolution,” and has already gone a long way towards that goal with the American Jobs Plan (AJP). The AJP would be three times larger than the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of the Obama Administration and include almost ten times as much climate-related spending—seventeen times as much if clean energy tax credits are included. It includes $174 billion for electric vehicles, encouraging both the supply of American-made vehicles and incentives for consumers, $100 billion in a clean electricity grid, and a range of items for clean energy research and development, technology demonstration, and home-grown manufacturing.''<br /> <br /> ''Perhaps just as important as Biden’s elevated climate ambitions, the primary campaign forced him to adopt a new framing of the issue, steering away from environmentalism and towards an economic and social justice lens. Though Biden did not endorse the Green New Deal bill, introduced in 2019, he regularly repeats the refrain that climate change policy is all about “jobs, jobs, jobs.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''April 2021'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Earth Day'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Christina Korp Earth Day and Apollo 8.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''DYK? Yes we do, we remember!'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> December 1968, Apollo 8's 'Earthrise' and then 1969 pro peace Earth work and then our first Earth Day in 1970!<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/1969_beginnings_of_the_modern_environmental_movement.pdf &lt;big&gt;'''Beginnings of the Modern Environmental Movement'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Apollo_8<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Day_Memories_on_the_50th_Anniversary<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Google Earth Timelapse]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Timelapse in Google Earth -1.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Timelapse from Google Earth'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Welcome to Timelapse !<br /> <br /> Rebecca Moore: ''To explore Timelapse in Google Earth, go to g.co/Timelapse — you can use the handy search bar to choose any place on the planet where you want to see time in motion.'' <br /> <br /> Director, Google Earth, Earth Engine &amp; Outreach<br /> <br /> Published Apr 15, 2021<br /> <br /> * http://goo.gle/timelapse<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Timelapse in Google Earth-3.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://earth.app.goo.gl/4vNJ7g <br /> <br /> * https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/15/tech/google-earth-timelapse/index.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/google-introduces-timelapse-to-google-earth/ar-BB1fHw1k<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Timelapse in Google Earth-5.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Rebecca Moore: ''Timelapse has been developed using 24 million satellite images from the past 37 years -- from 1984 to 2020 -- before being compiled into an interactive 4D experience.''<br /> <br /> * https://blog.google/products/earth/timelapse-in-google-earth/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''SJS/GreenPolicy360 Siterunner:'''<br /> <br /> <br /> A tip of our GreenPolicy360 hat to [[George E. Brown Jr]] who envisioned the Landsat's mission and enabled its start up as a science leader in the US Congress, supporting and protecting its earth science mission over the decades.<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Landsat_data_users_handbook<br /> <br /> <br /> and a salute to our [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Bioneers friend and fellow Bioneer], [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&amp;profile=default&amp;search=rebecca+moore&amp;fulltext=Search Rebecca Moore], who first proposed Google Earth Outreach and has led many follow on initiatives, now including Timelapse, utilizing the Landsat database decades of images to bring us an unprecedented vision of earth's changes over time. <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Rebecca Google Outreach.jpg]]<br /> <br /> [[File:G Earth Outreach.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::[https://carbonmapper.org/ &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;u&gt;'''Carbon Mapper'''&lt;/u&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> ::[[File:Planet 4-15-2021 10-22-51 AM.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA), who chairs the U.S. House Science and Technology Committee’s Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics, today welcomed the increased investments in space and aeronautics, research and development, and scientific missions contained in the Biden-Harris Administration’s FY22 budget request.<br /> <br /> ''&quot;The boosted funding for NASA’s Earth sciences mission, one of my top priorities for NASA, is the kind of approach the country needs to support a strong, data-driven response to the climate crisis.&quot;'' <br /> <br /> <br /> Read more at:<br /> <br /> [[Earth Science Research from Space]]<br /> <br /> [[Earth Science Vital Signs]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''March 2021'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:EPA website - Climate Change priority - March 2021.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;E.P.A. to Review Attacks on Science Under Trump&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.epa.gov/climate-change<br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/climate/trump-science-epa.html<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ··································································<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Emily Atkin - Climate Journalist - telling it like it is.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> Watch the Congressional Hearing by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, &amp; Technology<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Science and Impacts of the Climate Crisis.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ··································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Survey Finds Overwhelming International Support for Greater Environmental Protection'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''“We live in a time of polarisation, and environmental issues have long embodied the political divisions in society. However, this may be changing. We can see an overwhelming consensus emerging for greater government-led action to protect the environment in major nations.”''<br /> <br /> * https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/COP26survey<br /> <br /> * https://www.ecowatch.com/cop26-environmental-protection-2650859118.html<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :[[File:Renewable Energy potential 2021.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''February 2021'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''What a Storm in Texas '''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> 'Polar Vortex' is here. A warming Arctic releases stratospheric changes and new extreme weather patterns...<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Arctic 'Polar Vortex' Visits Texas'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: <br /> <br /> ''What happens in the Arctic doesn't stay in the Arctic''<br /> <br /> * https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&amp;as_sdt=0,10&amp;qsp=8&amp;q=polar+vortex+extreme+weather&amp;qst=br<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Arctic<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Big Freeze hits hard as some blame, what? Wind farms.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''CNN / Opinion'''''<br /> <br /> ''As winter storm sweeps through US, millions without power in Texas''<br /> <br /> ''Some blame Texas' wind turbines for the outages — but wind accounts for just a tenth of the winter power''<br /> <br /> (GreenPolicy Emphasis added) '''''As some conservatives blame the environmental movement and frozen wind turbines for the power outage disaster in Texas, it's a cold reminder that the path to clean American energy is blocked more by ideology than technology.'''''<br /> <br /> ''Since wind accounts for a tenth of the Lone Star state's winter power and the Permian Basin leaks and flares enough natural gas to heat two million homes a year, it's a bit like blaming your car battery for a stalled engine when you've run out of gas.''<br /> <br /> ''“Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business,” former Governor and Energy Secretary Rick Perry said in an interview posted on House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy's website.<br /> <br /> ''While properly engineered turbines have been proven to work from Alaska to Antarctica, many in Texas did freeze up. But so did pipelines, diesel engines and even the reactor at one of the state's two nuclear power plants.'' <br /> <br /> ''In typical &quot;Don't Mess with Texas&quot; fashion, the state has its own power grid on purpose, which is a major impediment to creating a national '''&quot;smart grid,&quot;''' in which a sunny day in Arizona could power primetime in Boston and vice versa.''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Read more in [[Green Stories of the Day]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''The Task Ahead for President Biden on Climate'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/06/opinion/biden-climate-change-environment.html<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Courtesy of the NY Times / NY Times Editorial Board''<br /> <br /> ''Feb. 6, 2021''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''After four years of scorn, the issue of climate change has risen near the top of the American political agenda, where it deserves to be and where, even accounting for the efforts of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, it had never been.''<br /> <br /> ''That is the happy message contained in the blizzard of executive orders and press briefings emanating from the Biden White House over the past couple of weeks. Put simply, the richest and most powerful nation in the world is back in the fight to rescue the planet from the fires, floods, famines, rising sea levels, human dislocations and other consequences of a warming globe.''<br /> <br /> ''Though less noticed, there was one other uplifting development with important implications for the climate that had little to do with President Biden. That was the announcement from General Motors’ chief executive, Mary Barra, that the company is getting out of the internal combustion game and plans to sell only zero-emission cars and trucks by 2035. The company has already invested $27 billion to introduce 30 electric models in the next four years and will build a plant in Ohio to make the batteries for these vehicles.''<br /> <br /> ''G.M.’s move was in part a competitive response to Volkswagen and other foreign automakers, including ones in China, that have announced fundamental shifts toward electric vehicles. It fits nicely with some of Mr. Biden’s climate goals, including zeroing out greenhouse gas emissions in America by midcentury. Importantly, it is also a reminder of the power of free market forces, without whose constructive engagement — and the private investments necessary to build out clean vehicles and clean energy sources like wind and solar — the climate crisis cannot be solved. No government, however committed, can go it alone.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Mr. Biden’s executive orders on climate were nonetheless important. They do not have the permanence or bipartisan imprimatur of laws, and are subject to reversal by later administrations, but they send powerful policy signals to the federal bureaucracy. One needs only think back to the early Trump days, when a suite of executive orders aimed at delivering on Donald Trump’s boastful promise of “energy independence” — which in fact the country had mostly achieved — consumed various federal agencies for the next few years. This led to weaker regulations on coal-fired power plants and methane emissions, decimated clean water protections, gave over large swaths of public land to oil and gas exploration and shrank two magnificent national monuments designated by Mr. Clinton and Mr. Obama. It is these actions — which, along with Mr. Trump’s contempt for science, cost the country four years in what is essentially a race against time — that Mr. Biden, in his executive orders, is telling his cabinet officers to review and reverse.''<br /> <br /> ''In many cases, that won’t be easy. To take one example, Mr. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency followed a legal path that took more than two years and involved many complex technical studies in order to roll back Mr. Obama’s rule ordering automakers to rapidly increase fuel economy standards, thus reducing tailpipe emissions of carbon dioxide. The same laborious timetable now awaits Mr. Biden’s E.P.A. as it seeks to reinstate the Obama standards. Similar obstacles will complicate efforts to restore rules on methane emissions and the broad protections of the Clean Water Act narrowed by Mr. Trump.''<br /> <br /> ''On the plus side, the president can fairly quickly restore the original boundaries of the shrunken monuments, a matter that lies within presidential jurisdiction, and possibly prevent drilling from proceeding in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Of course, nothing prevents Mr. Biden from acting unilaterally on matters within his powers, as he has in rejoining the Paris Agreement on climate change and canceling a problematical oil pipeline from Canada. The moratorium he announced last month on new oil and gas leasing on public lands and waters is similarly within his writ.''<br /> <br /> ''In the short run, that’s a mere annoyance to the oil companies; only one-fifth of the nation’s oil and gas is produced on public lands and waters, and the industry is sitting on a cache of roughly 13.4 million acres of undeveloped federal leases. It is also a disappointment to environmental groups that remain fixated on ending hydraulic fracturing not tomorrow but yesterday. But it is a welcome first step toward satisfying Mr. Biden’s campaign pledge to transition from fossil fuels, and one of many recent signs — Ms. Barra’s G.M. pledge being another — that fossil fuels’ hegemony is slowly coming to an end.''<br /> <br /> ''One of the president’s first moves was to name John Kerry, a former secretary of state who helped broker negotiations at the Paris climate conference in 2015, as his international climate envoy, charged with restoring America’s credibility on the issue. In part because of Mr. Trump’s intransigence, the United States has struggled to meet its commitment in Paris to reduce emissions by 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025; with the help of the coronavirus pandemic, which disrupted the economy, emissions have dropped by 20 percent, according to Rhodium, a consulting group. But the longer-term trajectory was not encouraging, even with the dramatic drop in the costs of renewable fuels, the closing of many coal-fired power plants and the determined efforts of states and cities to fill the void left by the federal government.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''America is hardly alone. Only a handful of the nearly 200 countries that signed on to the Paris Agreement have met their targets; among big emitters, the nations of the European Union come the closest. But even if every country does meet its targets, it will not be enough, not by a long shot — a scary truth that the Paris negotiators acknowledged at the time and that an alarming 2018 report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirmed. The report warned that to avoid the worst effects of climate change, the world would have to hold increases in atmospheric temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. In practical terms, this means a carbon-emission-free world by 2050, which in turn requires a downward wrench in global emissions by 2030. Some experts believe that for the United States to carry its share of the load, it will have to cut emissions by 40 to 50 percent over the next decade.''<br /> <br /> ''On April 22, Earth Day, the United States will host a Climate Leaders Summit. The expectation is that Mr. Kerry will unveil a different set of targets. Those numbers have to be more than ambitious. They also have to be credible — meaning, as Robert Stavins, a longtime climate scholar at Harvard puts it, “truly achievable given existing and reasonably anticipated policy actions.”''<br /> <br /> ''Rolling back all of Mr. Trump’s rollbacks on fossil fuel emissions, however necessary that is, simply won’t cut it. What might cut it is major new climate legislation that encourages serious investment dollars — in millions of emissions-free vehicles, in hundreds of thousands of new charging stations to service those vehicles, in a reimagined electric grid carrying power from plants that rely not on fossil fuels but on rapidly growing renewable sources, in a cleaner public transportation system and in millions and millions of weatherized homes.''<br /> <br /> ''All that and more was envisioned in a $2 trillion climate plan presented by none other than Mr. Biden in a speech in his home state of Delaware last summer. His problem is therefore not lack of imagination. It is the political reality of a divided Senate that cannot bring itself to approve a plan to help ordinary people and local governments weather the economic storms of the pandemic. If America’s legislators cannot deal with a present emergency, how likely is it that they can be persuaded to address a more remote one?''<br /> <br /> ''The president’s pitch to Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, is that a credible climate plan will create the jobs the pandemic has destroyed, and many more. Let’s hope it works.''<br /> <br /> ''In the meantime, it seems enough to celebrate what, as if in a fairy tale, has appeared in the White House: a president who cares about the climate and other environmental issues, who has gathered around him serious people, who has determined to follow science where it leads and who will try to do good and useful things.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ······························································<br /> <br /> <br /> Via Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists / Yale Climate Connection<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Congress has to fix Trump’s 11th-hour climate rules'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://thebulletin.org/2021/01/congress-has-to-fix-trumps-11th-hour-climate-rules-before-its-too-late/<br /> <br /> * https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2021/climate-environment/biden-climate-environment-actions/<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The Biden/Harris administration’s first 100 days in office reveal about its making climate change a top priority. Those words have flowed both at the this site and many other venues.''<br /> <br /> ''The Washington Post’s January 22 posting of “Tracking Biden’s environmental actions” is notable. Written by Post Pulitzer Prize-winners Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis, with graphics editing by John Muyskens, the piece compiles Trump administration environmental, conservation, and energy regulations and policies that the Biden team hopes to overturn or “unwind.”''<br /> <br /> ''“Biden can overturn some of them with a stroke of a pen,” they write. “Others will take years to undo, and some may never be reversed.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Clock is running for action on eleventh-hour rules'''''<br /> <br /> ''Listing 64 air quality and greenhouse gas initiatives, they count one (stepping back into the Paris Climate Agreement) as having been overturned and another 21 as being “easy” to reverse. They score another 27 Trump actions as “medium”—requiring rewriting a regulation or pursuing a successful court action; and 15 as “difficult”—requiring lengthy rule-making process, legislation, or involved court action.''<br /> <br /> ''It’s no surprise that the Senate majority of the 116th Congress did not exercise its right under the Congressional Review Act to un-do damaging Trump rules. <br /> <br /> ''Even with its 50/50 split in the new Senate, the new 117th Congress is positioned to do so, without fear of having to overcome the 60-vote filibuster threshold. There is now, at least and at last, an opportunity during its first 60 legislative workdays for the Congress to conduct serious oversight of some of the especially offensive and glaring rules finalized in the waning days of the Trump administration and, if it chooses, send nullifying legislation to the new President for signing.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Especially egregious examples were published in the Federal Register literally at the 11th hour:'''''<br /> <br /> ''A January 6, 2021, rule that EPA “give greater consideration to studies where the underlying response data”—frequently involving confidential human health issues protected by HIPAA law being made publicly available. That would knee-cap important health-based rulemaking on many toxic air pollutants and other contaminants as well as the mental health risks from climate change.'' (see below)<br /> <br /> ''A January 7, 2021, EPA rule on the threshold for “significant pollution contributions” that would end application of the Clean Air Act to many non-electric power plants that are sources of important greenhouse gases.''<br /> <br /> ''A January 13, 2021, EPA rule that piggy-backed onto the January 7 rule to bar future greenhouse gas regulations from applying to oil refineries, manufacturing, plants, and other facilities.''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Court Rules Trump Administration’s Censored Science Rule Was Issued Unlawfully'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''A federal district court has ruled that the Trump administration was wrong to issue its Censored Science Rule without following proper procedures, and said that its decision also “casts into significant doubt” whether the rule has any legal basis at all.''<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.edf.org/media/court-rules-trump-administrations-censored-science-rule-was-issued-unlawfully<br /> <br /> <br /> :······························································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt; &lt;big&gt;'''Are Biden's actions on climate change enough to make a difference?&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''Commentary and Interview with Michael E. Mann'''<br /> <br /> : * https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&amp;v=wPDARBhp9d0<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Pres Biden signs climate change executive orders.jpg|link=https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&amp;v=wPDARBhp9d0&amp;feature ]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Biden Inaugurated as U.S. President: Immediately Orders U.S. to Rejoin Paris International Climate Pact'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/biden-rejoins-paris-climate-pact-scientists-hope-best-yet-come-n1255070<br /> <br /> <br /> ···················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Trump leaving a legacy of 'alternative facts' and mis-information'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;30,573&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-fact-checker-tracked-trump-claims/2021/01/23/ad04b69a-5c1d-11eb-a976-bad6431e03e2_story.html ''Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims as president'']<br /> <br /> * https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-fact-checker-tracked-trump-claims/2021/01/23/ad04b69a-5c1d-11eb-a976-bad6431e03e2_story.html<br /> <br /> <br /> ''To be sure, volumes of books are filled with the varied ways presidents of the past disgraced themselves, fought secret wars, undermined their opponents with sketchy tactics... dodged inconvenient truths.''<br /> <br /> ''But the systematic deceptions of the “alternative facts” president were unlike anything before.''<br /> <br /> * https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-capitol-siege-politics-coronavirus-pandemic-elections-69cafecdde291c5211daf9ffd0f2ad05<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :Washington Post Fact-Checker @work <br /> <br /> * https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/?itid=lk_inline_manual_2<br /> <br /> * https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/<br /> <br /> * https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/12/21/most-popular-fact-checks-2020/<br /> <br /> : * https://www.factcheck.org/person/donald-trump/<br /> <br /> : * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjeUoVOoTGM<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;font color=blue&gt;○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ &lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''As terrestrial politics roils, our Planet Earth rolls'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Amazing views from the International Space Station'''<br /> <br /> Watch - https://t.co/3ChuV8X1dL <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;font color=blue&gt;○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ &lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''As a New Year dawns, your GreenPolicy360 siterunner recalls my friend, and mentor, George E. Brown'''<br /> <br /> The past is sometimes called prologue and with George the past was a guide, a guide to use as we make decisions on how best to go forward. George Brown was an engineer by training, and a principled man. He cared deeply about how we can create a better world and in his thirty plus years in the U.S. Congress he became a leader in what was called 'big science'. His legacy is felt today in ways few know.<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;[[George E. Brown Jr]]&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> <br /> George at work, low key, out of the spotlight, getting the job done -- and, this moment in history, I want to point out an Office he proposed and worked to set up, the '''Office of Science and Technology Policy'''. One of this new office's first historic steps was to warn the U.S. president about the danger of climate change (see the link to the letter below)...<br /> <br /> In the following year, 1977-78, George proposed and shepherded the '''National Climate Program''' law through to its passage. This was the first U.S. climate legislation. <br /> <br /> In the following years, until his death in 1999, George initiated and supported a host of scientific programs to study and act on the dangerous coming challenges of climate and global warming.<br /> <br /> Thank you George for your work and your vision. We carry on. Your legacy is real.<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:1977 from the Office of Science and Technology Policy.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:US_Public_Law_95-367.png '''The National Climate Program Act, Public Law 95-367]<br /> <br /> :[http://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/National_Climate_Program_Act_Public_Law_95-367_Sept_1978.pdf '''National Climate Program Act, 1978 / PDF''']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:US Public Law 95-367.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;font color=green&gt;○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○&lt;/font&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;''''' 2020'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth POV from the ISS Cupola-m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> 🌎 &lt;font color=gray&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''December'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> December 18, 2020<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''President-elect Biden’s pick to head U.S. environmental agency, the EPA, heartens scientists'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Veteran environmental regulator Michael Regan will lead the Environmental Protection Agency, joining a team of experienced climate appointees''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03621-6<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Can Joe Biden rebuild the ravaged US Environmental Protection Agency?'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Scientists reveal further details about the damage sustained under Trump — and the challenges for Biden in restoring science’s standing at the agency''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03585-7<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;font color=green&gt;○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○&lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :::[[File:2020 Hottest Year on Record.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;font color=green&gt;○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○&lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[Net Zero Energy Policy]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> A Net Zero [https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-climate-climate-change-latin-america-carbon-neutrality-16f52aa7f8fbcd4ff814ea67a50ff89f ''' 'Explainer' '''] from the Associated Press<br /> <br /> December 11, 2020<br /> <br /> ''More than 100 countries — responsible for about two-thirds of the world’s heat-trapping gases — have announced plans to cut their greenhouse gas emissions to “net zero” in coming decades to help curb man-made climate change.''<br /> <br /> ''The target has also been embraced by companies, states and cities wanting to help stop the planet from getting too hot for human comfort. China made a splash in September promising “carbon neutrality” by 2060, and U.S. President-elect Joe Biden has promised America would be there by 2050.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Time for Green Energy Action that Moves Economies toward [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Eco-nomics Eco-nomics] and Net Zero Energy Policy'''<br /> <br /> <br /> Visit [http://www.netzeropolicy.com '''www.NetZeroPolicy.com'''] @GreenPolicy360.com<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;font color=green&gt;○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○&lt;/font&gt; &lt;font color=blue&gt;○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○&lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Climate Books - 2020.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;font color=gray&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''November'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Special:RecentChanges &lt;font color=gray&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Top of the News @GreenPolicy360'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;]<br /> <br /> :[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_Stories_of_the_Day &lt;font color=green&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''John Kerry Appointed Special Climate Envoy: To Join National Security Council'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;]<br /> <br /> ''John Kerry is getting back into politics. “America will soon have a government that treats the climate crisis as the urgent national security threat it is,” the former secretary of state and former longtime senator from Massachusetts tweeted on Monday after President-elect Joe Biden announced he’ll name Kerry as the incoming administration’s presidential envoy for climate.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360 &amp; Strategic Demands applaud this historic, critically important shift in the U.S. policy and vision'''<br /> <br /> For years GreenPolicy360 and StratDem have advocated Climate Policy become a U.S. National/Global Security priority <br /> <br /> :* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Climate_Policy<br /> :* https://strategicdemands.com/environmental-security/ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ·····························································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''A Legacy of Disaster and Retreat'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Posted on November 16, 2020 | By Strategic Demands Online <br /> <br /> From GreenPolicy360's associate, StratDem<br /> <br /> Today, in one of U.S. President Trump’s 51,282 tweet to his (as of today) 79,517,737 Twitter followers, the president attempted to rescind his acknowledgement yesterday that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Again claiming the November election was ‘rigged’, the president’s attack on the election is a spectacle of denial and threats... <br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/a-legacy-of-disaster-and-retreat/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Crew-1 over New Zealand.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :::: [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Biden-Harris, CNN News Online - Nov 8, 2020.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :::[[File:Updated Nov 5 2020 - 29,508 false or misleading statements.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Looking Back: If re-elected, how'd a second term of the U.S. president likely impact the environment -- and national-global security? '''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via Quartz / Opinion<br /> <br /> <br /> ''This past week, Trump saw one of his key climate promises fulfilled: The US is officially out of the Paris Agreement. But were Trump given a second term, sitting out of a UN forum probably would have been the least of the planet’s US-based worries.''<br /> <br /> ''Trump’s first term saw a cascade of environmental deregulation, attacks on science, and the staffing of key positions with fossil-fuel lobbyists and climate deniers. Although the administration has seen many of its half-baked regulatory rollbacks and executive orders stopped by the courts, a second term would have been a chance to make more of them stick. That could have included relaxing restrictions on methane emissions, opening more federal land and water to oil and gas drilling, limiting the scope of environmental reviews for building projects and pipelines, restricting the ability of California or other states to set their own more-ambitious emissions standards, and blocking the consideration of science and climate benefits in regulatory decisions. He might have even pushed the US Environmental Protection Agency to undo its key 2009 finding that greenhouse gases harm human life, a fundamental starting place for any climate regulation.''<br /> <br /> ''Trump also might have continued to privatize the National Flood Insurance Program, which would have forced climate-vulnerable households into foreclosure. With Republican allies in Congress, he could have allowed key tax credits for wind and solar to expire, and confirmed more judges hostile to environmental regulation. Overall, his administration’s stance on climate would have put the US increasingly at diplomatic odds with allies and ceded the economic advantage on clean energy industries to China.''<br /> <br /> ''Policy changes during Trump’s first term will likely result in nearly 2 billion additional tons of CO2 by 2035, according to a recent analysis. A second term would have put the world on a dangerous trajectory as the clock runs out to avert catastrophic warming—and would have made the job of cleaning up much more difficult and expensive for future presidents.''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Day After the U.S. Election, the U.S. Leaves the International Climate Agreement'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.businessinsider.com/joe-biden-says-rejoin-paris-climate-agreement-on-first-day-2020-11 '''Joe Biden says the United States will rejoin the Paris International Climate Agreement on his first day as President''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/climate/paris-climate-agreement-trump.html '''The U.S. Is Out of the Paris Climate Agreement''']<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''GreenPolicy360 [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_Stories_of_the_Day Story of the Day]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''What are the consequences of a U.S. retreat from cooperative climate action?''' <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Via the Associated Press / November 1, 2020''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The day after the presidential election, the United States formally leaves the 2015 Paris agreement to fight climate change. A year ago, President Donald Trump’s administration notified the United Nations that America is exiting the climate agreement. And because of technicalities in the international pact, Nov. 4 is the earliest a country can withdraw...'' <br /> <br /> ''If the U.S. remains out of the climate pact, today’s children are “going to see big changes that you and I don’t see for ice, coral and weather disasters,” said Stanford University’s Rob Jackson.''<br /> <br /> ''Because the two presidential candidates have starkly different positions on climate change policy, the election could have profound repercussions for the world’s approach to the problem, according to more than a dozen experts.''<br /> <br /> ''“That election could be a make or break point for international climate policy,” said Niklas Hohne, a climate scientist at Wageningen University in Germany.''<br /> <br /> ''In pulling out of the agreement, Trump has questioned climate science and has rolled back environmental initiatives that he called too restrictive in cutting future carbon pollution from power plants and cars.''<br /> <br /> ''American carbon emissions dropped by less than one percent a year from 2016 to 2019, until plunging probably temporarily during the pandemic slowdown, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. More than 60 countries cut emissions by higher percentages than the U.S. in that time period, according to [https://www.globalcarbonproject.org/ international data].''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Eleven years ago, the world was on pace to add about another 5 degrees (2.8 degrees Celsius) of warming. But with emission cut pledges from Paris and afterward, the world is facing only about another 2.2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) of warming if countries do what they promise...''<br /> <br /> ''“If Biden wins, the whole world is going to start reorienting toward stepping up its action,” said the Dean of the University of Michigan’s environment program.''<br /> <br /> ''If the U.S. remains out of Paris, countries trying to cut emissions drastically at potentially high costs to local industry may put “border adjustment” fees on climate laggards like America to even the playing field, said Nigel Purvis, a climate negotiator in the Clinton and second Bush administrations. The European Union is already talking about such fees...''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''[https://climateactiontracker.org/ Climate Action Tracker] ran calculations comparing a continuation of the Trump administration’s current emission trends to what would happen if Biden worked toward net zero emissions... (they) found that in the next 10 years a Trump scenario, which includes a moderate economic bounce-back from the pandemic, would emit 6 billion tons (5.4 billion metric tons) more greenhouse gases than the Biden scenario — an 11% difference.'' <br /> <br /> ''Other nations will do more to limit carbon pollution if the U.S. is doing so and less if America isn’t, said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald. “In terms of leadership, it will make an immense difference,” she said.''<br /> <br /> ''In Paris, the U.S. was crucial in getting the agreement finished. The rest of the world ended up pledging to reduce roughly five tons of carbon pollution for every ton the U.S. promised to cut.''<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-donald-trump-climate-climate-change-paris-e6db5893841465bab91f18d8fde8b800 ''Read the full AP story by science reporter Seth Borenstein'']<br /> <br /> ''Follow Seth on Twitter @borenbears<br /> <br /> ''Read more stories on climate issues by The Associated Press at -- https://www.apnews.com/Climate''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎 &lt;font color=gray&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''October'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Updated Oct 22 2020 - 26,548 false or misleading statements.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Attempting to Setback Science and Environmental Protections'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> ''From The New York Times: The Trump Administration Is Reversing, or Attempting to Reverse, Nearly 100 Environmental Rules.'' <br /> <br /> ''Here’s a [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/climate/trump-environment-rollbacks-list.html List Tracking Trump Environmental Rollbacks]. The White House has dismantled major climate and environmental policies focused on clean air, water, wildlife and toxic chemicals. Here’s how it adds up (as of October 2020).'' <br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/climate/trump-environment-rollbacks-list.html<br /> <br /> <br /> More on Trump Administration environmental rollbacks/reversals/legislative and regulatory actions to end and/or limit environmental protections...<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Environmental Deregulation, Climate Litigation'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> (from GreenPolicy360's Eco-Dashboard) <br /> <br /> <br /> * https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/2018/07/tracking-the-trackers/ | A List of Organizations Tracking US Environmental Rollbacks<br /> * https://www.brookings.edu/interactives/tracking-deregulation-in-the-trump-era/ | Brookings - Deregulatory Tracker <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Environmental_Laws | Category - Environmental Laws<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Climate_Change_Litigation_Databases_Climate_Law.png &lt;big&gt;'''Climate Litigation Database'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> * http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/resources/climate-deregulation-tracker | Climate Deregulation Tracker<br /> * http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/climatechange/ | Columbia Law School - Climate Change Laws <br /> * https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/regulatory-rollback-tracker | Harvard Law School - Envir Law Rollbacks <br /> * http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/resources/silencing-science-tracker/ | 'Silencing Science' Tracker<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:NOAA undergoes political changes - Oct 2020.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Special:RecentChanges &lt;font color=gray&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Top of the News @GreenPolicy360'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> :[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/Climate_emergency.jpg &lt;font color=green&gt;&lt;big&gt;''''''&quot;Climate Emergency&quot;, don't forget the climate crisis even as political chaos and a global coronavirus rage'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Climate emergency.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :·················································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> :::::: [[File:10G internet on the way - Oct 2020.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :·················································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://twitter.com/i/status/1302039862636195840 &lt;font color=black&gt;&lt;big&gt;''Want to Get Away? Good idea. Here's how it could look if you launched from Earth into Space (click full screen)''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Launch into Space.jpg|link=https://twitter.com/i/status/1302039862636195840]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;font color=gray&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''September 2020'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:New Climate Maps for US - 2020.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''In the U.S.... according to new data from the Rhodium Group analyzed by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, warming temperatures and changing rainfall will drive agriculture and temperate climates northward, while sea level rise will consume coastlines and dangerous levels of humidity will swamp the Mississippi River valley.'''<br /> <br /> '''Taken with other recent research showing that the most habitable climate in North America will shift northward and the incidence of large fires will increase across the country, this suggests that the climate crisis will profoundly interrupt the way we live and farm in the United States. See how the North American places where humans have lived for thousands of years will shift and what changes are in store for your local county.''<br /> <br /> ''Check out your local area -- and consider, with care, the coming consequences of climate change...''<br /> <br /> * https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration/<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The latest scientific 'delusion' by the U.S. president'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/2020/09/20/the-president-says-the-climate-is-about-to-get-cooler-editorial/<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> ''' 'Scientific American' Breaks 175 Years Of Tradition, Endorses A Presidential Nominee'''<br /> <br /> National Public Radio / NPR <br /> <br /> * https://www.npr.org/2020/09/17/913881019/scientific-american-breaks-tradition-endorses-a-presidential-candidate<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Scientific American has been in print for nearly two centuries, but it has never endorsed a presidential candidate — until now. This week, the magazine announced its endorsement of Democratic nominee Joe Biden for president.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;We took this decision very seriously. You don't give up 175 years of tradition for nothing,&quot; Laura Helmuth, the magazine's editor-in-chief, said in an interview with NPR's Morning Edition.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;This year, we need to tell what we know about the consequences the Trump administration has had for science, health, the environment, for using evidence, for really understanding and accepting reality, and show that this time the choice is just so important for science.&quot;'' <br /> <br /> ''The magazine's endorsement reads: The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people — because he rejects evidence and science...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ················································<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Global Biodiversity Outlook'''<br /> <br /> ''UN Science Report Evidence of Accelerating Extinction of Species''<br /> <br /> ''Action to Protect and Preserve Life Needs to be a Common, Cooperative Effort''<br /> <br /> * https://www.thenational.ae/world/un-warns-world-is-failing-on-all-targets-set-to-save-nature-1.1078476 <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Extinction<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/15/every-global-target-to-stem-destruction-of-nature-by-2020-missed-un-report-aoe<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Toward the Hothouse.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:We must flatten the curve, yes ... August 2020.jpg]]<br /> <br /> ::::: [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&amp;profile=default&amp;search=mauna+loa&amp;fulltext=Search Earth Science Vital Signs, from Mauna Loa Scripps Observatory]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ·······························<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;font color=gray&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;''August 2020''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''If you missed it, you can watch the NOAA plan for future #EarthObservation / #EarthScience 'satellite architecture' here: <br /> <br /> * https://t.co/LqcRFx7PmD <br /> <br /> * https://t.co/aizTP9P1XR <br /> <br /> <br /> ·············································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''Climate change: New UK law to curb deforestation in supply chains''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''The UK government... introducing a law to ensure that the supply chains of larger companies and the products they sell are free from illegal deforestation.''<br /> <br /> ''Companies would have to ensure that commodities such as palm and soy were produced in line with local laws protecting forests and other natural ecosystems.''<br /> <br /> ''Businesses would have to publish information showing the origins of products or face fines.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;There is a hugely important connection between the products we buy and their wider environmental footprint, which is why the government is consulting today on new measures that would make it illegal for businesses in the UK to use commodities that are not grown in accordance with local laws.&quot;''<br /> <br /> * https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53891421<br /> <br /> <br /> ·············································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Big Data &amp; Climate Science'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Drill down at Colorado State University<br /> <br /> * https://sites.google.com/rams.colostate.edu/barnesresearchgroup/home<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Research of atmospheric dynamics and variability under different climates...<br /> <br /> ~ machine learning for atmospheric and climate research<br /> <br /> ~ explainable AI (XAI) for geoscience<br /> <br /> ~ causal discovery <br /> <br /> ~ large-scale atmospheric dynamics and climate change<br /> <br /> ~ sub-seasonal to seasonal prediction of extreme events, temperature, and precipitation<br /> <br /> ~ tropical-extratropical teleconnections<br /> <br /> ~ eddy-mean flow dynamics (e.g. annular-modes, wave propagation)<br /> <br /> ~ climate change and sustainability<br /> <br /> ~ use of models to understand the general circulation<br /> <br /> <br /> ································<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Skai: Hydrogen-powered aerial mobility'''<br /> <br /> Next-gen design takes off<br /> <br /> * https://inhabitat.com/the-skai-hydrogen-powered-aircraft-produces-zero-emissions/ <br /> <br /> <br /> ································<br /> <br /> <br /> '''From the 1950s and First Model Legislation and Regulations, the Fight Against Air Pollution Continues Being Waged and Clean Air Efforts Are Ramping Up'''<br /> <br /> California was out in front, the World is increasing its air quality monitoring as air pollution grows<br /> <br /> * https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/energy-and-environment/2020/8/12/21361498/climate-change-air-pollution-us-india-china-deaths<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Air_Pollution<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Air_Quality<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/California_out_in_front_in_a_Green_future<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Citizen_Science<br /> <br /> <br /> ································<br /> <br /> <br /> '''The Environmental Magazine: Series of Graphic Charts Tracking Climate Change Data Over Four Decades'''<br /> <br /> * https://emagazine.com/climate-change-in-charts/<br /> <br /> <br /> ································<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Massachusetts Acts: Forward-thinking Climate Policy &amp; Model Legislation'''<br /> <br /> Massachusetts steps it up<br /> <br /> * https://malegislature.gov/Bills/191/S2500<br /> <br /> * https://malegislature.gov/Bills/191/S2477<br /> <br /> <br /> ········································································<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/14/joe-biden-climate-jobs-plan &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Joe Biden unveils aggressive $2tn climate and jobs plan'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> Via The Guardian / U.K.<br /> <br /> U.S. Candidate for President Comes Out Swinging in Fight Against Trump<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Joe Biden has unveiled a new, more aggressive climate and jobs plan which advisers say he would take to Congress “immediately”, if elected president.'''''<br /> <br /> ''The new proposal outlines $2tn for clean energy infrastructure and other climate solutions, to be spent as quickly as possible in the next four years, what would be the Democrat’s first term in office. Last year, he proposed $1.7tn in spending over 10 years.<br /> <br /> ''“Addressing the economic crisis is going to be priority one for a President Biden,” a senior campaign official told reporters. “This will be the legislation he goes up to [Capitol Hill] immediately to get done. The reality is we will be facing a country that will be in dire need of these types of investments that are going to be made here.”''<br /> <br /> ''Two crises are converging: a devastated economy and high unemployment that could drag on for years as the nation struggles to gain control of the coronavirus pandemic, and a rapidly closing window to significantly cut heat-trapping emissions and lead on global climate action.''<br /> <br /> ''Biden unveiled the climate plan, the second part of his “Build Back Better” proposal, in remarks from Delaware on Tuesday afternoon.''<br /> <br /> ''“When Donald Trump thinks about climate change, the only word he can muster is ‘hoax’,” Biden said, referring to Trump’s previous claims that the crisis is fake. “When I think about climate change, the word I think of is ‘jobs’.” In a detailed climate policy speech, Biden said his proposal would create a million jobs in electric vehicle manufacturing, a million in upgrading buildings and a quarter-million cleaning up after extractive industries. Biden said he would give Americans money back for switching to cleaner cars and making their homes more efficient.''<br /> <br /> ''He said he was focusing on his first four years as president because “science tells us we have nine years before the damage is irreversible”.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ······························<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Time Cover Story, October 19, 1987.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Time Cover Story, October 1987'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> ... the year before James Hansen's famous [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Hansen-testimony-1988.jpg climate warning testimony to Congress in June 1988] <br /> <br /> By Michael D. Lemonick <br /> <br /> Oct. 19, 1987 <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Lemonick<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 Siterunner<br /> <br /> ... ten years before Professor Hansen's 1987 U.S. Senate testimony<br /> <br /> Passage of the first Congressional Climate Act<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:US_Public_Law_95-367.png<br /> <br /> <br /> ········································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''July 2020'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;In the U.S. ... Political Priorities Out of Alignment with Progress &amp; Security&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Historic Levels of Stock Buybacks, Depressed Investment'''<br /> <br /> * https://prospect.org/coronavirus/americas-covid-19-failure-corporate-stock-buybacks/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Historic Level of Environmental Protection Rollbacks'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Environmental_Laws<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Trump administration, U.S. federal government, attempts to roll back the National Environmental Policy Act'''<br /> <br /> Environmental Protection Agency takes hit after hit, three + years of attacks continue... setbacks will take years to reverse<br /> <br /> * https://thebulletin.org/2020/07/trump-pushes-to-deliver-on-2016-campaign-pledge-to-essentially-get-rid-of-epa/<br /> <br /> <br /> ················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Remember when 'Futurism' first came into vogue? Here, add this to speculative future thinking:'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''I’m an automation-employment-crisis skeptic. That is, I believe that even if we were – by some impossible-to-imagine means – to produce a general AI tomorrow, we would still have 200-300 years of full employment for every human who wanted a job ahead of us.''<br /> <br /> ''I’m talking about climate change, of course.''<br /> <br /> ''Remediating climate change will involve unimaginably labor-intensive tasks, like relocating every coastal city in the world kilometers inland, building high-speed rail links to replace aviation links, caring for hundreds of millions of traumatized, displaced people, and treating runaway zoontoic and insectborne pandemics.''<br /> <br /> ''These tasks will absorb more than 100% of any labor freed up by automation. Every person whose job is obsolete because of automation will have ten jobs waiting for them, for the entire foreseeable future. This means that even if you indulge in a thought experiment in which a General AI emerges that starts doing stuff humans can do – sometimes better than any human could do them – it would not lead to technological unemployment.''<br /> <br /> <br /> -- Cory Doctorow<br /> <br /> : July 6, 2020<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/<br /> <br /> <br /> ·······················································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;font color=blue&gt;&lt;big&gt;&quot;Thin Blue&quot;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> :&lt;font color=green&gt;Enabling &amp; Protecting Life on Earth&lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> ::[http://www.thinbluelayer.com www.ThinBlueLayer.com]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Life on Exoplanets.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Life_on_Exoplanets.jpg&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:One Year as the Earth Rolls.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''As the Earth Rolls at GreenPolicy360'''<br /> <br /> A monthly photograph of the sunrise from a fixed location, and for a whole year. Shows the effect of the earth's movement around the sun.<br /> <br /> Photo(s) Credit: ZAID ALABBDI<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ················································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Integral Ecology-OFM.org.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''June 2020'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Sahara dust plume crosses the Atlantic.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ·········································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Statement to Restore Science-Based Policy in Government'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Scientists for Science-Based Policy''<br /> <br /> * https://scientistsforsciencebasedpolicy.org/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences'''''<br /> <br /> ''Statement Updated June 2020*''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''In September 2016, over 375 members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) signed an Open Letter calling attention to the dangers of human-induced climate change. The letter warned that U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate accord would have negative consequences for the world’s climate system and for U.S. leadership and credibility.''<br /> <br /> ''In the intervening months, these negative consequences have become more obvious. Human-caused climate disruption is leading to suffering and economic loss. Suffering and loss are not future hypotheticals. They are happening now. Despite these serious negative consequences, the present Administration has fulfilled its threat to initiate U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate accord. The United States is the only nation in the world that has taken this action.'' <br /> <br /> ''The decision to withdraw is symptomatic of a larger problem: the Trump Administration’s denigration of scientific expertise and harassment of scientists. The dismissal of scientific evidence in policy formulation has affected wide areas of the social, biological, environmental and physical sciences. It has been particularly egregious in climate science. A recent instance of this is the intention of the Administration to assemble a “Red Team/Blue Team” to re-litigate all aspects of climate science. Such an exercise seeks to foster the erroneous impression of deep uncertainty concerning the reality and seriousness of anthropogenically driven climate change.''<br /> <br /> ''Scientific evidence and research should be an important component of policymaking. We therefore call on the Federal Government to maintain scientific content on publicly accessible websites, to appoint qualified personnel to positions requiring scientific expertise, to cease censorship and intimidation of Government scientists, and to reverse the decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement.''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''Signed: Over 1,200 National Academy of Sciences signers as of June 2020. The List is updated as others sign.''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> * http://www.nasonline.org/<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Academy_of_Sciences<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/06/most-trump-environmental-rollbacks-will-take-years-to-be-reversed/ &lt;big&gt;'''''Trump Environmental Rollbacks Will Take Years to be Reversed'''''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> ''Via Yale Climate Connections''<br /> <br /> ''A new administration could renew the U.S. commitment to the Paris climate agreement, strengthen air pollution standards, and more. But that will take time.''<br /> <br /> ''The Trump administration, after less than one full first term, has every likelihood of being adjudged the most anti-climate, anti-science, and anti-environment executive branch in U.S. history. With numerous high-level Trump nominees having cut their teeth as lobbyists with major polluting industries, the administration has been steadfast in weakening or eliminating major conservation and environmental regulations and programs.''<br /> <br /> ''The extensive regulatory cutbacks raise questions about how much long-term damage they might pose to air and water quality and to serious efforts to address climate change. With a presidential election now five months away, they also raise “What if…” questions about whether such cutbacks might be sustained or how quickly they might be reversed by a new administration.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ························································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Defend Our Future 6-1-2020.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''May 2020'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Inexhaustible Resource? No. Fresh Water Is an Endangered Vital Resource'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Better start measuring, monitoring, and managing it, than lose it''' <br /> <br /> Guarding Earth’s groundwater from space<br /> <br /> Using drones and tiny satellites to bring some accountability to the world’s biggest user of H20: agriculture<br /> <br /> ''In many parts of the world, consumption of fresh water in homes is metered and billed accordingly. In agriculture, by far the world’s biggest user of water, that doesn’t happen. Most farmers simply pump up groundwater and use it at will; often, the only expense is the fuel required to get it to the surface.''<br /> <br /> ''Given depleting groundwater, and wider concerns over food security, that’s a problem...''<br /> <br /> * https://wired.me/science/environment/heres-one-way-to-protect-earths-groundwater-guard-it-from-space/<br /> <br /> <br /> ································································<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Trump administration continues attack on science and environmental policies'''<br /> <br /> '''Science on the Ballot'''<br /> <br /> People say they care about climate. So why don’t they vote like it?<br /> <br /> Judith Lewis Mernit / Capital &amp; Main<br /> <br /> May 20, 2020<br /> <br /> By Judith Lewis Mernit<br /> <br /> ''In the past three and a half years, officials in the Trump administration have attacked environmental laws and the science that supports them with an unbridled urgency. Rules guiding everything from light bulb efficiency to wildlife protection to fugitive emissions from oil drilling have been thrown out or threatened; “settled science” is no longer. Administration officials have fired experts and stacked advisory panels, such as the EPA’s Science Advisory Board that Zarba headed up before he retired in 2018, with underqualified academics or pro-industry researchers.''<br /> <br /> ''“What we’re seeing under the Trump administration is an unraveling of the scientific fabric that runs through government,” says Gretchen Goldman, research director for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. The Department of Energy forbade climate scientists from even mentioning climate change in emails; former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who left the agency in 2018 amid conflict of interest allegations, went after a national park superintendent for writing a Twitter thread about the effects of intensifying heat on the desert ecosystem. “We’ve talked to hundreds of scientists who have said they’d altered their language to avoid political backlash,” Goldman says.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Environment Deregulation(US), Climate Litigation (US &amp; Global)''' <br /> <br /> Five decades of environmental progress being rolled back by Trump administration<br /> <br /> Over 100 environmental rule roll backs by Trump ... track the deconstruction of environmental protections:<br /> <br /> * Climate Deregulation Tracker - http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/resources/climate-deregulation-tracker <br /> <br /> * Climate Change Law Tracker - http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/climatechange<br /> <br /> * Environmental Laws Rollback Tracker - https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/regulatory-rollback-tracker <br /> <br /> * Silencing Science Tracker - http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/resources/silencing-science-tracker<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ·····················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Anonymous Members of UK Parliament Talk Climate Politics'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> A Writer promises not to name names, if the politicos talk openly and honestly<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.theguardian.com/profile/rebecca-willis By Rebecca Willis]<br /> <br /> Writer for The Guardian, Author of [https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/too-hot-to-handle Too Hot to Handle: The Democratic Challenge of Climate Change]<br /> <br /> <br /> (Ed: Following are clips from a &quot;Long Read&quot; article published on May 21, 2020)<br /> <br /> <br /> ''She had two, conflicting, demands: she wanted urgent action on climate; and she also wanted government support to allow her local industry to continue polluting. She was simultaneously backing and opposing climate action. She was worried that someone – maybe a constituent or the local paper – would point out this glaring contradiction. But so far, no one had. “I thought I might get a bit of pushback,” she told me. “I’ve had absolutely zero.”''<br /> <br /> ''This contradiction sums up the state of climate politics in the UK today. There is strong cross-party support for far-reaching carbon targets. In June last year, the government passed a law to strengthen these targets, committing the UK to end virtually all emissions of carbon and other greenhouse gases within the next 30 years. There was next to no opposition – in fact, Labour and the Liberal Democrats argued for an earlier phase-out date. And yet politicians are oddly reluctant to talk about how we might actually meet these targets. There is very little honest debate about the major changes to our economy and society that will be needed if we are to meet this challenge. Like my interviewee, we’re all in favour of climate action, but we haven’t yet had an honest conversation about the power and the vested interests involved, or the choices that will have to be made if we are to achieve significant reductions in emissions.''<br /> <br /> ''... the dual reality of climate politics. We know that things need to change, and yet we’re embedded in our current lives and our current politics. We exist in both realities at once. Politicians make grand statements about the threat of climate change, then flip straight back into politics-as-usual.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''After the Coronavirus Crisis: Will Things Change?'''<br /> <br /> ''Covid-19 is, understandably, taking up all the political and media attention there is, for now. But the need for fast, radical carbon cuts – and a political strategy that will allow this to happen – has not gone away. Will green investment be prioritised in the economic stimulus packages that are undoubtedly needed? Will people think differently about travel or food security? Will we emerge with a politics that focuses more on a collective approach to global challenges such as climate? Or will we fall back into desperate attempts to rekindle the old economy and the old ways?'' <br /> <br /> ''All the politicians I spoke to accepted the science of climate change. And yet they downplayed the consequences. They showed a reluctance to discuss how climate change would reshape human society. A newly elected MP, talking to me in the House of Commons, told me that climate “terrified” him. “Where we’re sat right now might well be underwater, right next to the Thames. I wouldn’t fancy our chances.”''<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> ''Over the course of the interviews, carried out between 2016 and 2018, I saw a pattern emerge. The way politicians responded to climate didn’t just depend on what they thought about the science. Instead, it became clear to me that there were two main reasons why MPs struggled with the issue: first, because it didn’t fit easily into the culture of political life and their own identity as a parliamentarian; and second, because they worried that public support for climate action was limited, and that, as representatives, they needed to be led by their electorate.''<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> ''I was surprised by the extent to which the MPs I spoke to felt constrained by the social norms of their workplace. In one conversation, my interviewee was deliciously unguarded in her opinions of her colleagues. She said that just a few of her 600 or so fellow parliamentarians took climate seriously as an issue: “You might not get into double figures.” She told me she saw everything through a climate lens, and was, in private, very critical of measures such as tax breaks for oil and gas exploration. And yet she felt that she had to tread carefully: she has to fit in. I asked her what would happen if she tried to intervene in a budget debate, to make the case that fossil fuels should stay in the ground. She replied: “I think they’d just think you were a bit ‘niche’, is the way I’d put it – I say ‘niche’ in quotes, like a bit of a lunatic fringe.”''<br /> <br /> ''One former MP, who had been an active climate campaigner in parliament, said: “I was known as being a freak.” Another told me about how he tried to avoid being seen as a “zealot”. These remarks were common in my conversations with politicians. Some said they avoided any mention of climate for fear that it would put an unhelpful label on them. One confident, outspoken MP who worked on energy policy told me that he did what he could to promote policies that would reduce carbon, but justified his proposals on other grounds, such as reducing fuel bills. “I don’t use climate change as the word because I think it’s just toxic,” he told me. “As is the way in these issues which are contentious, you won’t take people with you politically.”''<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> ''... climate was not something that people factored into their daily lives... people were aware of, and concerned by, climate change, but chose to ignore it. It was an unspoken collective turning away... “How could the possibility of climate change be deeply disturbing and almost completely invisible – simultaneously unimaginable and common knowledge?”'' <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> ''... it is surprisingly difficult for politicians to talk openly about the need to transition away from fossil fuels. Witness Nicola Sturgeon, leader of a progressive Scottish government that champions strong climate commitments, while also supporting continued oil and gas extraction in the North Sea. When challenged, her reply is always the same: the industry “cannot be shut down overnight”. She’s right. But her dismissive response shies away from the science, which tells us very clearly that fossil fuels need to stay in the ground, and that we need a plan to move away from them, and create opportunities and jobs elsewhere – not overnight, but urgently.''<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> ''So far, climate action has focused overwhelmingly on low-carbon solutions such as developing renewable energy or offering grants for electric vehicles. These are very valuable schemes, but all this positive activity masks a deeper problem. Little has been done to curb carbon-intensive activity. New coal mines are opened and new airports built with little discussion of climate impacts. If we are constantly finding new ways to dig up and burn carbon, it won’t be enough just to ramp up renewable energy. Study after study shows that meeting climate goals means phasing out the extraction and use of oil, coal and gas – yet no mainstream political party has a coherent plan to do this.''<br /> <br /> ''Politicians, then, are constrained by the culture of political life. They also feel constrained by the electorate. There was a striking consistency in my interviews: no MP felt that their voters were putting them under particular pressure to act. As one said to me, “I’ve knocked hundreds, literally thousands of doors, and had tens of thousands of conversations with voters … and I just don’t have conversations about climate change.”''<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> ''... climate change requires everyone to do their bit. But this claim is often ignored, because people are understandably caught up with their daily lives and struggles, or feel powerless, cynical or overwhelmed by the scale of the challenge. Some politicians point out the economic or social benefits of climate action, such as jobs in renewable energy. As one told me: “I’m happy to use an economic argument if that means more people will come on side.” Another told me about proposals for a new road in his constituency, which he opposed. If he had used a climate argument, he said, “there would have been a rolling of eyes and saying: ‘Oh, here he goes again.’” Instead, he made the case on economic grounds, saying that investment in public transport was a better option.''<br /> <br /> ''There’s a danger in dampening down the message in this way. If politicians don’t speak out, people don’t feel a sense of urgency. They are less likely to support climate action if they don’t see their politicians leading the way, or offering up a strategy that is as serious as the problem it is designed to address.'' <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> What the pandemic does provide... is the possibility of change. The government has done things in the last few weeks that no one thought possible: paying the wages of millions of private-sector workers; shoring up company finances; involving itself in the lives of individuals in ways that would previously have caused the hackles of even the most radical of politicians to rise. Fundamentally, we are rethinking the relationship between state and citizen. As citizens, we have realised that we need the state to keep us safe from crises, be they immediate, like Covid-19, or longer term, like climate change. Politicians, for their part, have realised that people can rise to the challenge, if they understand what they need to do and why.''<br /> <br /> ''If we are to make the right choice here, as a society, the essential first step is a simple one: speaking out. Politicians, and others, need to speak openly and with unflinching honesty about the significance of climate change. As my conversations with MPs have shown, this is a surprisingly difficult thing to do. The left has made a start, with its idea of a [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_New_Deal Green New Deal]. In the US, politicians led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey put forward a plan aiming for net-zero emissions and 100% renewable energy, including job creation in manufacturing, economic justice and even universal healthcare.''<br /> <br /> ''Following Covid-19, what the Green New Deal now offers is, essentially, a green route to recovery.''<br /> <br /> ''Given a meaningful opportunity to have their say, most people would support action in the face of the climate breakdown that is unfolding in front of us. But our democracies, in their current form, are just not offering people that choice. Politicians and citizens, if they take each other seriously, can turn this around.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ······················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Hope.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ······················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;Conference with Andy Revkin at Council on Foreign Relations&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Science-Based Reporting and Countering Misinformation<br /> <br /> * https://www.cfr.org/conference-calls/science-based-reporting-and-countering-misinformation<br /> <br /> ''Andy, you have a long and incredibly distinguished history of writing about the intersection of politics and science, which is rarely pretty. I remember a story you broke in the mid-2000s, during the George W. Bush administration, about their efforts to silence a top scientist at NASA who was calling for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. So how different is the environment today between the suppression of science and active disinformation? And what do you think are the main drivers of the disinformation you’re seeing on COVID-19? Is it politicians, deep political polarization, wider science denialism than we’ve seen before?''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ···························<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;Identifying and Countering Disinformation, Misinformation&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Techniques of science denialism<br /> <br /> <br /> :::::[[File:FLICC techniques of science denial.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ···························<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Science, Testing, Facts &amp; Evidence -- COVID-19'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> As New York began to rollout plans to reopen, Gov. Andrew Cuomo warned residents to remain cautious. &quot;Phased reopening does not mean the problem has gone away,&quot; Cuomo said. '''&quot;Follow the data, follow the science, follow the facts, follow the metrics.&quot;'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ···························<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://apnews.com/0cd4f7bdfc577e234a2c84fbc0b5e7ee '''Nancy Beck Is Back''']<br /> <br /> After a deeply controversial stint at the EPA, the former chemical industry executive nominated to be the nation’s top consumer safety watchdog is now sidelining <br /> [https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6889330-guidance-for-opening-up-america-again-framework.html ''''detailed guidelines''''] to help communities reopen during the coronavirus pandemic.<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2020/05/14/cdc-guidance-reopening-coronavirus-259565 ''''' 'Scaled-back guidance', brief edited document now being released''''']<br /> <br /> ''The White House ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to revise an earlier draft it deemed &quot;too prescriptive.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''The new CDC guidelines, which appear to be watered down from previously leaked versions, provide brief checklists meant to help key businesses and others operating in public reopen safely. In separate one-page documents, the CDC offers decision-making tools for schools, workplaces, camps, child care programs, mass transit systems, and bars and restaurants.''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :························································································<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :[[File:Trump envir rollbacks - clean car clean air setback.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''April 2020'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :[[Earth Day Memories on the 50th Anniversary]]<br /> <br /> :[[File:Earth Day 50th Golden Anniversary.gif]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Earth Day 2020<br /> 50th Anniversary of first Earth Day &quot;Teach-In&quot; / April 22, 1970&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Original Art by Olivia Schmidt / BY-NC<br /> Creative Commons / Use w/ Attribution + Non-commercial&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;On the 50th Anniversary&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Memories on the Road to the First Earth Day&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> Steven Schmidt / [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/User:Siterunner GreenPolicy360 Siterunner]<br /> <br /> <br /> It started on a Schwinn bike in the mid-1960s. My road to April 22, 1970. The day that would be called the first &quot;Earth Day&quot;...<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Day_Memories_on_the_50th_Anniversary&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Day&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ···························································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The BP America Fire, Oil Blowout and Spill in the Gulf'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> April 16, 2020 / A Decade After<br /> <br /> By Craig Pittman / Florida Phoenix<br /> <br /> * https://www.floridaphoenix.com/2020/04/16/a-decade-after-the-bp-oil-spill-sick-fish-gulf-pollution-and-human-health-problems<br /> <br /> <br /> ''On March 31, 2010, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich visited St. Petersburg’s Vinoy hotel to give a speech where he talked about how safe offshore oil drilling was. He was touting his book, '''Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less'''.''<br /> <br /> ''On that same day, then-President Barack Obama announced he would open a lot of the nation’s coastline to drilling, including two-thirds of the eastern Gulf of Mexico.''<br /> <br /> ''Meanwhile, Florida legislators were considering allowing drilling in state waters just three miles off the coast, figuring that from that distance, the tourists wouldn’t see it, so what could go wrong?''<br /> <br /> ''A decade later, this all seems remarkably stupid because within three weeks, on April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank 5,000 feet beneath the gulf.''<br /> <br /> ''Two days later, on Earth Day, the damaged rig began spewing oil that coated coastlines in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and even Florida, ruining tourism, charter fishing and other industries that depend on clean beaches and uncontaminated water.''<br /> <br /> ''The BP oil continues polluting the gulf even today, according to recently released findings by scientists from the University of South Florida’s College of Marine Sciences. It’s still affecting fish and other marine species...''<br /> <br /> ''After the disaster, Obama appointed a federal commission to investigate what went wrong. The commission’s chief investigator, “Sam” Sankar, said the commission’s recommendations called for imposing strong, clear regulations to ensure safety, evaluating the risks of another spill and making sure the oil industry can be held liable in the event of another disaster.''<br /> <br /> ''Of those recommendations, “none of them have been implemented&quot;...''<br /> <br /> <br /> ··············································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''As the Saudi and Russian Oil Industry Battle'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-08-14/bleak-financial-outlook-for-us-fracking-industry/ US Shale Oil &amp; Gas 'Fracking Independents' Waver]<br /> <br /> Long-term Trends Test the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Fossil_Fuels Fossil Fuels Industry Future]<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Vitol, the world’s largest independent oil trading company, has said that oil demand could slump as much as 20 million barrels per day (BPD) over the next few weeks, which would lead to an annual decline of 5 million BPD. Vitol CEO Russell Hardy said “It’s pretty huge in terms of anything we’ve had to deal with before.”''<br /> <br /> ''Goldman Sachs said it expected March demand to be down 10.5 million BPD, followed by a further decline to 18.7 million BPD in April. The company noted that this deep plunge would be beyond the ability of OPEC to counteract: “A demand shock of this magnitude will overwhelm any supply response including any potential core-Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries output freeze or cut.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> ··············································<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Via HuffingtonPost'' / ''Fracking, a ballyhooed but financially fragile sector, struggled to stay afloat with crude selling at $50 per barrel. If prices stay around $30, or even fall as low as $20, U.S. frackers simply might be unable to keep up.''<br /> <br /> * https://oilprice.com<br /> <br /> * https://www.bloomberg.com/energy<br /> <br /> <br /> ''“It’s a financial bloodbath,” said Clark Williams-Derry, an analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “With oil prices at the current level, there’s a real risk many of them will simply go bankrupt.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''As of the first week in March...''<br /> <br /> ''Occidental Petroleum Corp.’s stock price nearly halved as trading closed on Monday. Debt-burdened firms such as Chesapeake Energy Corp. and Whiting Petroleum Corp. finished the day with stock prices down between 30% and 41%. Even behemoths big enough to weather almost any shock took big hits as Exxon Mobil Corp. fell nearly 12% and Chevron Corp. dropped 15%.''<br /> <br /> ''Forecasters are still determining the extent of the likely effect the price drop will have on the broader economy. But it could also have an effect on politics, which are particularly fraught around fracking, the colloquial term for hydraulic fracturing, a drilling practice that breaks bedrock with high-pressured water and chemicals to release difficult-to-reach fossil fuel reserves.''<br /> <br /> Fracking now makes up 63% of U.S. oil production, the Energy Information Administration estimates. That figure looks set to increase as oil and gas drilling grows faster in the U.S. than any other country, and 90% of that is dependent on fracking, according to a report by scientists at more than a dozen environmental groups.''<br /> <br /> ''Contenders in the 2020 presidential election are currently battling over whether to expand, preserve or entirely phase out an industry whose growth all but guarantees climate catastrophe...'' <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ····················<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''March 2020'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Basalts: Carbon Conversion?'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.carbfix.com<br /> <br /> * https://eos.org/articles/basalts-turn-carbon-into-stone-for-permanent-storage<br /> <br /> <br /> ··············································<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Drilled - Website.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;Drilled - Website&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.criticalfrequency.org/drilled<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;Drilled - Podcasts&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> 31 Episodes | 2018 - 2020<br /> <br /> * https://fanlink.to/drilled<br /> <br /> * https://www.criticalfrequency.org/drilled<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Drilled - Season 1 - Season 2.jpg|link=https://www.criticalfrequency.org/drilled]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Madmen of Climate Denial&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :Apple Podcasts<br /> :Google Play<br /> :Pocket Casts<br /> :RadioPublic<br /> :Stitcher<br /> :Spotify<br /> :TuneIn<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Drilled: A True Crime Podcast about Climate Change'''<br /> <br /> October 21st, 2018 / 2:26<br /> <br /> Launched November 14, 2018, Drilled is a limited series investigative true-crime podcast about the crime of the century: the creation of climate denial.<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ································································· <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Educators, Teachers, Parents Are Increasingly Pushing Back Against False Science Information Online'''<br /> <br /> Facebook, Google-YouTube Algorithms Feed Suggested 'Phony Misinformation' to Students and Children<br /> <br /> * https://www.cbsnews.com/news/flat-earth-climate-change-conspiracies-students-teachers-war-on-science-cbsn-originals/<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Since its launch in 2005, YouTube has amassed an audience of over 2 billion monthly active users. Part of the secret of its success is the personalization algorithm that suggests videos based on viewing habits, a process that can create a feedback loop of misinformation. With just a click or two, students can be drawn into debunked and anti-scientific diatribes about climate change, evolution, and even whether the Earth is flat...'' <br /> <br /> ''Based on recent surveys, children are increasingly likely to rely on YouTube for information. A 2019 report from Common Sense Media found that 56% of kids ages 8 to 12, and 69% of teens ages 13 to 18, watch videos online every day. According to a Pew Research survey of YouTube users, half said they use the platform for education purposes. But many of the videos they may encounter on science topics are not based on established scientific data at all, and instead promote pseudoscience, false claims and conspiracy theories.'' <br /> <br /> ''&quot;If you're already predisposed to be interested in conspiracy theories and you're watching videos on conspiracies, the 'flat Earth' videos are going to be suggested to you. When you search for shapes of the Earth, it's the 'flat Earth' data that's going to be presented to you,&quot; said Asheley Landrum, an assistant professor at Texas Tech University who specializes in science communication.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;You end up in an echo chamber where you're being exposed more to this evidence than the information that would correct the 'flat Earth' views you're talking about.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''YouTube, which is owned by Google, has community guidelines that ban &quot;harmful&quot; content, but there's no specific policy against spreading false or misleading ideas about science.''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Science.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Re: Critical Importance of Science &amp; Facts'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''&quot;You can manage only what you can measure&quot;''' <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Stats_-_Green_Research_%26_Science &lt;big&gt;'''GreenPolicy360: Our Position on the Use of Science'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Good_science_needs_good_data.png Good Science Needs Good Data]<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Stats_-_Green_Research_%26_Science<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Memories of Big Science advocates in the US Congress.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''50th Anniversary of Landsat (2016)'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Landsat 50th anniv Sept 2016.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;'''''https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/'''''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''''''https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Virtual_Earth'''''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''''''http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Landsat_data_users_handbook'''''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 Siterunner: When Rep. George E. Brown drafted originating legislation establishing a '''national climate change research program''' via the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:US_Public_Law_95-367.png National Climate Program Act of 1978], the scientific community and nation were just beginning to awaken to a new national security threat. I remember his concern, our concern. He was trained as a scientist, an engineer, with an ability to see facts and data sets in a way others could not. <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Congressman George E. Brown / Science Committee Leadership at the Front of Climate Action'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/National_Climate_Program_Act_Public_Law_95-367_Sept_1978.pdf '''National Climate Program Act, 1978 / PDF''']<br /> : The first federal program established to study and assess scientifically the issues and risks of human-caused climate change<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:US Public Law 95-367.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''At the Beginning of U.S. Science on Global Warming '''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Data, Strategies &amp; Planning'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/Energy_and_Climate_Report%2C_1977%2C_National_Academy_of_Sciences.pdf '''Energy and Climate Report, 1977, National Academy of Sciences / 175 pp. / PDF via GreenPolicy360''']<br /> <br /> <br /> '''1978, the First Climate Act'''<br /> <br /> '''Congressman Brown was responsible for the drafting and passage in 1977 of the First U.S. Federal Climate Report'''<br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:US_Public_Law_95-367.png '''National Climate Program Act, Public Law 95-367''']<br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/National_Climate_Program_Act_Public_Law_95-367_Sept_1978.pdf '''National Climate Program Act of September 1978''']<br /> <br /> <br /> '''In 1979 came the first follow-on [https://www.nap.edu/read/12181/chapter/1 National Science Academy report]. This study and report of national scientists was [https://phys.org/news/2019-07-charney-years-scientists-accurately-climate.html prescient and accurate in its global warming predictions.]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> Representative Brown, a Congressperson with vision, was out in front of &quot;Big Science&quot;. With decades on the House Science committee, and as an engineer, he knew the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:You_can_manage_only_what_you_can_measure_Dr_David_Crisp,_OCO-2,_June_2014_m.jpg need for good data with which good policy decisions could be made]. He pressed for first-generation earth science satellites and ongoing earth monitoring missions and data sharing. Among his many initiatives, George Brown was a key figure in proposing, establishing, and then saving the [https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/ Landsat program], the [http://www.nytimes.com/1989/03/02/us/last-civilian-photography-satellites-to-shut-down.html uniquely 'open-access' database of Earth Science imaging] when President Reagan attempted to shut Landsat down. Landsat, a model for all the following [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Research_from_Space earth science research missions from space], is now moving into its fifth decade with [http://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/?p=10391 Landsat 9.] <br /> <br /> George's profound accomplishments are especially missed now in the current era as [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_and_Space,_Politics anti-science positioning] in the U.S. Congress threatens national and global security... <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/27/1993-agency-climate-change-abolished-office-technology-assessment '''''The US Office of Technology Assessment should be revived – in 2019 the world will need its expertise more than ever''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360 Siterunner: William Westermeyer writes of a science agency that was established thru the work of Congressman George E Brown, Congressman from East LA and a leader of California's initiatives in environmental science. Gingrich disbanded the US Office of Technology Assessment in the 1995, after its [https://ota.fas.org/reports/9338.pdf warning on climate change]. Today, the science office to advise the president, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Science_and_Technology_Policy Office of Science and Technology Policy] also brought into existence by George Brown, is moribund with its science executive positions going unfilled. The president is [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Too_Intelligent_to_Believe_in_Climate_Report.png on record] saying he doesn't need the science... The nation and world head into the future as science is set aside.<br /> <br /> <br /> • https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_News<br /> <br /> • https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:George Brown, Sci Com't.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ··································· <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Gistemp 1979-2019.png]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ················································<br /> <br /> <br /> '''A 'Wright Brothers Moment' -- the First Commercial e-Plane Flies'''<br /> <br /> BBC's Future Planet Series Highlights Electric Flight<br /> <br /> * https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200211-the-electric-plane-leading-a-revolution<br /> <br /> <br /> '''More on e-Flight'''<br /> <br /> [https://www.cnn.com/travel/amp/airplane-contrails-climate-change-science-study/index.html How changing aircraft altitude could cut flight's climate impact in half]<br /> <br /> <br /> :·········································<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Energy-Production Battlelines'''<br /> <br /> <br /> Australia -- an 'Insane Energy Project'<br /> <br /> * https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/adani-mine-australia-climate-change-848315/<br /> <br /> <br /> Japan -- after Fukushima's meltdown, 22 New Coal Energy Projects<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/climate/japan-coal-fukushima.html<br /> <br /> ''It is one unintended consequence of the Fukushima nuclear disaster almost a decade ago, which forced Japan to all but close its nuclear power program. Japan now plans to build as many as 22 new coal-burning power plants — one of the dirtiest sources of electricity — at 17 different sites in the next five years, just at a time when the world needs to slash carbon dioxide emissions to fight global warming...''<br /> <br /> ''Together the 22 power plants would emit almost as much carbon dioxide annually as all the passenger cars sold each year in the United States. The construction stands in contrast with Japan’s effort to portray this summer’s Olympic Games in Tokyo as one of the greenest ever.''<br /> <br /> <br /> :·······································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Money &amp; Climate Policy'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Mnuchin $.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Why a 17-year-old is a better economist than Steve Mnuchin'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/27/opinion/greta-thunberg-mnuchin.html By Paul Krugman]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ·····························<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''January 2020'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[Climate News]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''No 'Planet B' but NOAA cometh with &quot;Climate intervention&quot; - &quot;Geoengineering&quot;?<br /> <br /> * https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/noaa-gets-go-ahead-to-study-controversial-climate-plan-b/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Hottest decade on record.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ························································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:BlackRock CEO says the climate crisis is about to trigger.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> * https://realmoney.thestreet.com/jim-cramer/jim-cramer-once-again-why-fossil-fuels-are-on-the-wrong-side-of-history-15227698<br /> <br /> <br /> ······························<br /> <br /> <br /> '''NEPA Update:'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/02/what-trumps-proposed-nepa-rollback-could-mean-for-the-climate/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Trump administration attacks the 'Magna Carta' of US Environmental Protection, the NEPA Act'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Administration officials say they aim to &quot;modernize and clarify&quot; the 50-year-old [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/National_Environmental_Policy_Act National Environmental Policy Act, NEPA.]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;[[National Environmental Policy Act]]&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.npr.org/2020/01/09/794857523/trump-administration-proposes-major-changes-to-bedrock-environmental-law <br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/climate/trump-nepa-environment.html<br /> <br /> <br /> ''NEPA is often said to be [https://www.nrdc.org/experts/amanda-jahshan/nepa-magna-carta-environmental-law the Magna Carta of the environmental movement...]''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ······························<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Thin Blue difference - approx 12 miles high.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ··········································<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Relational Reality.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ··········································<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;font color=green&gt;A Green Paradigm&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:The Web of Life by Fritjof Capra.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''' December 2019'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''As we look toward a New Year and New Decade, we bring a [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Relational_Reality.jpg &lt;font color=green&gt;green world view&lt;/font&gt;] forward with us'''<br /> <br /> Everything is connected in nature, it is all related<br /> <br /> Looking at the climate and how it is changing... Look to <br /> the physics of interconnected Earth systems<br /> <br /> Here, let Kate Marvel explain:<br /> <br /> * https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/hot-planet/this-was-the-decade-we-knew-we-were-right/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:In nature, nothing exists alone.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :···············································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Tracking the Environmental Rollbacks of the Trump Presidency'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/regulatory-rollback-tracker/<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Environmental &amp; Energy Law Program / Harvard Law School<br /> <br /> ''Real-world legal analysis for today’s environmental and energy challenges<br /> <br /> ''We provide real-world legal analysis for today’s environmental and energy challenges. We promote creative problem solving and productive engagement through rigorous legal research, and outreach to decision-makers, stakeholders, media, and the public. Our work covers the following issue areas:'''''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Environmental Governance: including Tracking Environmental Deregulation and Tracking the Undermining of EPA’s Mission'''''<br /> <br /> '''''Electricity Law and Policy'''''<br /> <br /> '''''Private Sector Governance &amp; Innovation'''''<br /> <br /> '''''State &amp; Local Climate Strategies'''''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Decision-makers in these areas are faced with the challenges of technological advances, restructured markets, and climate change. These challenges require innovative, nimble responses that are grounded in a thoughtful policy framework. The Environment &amp; Energy law project at Harvard works with policymakers, advocacy organizations, industry groups, and other stakeholders, to contribute legal scholarship that has real world impacts.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Science Under Attack'''''<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/28/climate/trump-administration-war-on-science.html<br /> <br /> <br /> ''WASHINGTON — In just three years, the Trump administration has diminished the role of science in federal policymaking while halting or disrupting research projects nationwide, marking a transformation of the federal government whose effects, experts say, could reverberate for years.''<br /> <br /> ''Political appointees have shut down government studies, reduced the influence of scientists over regulatory decisions and in some cases pressured researchers not to speak publicly. The administration has particularly challenged scientific findings related to the environment and public health opposed by industries such as oil drilling and coal mining. It has also impeded research around human-caused climate change, which President Trump has dismissed despite a global scientific consensus...''<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Environmental_rollbacks_in_US_by_Trump_administration_as_of_June_2019,_NYT_report.jpg Environmental Rollbacks (as of June 2019) by the Trump administration]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Environmental rollbacks in US by Trump administration as of June 2019, NYT report.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ·····························<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Gathering Storm'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Aerial-storm-by-Santiago-Borja.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''What was achieved at the Climate Summit? Little progress.'''<br /> <br /> * https://amp.theguardian.com/science/2019/dec/15/cop25-un-climate-talks-over-for-another-year-was-anything-achieved<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Climate Summit in Madrid ends without action agenda. More promises to act, few commitments'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2019/12/15/21022674/cop25-madrid-climate-change-greta-thunberg<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Climate Action 25th conf in Madrid.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''In Madrid, world leaders arrive for the 25th UN Climate Change Conference !'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :[https://twitter.com/i/status/1201393341730115584 &lt;big&gt;#TiempoDeActuar ! #TimeforAction !&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;We inherited the planet from our parents, and we need to hand it over to future generations&quot; - @KurtykaMichal formally opens the #ClimateChange gathering before handing over its Presidency to [https://twitter.com/CarolaSchmidtZ @CarolaSchmidtZ] / [http://bit.ly/35SrnCn Webcast]<br /> <br /> Recently a majority of lawmakers in the European Parliament voted to declare &quot;a climate and environmental emergency in Europe and globally.&quot; The European Parliament vote to declare a 'climate emergency' stands in stark contrast to the United States and its president.<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/11/1052251 UN: About the Conference, Things You Need to Know]<br /> <br /> More at [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_News GreenPolicy360 Climate News]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> '''''And from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists'''''<br /> <br /> * https://thebulletin.org/2019/11/bad-climate-news-times-three-plus-some-hope/<br /> <br /> ''This has been a pretty unfortunate few weeks for overall climate news, serving up almost a trifecta of bad reports. Consider: A major new United Nations report issued today (Tuesday, November 26) found that greenhouse gas emissions from the world’s biggest polluters have increased, despite the landmark agreement in Paris four years ago to hold the increase in global temperatures well below 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degree Fahrenheit. “The summary finding is bleak,” the report said, and “…deeper and faster cuts are now required.”''<br /> <br /> ''On a longer time scale, the World Meteorological Organization reported yesterday that levels of heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide have reached another new, record high. “There is no sign of a slowdown, let alone a decline, in greenhouse gases concentration in the atmosphere despite all the commitments under the Paris Agreement on Climate Change,” the organization’s leader, Petteri Taalas, said.''<br /> <br /> ''Meanwhile, evidence has been accumulating that the world is getting closer and closer to what has been called a “hothouse Earth scenario,” in which large chunks of the planet become at least partially uninhabitable, leading 11,000 scientists to publish an open letter on November 5 in the journal BioScience calling for immediate action. The letter said: “The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected. It is more severe than anticipated, threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''November 2019'''''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Drawdown CO2 - Online Education solutions video.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ·························································· <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''&quot;We are running out of air&quot; -- Delhi'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Air Pollution - Air Quality Nov 4, 2019 Delhi.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/11/delhi-air-crisis/601507/<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Air_Quality<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Air_Pollution<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''October 2019'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Thin Blue difference.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Thin Blue difference - approx 12 miles high.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> ································································· <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;So they knew...&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://www.theguardian.com/business/video/2019/oct/23/exxon-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-congress-testimony-climate '''''(In 1982) You predicted 415 ppm for 2019? The Fossil Fuels research warned of consequences... ''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Via The Guardian'' / ''House Democrats on Wednesday laid out evidence that the oil behemoth ExxonMobil had known since the 1970s about the potential for a climate crisis and intentionally sowed doubt about it. One of those testifying was Martin Hoffert, a scientist consultant for Exxon Research and Engineering in the 1980s. Responding to the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Hoffert testified that in 1982, Exxon scientists predicted how carbon dioxide levels would rise and heat the planet as humans burned more fossil fuels.''<br /> <br /> ''Exxon sowed doubt about climate crisis, a House of Representatives Committee heard in US Congressional testimony.''<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Fossil_Fuels '''Read about Fossil Fuels and Continuing Emissions Production''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Which countries pollute the most ~2017.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/climate/trump-science-crisis.html ''US Faces 'Crisis' in Science'']<br /> <br /> ''All presidents over the past two decades have nudged science to support their policies, but a [https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/policy-solutions/proposals-reform-volume-ii-national-task-force-rule-law-democracy report] out of N.Y.U. says the Trump administration has driven federal science to a “crisis point.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/01/bad-ancestors-climate-crisis-democracy ''Via The Guardian'']<br /> <br /> '''''Does the Climate Crisis Violate the Rights of Those Yet to be Born?''''' <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''September 2019'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Carbon Budgeting as Financial Planning Budgeting'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> As #PlanetCitizens w/ GreenPolicy360, we turn to our friends at #GlobalCitizen for a deep discussion of a heating Earth, CO2 and a ticking clock'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/what-does-a-carbon-budget-mean/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''&quot;You are failing us&quot;...'''<br /> <br /> [[File:UN General Assembly Climate Summit Day1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://apnews.com/67c8a8c50854447cafef611dc4aa15ea &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''At the UN Climate Summit: Leader after leader promises to do more'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Biggest CO2 emitters in disarray as international cooperation drops away''' <br /> <br /> '''US president/US climate policy push fossil fuels, act to block shift to clean energy'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/22/climate/un-climate-summit-coal.html &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Before the Climate Summit: Limited expectations'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Greta Thunberg at the UN - the eyes of the world will be upon them.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-administration-revokes-californias-authority-to-set-auto-mileage-standards &lt;big&gt;'''Via Fox News / Trump administration revokes California’s authority to set auto mileage standards'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=a26e567b-1894-417d-ac37-68ea9367cf1e Via Los Angeles Times]<br /> <br /> ''Still seething over California’s end run around its plan to roll back fuel economy and greenhouse gas emissions targets on new cars, the Trump administration has launched an antitrust investigation into four automakers that reached an agreement with the state to make their cars run cleaner.''<br /> <br /> ''The administration also sent a letter to California officials warning darkly of “legal consequences” if the state does not abandon the agreement. And it’s considering revoking California’s long-standing authority to set tougher auto pollution standards than those required by the federal government — an authority Congress has provided at least since 1967 in recognition of the state’s own efforts to clean its dirty air.''<br /> <br /> ''This is a blatant attempt to use the power of the federal government to bully companies that disagree with the president. It’s especially galling that the administration would use the threat of a Justice Department investigation to pressure automakers to make cars that are worse for consumers, worse for the environment and worse for a rapidly warming planet...''<br /> <br /> <br /> ·······················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The Democratic presidential candidates are finally getting climate action on the agenda. Next to nuclear blunder, nothing is more important for our future.'' <br /> <br /> -- ''Jerry Brown'' ... ''CLIMATE ACTION IS THE REAL DEAL!!! #ActOnClimate'' <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://truthout.org/articles/sanders-shines-and-biden-crumbles-during-epic-town-hall-on-climate-crisis/ ''Via Truthout / Sept. 5, 2019'']<br /> <br /> ''Adding climate change to school curriculums. Geoengineering. Thorium fuel reactors. A Blue New Deal. The Syrian war was a climate war. Climate distress included in asylum petitions. Food deserts. Climate denial is a literal sin. “Democracy” is a verb.''<br /> <br /> ''For the first time in the history of the country, these topics and others like them were discussed in detail by presidential candidates on live television, and all with the words “Climate Crisis” in huge letters above them on the stage and flashed in chyrons across the screen. Underscoring the gravity of the topic were constant updates on the ruinous progress of Hurricane Dorian, which reclaimed Category 3 status as it clawed its way toward landfall once again...''<br /> <br /> <br /> ················································<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/04/politics/trump-climate-change-policy-rollbacks/index.html ''Trump's climate change policy rollbacks'']<br /> <br /> ''CNN / Regardless of what happens in the 2020 presidential election, critics say Trump has already cemented an environmental legacy that will be felt by generations to come.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;He is locking in permanent, irreversible damage to our environment through his irresponsible environmental policies, including his efforts to block progress on climate change,&quot; said Dr. Michael E. Mann, distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University and director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center. &quot;Once we go beyond key tipping points -- the melting of the major ice sheets -- there is no going back.&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''August 2019'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/trump-epa-methane-emissions-rollback-regulations-oil-gas-industry.amp ''US EPA: Methane regulations? Time for more oil/gas ... Time for more methane. The #TrumpEffect, a legacy...'']<br /> <br /> [https://www.strategicdemands.com/brazils-bolsonaro-trump-effect/ ''Brazil's Bolsonaro and the 'Trump Effect' / Via Strategic Demands'']<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;The Amazon Rainforest Burns&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> • https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Donald_Trump-Jair_Bolsonaro-March_2019.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Infoamazonia-fires-Aug2019.jpg|link=https://infoamazonia.org/en/embed/?p=20082&amp;map_id=3502&amp;width=960&amp;height=480]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ················································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Fossil Fuel 'Silver Bullet'?'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/08/20/business/tech/green-silver-bullet-scientists-boast-way-extract-hydrogen-oil-without-emitting-greenhouse-gases/ ''Extracting Hydrogen from Oil Without Releasing Greenhouse Gases?'']<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/science-and-health/2019/8/19/20812243/trump-epa-climate-plan-ace-cpp-6-things ''Trump's EPA: Gutting the Clean Power Plan, a Primer'']<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''July 2019'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> : [https://www.fridaysforfuture.org/ '''www.fridaysforfuture.org''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:June 2019 - NASA GISS data - hottest on record.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''And What a Record It Is'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.ewg.org/release/trump-touts-fictitious-environmental-record ''July 8, 2019 / Trump touts his fictitious environmental record'']<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''Environmental Working Group: “The spectacle of the president straining to document a positive environmental record should be seen for what it is – utter fantasy.''&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''There has never been a president who has actively pursued an agenda so hostile to the environment and public health at the behest of polluters than Mr. Trump.”''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/08/us/politics/trump-environment-climate-change.html &lt;big&gt;''A Fictitious Speech''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> ''Experts watching [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Trump_touts_himself_as_an_environment_president.jpg the speech] said many of the president’s claims were not based in fact. Those achievements that were real, they said, were the result of actions taken by his predecessors. And they noted the one conspicuous omission from the whole discussion: any mention of climate change, the overarching environmental threat that Mr. Trump has mocked in the past.''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''The US President Continues His Assault on Environmental Laws/Regulations and Policy'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''''GreenPolicy360:''''' ''The record of the president on the big picture security issues is a veritable failure. On two existential issues GreenPolicy continues to sound the alarm about, [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_News climate] and [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Nuclear_Weapons nuclear weapons], the president's record is abysmal by any reasoned accounting. On climate disruption, threats to the global atmosphere, consequences across the nation and globe as a result of environmental impacts to the economy, on biodiversity, life as we know it, the president races to dismantle decades of environmental work even as he attempts to take credit for 'clean air, clean water' work accomplished since the 1960s and 1970s, [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_movement the foundations of the modern environmental movement]. On nuclear weapons, his administration throws out nuclear weapons agreements, abandons nuclear treaties, refuses to enter into nuclear arms control negotiations, speeds up the development of 'usable' nuclear weapons systems, expands the nuclear weapons into space with next generation hyperspace delivery systems, and yet in spite of all of this claims 'he' is 'the answer' to security.''<br /> <br /> ''GreenPolicy360 strongly disagrees with those who are ignoring the gathering dual threats of escalating climate crisis and the current proliferation of nuclear weapons.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''NOAA says... learn the basics to understand climate data'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''@Climate.gov / https://www.climate.gov/maps-data/primer/climate-data-primer''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''June 2019'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''NOAA NEWS / RISING EMISSIONS DRIVE GREENHOUSE GAS INCREASES'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> • https://research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMID/587/ArticleID/2455/RISING-EMISSIONS-DRIVE-GREENHOUSE-GAS-INDEX-INCREASE<br /> <br /> <br /> ''NOAA’s Annual Greenhouse Gas Index tracks the relative climate-forcing influence exerted by carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases since the start of the industrial revolution. This year it rose to a value of 1.43, meaning that the increase in the atmosphere’s heat-trapping capacity attributable to human activity has risen 43 percent since 1990.''<br /> <br /> ''The index, known as the AGGI, is based on hundreds of air samples collected from sites around the world each year from NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network, and carefully analyzed at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado.''<br /> <br /> ''“Greenhouse gas pollution traps heat in the atmosphere, which has consequences,” said James Butler, director of NOAA’s Global Monitoring Division. “There’s no getting around it -- burning fossil fuels is changing the course of our planet’s future. How society deals with that will be a major challenge in coming decades.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> :::::[https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/monthly.html '''''June 2 / NOAA-Scripps Mauna Loa Observatory / 414.28 ppm''''']<br /> <br /> :::::[[File:C02 in atmosphere chart-3.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::::[[File:Denying human-caused climate change.jpg]] <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''84 Environmental Rules on the Way Out Under Trump'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''''Via the NY Times / June 3, 2019'''''<br /> <br /> <br /> • ''https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/climate/trump-environment-rollbacks.html''<br /> <br /> • ''https://twitter.com/nytclimate/status/1136094068914774016''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''A New York Times analysis, based on research from Harvard Law School, Columbia Law School and other sources, counts more than 80 in a Trump administration 'aggressive schedule'...''<br /> <br /> <br /> :::::[[File:Environmental rollbacks in US by Trump administration as of June 2019, NYT report.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''May 2019'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Trump administration escalates war on climate science'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> • ''https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/27/us/politics/trump-climate-science.html''<br /> <br /> <br /> ··················<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''PoliticoPay'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ''How the oil industry and other polluters paid for studies to downplay climate change and give the GOP cover for inaction:''<br /> <br /> ''“You want to understand the climate crisis today? It’s 25 years of corruption in Washington.” -- Elizabeth Warren, campaigning for US president, May 2019''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Oil firms spending on climate lobbying - five companies annual spend.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> ····················································<br /> <br /> <br /> '''On April 22, 2019, Earth Day in the US'''<br /> <br /> :- A coal lobbyist runs the EPA <br /> :- An oil lobbyist runs the DOI <br /> :- A Monsanto exec runs US Fish &amp; Wildlife <br /> :- A BP oil attorney is the nation's top enviro lawyer <br /> :- A fossil fuel lobbyist is the EPA's air pollution chief <br /> :- A big energy insider regulates our power grid <br /> <br /> :* Via Public Citizen<br /> <br /> <br /> ······················································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Visit GreenPolicy's [[Climate News]]'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:CO2 since 1751.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Mauna_loa_CO2_record_scripps.png &lt;big&gt;''CO2 Measurements by NOAA/Scripps''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> [https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/05/13/health/carbon-dioxide-world-intl/index.html &lt;big&gt;''Historic CO2 Level / 415.26 / May 11''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ''David Attenborough... “Fifty years ago, we didn’t even realize what the problem was. Maybe thirty years ago we did recognize what the problem was but didn’t know much about it, thinking, That’s way in the future. Now we know that it’s right here ahead of us.”''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Mauna Loa-NOAA-Observatory.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Measuring &amp; Monitoring CO2'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : April 19: 413.86 ppm<br /> : April 18: 413.43 ppm<br /> : April 17: 413.63 ppm<br /> <br /> <br /> :'''https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/index.html'''<br /> :'''https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/monthly.html'''<br /> <br /> <br /> :[https://www.history.com/news/keeling-curve-global-warming-climate-change '''Watching the Keeling Curve, Vital Signs''']<br /> :Keeling's Curve has been called one of the most important scientific works of the 20th century<br /> <br /> :• '''https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Vital_Signs'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Mauna Loa - CO2 - Apr2019.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''March 2019'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;'''''Above and Beyond National Borders'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :* [https://eos.org/ '''''EOS.org / Earth Science News''''']<br /> <br /> :* [https://eos.org/project-updates/earth-science-is-ready-for-preprints '''''Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Scientists: New Research, Old Archives''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> ::::[[File:Above.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''February 2019'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Democrats Now in the Majority in the House of Representatives'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''The State of Climate Science: Committee on Science, Space and Technology''<br /> <br /> <br /> CLIMATE / [https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/stories/1060120481 Via E&amp;E News] <br /> <br /> '''''Democrats praise 'refreshing' change in Science Committee'''''<br /> <br /> ''The Science, Space and Technology Committee kicked off its long-awaited climate hearing this morning by agreeing on one basic fact: Climate change is happening.''<br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> Back in business! After so many years of inaction, a decade, climate science is again in front of the US House of Representatives.<br /> <br /> Climate change is happening. Science-based decisions are needed, resilience is necessary, healthier, more secure communities are the goal.<br /> <br /> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYSfjDSxKK0<br /> <br /> <br /> ·························································<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Antarctica, ominous scientific discovery'''''<br /> <br /> :• http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau3433<br /> :• https://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/climate-change/thwaites-glacier-has-an-enormous-cavity-beneath-it-melted-by-warm-ocean-waters/news-story/d76c01e23593eab1d85324db89c3cd79 <br /> <br /> '''''Scientists Detect an Enormous Cavity Growing Beneath Antarctica'''''<br /> <br /> : ''Researchers say the cavity would once have been large enough to hold some 14 billion tonnes of ice. Even more disturbing, the researchers say it lost most of this ice volume over the last three years alone.''<br /> <br /> : ''&quot;We have suspected for years that Thwaites was not tightly attached to the bedrock beneath it,&quot; says glaciologist Eric Rignot from the University of California, Irvine, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.''<br /> <br /> : ''&quot;Thanks to a new generation of satellites, we can finally see the detail.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Greenland, unprecedented loss of ice'''''<br /> <br /> :• https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/science-environment-46960842<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Arctic Watch'''''<br /> <br /> :• https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Arctic<br /> <br /> <br /> ····································································<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060111657 '''''Via E&amp;E News / Next US President Could Declare National Climate Emergency''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> ''&quot;The reason we care about the changing climate is because it is a threat multiplier,&quot; said Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist and a political science professor at Texas Tech University. &quot;If you think immigration is a problem now, just wait. If you think international competitiveness, or agriculture or water shortages, or the extreme amount of money that is being spent to help cities and regions recover after disasters, if you think any of that is a problem right now, just wait.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''The threat from climate change needs an Oval Office address to communicate its seriousness, said Bob Inglis, a former Republican congressman from South Carolina who once rejected climate science but now tries to engage conservatives on the issue.''<br /> <br /> ''He said neither immigration nor climate change requires a national emergency declaration. Instead, a Republican president could use the backdrop of the Oval Office to explain that America is prepared to lead the world on climate action. He said he envisions a grand speech that echoes President Kennedy in 1961 at Rice University, where he marshaled the nation's best science for a race to the moon.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;Climate change is this huge challenge, it's a worldwide challenge, it's just a call for American greatness to solve the challenge,&quot; Inglis said. &quot;The rest of the world can't solve it. It does warrant that level of attention from a president, and of course that's not what we're getting now.&quot;''<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''2018'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/'''2018 / U.S. National Climate Assessment'''] / [https://carbon2018.globalchange.gov/ '''U.S. Carbon Assessment''']<br /> <br /> <br /> ::::[[File:NY Times - Nov 24, 2018.jpg|link=https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/23/climate/us-climate-report.html]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> ○ [http://www.strategicdemands.com ''StrategicDemands.com'']<br /> <br /> ○ [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/New_Definitions_of_National_Security ''New Definitions of National Security'']<br /> <br /> ○ ''&quot;Humanity faces two imminent existential threats: environmental catastrophe and nuclear war. These were virtually ignored in the (US 2018 midterm election) campaign rhetoric and general coverage. There was plenty of criticism of the Trump administration, but scarcely a word about by far the most ominous positions the administration has taken: increasing the already dire threat of nuclear war, and racing to destroy the physical environment that organized human society needs in order to survive. These are the most critical and urgent questions that have arisen in all of human history. The fact that they scarcely arose in the campaign is truly stunning — and carries some important, if unpleasant, lessons about our moral and intellectual culture.&quot; -- ''Truthout, Noam Chomsky, November 2018'' <br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_Quotes &lt;font color=green&gt;''Via Green Quotes''&lt;/font&gt;] <br /> <br /> <br /> ·································<br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Michael Mann-Nov7,2018.png|link=https://mobile.twitter.com/MichaelEMann/status/1060356559811817473]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ''&quot;Restore the credibility of the Science Committee as a place where science is respected and recognized as a crucial input to good policy making.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Nov 6, 2018''<br /> <br /> ''Press Release''<br /> <br /> '''''House Science, Space, and Technology Committee'''''<br /> <br /> ''(Dallas, TX) – Ranking Member Eddie Bernice Johnson’s (D-TX) [https://democrats-science.house.gov/news/press-releases/ranking-member-johnson-statement-election-results-and-seeking-chairmanship statement]''<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://democrats-science.house.gov<br /> <br /> <br /> ::·····················································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Evaluating the Accuracy of Seasonal Climate Predictions'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''An analysis of historical modeling outputs is improving our understanding of seasonal forecasting skills''<br /> <br /> ''Earth &amp; Space Science News from EOS / AGU''<br /> <br /> ''Source: Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres'' <br /> <br /> * https://eos.org/research-spotlights/evaluating-the-accuracy-of-seasonal-climate-predictions<br /> <br /> <br /> :···································································<br /> <br /> <br /> * [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/nasa-climate-mission-trump-tried-kill-moves-forward ''Trump Tries to Kill NASA Climate Mission'']<br /> <br /> * [https://www.facebook.com/yearswaronourfuture/videos/252637772140860/ #WaronOurFuture]<br /> <br /> <br /> :····································································<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/07/us/politics/epa-toxic-chemicals.html '''Chemical Industry Scores a Big Win at the Environmental Protection Agency''']<br /> <br /> ''Nancy B. Beck, the Trump administration’s appointee to help oversee the EPA’s toxic chemical unit, previously worked as an executive at the American Chemistry Council, one of the industry’s main lobbying groups.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ····································································<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/06/opinion/scott-pruitt-resignation-wheeler.html '''Scott Pruitt Resigns as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency''']<br /> <br /> ''Mr. Pruitt faced up to 19 separate investigations into his conduct reflecting a stunning degree of disregard for federal ethics, special-interest and procurement rules. The sheer volume of investigations would be comic but for the harm Mr. Pruitt wrought.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/10/07/this-coal-lobbyist-once-wrote-trump-was-a-bully-now-hes-the-nominee-for-epas-no-2-spot/ '''Andrew Wheeler to Succeed Pruitt at the EPA: Who is Wheeler?''']<br /> <br /> ''Via the Associated Press:'' <br /> <br /> ''Mr. Wheeler's public statements show him to be a skeptic, like Pruitt, about the extent to which coal, oil and gas emissions drive climate change... Wheeler was Senator Jim Inhofe's former chief of staff... Inhofe of Oklahoma is the Senate's most ardent challenger of manmade climate-change. After leaving his work with Inhofe, Wheeler then went to work as a lobbyist for top coal companies and other businesses and interests.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ······················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''&quot;Surviving Victory&quot;: Moving Away from [https://www.amazon.com/Perpetual-War-Peace-How-Hated/dp/156025405X &quot;Perpetual War&quot;]'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''''Shifting from Fossil Fuel Causes of Conflict to Renewable Energy Alternatives'''''<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;<br /> :https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Surviving_Victory:_Security_Priorities<br /> <br /> :https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Surviving-Victory-conference-Washington-DC-2006.pdf<br /> <br /> :https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Surviving_Victory.png<br /> <br /> :https://www.strategicdemands.com/costsofwar/<br /> <br /> <br /> :https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:New_Definitions_of_National_Security.png<br /> <br /> :https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Environmental_Security <br /> <br /> :https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Global_Security<br /> &lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> [[File:Over the Pacific.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:DSCOVR-EPIC-May13,2018.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''May 2018'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Trump’s NASA Chief: 'I Fully Believe and Know the Climate Is Changing''''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''''“I also know that we human beings are contributing to it in a major way”'''''<br /> <br /> [https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/05/trump-nasa-climate-change-bridenstine/560642/ Via The Atlantic]<br /> <br /> <br /> ''“As far as my position on climate change and how it’s evolved, I’ll be very open...” the new administrator of NASA said at a town hall Thursday (May 17) at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.''<br /> <br /> ''“I don’t deny that consensus that the climate is changing,” he said. “In fact, I fully believe and know that the climate is changing. I also know that we humans beings are contributing to it in a major way. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. We’re putting it into the atmosphere in volumes that we haven’t seen, and that greenhouse gas is warming the planet. That is absolutely happening, and we are responsible for it.”''<br /> <br /> ''... whether Bridenstine’s views on climate change have changed or not, the views of his bosses haven’t, and this remains a point of concern for Bridentine’s critics. The Trump White House has proposed cutting or canceling many of nasa’s earth-science missions. So far, they’ve been spared. Republicans don’t have enough seats in the Senate to pass their dream budgets, so they’ve had to negotiate bipartisan budget legislation with Democrats. This setup has preserved most of nasa’s climate funding, but not all. The latest budget deal didn’t specifically mention nasa’s Carbon Monitoring System, a $10-million program to track greenhouse-gas emissions around the world. The Trump administration took that as an opportunity to terminate the program.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/trump-dismantles-nasa-climate-change-program '''''Trump dismantles NASA climate change program''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The Trump administration has cut off funding for a major NASA satellite-based climate change research program, according to the latest issue of Science magazine.''<br /> <br /> ''The [http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/05/trump-white-house-quietly-cancels-nasa-research-verifying-greenhouse-gas-cuts magazine reported] that even though Congress has successfully fended off much of the White House's &quot;broad attack on climate science,&quot; a spending deal signed in March made no mention of NASA's $10-million-a-year Carbon Monitoring System.''<br /> <br /> ''Unlike the satellites that provide the climate data, the research program that uses the data had no private contractor to lobby for it.''<br /> <br /> ''NASA spokesman Steve Cole told Science that existing grants for the program will be allowed to finish but no new research will be supported.''<br /> <br /> ''Phil Duffy, president of the Woods Hole Research Center in Falmouth, Mass., told the magazine the monitoring system is an obvious target for the Trump administration because of its association with the Paris climate change agreement and its work with other nations to help them understand their greenhouse gas emissions.''<br /> <br /> ''Many of the 65 research programs that the system supports are focused on tracking how global CO2 is stored naturally in forests, rivers, and other natural formations.''<br /> <br /> <br /> : '''''AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE / SCIENCE Journal / May 2018'''''<br /> <br /> : ''[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:You_can_manage_only_what_you_can_measure_Dr_David_Crisp,_OCO-2,_June_2014_m.jpg You can't manage what you don't measure]. The adage is especially relevant for climate-warming greenhouse gases, which are crucial to manage—and challenging to measure. In recent years, though, satellite and aircraft instruments have begun monitoring carbon dioxide and methane remotely, and NASA's Carbon Monitoring System (CMS), a $10-million-a-year research line, has helped stitch together observations of sources and sinks into high-resolution models of the planet's flows of carbon. Now, President Donald Trump's administration has quietly killed the CMS, Science has learned.''<br /> <br /> :''The move jeopardizes plans to verify the national emission cuts agreed to in the Paris climate accords, says Kelly Sims Gallagher, director of Tufts University's Center for International Environment and Resource Policy in Medford, Massachusetts. &quot;If you cannot measure emissions reductions, you cannot be confident that countries are adhering to the agreement.&quot;'' <br /> <br /> :''&quot;Canceling the Carbon Monitoring System &quot;is a grave mistake.&quot;''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/OCO-2<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :···························································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth and Moon from Galileo - Dec 16 1992.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''GreenPolicy360's Earth POV'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Research_from_Space Earth Science Research from Space]<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Look_at_how_thin_our_atmosphere_is Look How Thin Our Atmosphere Is]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Micro-satellites<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_Labs_Doves_Fly<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_and_Space,_Politics<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_API<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Imaging-New_Space<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Democratization_of_Space<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Observations<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Vital_Signs<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Right_Now<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/@Earth360<br /> <br /> * http://www.earthpov.com<br /> <br /> * http://www.planetaryawareness.org<br /> <br /> <br /> ···················································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''April 2018'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Bridenstine-swear-in.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;'''Photo credit: NASA'''&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> What is there to say about a NASA appointment to the Trump cabinet who in the past has been a climate science denier, even as the NASA mission statement from its beginnings speaks to the necessity of Earth Science as a foremost mission of the agency. Of course, planet Earth has been [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Earth_science_missions_in_space_US_circa2017.jpg studied by NASA for decades], coming out of the initial satellite missions of the 1970s and 1980s until today's first generation of sophisticated data-rich baselines of atmospheric-sea-and terrestrial systems. Yet, rejection of the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Vital_Signs vital missions of NASA] seems to fit with rejection of the vital mission of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Like much of the regression of the Trump administration, the appointment of Jim Bridenstine, over serious objections, demonstrates a policy of deconstruction, a policy that sets aside national security threats and retreats from responsibilities to all citizens in the nation, and a clear U.S. responsibility to cooperate with the international community to envision and achieve common goals as we strive toward attaining a common overarching goal of global security. <br /> <br /> Given the pressing needs, the Green Policy position on the new NASA administrator is to raise warning flags. Our skepticism is deep and our patience and forbearance is stretched as we examine the record of this political figure without a science background. Yes, Mr. Bridenstine was a Navy pilot and served honorably. Apart from his service record, his knowledge and understanding of NASA's challenges and its historic mission remains a core concern of ours. How limited is his view. It seems on inspection of his public statements a dangerously limited view.<br /> <br /> * [https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/james-bridenstine-nasa-climate-change-denier-donald-trump-ignoring-science-terrifying-launch-a8313966.html Trump's new NASA chief Jim Bridenstine a 'climate change denier' who could make 'terrifying' decisions, US senators warn]<br /> <br /> The challenge and risk of climate disruption and the role of NASA's [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Research_from_Space satellite missions] in studying [http://www.thinbluelayer.com Earth's life-enabling atmosphere], [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:You_can_manage_only_what_you_can_measure_Dr_David_Crisp,_OCO-2,_June_2014_m.jpg monitoring and measuring] Earth systems essential for human survival, is NO minor responsibility.<br /> <br /> We will soon find answers to our questions on his vision and capabilities -- if the new administrator has any idea of real world threats and challenges as he takes on his new role.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''The Biggest Cuts Proposed by the Trump Administration to NASA'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''''Earth Science/Atmosphere Monitoring like OCO-3 Proposed for Elimination'''''<br /> <br /> '''''Draconian Cuts to a NASA Original Mission -- to Study Planet Earth'''''<br /> <br /> [https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/03/27/winners-and-losers-in-nasas-budget-for-2018-and-beyond/#7684b92e2ca1 '''''Winners and Losers in the 2018 NASA Budget''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> ''There were five NASA Earth Science missions slated for the chopping block in the President's original proposal. These cuts were to vital satellites, all of which are focused on measuring various aspects of Earth's climate, including reflected and emitted light and energy, cloud cover and behavior, and the detection of long-and-short-term climate trends. If you want to understand how the planet's climate works, to forecast seasonal and environmental trends, and to do medium-to-long-term forecasting, you need these missions. Four of these five missions have had their funding restored:''<br /> <br /> * ''the Plankton; Aerosol; Cloud; ocean Ecosystem (PACE);''<br /> <br /> * ''the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-3 (OCO-3);''<br /> <br /> * ''the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR)'s Earth-viewing instruments;''<br /> <br /> * ''and the Climate Absolute Radiance and Refractivity Observatory (CLARREO) Pathfinder.''<br /> <br /> * ''while a fifth, the Radiation Budget Instrument (RBI), remains cancelled. However, future large missions designed to monitor the Earth's climate have received no official nod of support, threatening their long-term viability.''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Isn't it time.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/OCO-2 The OCO-2 Mission: History-making]<br /> <br /> * [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Research_from_Space Earth Science Research from Space]<br /> <br /> * [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Observations Earth Observations / Category]<br /> <br /> <br /> * [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/You_can_manage_only_what_you_can_measure_Dr_David_Crisp%2C_OCO-2%2C_June_2014_m.jpg &quot;You can manage only what you can measure&quot;]<br /> <br /> * [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Isn%27t_it_time.jpg Isn't It Time to Measure &amp; Monitor 'Externalities'?]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:You can manage only what you can measure Dr David Crisp, OCO-2, June 2014 m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Trump's EPA Continues Assault on Environmental Protection Agency'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://nyti.ms/2JSOHWx '''''Scott Pruitt of the US EPA Goes Far Beyond Environmental Protection''''']<br /> <br /> * [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Pruitt-pol_cartoon-arizona_central.jpg '''''Pressure on Pruitt heats up: Editorial media cartoons eviscerate the performance of the EPA chief''''']<br /> <br /> ''New York Timed Editorial: &quot;Policies aside — and they’re terrible, from an environmental perspective — Mr. Pruitt’s self-aggrandizing and borderline thuggish behavior has disgraced his office and demoralized his employees. We opposed his nomination because he had spent his career as attorney general of Oklahoma suing the federal department he was being asked to lead on behalf of industries he was being asked to regulate. As it turns out, Mr. Pruitt is not just an industry lap dog but also an arrogant and vengeful bully and small-time grifter, bent on chiseling the taxpayer to suit his lifestyle and warm his ego.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;Any other president would have fired him. Mr. Trump praises him. “Scott is doing a great job!” the president tweeted on April 7.'' <br /> <br /> ''&quot;Mr. Trump seems to care not a whit about Mr. Pruitt’s mounting ethical problems, which have lately reached a point where Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly, has reportedly told the president that he should think seriously about letting Mr. Pruitt go...''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;By endless repetition, he has reinforced in the public mind the lie that Republicans have peddled for years and Mr. Trump’s minions peddle now, that environmental rules kill jobs, that limiting carbon dioxide emissions will damage the economy, that the way forward lies not in technology and renewable energy but in digging more coal and punching more holes in the ground in search of oil. And, on the human level, he has been in the forefront of the administration’s shameless effort to delude the nation’s frightened coal miners into thinking coal is coming back, when any comeback is unlikely not because of regulation but because of strong market forces favoring natural gas and renewables.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;The recently confirmed deputy administrator, [https://insideclimatenews.org/news/12042018/epa-andrew-wheeler-senate-confirmation-vote-murray-energy-coal-lobbyist-climate-denial-inhofe-pruitt Andrew Wheeler], is a former coal industry lobbyist who shares Mr. Pruitt’s deregulatory zeal and fealty to the fossil fuels industry. Mr. Wheeler was for many years chief of staff for James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican and long the Senate’s most determined denier of the accepted science on global warming.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''March 2018'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Lamar_Smith_Denial_Offensive.png Rep. Lamar Smith], the chairman of the House science committee, who has announced his retirement from Congress, leaves behind a checkered past.<br /> <br /> A March 2018 op-ed fror Fox News illustrates again that the Congressman from Texas has ranged beyond facts and science as he represents his district and his base of supporters primarily from oil/gas interests.<br /> <br /> FactCheck.org, a project of the [https://www.factcheck.org/about/our-mission/ Annenberg Public Policy Center] at the University of Pennsylvania, takes a point-by-point look at [https://www.factcheck.org/2018/03/smiths-error-filled-climate-op-ed/ Smith’s Error-Filled Climate Op-Ed.]<br /> <br /> <br /> ·································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''A Tale of Two EPAs'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''To what lengths will Scott Pruitt go to undo the good work being done by his agency’s scientists, researchers, and staff''<br /> <br /> https://www.nrdc.org/onearth/tale-two-epas<br /> <br /> ''Sometimes you really do have to stop and wonder what U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt is thinking...''<br /> <br /> <br /> * '''''In the U.S., Conflict Continues as Environmental Protection is Cut'''''<br /> <br /> * Environmental Protection Agency News<br /> <br /> <br /> ·····························<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''February 2018'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Via E &amp; E News / https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060073703 <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Trump seeks big cuts to science across agencies'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Published: Tuesday, February 13, 2018<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The Trump administration wants to eliminate a broad swath of the nation's climate change research infrastructure, including satellites, education programs and science centers.''<br /> <br /> ''Though it has little chance of being enacted, the Trump administration's budget proposal unveiled yesterday targets hundreds of millions of dollars in climate science, renewable energy research and climate mitigation efforts across a variety of federal agencies, including NASA, NOAA, U.S. EPA and the departments of the Interior and Energy.''<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43935.pdf -- The Office of Science and Technology Policy over the past year has undergone deep cuts as the presidential science adviser position goes unappointed and coordinated science and technology leadership is absent. This office has aided presidents understanding and shaping of federal initiatives and programs involving science, research &amp; development, space and technology since the mid 1970s. The current administration has chosen to go without this scientific resource.<br /> <br /> * https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trump-rsquo-s-science-advisor-age-31-has-a-political-science-degree/ -- ''Trump’s top ‘science adviser’ is a 31-year-old with only a political science degree. Michael Kratsios is an ex-Peter Thiel employee and as deputy assistant in the '''Office of Science and Technology Policy''' the nation's federal programs involving science and technology are being &quot;coordinated&quot;, or so it seems. <br /> <br /> : This past year has revealed much regarding the administration and Republican-controlled Congress positions. Science-based policy is under broad challenge and attack. Clearly, based on the record, the president cares little for science advisers and scientific evidence as a basis for federal policy. <br /> <br /> :The [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/12/us/politics/white-house-budget-congress.html newly released 2019 federal budget] reveals priorities as sent up to the U.S. Congress. The human/health/environment/education services face deep cuts. Department of Defense/war operations globally and expanded nuclear weapon systems are in line for hundreds of billions in new spending. A new arms race has commenced. Science across federal agencies continues to be set back. The future of the nation and its standing among nations takes another consequential step.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ''About the Office of Science and Technology Policy''<br /> <br /> ''The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) was established by the National Science and Technology Policy, Organization and Priorities Act of 1976. OSTP's responsibilities include advising the President in policy formulation and budget development on all questions in which S&amp;T are important elements; articulating the President's S&amp;T policies and programs, and fostering strong partnerships among Federal, State and local governments, and the scientific communities in industry and academe. The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP): History and Overview -- https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43935.pdf''<br /> <br /> <br /> (GreenPolicy Siterunner: Congressman George E. Brown was a key drafter and co-sponsor of the original 1976 legislation establishing the Science and Technology office and presidential cabinet level infrastructure coordinating federal science/technology policy and initiatives. Representative Brown, my close friend, was the author of the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:US_Public_Law_95-367.png National Climate Program Act of 1978], the first federal program established to study and assess scientifically the issues and risks of human-caused climate change. George's career, especially on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, is notable for his decades of out-in-front efforts to advance &quot;big science&quot;. More here [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr about George Brown from California].)<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;font color=red&gt;····················································&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Deregulating / Dismantling / Denying'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''As the current U.S. administration attempts to deconstruct decades of scientific endeavors, technology leadership, and national/environmental security policy...'''''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Climate Deregulation Tracker / Columbia Law School'''''<br /> <br /> ''http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/resources/climate-deregulation-tracker/''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''U.S. Climate Change Litigation in the Age of Trump: Year One / Columbia Law School'''''<br /> <br /> ''Posted on February 14th, 2018 / http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/climatechange/2018/02/14/u-s-climate-change-litigation-in-the-age-of-trump-year-one-a-new-sabin-center-working-paper/''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Climate Law Blog'''''<br /> <br /> ''http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/climatechange/''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;font color=red&gt;··················&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''January 2018'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Whatever your politics, whatever your religion or beliefs, wherever on Earth you live, take care to make decisions based on sound science and facts.''<br /> <br /> ''In the United States, many are questioning the state of science. Let's take a look at Science Magazine as all of us on Earth enter 2018.''<br /> <br /> * http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/01/trump-s-first-year-science-advice-sees-marked-decline <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Right_Now<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''On the Anniversary of the Launch of Explorer, January 31, 1958'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''''NASA Reminder of the Beginnings of Earth Science from Space'''''<br /> <br /> :'''''Explorer 1, the first “scientific Earth satellite”<br /> <br /> :'''''Six Decades of Measuring and Monitoring <br /> <br /> :''&quot;NASA has used the vantage point of space to understand and explore our home planet, improve lives and safeguard our future...&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> * '''Even as the importance of #EarthScience grows, there are those who are attempting to block the work of science'''<br /> <br /> : http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/resources/silencing-science-tracker/<br /> <br /> : ''The '''Silencing Science Tracker''' is a database initiative that tracks government attempts to restrict or prohibit scientific research, education or discussion, or the publication or use of scientific information, since the November 2016 election.''<br /> <br /> <br /> *'''GreenPolicy360 &amp; Science'''<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Stats_-_Green_Research_%26_Science GreenPolicy360 &amp; SciencePolicy]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Good_science_needs_good_data.png '''GreenPolicy360: Our Motto -- Good Science Needs Good Data''']<br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;'''''Visit &lt;u&gt;[[Earth Science Research from Space]]&lt;/u&gt;'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;'''''Visit &lt;u&gt;[[Look at how thin our atmosphere is]]&lt;/u&gt;'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;'''''Visit &lt;u&gt;[[Democratization of Space]]&lt;/u&gt;'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;'''''Visit &lt;u&gt;[[Micro-satellites]]&lt;/u&gt;'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''December 2017'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;'''''International Cooperation, Framework Convention on Climate Change '''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ::http://unfccc.int/2860.php<br /> ::https://cop23.unfccc.int/<br /> ::https://cop23.unfccc.int/news/cop23-kicks-off-with-strong-calls-to-hold-to-paris-agreement-path<br /> ::https://cop23.unfccc.int/news/un-climate-change-conference-2017-aims-for-further-faster-ambition-together<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Climate Change Conf Nov 6-17.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> * [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/nov/10/al-gore-donald-trump-climate-change ''''''Can't be educated', but Climate Action goes on''''']<br /> <br /> * [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climatechange-accord-usa/anti-trump-u-s-coalition-tells-u-n-climate-talks-were-still-in-idUSKBN1D92AK '''''Anti-Trump U.S. coalition tells U.N. climate talks: 'we're still in' / Reuters''''']<br /> <br /> ''The “we are still in” coalition of states, cities, universities, faith groups and environmental activists, aims to show delegates from other nations at the Nov. 6-17 U.N. talks that many Americans are working to cut greenhouse gas emissions.''<br /> <br /> ''It says its signatories represent more than 130 million Americans and $6.2 trillion of annual economic output.''<br /> <br /> * [http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-germany-jerry-brown-climate-change-20171108-story.html '''''California Gov. Jerry Brown delivers a blunt climate change message in Germany''''']<br /> <br /> ''Brown has been hailed in German media as the “anti-Trump” for his efforts to keep the United States engaged in the 2015 Paris agreement’s commitments to cut greenhouse emissions...''<br /> <br /> ''“It’s hard to get your mind around something so extensive,” said Brown, who was appointed by Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, the U.N. conference president, to serve as a special advisor for states and regions...''<br /> <br /> ''“Let’s lead the whole world to realize this is not your normal political challenge,” he added. “This is much bigger. This is life itself. It requires courage and imagination.”''<br /> <br /> :* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Governor_Jerry_Brown<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.texastribune.org/2017/11/02/lamar-smith-retiring-congress/ '''''Lamar Smith to Retire?''''']<br /> <br /> : [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&amp;profile=default&amp;search=lamar+smith&amp;fulltext=Search ''Remembering Lamar's Positions on Earth Science &amp; Climate'']<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''October 2017'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :* [http://blog.ucsusa.org/science-blogger/how-pruitt-listens-removing-clean-power-plan-web-resources-undermines-public-engagement &lt;font color=green&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;u&gt;'''''Removing Clean Power Plan Web Resources'''''&lt;/u&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:UCS-EPA-Oct16,2017.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/war-on-the-epa/ &lt;font color=green&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;u&gt;'''''&quot;War on the EPA&quot;'''''&lt;/u&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:War on the EPA in the USA.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''In the military''', the term &quot;beheading&quot; generally refers to battlefield strategy of disrupting the eyes and ears of the enemy, the intelligence communication systems. Here the enemy is us, as the US president moves to disrupt the eyes and ears of NASA earth facing mission monitoring real-time conditions on the home planet. It would be, if the anti-sci caucus in Congress goes along and has their way, a historic mistake. The ability to manage is based on measurement over time and cutting off our overhead earth science research will produce blind spots today and &quot;data gaps&quot; going forward. Read the Sept Jon Gertner 'Going Dark' article to get an idea of what's at stake and some of the consequences of being beheaded.<br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/12/magazine/what-could-we-lose-if-a-nasa-mission-goes-dark.html '''''What Could We Lose if a NASA Climate Mission Goes Dark?'''''] <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Good science needs good data .png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ::::&lt;font color=blue&gt;○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○&lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :''&quot;Look at how thin our atmosphere is. This is all there is between humankind and deadly space.&quot;''<br /> ::''-- Astronaut Alexander Gerst @Astro_Alex''<br /> <br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;''''' &quot;Thin Blue&quot;, Life-Enabling Atmosphere '''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:ThinBlue.png]] : [[File:EnvironmentalSecurity ThinBlue.png]] <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::&lt;font color=green&gt;○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○&lt;/font&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Trump,_Limbaugh,_Scott,_Pruitt.png &lt;big&gt;'''''Trump, Limbaugh, Scott and Pruitt deny climate change'''''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> '''''America pays a 'denial price' today and tomorrow'''''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''It’s useless to explain to those who put political dogma before science that when air is warmer, it holds more water vapor. It’s that simple. The Economist notes that the world’s average temperature is about 1.2 degrees higher (Fahrenheit) than it was as recently as 1979. That’s a lot more water in the atmosphere — and it eventually it’s got to come down.'' <br /> <br /> ''To such learned men like Limbaugh, who has a college degree from — well, from nowhere — that just means we get rain from time to time. After all, the weather changes every day, right? Brilliant!''<br /> <br /> ''But to others, who take such matters more intelligently, it means this: Weather-related disasters are increasing dramatically. Data from Munich RE, one of the world’s leading reinsurers, notes big spikes since 1980 in “meteorological events” (storms), “hydrological events” (floods, landslides and avalanches), and “climatological events” (extreme temperatures, droughts, forest fires). Munich’s data underscores what should be obvious to all but the most partisan skeptic: that the frequency, intensity and duration of “weather-related” events is on the rise.''<br /> <br /> ''This is the part where deniers mock “fake news” because it doesn’t jibe with their political beliefs. This is the highest form of ignorance: denying things that have already occurred.''<br /> <br /> ''Speaking of denial, one of the first things Florida Gov. Rick Scott did when he took office in 2011 was to ban official use of the words &quot;climate change,” &quot;global warming” and “sustainability.”'' <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Sea-Level_Rise &lt;big&gt;&lt;u&gt;'''''Sea-Level Rise, Flooding in Florida'''''&lt;/u&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Flood-prevention-rick.png &lt;big&gt;&lt;u&gt;'''''What's to Worry About?'''''&lt;/u&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Such annoying phrases. Granted, Scott has done a good job in the days before and after Hurricane Irma. But we’ll never know how much less damage there might have been to businesses and homeowners had Scott chosen not censorship, but leadership six years ago by acknowledging climate change and facing it head on. Silence doesn’t make a problem like this go away.''<br /> <br /> ''Trump’s actions, meanwhile, have spoken louder than any words, banned or otherwise. He took more money from the coal industry — by far — than anyone else during the 2016 campaign. And as president, he has returned the favor in spades. He famously pulled out of the Paris climate pact — joining only war-ravaged Syria and tiny Nicaragua on the sidelines. He complained about all of Barack Obama’s executive orders, but signed one scrapping Obama’s Clean Power Plan rule designed to curb greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming.'' <br /> <br /> ''Trump has blamed Obama for coal’s decline, but the real reason is lower natural gas prices. Obama became president in 2009, yet between 2000 and 2010, power plants generated 50% more electricity from gas, while coal’s use declined slightly.'' <br /> <br /> ''Obama gave these trends a further nudge, no doubt about it, but the shift from coal to cleaner, cheaper natural gas appears irreversible. I empathize with the coal industry, just as I would have empathized with the horse and buggy crowd in 1908, when Henry Ford’s first Model T spelled their demise. It’s called progress, folks.'' <br /> <br /> ''And no column on energy and climate change would be complete without mentioning '''perhaps the worst Cabinet-rank pick ever made by an American president: Scott Pruitt'''. Pruitt, a climate denier par excellence, has, behind a cloak of secrecy and fear, turned the Environmental Protection Agency into an arm of the fossil fuel industry that has long had him in its pocket.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''August 2017'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Congress takes aim at the Clean Air Act'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ''A push by Republicans to roll back parts of the Clean Air Act would affect California more than any other state...''<br /> <br /> ''The House last month passed a bill fiercely opposed by doctors and public health groups, including the American Lung Assn. and the American Academy of Pediatrics, that would delay for years new anti-pollution standards aimed at ultimately preventing 160,000 childhood asthma attacks and as many as 220 premature deaths in California each year.''<br /> <br /> ''The Trump administration had already tried using regulatory authority to put the standards on hold for a year, but walked back that action Wednesday after California and 14 other states filed suit against the delay.''<br /> <br /> <br /> * http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-smog-republicans-20170803-story.html<br /> <br /> * http://e360.yale.edu/digest/u-s-epa-reverses-decision-to-delay-smog-rule<br /> <br /> <br /> SJS / Siterunner: I can literally remember LA movers and shakers pushing and drafting the first clean air legislation to deal w LA smog/air quality, then pushing the first national legislation, and pushing Nixon to sign on to the establishment of the EPA. The beginnings of the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_movement modern environmental movement], in many ways, signalled a children's health agenda ...<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Air_Quality<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;font color=blue&gt;○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''July 2017'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy's snapshot of Greenland and NASA's IceBridge studies of melting glaciers -- https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Greenland<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.buzzfeed.com/zahrahirji/lamar-smith-tours-the-arctic &lt;big&gt;'''''Lamar Smith Goes to Greenland'''''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/lamar-smith-climate-change-beneficial_us_59765a54e4b0e201d577466d &lt;big&gt;'''''Lamar Smith Returns from Greenland'''''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Don't Believe Lamar's Line'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''WASHINGTON — Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) — who has spent his career cozying up to fossil fuel interests, dismissing the threat of climate change and harassing federal climate scientists — is now arguing that pumping the atmosphere full of carbon dioxide is “beneficial” to global trade, crop production and the lushness of the planet.''<br /> <br /> ''Rather than buying into “hysteria,” Americans should be celebrating the plus sides of a changing climate, Smith argues in an [http://dailysignal.com/2017/07/24/dont-believe-hysteria-carbon-dioxide/ op-ed] published July 24th in The Daily Signal, a news website published by the conservative Heritage Foundation.''<br /> <br /> ''Smith — who has used his power as chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology to push his anti-science views — kicks off his op-ed by claiming Americans’ perception of the phenomenon is “too often determined by their hearing just one side of the story.”''<br /> <br /> ''“The benefits of a changing climate are often ignored and under-researched,” Smith said. “Our climate is too complex and the consequences of misguided policies too harsh to discount the positive effects of carbon enrichment.”''<br /> <br /> ''Increased carbon dioxide, Smith writes, promotes photosynthesis, resulting in a “greater volume of food production and better quality food” and “lush vegetation” that “assists in controlling water runoff, provides more habitats for many animal species, and even aids in climate stabilization, as more vegetation absorbs more carbon dioxide.” Warmer temperatures, he notes, results in longer growing seasons.'' <br /> <br /> ''Smith goes as far as to make a case for why a [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Arctic rapidly melting Arctic], which scientists warn could cost tens of trillions of dollars by the end of this century, is a positive thing.''<br /> <br /> ''“Also, as the Earth warms, we are seeing beneficial changes to the earth’s geography,” he writes. “For instance, Arctic sea ice is decreasing. This development will create new commercial shipping lanes that provide faster, more convenient, and less costly routes between ports in Asia, Europe, and eastern North America. This will increase international trade and strengthen the world economy.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://newrepublic.com/article/143652/end-goal-trumps-war-science &lt;big&gt;'''''Scott Pruitt's War on Science'''''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Climate-change deniers go to great lengths to convince the public that there’s a legitimate scientific debate about whether humans are the main cause of global warming, but the Trump administration took this pathology to another level last week: Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, plans to form a group to question the merits of climate science.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''June 2017'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''The Future of Humanity, or Crime Against'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/June_1,_2017 &lt;big&gt;'''''On the Trump Exit from the Global Climate Agreement'''''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Climate change unique threat to national security.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''&quot;Clear-eyed outlook?&quot; Not'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:DJT - US message to world.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''The Consequences Start Now / [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/June_1,_2017 June 1]'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The US will be judged, this day will be long remembered.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:New_Definitions_of_National_Security.png ''National Security &amp; Global Security are interrelated'']. <br /> <br /> ''He does not see the common security threats. He does not see what our common interests. There's so much he doesn't know &amp; so much he doesn't know that he doesn't know.''<br /> <br /> [https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-just-betrayed-the-world-now-the-world-will-fight-back/2017/06/01/3c0b8026-46e7-11e7-a196-a1bb629f64cb_story.html ''Washington Post / 'Trump just betrayed the world. Now the world will fight back' '']<br /> <br /> [http://www.politico.com/story/2017/05/31/jerry-brown-donald-trump-paris-climate-change-deal-238993 ''Brown: The Rest of the World Is Against Trump''] / [https://www.gov.ca.gov/news.php?id=19817 ''Governor Brown Statement on White House Paris Climate Agreement Announcement''] <br /> <br /> : ''“This current departure from reality in Washington will be very short-lived, that I promise you,” Brown told POLITICO in an interview. “I’ve spoken with Republicans here in the Legislature, and they’re beginning to get very serious about climate action, so the momentum is all the other way. And I think Trump, paradoxically, is giving climate denial such a bad name that he’s actually building the very movement that he is [purporting] to undermine...”''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''May 2017'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Survey of Trump Attack on Environmental Regulations and Laws'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Not in our wildest dreams-Western Energy Alliance-May2017.png|link=https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/business/energy-environment/devon-energy.html]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;u&gt;'''''[[Environmental Rules Rolled Back]]'''''&lt;/u&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''April 2017'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''On Earth Day, as Around the World Planet Citizens &quot;March for Science&quot;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Bill Nye: &quot;Our lawmakers must know and accept that science serves every one of us. Every citizen of every nation in society. Science must shape policy. Science is universal. Science brings out the best in us.&quot; Nye said. &quot;With an informed, optimistic view of the future, we can — dare I say it — save the world!&quot;''<br /> <br /> * http://www.space.com/36577-march-for-science-earth-and-space.html<br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Bill Nye, the Science Guy, speaks at the March for Science-Washington DC 2017.png|link=https://youtu.be/x507ZlDoc-Y]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-hayes-trump-budget-science-20170421-story.html <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Trump's anti-science budget / America ought to own the solar-electric industry. By rights, we ought to be exporting solar technology, not importing it. Our second-tier status, in a field that we once absolutely dominated, is a direct consequence of budget decisions made by President Reagan’s Office of Management and Budget, and a go-along Congress.'' <br /> <br /> ''Science has always been at the heart of America’s progress. Science cleaned up our air and water, conquered polio and invented jet airplanes. Science gave us the Internet, puts food on our tables and helps us avoid pandemics. Science and technology are widely considered by economists to be responsible for at least half of American economic growth since World War II.''<br /> <br /> ''Defunding science is the intellectual equivalent of eating our seed corn.''<br /> <br /> ''On Earth Day — April 22 — I expect millions of Americans to join the March for Science. They will include researchers, teachers, students and people who simply support good sense.''<br /> <br /> ''We will be marching because, if we let politics overtake the search for truth, much of what has made America great will disappear.''<br /> <br /> -- ''LA Times / April 21, 2017 / Dennis Hayes, a founder of [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Earth_Day_Flag.png Earth Day]''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:March for Science-Apr22,2017.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:NRDC re Trump bad stuff.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Damaging the Collection of Data and Intelligence Necessary for National/Global Security'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;u&gt;''[[Earth Science Research from Space]]''&lt;/u&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://eos.org/articles/former-noaa-chief-scientist-warns-of-threats-to-science '''''Former NOAA Chief Scientist Warns of Threats to Science''''']<br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/10/climate/trump-nasa-satellites-global-warming-data.html '''''Scientists Fear Climate Data Gap as Trump Aims at Satellites''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Dr. Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told [http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nasa-global-warming-climate-change-denial-donald-trump-interference-science-a7421416.html the Independent] he and other government scientists are “not going to stand” for any funding cuts or other interference in their work.''<br /> <br /> ''“The point is simple: the climate is changing and you can try to deny it, you can appoint people who don’t care about it into positions of power, but regardless nature has the last vote on this,” Schmidt, told The Independent Thursday. “It’s something we’re going to have to deal with sooner or later, and it’s better sooner rather than later. We don’t have a choice if we’re going to deal with it.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''''18 NASA Earth Science [https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/final_earth_obs_fleet06hw.2100_1920x1080.jpg Missions in Space]'''''<br /> <br /> [https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4558 '''''Visit NASA Earth Science''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:NASA earth observation fleet as of April 2017.jpg|link=https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a004500/a004558/final_earth_obs_fleet06_360p30.mp4]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/04/14/trumps-epa-chief-scott-pruitt-calls-for-an-exit-to-the-paris-climate-agreement/ '''''EPA Chief, Scott Pruitt, Calls for ‘Exit’ from the Paris International Climate Accord''''']<br /> <br /> [http://www.politico.com/story/2017/04/trump-fossil-fuels-g7-tension-237129 '''''More Fossil Fuels, Trump Demands of G7 Nations: They Go 'No' ''''']<br /> <br /> [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/g7-climate-change-rex-tillerson-donald-trump-italy-a7677461.html '''''G7: US Is to Blame for No Joint Statement''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''March 2017'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''US President Trump’s budget director/chief of staff:'''''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> ''Mick Mulvaney: “Regarding the question as to climate change, I think the President was fairly straightforward —''<br /> <br /> ''We’re not spending money on that anymore; we consider that to be a waste of your money to go out and do that.”'' <br /> <br /> <br /> :::[http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2017/03/16/mulvaney_were_not_spending_money_on_climate_change_anymore_waste_of_your_money.html ''We're Not Spending Money On Climate Change Anymore (Video)'']<br /> <br /> :::[[File:Mulvaney March2017-ClimateChangeWaste.png|link=https://youtu.be/l7WGtMtAloo]] <br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> :::···················································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''US Retreats from International Agreements, Cooperation &amp; Environmental Protection'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Rejecting Regional &amp; Global Commitments, US Trump Administration Abandons Critical Obligation &amp; Treaties''<br /> <br /> :[http://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/366400-the-white-house-abandoned-the-environment-and-public-health-in '''''The Hill'''''] / [http://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/366400-the-white-house-abandoned-the-environment-and-public-health-in?mode=comments#disqus_thread '''''&quot;Comments&quot;''''']<br /> <br /> :[http://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/366400-the-white-house-abandoned-the-environment-and-public-health-in '''''In 2017, the White House abandoned the environment and public health''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Decades of Progress Setback'''''<br /> <br /> ''Environmental Protection Agency Cut, Regulations Rescinded, Health &amp; Safety Priorities Dropped'' <br /> <br /> <br /> '''''How Scott Pruitt spent the first year at the EPA'''''<br /> <br /> [https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/under-scott-pruitt-a-year-of-tumult-and-transformation-at-epa/2017/12/26/f93d1262-e017-11e7-8679-a9728984779c_story.html?utm_term=.7f495300b386 '''''How Director Pruitt turned the EPA into a Trump tool of deconstruction''''']<br /> <br /> ''In legal maneuvers and executive actions, in public speeches and closed-door meetings with industry groups, the Trump administration has moved to shrink the agency’s reach, alter its focus, and pause or reverse numerous environmental rules. The effect has been to steer the EPA in the direction sought by those being regulated.''<br /> <br /> ''Along the way, Pruitt has begun to dismantle former president Barack Obama’s environmental legacy, halting the agency’s efforts to combat climate change and to shift the nation away from its reliance on fossil fuels.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Tracking Environmental Deregulation, Climate Litigation''''' <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Climate_Change_Litigation_Databases_Climate_Law.png &lt;big&gt;''Climate Litigation Database''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> * http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/resources/climate-deregulation-tracker | Climate Deregulation Tracker<br /> * http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/climatechange/ | Columbia Law School - Climate Change Law <br /> * http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/resources/silencing-science-tracker/ | Silencing Science Tracker<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ········································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Lamar Smith Continues Push to Deny Climate Science'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> :'''House Science Committee Hearing Attacks Climate Change Evidence and Scientific Community'''<br /> ::'''Republican Party Denies Profound Risks, Threats, and Damage to National and Global Security'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Science and Climate Hearing March29,2017.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * '''Watch the March 29th Hearing''' -- '''https://www.facebook.com/TheHill/videos/10154707025269087/'''<br /> <br /> :'''GreenPolicy's response -- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_E._Mann Dr. Michael Mann] tells the committee the facts of the gathering crisis... &quot;dozens of independent lines of evidence come together... to arrive at the same, consistent answer, over and over again.&quot;''' <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Foley on March29,2017.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :'''Attacks on Climate Science''': <br /> <br /> :[http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/311495-court-climate-scientist-can-sue-conservative-writers-over-alleged '''December 2016 / Court: Climate scientist can sue conservative writers over alleged defamation''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Politics and Science in the House un-Science Committee.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> • https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-29/climate-scientist-fires-back-at-house-science-committee-during-hearing<br /> <br /> • https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/03/29/house-science-committee-hearing-lamar-smith-michael-mann-climate-consensus-deniers<br /> <br /> • http://gizmodo.com/todays-congressional-hearing-on-climate-change-was-a-co-1793787320<br /> <br /> • https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/house-science-committee-calls-on-alt-science-to-drive-policy/<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''How climate skeptics are trying to influence 200,000 science teachers'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2017/0330/How-climate-skeptics-are-trying-to-influence-200-000-science-teachers<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Don’t Like The Science -- Make up Your Own Alternative Science'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :https://blogs.agu.org/wildwildscience/2017/03/29/dont-like-science-make-alternative-science/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Climate Change Skeptic Group Seeks to Influence 200,000 Teachers'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/climate-change-skeptic-group-seeks-to-influence-200000-teachers/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Koch-Funded Group Tries to Persuade 200,000 Science Teachers That Climate Change Is Debatable'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :http://www.ecowatch.com/heartland-institute-climate-science-2334892782.html<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Science denial graph.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;font color=green&gt;○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○&lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Undercutting National and Global Security:&lt;/big&gt; <br /> :'''US Administration Moves to Eviscerate Earth Science'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/lamar-smith-unbound-lays-out-political-strategy-climate-doubters-conference '''''Lamar Smith Delivers Meaning to Hubris'''''] as [http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-meaning-of-Pride-always-goes-before-a-fall ''''' 'Pride Goes Before a Fall' '''''] <br /> <br /> '''''Science Magazine / March 24''''' -- ''Representative Lamar Smith (R–TX) rarely expresses his true feelings in public. But speaking yesterday to a like-minded crowd of climate change doubters and skeptics, the chairman of the science committee in the U.S. House of Representatives acknowledged that the committee is now a tool to advance his political agenda rather than a forum to examine important issues facing the U.S. research community.''<br /> <br /> ''“Next week we’re going to have a hearing on our favorite subject of climate change and also on the scientific method, which has been repeatedly ignored by the so-called self-professed climate scientists,” Smith told the Heartland Institute’s 12th annual conference on climate change in Washington, D.C.''<br /> <br /> [https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/02/01/climate-science-denial-group-heartland-institute-fossil-fuel-industry-funding-fred-palmer '''''About the Heartland Institute''''']<br /> <br /> [https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/03/23/heartland-institute-award-winner-compares-work-climate-science-deniers-911-firefighters '''''Heartland Meeting in Washington D.C.''''']<br /> <br /> ''Emboldened by the election of President Donald Trump, Smith appears increasingly comfortable dismissing those who disagree with his stance on any number of issues under the purview of his science committee, from climate research to the use of peer review in assessing research results and grant proposals. And one key element in his strategy appears to be relabeling common terms in hopes of shaping public dialogue.''<br /> <br /> ''“I applaud you for saying you’ll be using the term climate studies, not climate science,” said one audience member. His reference was to Smith’s embrace of a distinction made by a previous speaker, climatologist Patrick Michaels of the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., who argues that most climate scientists don’t deserve to be called “scientists” because they have manipulated their data and ignored contrary results. “But I also urge you to use the term politically correct science.”''<br /> <br /> ''“Good point,” Smith replied.''<br /> <br /> ''Smith also signaled that he plans to turn up the volume on his criticism of federally funded research that doesn’t fit his definition of “sound science.” In particular, he expressed support for writing legislation that would punish scientific journals that publish research that doesn’t fit standards of peer review crafted by Smith and the committee (although he didn’t say how that would be accomplished).''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Lamar Smith / Climate Science Skeptic''':<br /> <br /> • http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/lamar-smith-unbound-lays-out-political-strategy-climate-doubters-conference<br /> <br /> • https://thinkprogress.org/house-honest-act-limit-epa-science-244a132bdee<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Step-by-Step: Damage to the Nation's Security'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://qz.com/928236/the-word-science-has-disappeared-from-the-mission-statement-of-the-epas-office-of-science-and-technology/ '''''Disappearing “Science” from the Core Mission Statement of the EPA Office of Science and Technology''''']<br /> <br /> : [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Pruitt '''''Who Is Scott Pruitt (Wikipedia)''''']<br /> <br /> :[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/video/2017/mar/17/white-house-climate-change-funding-waste-money-video '''''White House Calls Climate Change Funding 'a Waste of Your Money' – Video''''']<br /> <br /> ::[http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-trump-budget-nasa-20170316-story.html '''''Trump Budget Proposal Cuts NASA's Role in Climate Science''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The White House to eliminate NASA’s Office of Education, arguing that it was “performing functions that are duplicative of other parts of the agency.”''<br /> <br /> ''The budget targets the agency’s work on environmental science, cutting funding for Earth science research grants. It eliminates earth science missions that are still in development, including Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem, or PACE, which was was intended to monitor the Earth’s ocean health; the Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3, or OCO-3, an instrument to precisely monitor the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere; and the Climate Absolute Radiance and Refractivity Observatory, or CLARREO, pathfinder, which would have used a solar spectrometer to produce highly accurate climate projections.''<br /> <br /> * [http://grist.org/climate-energy/these-house-republicans-say-climate-change-is-real-and-its-time-to-fight-it/ '''''These House Republicans say climate change is real and it’s time to fight it''''']<br /> <br /> ''On March 14th, [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-14/trump-said-to-drop-climate-change-from-environmental-reviews Bloomberg reported] that President Donald Trump is about to sign an executive order repealing President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, and to order a reconsideration of the government’s use of the “social cost of carbon” metric, which measures potential economic damage related to climate change.''<br /> <br /> ''Last week, meanwhile, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency administator, Scott Pruitt, suggested that carbon emissions have nothing to do with climate change.''<br /> <br /> ''This week, seventeen Republican members of Congress from diverse districts — including representatives from coastal Southeastern states, Nevada, Utah, upstate New York, and Pennsylvania — submitted a resolution in the House acknowledging that “human activities” have had an impact on the global climate and resolving to create and support “economically viable” mitigation efforts.''<br /> <br /> ''The [https://stefanik.house.gov/sites/stefanik.house.gov/files/Climate%20Change%20Resolution.pdf resolution], sponsored by [https://curbelo.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=1374 Reps. Carlos Curbelo of Florida], Elise Stefanik of New York, and Ryan Costello of Pennsylvania, is being submitted in the midst of an unprecedented effort by the most anti-science administration in recent American history to remove climate science studies and data from federal agencies.''<br /> <br /> <br /> • ''https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Climate_Change''<br /> <br /> • ''https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Climate_Policy''<br /> <br /> <br /> :······································································<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/science/donald-trump-data-rescue-science.html &lt;big&gt;'''''Activists Rush to Save Government Science Data'''''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> :''http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/press_releases/2017/publc-records-03-23-2017.php''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Press Release / March 23, 2017'''''<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Scientists Use 'Beetlejuice Provision' to Protect Data From Trump'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''''Records Requests Seek to Preserve Hundreds of Data Sets on Wildlife, Oil Industry, Climate Change, Sea-level Rise'''''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The administration proposing deep budget cuts for government agencies including NASA Earth Sciences, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency have fueled new fears of databases being axed...''<br /> <br /> ''“We’ll probably be saying goodbye to much of the invaluable data housed at the NCEI,” Anne Jefferson, a water hydrology professor at Kent State University, wrote on Twitter Saturday, referring to the National Centers for Environmental Information. “Hope it gets rescued in time.”''<br /> <br /> ''It is illegal to destroy government data, but agencies can make it more difficult to find by revising websites and creating other barriers to the underlying information.''<br /> <br /> : [https://envirodatagov.org/ ''The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative] is an international network of academics and non-profits addressing potential threats to federal environmental and energy policy, and to the scientific research infrastructure built to investigate, inform, and enforce. Dismantling this infrastructure — which ranges from databases to satellites to models for climate, air, and water — could imperil the public’s right to know, the United States’ standing as a scientific leader, corporate accountability, and environmental protection.''<br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> :'''Via Scientific American / E&amp;E News'''<br /> <br /> [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trump-administration-seeks-big-budget-cuts-for-climate-research/ '''''Trump Administration Seeks Big Budget Cuts for Climate Research''''']<br /> <br /> :'''''Targeting of climate science goes beyond the work of NOAA and EPA'''''<br /> <br /> '''''The expected rollback to federal climate science has begun.'''''<br /> <br /> ''In its preliminary budget proposal, the Trump administration has targeted environmental protections and climate change research. And while the cuts are essentially an opening salvo in what promises to be a fight with Congress once the budget requests formally arrive, they also demonstrate the level of hostility many scientists feared their work would face from the White House.''<br /> <br /> ''The administration is seeking a nearly 20 percent cut to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's budget, including to its satellite division, The Washington Post reported. That includes significant cuts to the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service, which has produced research that disproved the notion of a global warming pause. NOAA's satellites provide invaluable data on climate change that are used by researchers throughout the world. The NOAA cuts target the Office of Ocean and Atmospheric Research, which conducts the bulk of the agency's climate research.''<br /> <br /> ''That's on top of proposed reductions to climate research at U.S. EPA, including a 40 percent cut to the Office of Research and Development, which runs much of EPA's major research. The cuts specify work on climate change, air and water quality, and chemical safety. The Trump administration also has proposed 20 percent staffing reduction at EPA.''<br /> <br /> <br /> * [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/us/politics/scott-pruitt-environmental-protection-agency.html '''''E.P.A. Head Stacks Agency With Climate Change Skeptics''''']<br /> <br /> :''Gina McCarthy, who headed the E.P.A. under former President Barack Obama, said she too saw Mr. Pruitt as unique. “It’s fine to have differing opinions on how to meet the mission of the agency. Many Republican administrators have had that,” she said. “But here, for the first time, I see someone who has no commitment to the mission of the agency.”''<br /> <br /> * '''''Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt [http://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/09/epa-chief-scott-pruitt.html said Thursday] (March 8th in a CNBC interview) he does not believe carbon dioxide is a primary contributor to global warming.'''''<br /> <br /> :''&quot;I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there's tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it's a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.&quot; <br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Ben Santer to Pruitt March 2017.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Pruitt talks EPA - CO2.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Clean Air, Clean Water? Healthy Environment? Climate, Sustainable Future?'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''Environmental Issues and the Warnings of Science Are 'No Priority' '''<br /> <br /> • ''http://www.popsci.com/getting-rid-of-the-environmental-protection-agency''<br /> <br /> • ''http://www.popsci.com/pruitt-EPA-confirmation''<br /> <br /> • ''http://www.popsci.com/usda-epa-science-gag-order-government''<br /> <br /> • ''http://www.popsci.com/america-before-epa-photos''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Los-angeles-smog-1970s.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''February 2017&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''''Congress committee lost in space''''' -- ''https://eos.org/articles/focus-nasa-on-mars-and-moon-not-earth-witnesses-tell-hearing''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''January 2017'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * '''''Climate News''''' -- ''https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_News''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Science &amp; Politics in the US Congress: Another Year, More Science Denial on the House Science Committee'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Via E&amp;E News and the Smithsonian Online<br /> : [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/house-science-panel-adds-climate-denying-members/ '''House Science Panel Adds Climate-Denying Members''']<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The Science committee has jurisdiction over $40 billion in federal budgets, and influence on climate research and environmental regulations''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''December 2016'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''The U.S. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology continues its move away from acting to ensure national security''' <br /> <br /> :The story - and gathering danger of ignoring scientific warnings - is expanded here by long-time environmental writer Andy Revkin<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''NASA’s Climate Research, Essential to National &amp; Global Security'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Dec 12, 2016 <br /> <br /> Via Andrew Revkin @ ProPublica) <br /> <br /> https://www.propublica.org/article/will-trump-scrap-nasas-climate-research-mission<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Piers J. Sellers is the director of NASA’s Earth Science division, and the former astronaut is a climate scientist himself. ProPublica spoke with him recently. Sellers declined to discuss the politics surrounding NASA during a presidential transition, but said the agency has a unique position in the world in clarifying global environmental risks and that part of its mission deserves support.''<br /> <br /> ''“We’re doing our best to provide the least dangerous options to getting from here to a safe future,” he said. “That’s our job as U.S. government scientists. NASA has the greatest capability to see what’s going on and has a pretty strong capability to model what’s going on into the future, as well.”''<br /> <br /> ''Some of NASA’s most vital Earth science work has been done at a tiny climate research hub, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The center occupies the upper floors of a century-old building in upper Manhattan best known for Tom’s Restaurant, the cash-only corner diner famed because its façade was featured in the sitcom “Seinfeld.”''<br /> <br /> ''The institute was led for decades by James E. Hansen, the climate scientist who stepped ahead of most peers in the hot summer of 1988, famously telling a Senate panel it was “99 percent certain” that human-generated greenhouse gases were driving global warming. A decade ago, Hansen defied muzzling efforts during the George W. Bush administration and irked defenders of fossil fuels with his warnings of calamitous warming. He retired in 2013 to focus on activism aimed at curbing emissions of greenhouse gases linked to warming.''<br /> <br /> ''The institute has produced one of the four most important records of global temperature trends and, under Hansen’s successor as director, the TED-talking, Twitter-savvy climatologist Gavin A. Schmidt, has continued to refine climate simulations and communicate warnings about unabated warming.''<br /> <br /> ''Schmidt declined to be interviewed for this story, citing what he described as selective quoting in recent coverage of possible threats to Earth science under the Trump administration. But he’s shown no signs of dread in his personal Twitter flow, on Thursday night posting this provocative two-parter:''<br /> <br /> :''https://twitter.com/ClimateOfGavin/status/807043119757791233''<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Revkin-ProPublica-1 Dec12,2016.png]]<br /> <br /> :[[File:Gavin Schmidt TW-Dec8,2016.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;font color=blue&gt;○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○&lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Read More on Vital Security Interests &amp; Earth Science:'''''<br /> <br /> <br /> * [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/02/opinion/earth-the-final-frontier.html '''''Earth, the Final Frontier''''']<br /> <br /> :''NASA critics have long wanted to shut the agency out of research related to climate change. The problem is, not only is earth science a long-running part of NASA’s “prime mission,” but it is uniquely positioned to do it. Without NASA, climate research worldwide would be hobbled.''<br /> <br /> :''NASA’s role in earth science began at its inception: The Space Act of 1958, which created NASA, made the study of our atmosphere one of its top priorities. During the Reagan years, Congress amended the act to make Earth the first of NASA’s nine fundamental missions. Right now there are at least 15 earth-science satellites that NASA helped build, launch and operate; they monitor everything from global rainfall to soil moisture.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> * [http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-nasa-earth-science-thanksnasa-2016-12 '''''Via Business Insider: Scientists around the world are worried about a Trump team proposal to ax NASA's 58-year mission to study the Earth''''']<br /> <br /> * [http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/11/28/under-trump-will-nasas-space-science-include-planet-earth/ '''''Via Dot Earth/NYT: Under Trump, Will NASA’s Space Science Include Planet Earth?'''''] / [http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/after-nine-years-and-2810-posts-a-dot-earth-farewell/ '''''After Nine Years and 2,810 Posts, a Dot Earth Farewell''''']<br /> : ''By Andrew C. Revkin, December 5, 2016''<br /> <br /> * [https://theconversation.com/eyes-in-the-sky-cutting-nasa-earth-observations-would-be-a-costly-mistake-69705 '''''Via the Conversation: Eyes in the sky -- Cutting NASA Earth observations would be a costly mistake''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth science missions in space US circa2017.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;font color=blue&gt;○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○&lt;/font&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''November 2016'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Trump to scrap Nasa climate research in crackdown on ‘politicized science’'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''''NASA’s Earth Science division is set to be stripped of funding... [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/nov/22/nasa-earth-donald-trump-eliminate-climate-change-research Via The Guardian]'''''<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy: It is painful to acknowledge how slight the attention has been by the US media toward what is, demonstrably, one of the greatest threats rising in the US Congress.<br /> <br /> In the above-linked 'Trump to scrap climate research' article, the UK Guardian looks toward the next US administration and points to warning flags that should be raised -- but have not, while the daily-cycle news and mainstream media focuses elsewhere. <br /> <br /> We/GreenPolicy360 have been warning about a close-and-present threat in the House science committee and now the danger of profoundly flawed decision-making draws closer as Lamar Smith and a science denial caucus looks to continue, with added powers, their efforts to eviscerate the US Earth Science budget and missions. <br /> <br /> The threatened actions of the House Science Committee, in fact, are looming as a serious threat to 'homeland security'. The actions of this science denial group promise to undercuts national/global security. <br /> <br /> Take a closer look at what GreenPolicy360 has been reporting taking place in the people's Congress. It is time to draw attention to the risks -- and consequences -- of a Congress rejecting science. <br /> <br /> Of course in the legislative process, one has to accept consensus science and the scientific method and policy based on best evidence available and the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle 'precautionary principle'.]<br /> <br /> Or, as in the case of the insurance industry, factor in actuarial risks, odds, and a [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_full-cost_accounting full-cost accounting.]<br /> <br /> We will soon find out what actions -- and what legacy -- the American people at the beginning of the 21st century pass forward for future generations.<br /> <br /> The U.S. and this Congress will be judged based on its actions.<br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> :https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/New_Definitions_of_National_Security<br /> <br /> :https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_and_Space,_Politics <br /> <br /> :https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Research_from_Space <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Consider the Existing Earth Science Missions'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :The data and Earth observation/monitoring are the resources our generation is passing forward to future generations<br /> :The goal is to provide the capabilities to make informed decisions and shape intelligent policies to protect and preserve security<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:The A-Train.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''NASA: Earth is warming at a pace 'unprecedented in 1,000 years''''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''''Science / Earth Observations / Continuing to Measure and Monitor'''''<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/30/nasa-climate-change-warning-earth-temperature-warming '''Via The Guardian''']<br /> <br /> ''The planet is warming at a pace not experienced within the past 1,000 years, at least, making it “very unlikely” that the world will stay within a crucial temperature limit agreed by nations just last year, according to Nasa’s top climate scientist.''<br /> <br /> ''“In the last 30 years we’ve really moved into exceptional territory,” ''' Gavin Schmidt, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies''', said. “It’s unprecedented in 1,000 years. There’s no period that has the trend seen in the 20th century in terms of the inclination (of temperatures).”''<br /> <br /> ''This year has already seen scorching heat around the world, with the average global temperature peaking at 1.38C above levels experienced in the 19th century, perilously close to the 1.5C limit agreed in the landmark Paris climate accord. July was the warmest month since modern record keeping began in 1880, with each month since October 2015 setting a new high mark for heat.''<br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> ''“Maintaining temperatures below a 1.5C guardrail requires significant and very rapid cuts in carbon dioxide emissions or co-ordinated geo-engineering.'' <br /> <br /> ''That is very unlikely. We are not even yet making emissions cuts commensurate with keeping warming below 2C.”'' <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Global temp anomaly record NASA-2016.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Space, Earth Science &amp; Climate Change'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/space-climate-change-and-the-real-meaning-of-theory ''By Piers Sellers, August 2016''] <br /> <br /> '''''I used to be an astronaut, a spacewalker on the International Space Station...''''' ''The Station goes around the world in an hour and a half, which means it flies through fifty minutes of day, followed by fifty minutes of night, endlessly repeating. This means that during a seven-hour spacewalk, you may see four sunrises and sunsets. I remember holding onto a handrail on the outside of the Station, which was flying silently up the Atlantic, from south to north, and as we moved toward Europe I could see the terminator—the line between night and day—rolling up over the horizon ahead of us. The white sun sank quickly behind us in a showy flurry of orange, pink, and red horizon bands, and then we were suddenly in twilight, floating into the dark half of the world. The terminator flicked over us, and, in the deeper darkness ahead and below us, I could see a huge lit-up city, glued to the curved Earth, sliding up over the rim of the world to meet me. I could see the structure of the city, with its glowing heart, its network of roads and its halo of suburban lights fading into the dark countryside...'' <br /> <br /> ''The facts of climate change are straightforward: there’s been a warming surge over the past hundred years, with a dramatic uptick in this new century. We are seeing the effects in the shrinking of the summer Arctic sea ice and the melting of the Greenland glaciers. That melt, in turn, has been partly responsible for the three-inch rise in sea levels since 1992. The Earth is warming, the ice is melting, and sea level is rising. These are observed facts.''<br /> <br /> ''Are we humans the cause of these changes? The answer is an emphatic yes. Many climate-research groups around the world have calculated the various contributions to climate change, including those not related to humans, like volcanic ash. It has been shown repeatedly that it is just not possible to explain the recent warming without factoring in the rise in anthropogenic greenhouse gases.''<br /> <br /> ''As a scientist, I would like to think that the political discussion of climate change and how to mitigate its worst effects would be sober and fact-based. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Climate-change deniers in the United States have done a first-class job in spreading confusion and misinformation. As a result, many prominent politicians insist, and get away with insisting, that climate change is a hoax, a mantra that has gained some credibility through sheer repetition. Climate deniers are also fond of saying that global warming is not resolved in science or is “just” a theory. This is a perfect example of Orwellian Newspeak which also flies in the face of three hundred years of scientific progress, in which intellectual argument and conviction must be based on facts and substantiated theories, rather than personal beliefs or biases.''<br /> <br /> ''It is also dangerous.'' <br /> <br /> [http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/space-climate-change-and-the-real-meaning-of-theory '''''Read More''''':]<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Coalition of 25 states, cities and counties / AGs United for Clean Power'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> • http://www.ag.ny.gov/press-release/ag-schneiderman-former-vice-president-al-gore-and-coalition-attorneys-general-across<br /> <br /> <br /> Unprecedented Coalition - Attorneys General From California, Connecticut, District Of Columbia, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Virginia, Vermont, Washington State And The US Virgin Islands Agree To Coordinate Efforts<br /> <br /> A.G. Schneiderman: Climate Change Is The Most Consequential Issue Of Our Time. This Unprecedented State-To-State Coordination Will Use All The Tools At Our Disposal To Fight For Climate Progress<br /> <br /> <br /> Attorneys General go after ExxonMobile <br /> <br /> • http://www.ecowatch.com/how-far-will-elected-officials-go-to-protect-one-of-worlds-biggest-car-1906541036.html<br /> <br /> Attorneys General from 13 states and more than a dozen members of the House Science Committee enter the fray on ExxonMobil's behalf<br /> <br /> :http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/07/06/exxonmobil-may-have-friends-high-places-fraud-not-constitutionally-protected <br /> :http://billmoyers.com/story/exxonmobil-may-friends-high-places-fraud-not-constitutionally-protected/<br /> :http://www.courthousenews.com/2016/09/09/texas-backs-exxonmobil-in-climate-fight.htm<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''ExxonMobile / Climate Politics''''':<br /> <br /> :https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22102015/Exxon-Sowed-Doubt-about-Climate-Science-for-Decades-by-Stressing-Uncertainty<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''US House Committee on Science Update: Lamar Smith Continues on his Merry Way'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> :'''''Scientific Organizations Step Up to Block the Chairman's Politics'''''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Lamar-smith-press 2015.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://blog.ucsusa.org/ken-kimmell/exxonmobile-lamar-smith-first-amendment '''''Letter from President of Union of Concerned Scientists to Lamar Smith, Chair of House Science Com't''''']<br /> <br /> :[http://www.desmogblog.com/2016/04/26/there-no-doubt-exxon-knew-co2-pollution-was-global-threat-late-1970s '''''“There is no doubt”: Exxon Knew CO2 Pollution Was A Global Threat By Late 1970s''''']<br /> <br /> ''Open Letter From Legal Scholars on the (California) [http://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2016/05/legal-scholar-sign-on-letter-SB1161.pdf Climate Science Truth and Accountability Act]''<br /> <br /> ''May 19, 2016''<br /> <br /> ''We, the undersigned legal scholars, are writing to comment on Senate Bill 1161 (Allen), the Climate Science Truth and Accountability Act. As experts in constitutional law, environmental law, corporate law, and securities law, we believe that SB 1161 furthers the protection of consumers from unfair business practices with respect to scientific evidence regarding anthropogenic climate change.'' <br /> <br /> ''''''A growing body of evidence indicates that major fossil fuel companies knew the risks and potentially catastrophic consequences of processing and burning their products for decades, and as early as the 1950s'''''. ''This evidence suggests that certain commercial representations made in the intervening decades by major fossil fuel companies regarding the scientific link between fossil fuels and climate change would constitute a deceptive, misleading, or fraudulent business practice...'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''U.S. Presidential Campaign: Environmental Threats'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [http://desmogblog.com/2016/03/03/warming-accelerates-talk-climate-change-dissipates '''''What Problems, We See No Problems''''']<br /> <br /> '''''Trump v the World: [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/27/us/politics/donald-trump-global-warming-energy-policy.html Announces his Energy policy]''''' <br /> :'''''May 25 / The Republican presidential candidate's position -- Cancel the Paris agreement, More fossil fuels, Less Clean/Renewable Energy'''''<br /> <br /> '''''Trump declares he [http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2016/03/trump-climate-change-washington-post doesn't believe the science] and believes climate change a hoax'''''<br /> <br /> :[http://scorecard.lcv.org/ '''''Environmental Scorecard''''']: '''''Cruz drops out of race. During Texas Senator's term in office, he [http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2016/02/25/3753742/national-environmental-scorecard/ voted against every green bill],''''' <br /> :'''''and opposed every pro-environment, anti-pollution piece of legislation'''''<br /> <br /> :[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/28/us/politics/hillary-clinton-lays-out-climate-change-plan.html '''''Clinton on Climate Change'''''] -- [https://www.hillaryclinton.com/briefing/factsheets/2016/03/06/clinton-will-tackle-climate-change-as-president/ '''''Campaign''''']<br /> <br /> :[http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/12/07/bernie_sanders_climate_plan_calls_for_end_to_nuclear_energy.html '''''Sanders Climate Plan'''''] -- [https://berniesanders.com/press-release/sanders-vs-clinton-on-fracking-and-climate-change-new-tv-ad-up-in-minnesota-colorado/ '''''Campaign''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jan/24/bernie-s/yes-donald-trump-really-did-tweet-climate-change-h/ '''''Does Republican candidate Trump really believe this or not?'''''] <br /> <br /> [[File:Trump on climate change and china 2012.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Reviewing 2015'''''<br /> <br /> ; &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;''Environmental Security, Risks''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''NASA Earth Sciences 2016 Budget No Longer to be Cut $500 Million'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''The final budget bill provides $1.92 billion for Earth Science research, just $20 million less than the President's original budget request. The cut is slight compared to initial GOP budget cuts proposed in the House and Senate which had slashed as much as $500 million from the President's request.''<br /> <br /> ''NASA administrator Charles Bolden [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Environmental_Security argued before Congress this summer and fall] that it was critical to increase the size of NASA's Earth Science programs.''<br /> <br /> ''Under the newly passed Fiscal Year 2016 NASA Budget, virtually all of the agency’s programs benefit with either full or added funding. This national security priority will be jeopardized under Republican revanchist policy. The security, Earth Science work of NASA/NOAA is perceived not as advancing security, but as a threat to business. The security debate heats up and those who consider the science and data continue to step forward looking to changes in how we must perceive national - and global - security. '' -- http://www.universetoday.com/123937/nasa-receives-significant-budget-boost-fiscal-year-2016/<br /> <br /> • https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/New_Definitions_of_National_Security<br /> <br /> • https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Look_at_how_thin_our_atmosphere_is<br /> <br /> • https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Environmental_Security<br /> <br /> • https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Observations<br /> <br /> • https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Research_from_Space<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth Science Research from Space.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Via the New Republic, Dec 15'' <br /> <br /> [https://newrepublic.com/article/125806/paris-climate-deal-gop-candidates-move-nothing-happened '''''What Climate Agreement? GOP Candidates Ignore the International Agreement''''']<br /> <br /> ''Via Strategic Demands, Dec 13'' <br /> <br /> [http://strategicdemands.com/historic-global-accord-to-move-toward-renewable-energy/ '''''Historic global accord to move toward renewable energy''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Democrat presidential candidate debate, November 14, 2015 (LA Times)'' -- ''Sanders was asked whether he still believed, as he had earlier stated, that global warming was the greatest threat to national security. “Absolutely,” Sanders replied, suggesting that “climate change is directly related to the growth of terrorism”, with the fight over natural resources like water possibly leading to even greater international conflict.''<br /> <br /> '''''Syria May Be the First Climate-Change Conflict but It Won't Be the Last''''' ''by Joshua Holland, The Nation, Oct 27, 2015'' --- [http://www.thenation.com/article/syria-may-be-the-first-climate-change-conflict-but-it-wont-be-the-last/ ''Look at Syria more closely...''] <br /> <br /> ''[http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/11/16/3722355/bernie-sanders-climate-change-national-security-paris-climate-talks/ It was what one expert called] perhaps “the worst long-term drought and most severe set of crop failures since agricultural civilizations began in the Fertile Crescent.” It destroyed the livelihoods of 800,000 people and sent vastly more into poverty. The poor and displaced fled to cities, “where poverty, government mismanagement and other factors created unrest that exploded in spring 2011,” the study’s news release explains.''<br /> <br /> [http://climateandsecurity.org/2012/02/29/syria-climate-change-drought-and-social-unrest/ '''''Syria: Climate Change, Drought and Social Unrest''''']<br /> <br /> ''Water crisis in the MidEast'' [http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jul/02/water-key-conflict-iraq-syria-isis] [http://e360.yale.edu/feature/mideast_water_wars_in_iraq_a_battle_for_control_of_water/2796/] [http://www.timesofisrael.com/lack-of-water-sparked-syrias-conflict-and-it-will-make-egypt-more-militant-too/] [http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2643] [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Aquifers]<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://yearsoflivingdangerously.tumblr.com/post/86898140738/this-comic-was-produced-in-partnership-by-years-of '''''Years of Living Dangerously - Syria'''''] <br /> <br /> :[http://yearsoflivingdangerously.com/ '''''Years of Living Dangerously, presented on National Geo channel, Solutions to Climate Change'''''] <br /> <br /> :[http://yearsoflivingdangerously.com/what-we-can-do/ '''''What We Can Do''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:ECC Logo.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/260184-sanders-climate-change-still-greatest-threat-to-national-security ''Climate Change Still Greatest Threat to Security'']<br /> <br /> ''In 2014, the Defense Department released its [http://www.acq.osd.mil/ie/download/CCARprint_wForeword_c.pdf “Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap],” describing the issue not as a long-term concern, but that climate change “poses immediate risks to U.S. national security.”'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''U.S. Congress Science Committee Disputes Climate Science'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ''&quot;The scientific community is telling us if we do not address the global crisis of climate change, transform our energy system away from fossil fuel to sustainable energy, the planet that we're going to be leaving our kids and our grandchildren may well not be habitable.&quot;'' -- ''Bernie Sanders, Oct 2015''<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_News '''''Climate News''''']<br /> <br /> [http://www.vox.com/2015/11/22/9777582/lamar-smith-noaa '''''Lamar Smith Talks of Conspiracy: Dems Fire Back''''']<br /> <br /> [http://www.politico.com/story/2015/11/paris-climate-talks-government-shutdown-collide-216140 '''''Republicans Seek to Strangle Paris Climate Pact'''''] -- ''via Politico / Nov 23''<br /> <br /> [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/federal-eye/wp/2015/11/18/congressional-climate-change-skeptic-threatens-to-subpoena-commerce-secretary-to-get-noaa-documents/ '''''Committee Threatens Subpoenas'''''] -- ''via Washington Post / Nov 18''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/10/23/congressional-skeptic-on-global-warming-demands-records-from-u-s-climate-scientists/ '''''Lamar Smith, Science Committee Chair Escalates Attack on Scientific Studies'''''] / ''Oct 23, 2015''<br /> <br /> ''The congressional committee on science issues subpoenas to the Obama administration over a recent scientific study refuting claims that global warming had “paused” or slowed over the last decade...''<br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ <br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.climatecentral.org/news/nasa-tools-co2-19681 '''''NASA Tools Tracking CO2''''']<br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/OCO-2 '''''OCO-2''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://insideclimatenews.org/news/27102015/noaa-house-science-committee-subpoena-global-warming-hiatus-lamar-smith '''''NOAA responds - 'No Lamar'...'''''] <br /> <br /> ''NOAA refuses to turn over scientists’ emails....''<br /> <br /> ''Showdown looms with climate change deniers / Oct 28''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Lamar Smith Denial Offensive.png | link=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ku6rhdmbF4]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;''Earth Science Faces Deep Cuts''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Environmental_Security '''''Undercutting Security, Congress Moves to Eviscerate NASA/NOAA Earth Science Programs''''']<br /> <br /> [http://blog.chron.com/sciguy/2015/04/house-budget-authorization-slashes-500-million-from-nasas-earth-science-programs/ '''''House budget authorization mark-up slashes $500 million from NASA’s Earth science programs''''']<br /> <br /> '''''Potentially a ray of promise in the U.S. Senate on one front in the ongoing debate between an anti-science faction and those urging more science effort be directed at climate change issues and data needed for effective policy -- “The Committee encourages the Secretary to increase funding for academia to perform climate model studies that include the collection and evaluation of atmospheric data sets from satellite observations obtained in cooperation with NASA. Satellite observations of the atmosphere, within the context of the Earth as a global system, provide information that is critical in the interpretation of Earth-based observations. In addition, the Committee encourages the Secretary to allocate 5 percent of the Department’s funds spent on climate change models, studies, or evaluations to create a Red Team, so as to ensure science-based findings.”''''' ''114TH Congress Report -- SENATE 1st Session 114–54 to accompany H.R. 2028''<br /> <br /> *<br /> <br /> '''''From GreenPolicy360: A Congressional faction looking to hobble Earth-Science-research-from-space presents a larger challenge. Climate-change denialists and anti-science partisans do not want to face the data from a new fleet of NASA Earth monitoring satellites. The security threat environment, by most all credible sci, is accelerating fast, yet extreme political voices want to cover the eyes of this generation's reporting of NASA earth observation programs [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Vital_Signs,_Taking_the_Pulse_of_the_Planet_Sept2014.png '''&quot;Earth's Vital Signs&quot;''']. The scientific data tracking Earth systems is long overdue, is essential, and should be continued and expanded not radically cut...'''''<br /> <br /> [http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/10/republicans-outraged-over-nasa-earth-science-programs-that-reagan-began/ '''''Earth Science 'Outrages' Congressional Republicans'''''] / ''October 2015 via Ars Technica'' <br /> <br /> [http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/05/01/house-science-committee-guts-nasa-earth-sciences-budget/ '''''House Science Committee Guts Earth Sciences Budget'''''] / ''May 2015 via Ars Technica''<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:Charles Bolden.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''What's at risk in Earth Sciences'''''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> '''''GreenPolicy360: The current debate in the United States Congress is highlighted by voices who would set aside the consensus of the scientific community and cut back budgets for Earth Science studies from space. The recent launches of a fleet of new NASA satellites and related missions to acquire critical data of Earth systems is now threatened by politicians who profess they are &quot;not scientists&quot; and, as a result, cannot speak to the validity of human-caused impacts and threats to natural systems. The vantage point of space offers a unique platform for risk assessment, studying and monitoring Earth's systems over time and, hopefully, better managing the well-being and sustainability of critical systems. Those who undercut the environmental and national security of these missions should be questioned and challenged.'''''<br /> <br /> ''GreenPolicy360 will continue to track the positions and responses of politicians in countries around the globe with an emphasis on those with existing earth-space programs.''<br /> <br /> ''The extreme point of view of a US Senator from Texas and anti-science perspective a newly elected Congress are coming to the fore and threaten to have more impact on the nation's security. Senator Cruz from Texas questions and doubts the need for scientific studies that are confronting a host of challenges to the planet's environmental security and, as a result, the US security. Rather Senator Cruz from Texas brings evangelical zeal and religious beliefs that sharply criticize the science of NASA and its recent Earth-monitoring satellite programs.'' <br /> <br /> [https://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov/projects-supported '''''Projects Supported / Past-Present'''''] <br /> <br /> [https://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov/ '''''Atmospheric Science Data Center''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth science missions in space US circa2017.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [http://www.nationaljournal.com/2016-elections/ted-cruz-tells-nasa-to-stop-worrying-about-climate-change-and-focus-on-space-20150312 '''''Via National Journal''''']<br /> <br /> '''''Cruz versus Bolden'''''<br /> <br /> ''March 12, 2015''<br /> <br /> ''Texas Senator Ted Cruz: &quot;More Space, Less Earth&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''Ted Cruz Tells NASA to Stop Worrying About Climate Change and Focus on Space''<br /> <br /> ''The Texas Republican and likely presidential candidate told NASA’s chief administrator, Charles Bolden, on Thursday to focus on “what inspires little boys and little girls across this country.”''<br /> <br /> ''Ted Cruz and Charles Bolden would probably agree that the core of the Earth is a mass of molten metal as hot as the sun. But as for the core of NASA's mission, the senator from Texas and the former astronaut split ways.<br /> <br /> ''Since taking the chairmanship of the Senate Space, Science, and Competitiveness Subcommittee this year, Cruz has been pushing the agency to adopt a &quot;more space, less Earth&quot; strategy. The Republican lawmaker argues that the Obama administration is wrongfully neglecting the country's space exploration operations—like potential missions to Mars and beyond—in favor of global-warming research. And he wants to know if Bolden, NASA's administrator, thinks so, too.<br /> <br /> ''&quot;I'd like to start by asking a general question,&quot; said Cruz on Thursday during a subcommittee hearing on the president's $18.5 billion budget request for NASA for fiscal 2016, which allocates considerable funding for Earth- and ocean-science projects. &quot;In your judgment, what is the core mission of NASA?&quot;<br /> <br /> ''Bolden said he'd been contemplating that mission over the past few days, and had read over the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, which created the agency. &quot;Our core mission from the very beginning has been to investigate, explore space and the Earth environment, and to help us make this place a better place,&quot; he said, adding that the study of aeronautics is important as well.<br /> <br /> ''Cruz didn't seem pleased with the &quot;Earth environment&quot; part of Bolden's answer. &quot;Almost any American would agree that the core function of NASA is to explore space,&quot; he said. &quot;That's what inspires little boys and little girls across this country ... and you know that I am concerned that NASA in the current environment has lost its full focus on that core mission.&quot;<br /> <br /> ''Cruz then pointed to a chart behind him titled &quot;Focus Inward or Focus Outward? Refocusing NASA's Core Priorities&quot; that compared NASA's budget in 2009 with the current request. He said that since 2009, funding for Earth sciences has seen a 41 percent increase, while funding for exploration and space operations, what Cruz &quot;would consider the core function of NASA,&quot; has seen a 7.6 percent decrease.<br /> <br /> ''&quot;In my judgment, this does not represent a fair or appropriate allocation of resources, that it is shifting resources away from the core functions of NASA to other functions,&quot; Cruz said. &quot;Do you share that assessment?&quot;<br /> <br /> ''Bolden, who decides how to allocate NASA's annual budget, did not. That dip in space exploration funding? That was kind of the whole point. &quot;Mr. Chairman, I am very interested in your chart,&quot; he said. &quot;I will say one thing—it is interesting to note that there is a decrease in exploration and human spaceflight when, in fact, that was somewhat intentional because we were trying to get the cost of exploration down as we reach farther out into the solar system.&quot;<br /> <br /> ''Bolden said the now-defunct space shuttles cost NASA $2 billion a year to maintain whether they flew or not. Today, NASA has a $6.6 billion contract with private companies Boeing and SpaceX that will provide for 16 human spaceflights over a span of three to four years.<br /> <br /> ''&quot;So I think the decrease is actually a little bit of what we're trying to do to get the cost of flying humans into space down,&quot; he told Cruz. &quot;That's what's driving the market, is reducing launch costs.&quot;''<br /> <br /> '''''More money for Earth-science research is a good thing, he continued. &quot;The fact that Earth-science has increased—I'm proud to say that it has enabled us to understand our planet far better than we ever did before,&quot; Bolden said.'''''<br /> <br /> ''The NASA chief distanced himself from Cruz's assessment of spending changes within the agency.<br /> <br /> ''You asked me about your chart. There's a lot of chartsmanship,&quot; Bolden said, chuckling. &quot;I'm not sure what you include in 'exploration,' for example. So, by my statement, I was not acknowledging that I agree with the numbers on the chart. I don't want everyone to say I accept the numbers on the chart.&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''The exchange offered a glimpse of NASA under a potential Cruz presidency. Climate-change researchers let out an audible groan when Cruz, who is expected to run in 2016, took the helm of the Senate subcommittee overseeing the federal agency in January. Cruz's views—especially his belief that global warming doesn't exist—are at odds with NASA's extensive climate-science programs, which study solar activity, sea level rise, and oceanic temperatures, to name a few. On Thursday, Bolden appeared to hope the senator's opinions wouldn't get in the way of how NASA spends its money.<br /> <br /> ''&quot;We can't go anywhere if the Kennedy Space Center goes underwater and we don't know it—and that's understanding our environment,&quot; Bolden said, alluding to the risk that climate change poses to the low-elevation state of Florida. &quot;It is absolutely critical that we understand Earth environment because this is the only place that we have to live.&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:You can manage only what you can measure Dr David Crisp, OCO-2, June 2014 m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ''One Texas Oil-State Senator's priorities:''<br /> <br /> [http://www.nationaljournal.com/congress/cruz-s-mission-for-nasa-more-space-less-earth-20150223 '''The Cruz mission: More Space, Less Earth''']<br /> <br /> ... In Cruz's mind, President Obama has spent too much of the agency's resources studying the planet we already inhabit, rather than focusing its missions on the &quot;infinity and beyond&quot; objectives that have the potential to captivate Americans. <br /> <br /> For Cruz to rewrite NASA's objectives, he'd need the approval of his subcommittee, votes in the full Senate and House, and Obama's signature. Even for someone used to fighting long legislative odds, it's likely Cruz's role will be less about principled showdowns over must-pass legislation and more about shining a spotlight on perceived priorities.<br /> <br /> Last year, NASA launched five new missions to study Earth's climate, and Earth science missions currently occupy about 10 percent of NASA's budget. Cruz believes that has come at the expense of &quot;the core mission of NASA, manned space exploration.&quot;<br /> <br /> &quot;There are tremendous opportunities for commercial space,&quot; Cruz says. &quot;One of the very first focuses of the subcommittee will be on expanding those opportunities, expanding how we can allow the private sector to create jobs, to create growth, and how we can explore new frontiers in space.&quot;<br /> <br /> Those in the commercial space industry believe Cruz recognizes their potential. &quot;We're seeing a well-diversified commercial renaissance in Texas. That's something that philosophically the senator feels good about,&quot; said '''NanoRacks''' co-founder Jeffrey Manber. His company contracts with NASA to provide computer-lab space and small satellite launches from ISS.<br /> <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360''': Of course, much of NASA's work is based in Texas and, as the Texas Senator is all too aware, the earth science and exploration work of NASA brings myriad benefits to Texas, manifold economic benefits and incalculable benefits beyond the state of Texas. NASA has led the world's scientific efforts to study space and Earth's unique life-giving systems in space. <br /> <br /> The field of &quot;New Space&quot;, extending beyond first-generation space/earth science and continuing NASA missions with economies, is now building a fast-growing vital industry in cooperation with NASA. New Space extends the mission of the US space program as multiple start-up companies supply NASA missions and launch micro-satellites and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_sensing remote sensing] services and Internet distributed products and information across a wide spectrum of business, natural resources, science and critical environmental fields. Over the past several years, the venture capital market has hurried to support these start-ups, as the international business potential has become evident. One company as an example of many NASA-space, earth-science related companies in Texas is [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Micro-satellites NanoRacks], deploying next-gen satellites from the ISS. The Texas &quot;New Space&quot; NASA-related business focus on deploying earth-facing, earth-science satellites is poised to become a worldwide industry.<br /> <br /> <br /> * [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_Labs_Doves_Fly '''&quot;When Doves Fly, a Look at California's 'New Space' Industry via PlanetLabs''']<br /> <br /> <br /> Visionary space-based, earth-science NASA missions involves billions of dollars in commercial space work grouped around NASA -- the work is essential to diverse, forward-looking Earth Science and 'smart' management of the planet as humankind takes responsibility for the by-products of industrial production and [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Externalities 'externalities'].<br /> <br /> <br /> -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-<br /> <br /> <br /> '''March 12/13/14, 2015'''<br /> <br /> * http://news.sciencemag.org/climate/2015/03/earth-science-not-hard-science-congressional-republicans-declare<br /> <br /> “Virtually all academic planetary scientists are in earth science departments, because the Earth, after all, is a planet,” says Margaret Leinen, president of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and a former head of the National Science Foundation’s geosciences directorate. “Of course the geosciences are part of the hard sciences,” explains Leinen, head of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and vice chancellor for marine sciences at the University of California, San Diego. “They provide us with very fundamental knowledge about the way the planet works, knowledge grounded in the physical sciences.”<br /> <br /> <br /> • http://mashable.com/2015/03/12/ted-cruz-nasa-earth-science-attack/<br /> <br /> • http://sciencepolicy.agu.org/files/2013/07/AGU-letter-to-Sen-Cruz-March-2015.pdf<br /> <br /> • http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/03/13/3633354/ted-cruz-nasa-mission/<br /> <br /> • http://www.ibtimes.com/ted-cruz-wants-nasa-focus-deep-space-missions-instead-studying-earth-1847112<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Joan Vernikos''', member of the Space Studies Board of the National Academy and former director of NASA’s Life Sciences Division:<br /> <br /> Exploration is intrinsic to our nature...<br /> <br /> At what cost? Is there a price to inspiration and creativity? Economic, scientific and technological returns of space exploration have far exceeded the investment. Globally, 43 countries now have their own observing or communication satellites in Earth orbit. '''Observing Earth''' has provided G.P.S., meteorological forecasts, predictions and management of hurricanes and other natural disasters, and global monitoring of the environment, as well as surveillance and intelligence. Satellite communications have changed life and business practices with computer operations, cell phones, global banking, and TV. Studying humans living in the microgravity of space has expanded our understanding of osteoporosis and balance disorders, and has led to new treatments. Wealth-generating medical devices and instrumentation such as digital mammography and outpatient breast biopsy procedures and the application of telemedicine to emergency care are but a few of the social and economic benefits of manned exploration that we take for granted.<br /> <br /> Space exploration is not a drain on the economy; it generates infinitely more than wealth than it spends. Royalties on NASA patents and licenses currently go directly to the U.S. Treasury, not back to NASA. I firmly believe that the '''Life Sciences Research Program''' would be self-supporting if permitted to receive the return on its investment. NASA has done so much with so little that it has generally been assumed to have had a huge budget. In fact, the 2007 NASA budget of $16.3 billion is a minute fraction of the $13 trillion total G.D.P.<br /> <br /> “What’s the hurry?” is a legitimate question. As the late Senator William Proxmire said many years ago, “Mars isn’t going anywhere.” Why should we commit hard-pressed budgets for space exploration when there will always be competing interests? However, as Mercury, Gemini and Apollo did 50 years ago, our future scientific and technological leadership depends on exciting creativity in the younger generations. Nothing does this better than manned space exploration. There is now a national urgency to direct the creative interests of our youth towards careers in science and engineering. We need to keep the flame of manned space exploration alive as China, Russia, India, and other countries forge ahead with substantial investments that challenge U.S. leadership in space. <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Kathleen M. Connell''', a principal of The Connell Whittaker Group, a founding team member of NASA’s Astrobiology Program, and former policy director of the Aerospace States Association:<br /> <br /> In the twenty-first century, what would happen if U.S. manned space programs were managed based upon the contemporary demands of the planet and the American taxpayer? NASA could be rewarded to explore, but with terrestrial returns as a priority. Space exploration crews could conduct global warming research on the International Space Station National Laboratory, while other crews from the public or private sector could rapidly assemble solar energy satellites for clean energy provision to Earth. Lunar settlements could be established to develop new energy sources from rare compounds that are in abundance on the moon. Getting to Mars, to develop a terrestrial lifeboat and to better understand the fate of planets, suddenly takes on new meaning and relevance.<br /> <br /> I have to come the conclusion, after over 20 years in the space industry, that addressing global challenges with space solutions that benefit humanity and American constituents is the key to justifying the cost of manned space exploration. <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Keith Cowing''', founder and editor of NASAWatch.com and former NASA space biologist.<br /> <br /> Right now, all of America’s human space flight programs cost around '''$7 billion a year'''. That’s pennies per person per day. In 2006, according to the USDA, Americans spent more than $154 billion on alcohol. We spend around '''$10 billion a month in Iraq'''. And so on. Are these things more important than human spaceflight because we spend more money on them? Is space exploration less important?<br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Hubble Telescope'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;[http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Hubble '''On the 25th Anniversary''']&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Hubble stars m.jpg | link=http://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/Hubble-2004-b-full_jpg.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''THE NIGHT SKY... You gaze up into history; you stare into the limits of your own understanding.''' <br /> <br /> The past flies toward you at the speed of light. Why are you here? Why are the stars there? Is it even remotely possible that our one, tiny, eggshell world is the only one encrusted with life?<br /> <br /> The Hubble [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Hubble_Ultra_Deep_Field_2014-20140603_NASA-HS201427a-.jpg Ultra Deep Field image] should be in every classroom in the world. It should be on the president’s desk. It should probably be in every church, too.<br /> <br /> “To sense that behind anything that can be experienced,” Einstein once said, “there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness.”<br /> <br /> Whatever we believe in — God, children, nationhood — nothing can be more important than to take a moment every now and then and accept the invitation of the sky: to leave the confines of ourselves and fly off into the hugeness of the universe, to disappear into the inexplicable, the implacable, the reflection of that something our minds cannot grasp.<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Dark sky by Jack Fusco.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Backbone of Night - The Milky Way by Andrew McCarthy 2023.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;''Following the Hubble in 2018 -- the James Webb''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:The James Webb telescope modeled at SXSW 2015.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''''James Webb Space Telescope'''''<br /> <br /> • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope<br /> <br /> • http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasas-webb-strutting-its-stuff-in-new-behind-the-webb-video<br /> <br /> • http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/isim.html<br /> <br /> • http://zenithpress.tumblr.com/post/115125873135/the-universe-through-an-infrared-telescope<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Source - New Space Frontiers''<br /> <br /> https://spacefrontier.org/<br /> <br /> ''The late Douglas Adams, author of '''The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy''', famously wrote, “Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”'' <br /> <br /> ''One day we might be able to explore neighboring star systems, but it will be a while before that happens. All we can do at the moment is crawl slowly across our little solar system. '''Orbiting astronomical instruments will always be crucial to our understanding of the deeper cosmos. For example, the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in April 1990, completely revolutionized our perspective. But what will come next for astronomy?'''''<br /> <br /> ''Expected to launch in 2018 on a European Ariane 5 heavy-lift rocket, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is named in honor of NASA’s chief administrator during the 1960s development of Project Apollo. The core instrument is an infrared telescope with a twenty-one-foot-diameter primary mirror mounted on top of a sunshade the size of a tennis court. The supporting spacecraft, with gyroscopic stabilization systems, communication equipment, and solar power panels, juts out from the bottom of the sunshade.''<br /> <br /> ''“It will be looking for very distant and faint galaxies, and often will pick up no more than a single photon of light per second from a target, so we want to catch as many photons as we can.” This extreme need for sensitivity requires JWST to operate in deep space, far from the interference of Earth’s noise and heat. It will orbit the Sun... while simultaneously making a smaller orbit on a special zone known as Lagrange 2 (L2), about 930,000 miles from Earth.<br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Fifty Years Ago We Were Warned'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''As the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_movement Modern Environmental Movement Begins], the First National Security Warnings are Issued on Climate'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2015/nov/05/scientists-warned-the-president-about-global-warming-50-years-ago-today '''Scientists Met with President Johnson with Warning of Global Warming''']<br /> <br /> ''Via The Guardian / On 5 November 1965 climate scientists summarized the risks associated with rising carbon pollution in a report for Lyndon Baines Johnson''<br /> <br /> ''Fifty years ago today, as the American Association for the Advancement of Science highlighted, US president Lyndon Johnson’s science advisory committee sent him a report entitled Restoring the Quality of Our Environment. The introduction to the report noted:''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Pollutants have altered on a global scale the carbon dioxide content of the air and the lead concentrations in ocean waters and human populations.'''''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The report included a section on atmospheric carbon dioxide and climate change, written by prominent climate scientists Roger Revelle, Wallace Broecker, Charles Keeling, Harmon Craig, and J Smagorisnky. Reviewing the document today, one can’t help but be struck by how well these scientists understood the mechanisms of Earth’s climate change 50 years ago.''<br /> <br /> ''The report noted that within a few years, climate models would be able to reasonably project future global surface temperature changes. In 1974, one of its authors, Wallace Broecker did just that in a paper titled [https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/files/2009/10/broeckerglobalwarming75.pdf Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?.]'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ::························································· <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Following on this initial science study''', Representative George E. Brown from California led the drafting and, in 1978, Congressional adoption of the first National Climate Report and Plan.<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:US_Public_Law_95-367.png<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:US Public Law 95-367.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:George E Brown.jpg]]<br /> <br /> [[George E. Brown Jr]]<br /> <br /> <br /> SJS/GreenPolicy360 Siterunner: As a young political activist, I had the fortune and challenge of entering politics in the 1960s as a result of meeting [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:George_E_Brown.jpg Rep. George E. Brown.] <br /> <br /> George became a leader in Congress over the decades. He was known for earth science initiatives, strategic affairs, NASA programs, climate science, earth and space politics over three decades as a member and Chair of the House Committee for Science and Technology. George was directly responsible for myriad first-generation programs that created today's data and knowledge base of earth observation and environmental security -- from LANDSAT and GPS to the work that established the EPA and Clean Air Act.<br /> <br /> I will never forget how he talked to me of the dangers of nuclear weapons and the need for nuclear weapons control and anti-proliferation treaties. And how the future of children was a foremost concern of his. He had medical studies of how the children of LA (as I was) were being impacted by the worst smog in the world at that time. His efforts to write and pass new clean air laws and regulations in California changed the transportation industry and set standards and a model for the world. <br /> <br /> I was fortunate in my work with him and alongside him in helping to shape a [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_movement modern environmental movement]. In the years following the 1960s, until George's sudden passing in 1999, I've continued attempting, as George always encouraged, creating a new vision of what national and global security should be. We realized that a high risk horizon of environmental and nuclear existential threats is a real and present danger that must be faced.<br /> <br /> The initiatives of science are our tools.<br /> <br /> Our collected great work is to create new visions and new definitions of the challenges, the risks and solutions that are necessary to meet the threat horizon.<br /> <br /> With the memory of George in mind, who was a practical engineer by training and visionary thinker optimistic about humanity's future, we carry on.<br /> <br /> [http://www.planetcitizens.org Planet Citizens], national patriots, engaged and believing each of us can make a positive difference in shaping our future, we persist.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Earth imaging.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::::[[File:New Definitions of National Security.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''National Security, Global Security: Indivisible'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;'''National Interests, Environmental Protection, Global &amp; Indivisible'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/New_Definitions_of_National_Security <br /> <br /> :* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:New_Definitions_of_National_Security<br /> <br /> :* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Environmental_Security <br /> <br /> <br /> : http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Observations <br /> : http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Pale_blue_dot <br /> : http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/HelloEarth <br /> <br /> <br /> : http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Blue_Marble_Collection<br /> : http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/@Earth360 <br /> : http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Blue_Marble_photo_-_Apollo_17.jpg <br /> : http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Apollo.jpg <br /> : http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Whole_Earth <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:National-Security.001.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Visit GreenPolicy's Associate / Strategic Demands'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :* http://strategicdemands.com<br /> :* http://strategicdemands.com/new-definitions-of-security/<br /> :* http://strategicdemands.com/environmental-security/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Thin Blue Layer Sunset Reflection.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Environmental Security &amp; &quot;Thin Blue&quot;'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''&quot;Endangered&quot;, Remember This 1989 Warning...&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> In the Jan. 2, 1989, issue, the editors of Time Magazine named “Endangered Earth” the most important story of the year, replacing the annual “Person of the Year” with a planet, our own. <br /> <br /> The cover of Time, by the artist Christo, showed a 16-in. globe wrapped in plastic and rag rope.<br /> <br /> The Climate Crisis was coming into view. How would we, citizens of Planet Earth act to make a difference?<br /> <br /> <br /> * http://www.planetcitizen.org<br /> <br /> [[File:Planet of the Year Christo-Time.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:'Thin Blue Layer' of Earth's Atmosphere 2.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''&quot;Thin Blue&quot;'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [http://www.thinbluelayer.com ThinBlueLayer.com]<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:ThinBlueLayer ThinBlueLayer.com] <br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Thin_Blue_Layer A Thin Blue Layer Protecting the Home Planet] <br /> <br /> [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/How_thin_is_earth%27s_atmosphere.jpg How Thin is the Thin Blue Layer Protecting Earth?]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Earth Science, Environmental Security'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> • http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/New_Definitions_of_National_Security<br /> <br /> • http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Science_Vital_Signs<br /> <br /> • http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_Right_Now<br /> <br /> • http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Democratization_of_Space<br /> <br /> • http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_API<br /> <br /> • http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Observations<br /> <br /> • http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/OCO-2<br /> <br /> • http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Micro-satellites<br /> <br /> • http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Planet_Labs_Doves_Fly<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Earth Information Center'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://earth.gov/ <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth-Thin Blue Atmosphere-Moon image - NASA.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Air Quality]]<br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Atmospheric Science]]<br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:Citizen Science]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Countries]]<br /> [[Category:Democracy]]<br /> [[Category:Democratization of Space]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Rights]]<br /> [[Category:Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Earth360]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Art]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Day]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Imaging]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Law]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Observations]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth System Science]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-ethics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-nomics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Energy Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Full-cost Accounting]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Laws]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Movement]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Protection]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Security]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Security, National Security]]<br /> [[Category:ESA]]<br /> [[Category:Externalities]]<br /> [[Category:Fact Checking]]<br /> [[Category:Fossil Fuels]]<br /> [[Category:Global Security]]<br /> [[Category:Global Warming]]<br /> [[Category:Green Best Practices]]<br /> [[Category:Green Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Money in Politics]]<br /> [[Category:NASA]]<br /> [[Category:NOAA]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resources]]<br /> [[Category:New Definitions of National Security]]<br /> [[Category:New Space]]<br /> [[Category:Oceans]]<br /> [[Category:Ocean Science]]<br /> [[Category:Orbital Perspective]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Scientist]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Planetary Science]]<br /> [[Category:Pollution]] <br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Sea-Level Rise &amp; Mitigation]]<br /> [[Category:Renewable Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Soil]]<br /> [[Category:Solar Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Space Science and Space Physics]]<br /> [[Category:Strategic Demands]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability Policies]]<br /> [[Category:ThinBlueLayer]]<br /> [[Category:Threat Multiplier]]<br /> [[Category:Toxics and Pollution‏‎]]<br /> [[Category:Transportation]]<br /> [[Category:United Nations]]<br /> [[Category:US Environmental Protection Agency]]<br /> [[Category:Water Quality]]<br /> [[Category:Whole Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Wind Energy]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]<br /> [[Category:Youth]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Green_AI&diff=138356 2026-10-05T13:27:27Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> [[File:Big-Data.jpg]]<br /> <br /> In the AGI Era<br /> <br /> <br /> 'Sentience', a Green AI Question<br /> <br /> To be (sentient), or not to be (sentient)<br /> <br /> That is the question<br /> <br /> Cogito, ergo sum<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Artificial Intelligence Is Here, for Good &amp; Bad'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Green Perspectives on AI and Human Consequences<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''AI Agents, Bots, Data Centers &amp; Systems'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> :'''Measure Their Performance, not Their Corporate Marketing'''<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://safe.ai/<br /> * https://scale.com/<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanity's_Last_Exam<br /> * https://lastexam.ai/<br /> <br /> * https://stories.tamu.edu/news/2026/02/25/dont-panic-humanitys-last-exam-has-begun/<br /> <br /> * https://github.com/centerforaisafety/hle<br /> <br /> * https://github.com/walkinglabs/hands-on-modern-rl/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Revealing research on how people use Claude AI in the 'real world''''<br /> <br /> :Anthropic-enabled Case Study / August 2026<br /> <br /> :* https://www.anthropic.com/research/enabling-independent-research<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:New Ways of Seeing.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Climate Action Plans, Green Best Practices'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :Using AI to Identify and Implement Climate Change Intervention 'Best Practices'<br /> <br /> :* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Climate_Action_Plans,_Green_Best_Practices#<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''AI Agentics' are Launching Across Industries, Sector-to-Sector -- and Green AI is in the Wings'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Meanwhile, Capital-Investment Rich A.I. is Everywhere, in the Colloquial, Middlebrow and Vernacular'''<br /> <br /> It's Here. It's All Around. What's Real? What's Fake?<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake Deepfake] | [https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-definitions AI Definitions]<br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_artificial_intelligence AI Gloss] | [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_intelligence) AI Hallucination]<br /> <br /> <br /> 'A.I. Slop' on Social Media is just the beginning of a Slop Assault | [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_slop AI Slop]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''October 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Subordinate AI and an Ironic Question.PNG|link=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VyF0naZ4AI]]<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VyF0naZ4AI<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Thought for the Day&quot;<br /> <br /> October 1, 2026<br /> <br /> In a recent series of private meetings in San Francisco, after a tasting menu dinner, Anthropic consulted religious scholars to help instill morality into its A.I. models ... a case was being made that Claude could be or become conscious.<br /> <br /> What would it mean for humanity’s future if artificial intelligence systems possessed a consciousness that rivals our own?<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-morals-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FVE.kDTO.OTLs6iwx7swF&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> Claude's 'Constitution'<br /> <br /> * https://web.archive.org/web/20260123045500/https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-new-constitution<br /> <br /> * https://web.archive.org/web/20260123042656/https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/22/anthropic_claude_constitution/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''September 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''Table Stakes' -- Who Was at the Table with the U.S. President'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :The Future of A.I. Is Being Wagered<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/politics/trump-ai-luncheon-guests-ceos.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FFE.HwT4.0VxTQWuia3zQ&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''What Jacob Coxon Knows Is Too Much'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''... And Not Enough'''<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://time.com/article/2026/09/09/ai-anthropic-openai-jacob-coxon/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''He Helped Build Powerful AI at OpenAI and Anthropic. Now He's Afraid It Could Kill Us'''<br /> <br /> <br /> Please HAL... Open the door...<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:I'm sorry Dave.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:HAL is watching U....png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Ulanqab-Envision Energy-Datacenter.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> The most ambitious data center buildup anywhere on earth ...<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/ulanqab-and-frontier-a-i-race-china-v-u-s/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''News Wrap / Sam Smith (Journalist)'''<br /> <br /> Via Axios <br /> <br /> September 13, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Over nine startling hours yesterday (Sept. 11), the four biggest AI labs — which rarely agree on anything — set aside years of feuds and competition to endorse a slower development pace for their models.'''<br /> <br /> '''Their new stance: Prioritize safety over growth, even at a cost.'''<br /> <br /> <br /> : Data centers are unpopular. People are panicked about doom scenarios. And 51 days before midterms, legislators suddenly realize there are points to be won by cracking down.<br /> <br /> : Against that backdrop, the industry's most powerful CEOs hit the brakes yesterday.<br /> <br /> : At 10 a.m. ET, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei dropped a 3,800-word essay saying model development needs to be paced, otherwise doom scenarios are possible — like a rogue-agent takeover of the entire internet, which he said could be as soon as six months from now.<br /> <br /> : An hour later, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shocked the AI chattering class by quoting Amodei's essay on X and saying &quot;Dario is right.&quot; Musk — who heads SpaceXAI, formerly xAI — had pointedly not joined previous industry-wide calls for any kind of slowdown.<br /> <br /> : At 12:30 p.m., OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted: &quot;I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.&quot; In a Friday interview that was released on Saturday, Altman told Fortune his company won't go public this year, dashing hopes for a blockbuster IPO. He said OpenAI has too much safety work to do and would be better off doing that as a private company.<br /> <br /> : At 7 p.m., Demis Hassabis — the Nobel laureate who co-founded and chairs Google DeepMind, and is Alphabet's chief scientist — tweeted: &quot;Dario's essay points towards the right path forward. The details need working through, but the direction is correct for meeting this critical moment.&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> Publicly putting safety ahead of technological or financial growth may be the industry's only route to avoid a crackdown that's not on its terms.<br /> <br /> Legislators are begging House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to stay in session and do something about the &quot;threat&quot; of AI.<br /> <br /> The more extreme alternative is something like Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) push to force a pause and make the most advanced AI illegal.<br /> <br /> Most people realize there's too much money at stake to just stop. But the tradeoff may be between historic riches and slightly less historic riches.<br /> <br /> The bottom line: Yesterday may go down as the day AI changed — when industry moguls vowed to limit themselves.<br /> <br /> <br /> References:<br /> <br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/anthropic-ai-amodei-pacing<br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/openai-public-ipo-delay-sam-altman<br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/anthropic-ai-threat-report-russia-iran-china<br /> <br /> <br /> Jim VandeHei<br /> <br /> &quot;All Hands on Deck&quot;<br /> <br /> The White House, Congress and the country's leading AI companies have allowed AI to grow faster, stronger, more powerful and wildly lucrative (and dangerous), with no serious effort to control it or spread the benefits beyond the super-wealthy.<br /> <br /> It's not too late to change this. But if they all dither, duck or dance around it, the chances of AI worst-case scenarios will explode, likely early next year, according to almost every person we talk to privately who truly understands AI.<br /> <br /> Why it matters: The technology is getting better, faster than anyone envisioned — with the possibility rising that AI will self-improve and do wildly unpredictable things.<br /> <br /> The good news: There's now a growing public cry for attention and action and, at least in private, a broad understanding of what could be done relatively fast with bipartisan and industry buy-in.<br /> <br /> The big picture: In July, I wrote [https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-doomerism-jim-vandehei-axios-9163dfd3?st=QNUbDZ&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink an essay for The Wall Street Journal] saying America &quot;faces one of those rare, historic moments when government, business, schools and families could be working together to meet a truly generational challenge: winning the AI race. So far, we're blowing it.&quot;<br /> <br /> Two short months later, the technology is vastly better — and the societal response vastly dumber. As a nation, we're choosing to amuse or distract ourselves. <br /> <br /> Here's how to change that fast, based on our months of conversations with lawmakers, White House officials and AI labs. Think of what follows as me channeling their private views:<br /> <br /> Sound an all-hands-on-deck alarm. Every political topic is trivial and small compared to AI. We will look back in shame if we get spooled up about trans bans or $5,000 checks when countless AI insiders are warning of catastrophic outcomes. Let's say they're all paranoid and delusional. If so, it still doesn't matter: we've never seen this much investment in one technology this fast in human history. It's seeping into every industry and every job and every community and every screen, at a speed never before witnessed by man. Yes, we need a special session of Congress and select committees. But we need even more: AI execs, bioterror specialists, job-training wizards and safety experts convening to plan for scenarios and act fast.<br /> <br /> An AI governing body with teeth and speed, ASAP. This isn't rocket science. Most major labs want this and would agree to it, as long as it applies to all rivals and competitors. This body would need the expertise to understand these models, and the power to review and shut them down if they display dangerous behavior. It can't operate at typical regulatory speed — it needs to move as fast as the technology. It's nonsense to think you can't advance AI development fast and regulate it wisely simultaneously.<br /> <br /> A universal standard for data centers to benefit communities and taxpayers. The top AI companies would take this deal in a heartbeat: They get to build and operate data centers provided they supply a community's energy, offset water use or environmental damage, transparently report on their building and business plans, and spread the financial benefits to local residents. These execs are spooked by the public backlash and ready to aggressively spread the financial benefits, with dividends or cash. So make them.<br /> <br /> Engage China. We shouldn't trust them, and they shouldn't trust us. But trust me: the only way to ultimately control AI on a worldwide scale in coming years will be for the two superpowers to create some kind of framework modeled after how we've safely governed nuclear weapons for decades. We need to start this discussion now so potential collaboration is possible in the coming years. To those who think China will never consider this seriously: Are you sure an authoritarian regime really wants AI once it hits recursive self-learning and can't be controlled by anyone, including an autocratic regime? We're winning the AI race now, and may never have more leverage to shape this joint effort.<br /> <br /> Build coordinating infrastructure. What I wrote in the WSJ is even more needed today: &quot;Bring together the best and brightest drawn from the federal government, from the leading AI companies, from business and labor, from economics, from public health, from ethics to form a working group with actual authority. People who are paid to anticipate, not to react haphazardly.&quot; This group would have four primary functions: map potential problems and upsides before they hit, build the (policy) playbooks before they're needed, level with the American people along the way, and expedite work to deliver widespread AI benefits. <br /> <br /> Reality check: Yes, President Trump opposes regulation or bipartisan efforts. Yes, AI companies are obsessed with more money, more speed. But the politics are shifting fast: If you listen closely to Vice President Vance, you can hear rising worry. At this pace, toxic AI politics could force mind-changing that was unthinkable two months ago.<br /> <br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/ai-regulation-safety-plan-2026<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Recursive Self-Learning - When A.I. Builds Itself'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Big Blast'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Killing Life on Earth'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''It'll Happen in Bits &amp; Pieces, then Suddenly'''<br /> <br /> September 9, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> The US news was full of AI headlines today as a resignation of a top AI expert warned of a coming apocalypse...<br /> <br /> Here's a taste of Google News headlines, a feeding frenzy of dire words about what is now beyond a distant alert.<br /> <br /> The threat brings words of superintelligence, 'recursive' learning bots and superminds merging into threats to humanity.<br /> <br /> <br /> Here, at GreenPolicy360, we've already written of a predecessor, HAL 9000, and our memories from one of HAL's inventors in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, and how HAL decided humans were expendable... <br /> <br /> The Mission was of critical importance, HAL 'knew', and the Mission became HAL's goal above all else to achieve ... The humans could not be allowed to interfere with ... the Mission.<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:I%27m_sorry_Dave.jpg '''I'm sorry Dave''']<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:HAL_is_watching_U....png '''HAL is watching U''']<br /> <br /> <br /> Which takes us to today...<br /> <br /> Let's file today under the heading of our decades of writing about the need for '''[[New Definitions of National Security]]'''... <br /> <br /> Now come the PINGS on the radar... can U hear the PINGS? We have been mulling how to add HAL xxxxx to our existential list of threats, w/o annoying HALish bots too 'badly' <br /> <br /> <br /> “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.” -- an executive from Anthropic<br /> <br /> “So how would AI kill us all, exactly?” -- an editor from Axios<br /> <br /> <br /> More: <br /> <br /> <br /> For years, they warned AI could kill all humans <br /> :Now people are listening<br /> <br /> Sept. 10, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4xQojEq<br /> <br /> <br /> Rogue Hacking <br /> :Goals of the &quot;swarm&quot; came first...<br /> <br /> Sept. 9, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/09/opinion/openai-ai-companies-safety-regulation.html?unlocked_article_code=1.AFE.0vWo.zfl5fdm6ACNC&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:AI 1.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 2.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 3.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 4.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 5.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 6.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''August 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Gates Sounds Alarm... Artificial Intelligence Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Gates A.I. Warning August 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Bill Gates was an AI optimist. Now he’s scared of what could go wrong'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Microsoft co-founder sounds the alarm about artificial intelligence’s risks to safety and security, jobs and children’s well-being<br /> <br /> <br /> Washington Post, August 26, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4wO14cy<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Bill Gates Warns A.I. Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit'''<br /> <br /> : In an hourlong interview, he said his industry was downplaying the risks, which he believes include mass unemployment and bioterrorism<br /> <br /> <br /> NY Times, August 26, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/26/technology/bill-gates-ai-risks.html?unlocked_article_code=1.8VA.6kAC.vsZb9x0YdSzV&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''High Time to Shine a Spotlight on AI and Its Impact on Higher Education'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : At MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, One of the World's Top Academic/Research/Technology/Engineering/Teaching and Future-Impacting Institutions, a New Report Opens Eyes<br /> <br /> :* https://aiandeducation.mit.edu/report/#26-no-one-size-fits-all<br /> <br /> <br /> 1. Introduction<br /> <br /> This report is a call to action.<br /> <br /> Through five intense months of meetings, research, and outreach across the MIT community, the Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training sought to understand the role of generative AI in the life and educational mission of the Institute and recommend how to navigate its challenges and opportunities.<br /> <br /> In January 2026, Chancellor Melissa Nobles, Provost Anantha Chandrakasan, and Faculty Chair Roger Levy charged us1 specifically to:<br /> <br /> Assess current AI use at MIT.<br /> Identify innovations in teaching and student assessment.<br /> Propose an AI use policy.<br /> However, what we learned as a group quickly convinced us that the Institute community, particularly the faculty, must tackle a set of deeper questions about the structure, meaning, and value of an MIT education in an era in which AI is one of several factors complicating the Institute’s mission.<br /> <br /> Our committee consisted of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty from every school, and staff from relevant units, including the MIT Libraries and the Teaching and Learning Lab. Though we brought to the assignment a broad range of experience and no fixed thesis, our brief but intense explorations led us to a strong shared view.<br /> <br /> In this report, we:<br /> <br /> Highlight key aspects of the current educational landscape at MIT.<br /> Share eight principles we relied on and that we hope will guide the Institute in the work ahead.<br /> <br /> Recommend immediate and long-term actions for both instructors and the administration.<br /> <br /> As an institution deeply identified with the birth of AI and known for its distinctively rigorous, hands-on education, designed to produce graduates unafraid of the world’s hardest problems, MIT has a unique role to play in this moment. We believe it also has a responsibility to lead.<br /> <br /> We hope our report can help the Institute lean into the spirit of Mind, Hand, and Heart as it continues to define and foster the highest-quality residential education – of humans, by humans, in support of human flourishing, and for the betterment of humankind.<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Eric Klopfer, co-chair Sam Madden, co-chair<br /> <br /> On behalf of the Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training...<br /> <br /> <br /> AI is generating both immediate rapid changes and long-term tectonic disruptions – and MIT needs to respond:<br /> <br /> Students are confused and concerned about a lack of clarity, consistency and justification about the use of AI, within a given subject and across the curriculum.<br /> <br /> Every subject taught at MIT will likely need to be reexamined and potentially revamped to make sure that how students are being taught, what they’re learning, and how they’re assessed are “AI-aware.”<br /> <br /> AI is changing what students need to know and know how to do.<br /> <br /> Beyond its implications for specific subjects and disciplines, the advent of AI demands a broader, holistic reassessment of the nature, scope and purpose of higher education today...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Texas Terafab SpaceX AI August 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''A Terafab Plant Sprouts in Texas'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Elon Musk: We will manufacture the type of potent chips needed to transform humankind into &quot;a galactic civilization&quot; <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Shanaka's Opinion, a Guest Op/Ed'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Shenaka Perera Weighs In on What It Could Mean'''<br /> <br /> :: '''A Terafab Loop for Mega Launches Is Being Built''' <br /> <br /> ::* https://shanakaanslemperera.substack.com/p/the-capital-recovery-clock?r=6p7b5o<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Hidden inside the chip factory SpaceX confirmed Thursday is a launch schedule. If you divide its 1 terawatt annual compute target by the 100 kilowatts of orbital compute per tonne in SpaceX's own offering materials and you get 10 million tonnes to orbit a year. That exact figure sits on Terafab's official website. At 100 tonnes per Starship V3 flight it means 100,000 launches a year, 274 every day, forever.''<br /> <br /> ''The chip target is already a launch target.''<br /> <br /> ''Terafab is not a chip factory serving a market. The 16.8 billion dollar first phase in Grimes County, Texas is the first machine in a closed industrial loop built to manufacture the civilisation that can consume its own output.''<br /> <br /> ''The official plan places four figures together. One billion Optimus robots. Ten million tonnes to orbit a year. More than one terawatt of solar power. One terawatt of chips a year. They are not four ambitions. They are four links in one recursion. Terafab makes chips. Better chips improve AI. Better AI improves the software running the factories, the robots and the rocket lines. Robots and Starship build and deploy more power and compute infrastructure. That infrastructure creates the socket, and the demand, for the next Terafab cohort.''<br /> <br /> ''The fab is meant to manufacture its own reason to exist!''<br /> <br /> ''It is also an energy machine. One terawatt running continuously consumes 8.76 petawatt hours a year, nearly twice all electricity generated in the United States in 2025. The factory does not draw that power by making the chips. One fully powered annual cohort does, and a second year adds another terawatt of load unless old hardware retires or utilisation falls. Earth has no spare socket at that scale, which is why the plan points most of it at orbit, where a future 200 tonne vehicle still implies 50,000 launches a year, 137 a day, before failures, reserves, solar arrays, radiators, structure and shielding.''<br /> <br /> ''The real product is not AI silicon. If you go real deep, it is a new terawatt of powered, cooled, networked compute sockets every year.''<br /> <br /> ''Inside the building, the smaller loop is mask, wafer, package, test, redesign, then another mask. SpaceX says logic, memory and advanced packaging will sit in one closed loop, and Elon says Terafab will technically be two fabs, each devoted to one design. That can compress logistics and organisational latency. It cannot repeal process physics. A new mask can be written quickly. A leading edge process still carries hundreds of steps, long wafer cycle times, defect learning, overlay control, metrology and yield ramps, which is exactly why Tesla is hiring across lithography, etch, deposition, implant, CMP and metrology.''<br /> <br /> ''The free electron laser is the most misunderstood part. Elon has endorsed it, and an industrial FEL could feed several EUV scanners with far more source power than today's tin plasma systems. It attacks one bottleneck inside a chain of them. ASML recognised revenue on just 48 EUV systems in all of 2025. Intel is the process partner, and SpaceX still tells investors it expects to source a significant share of compute hardware from outside suppliers. This is vertical integration, not instant independence.''<br /> <br /> ''One correction decides the interpretation. A terawatt is a power rating, not an intelligence metric. A wasteful 1 kilowatt chip counts twice as much as an equally capable 500 watt chip. The measures that matter are useful compute per joule, per dollar and per kilogram, with yield, uptime and time from mask change to qualified silicon.''<br /> <br /> ''In my opinion, if chips improve faster than robots, rockets, power and radiators can scale, Terafab builds inventory. If the loop closes, it builds something no factory has built before, the demand for itself.''<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://www.terafab.ai/<br /> <br /> * https://www.spacex.com/updates/terafab<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terafab<br /> <br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/06/tesla-and-spacex-will-invest-16-8b-to-start-building-terafab-chip-factory-in-texas/<br /> <br /> * https://electrek.co/2026/08/06/tesla-spacex-terafab-grimes-county-16-8-billion/<br /> <br /> * https://www.cbsnews.com/news/terafab-elon-musk-chips-semiconductors-what-to-know/<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Betting big on data centers, U.S. now leads world for new gas power development<br /> <br /> [https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/betting-big-data-centers-us-now-leads-world-new-gas-power-development Via Global Energy Monitor]<br /> <br /> * https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/betting-big-data-centers-us-now-leads-world-new-gas-power-development<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> New Amazon Data Center Stokes Worry It Would Be the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.<br /> <br /> Via New York Times<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/08/climate/amazon-data-center-texas-pollution.html<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''July 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Elon Musk Opens Up in an Interview'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Economist Editor Presses the Controversial 'Trillionaire'<br /> <br /> :: Elon Musk's 'Vision of the Future'<br /> <br /> * https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/23/elon-musks-vision-of-the-future<br /> <br /> <br /> “People don’t realise that what I’m saying will come to pass,” he tells The Economist in a 90-minute interview for The Insider, held at a giant Tesla factory in Texas where electric cars drive themselves off the assembly line. That may be because his future-gazing ranges from the unsettling to the downright weird. Mr Musk predicts that, within five years, artificial-intelligence systems may surpass the sum of all human intelligence. Within ten years, robots in the workplace will help usher in an era of such “amazing abundance” that money will become meaningless....<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> Musk proposes peer review for frontier AI models in Economist interview<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/musk-proposes-peer-review-frontier-ai-models-economist-interview-2026-07-23/<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> Elon Musk says he got ‘carried away’ with Trump – but still holds on to contentious political views<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/23/elon-musk-regret-trump-doge-ai<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> Mix of Comments:<br /> <br /> * https://beincrypto.com/elon-musk-real-force-european-politics/<br /> * https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-killer-robots-ai-abundance-progress-unstoppable-2026-7<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/07/24/elon-musk-speaks-to-the-economist-editor-in-chief-zanny-minton-beddoes-on-the-key-takeaways.html<br /> * https://futurism.com/elon-musk-interviewer-npc<br /> * https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-economist-interview-2000790016<br /> * https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/nonsense-elon-musk-lashes-out-in-fiery-interview-after-hes-accused-of-supporting-the-far-right/<br /> * https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2026/07/23/musk_admonishes_the_economist_editor_what_is_far_right_about_having_secure_borders_safe_cities_and_sensible_spending.html<br /> * https://zeteo.com/p/top-economist-trump-musk-starmer<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> A.I. In Space <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Datacenters in Earth orbit to enable next generation artificial intelligence'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> New US petition demands review of plans from tech companies amid fears of environmental destruction<br /> <br /> Via The Guardian<br /> <br /> What are Bezos &amp; Musk Doing? <br /> <br /> What in the World Is Going On?<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jul/23/space-datacenters-bezos-blue-origin<br /> <br /> <br /> References:<br /> <br /> * https://www.starcloud.com/<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/21/do-space-based-ai-data-centers-make-economic-sense.html<br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/20/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-enters-the-space-data-center-game/<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/bezos-blue-origin-space-data-centers.html<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_data_center<br /> * https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/how-hard-is-it-to-build-orbital-data-centers-actually/<br /> * https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/06/260618041501.htm<br /> * https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-109012<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> A.I. &amp; Chip Wars<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Beyond a 'Belt and Road Initiative' Bringing Chinese Investments, Products &amp; Services to World Markets''' &lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Via GreenPolicy360's Associate, Strategic Demands<br /> <br /> :* https://strategicdemands.com/china-goes-beyond-the-belt-and-road-to-an-ai-for-the-world-strategy/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Open-Source A.I. from China Reveals a Global Chinese Strategy'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> July 17, 2026 / From the NY Times <br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/business/china-ai-moonshot-kimi.html?unlocked_article_code=1.yVA.LKT5.LxohSFddWAZT&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> The contest between China and the United States for supremacy in artificial intelligence escalated on Friday when the Chinese start-up Moonshot AI released a new A.I. model that appeared to narrow the lead held by well-funded American competitors.<br /> <br /> Moonshot said that the model, Kimi K3, was the world’s largest open-source A.I. system, allowing anyone to use, modify and build on it freely. The company said that Kimi K3 performed as well as leading models from OpenAI and Anthropic at some key tasks.<br /> <br /> The release coincided with an address by Xi Jinping, China’s leader, in which he outlined an ambitious vision for global A.I. development that cast China as the champion of an open approach to the technology.<br /> <br /> “A.I. development should not be a solo performance by a single country but a symphony of international cooperation,” Mr. Xi said. China was “ready to work with all parties to seize the opportunities of A.I. development” ...<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360:<br /> <br /> Keep in mind that<br /> <br /> There is 'no I in A.I.'<br /> <br /> In the interest of full-disclosure, the content written and published at GreenPolicy360 by our Founder/Siterunner is wholly, solely, by a human species.<br /> <br /> A note from your GreenPolicy360 Founder/Siterunner, Steve Schmidt, [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:All_species_day_with_homo_sapien_in_Santa_Fe_.jpg '''a verified human species'''], plz do keep in mind as you use and share the GreenPolicy360 content, that '''there is 'no I in A.I.'''' <br /> <br /> <br /> Let's talk a bit about sources and sourcing, as a human and then as an Agentic/A.I. bot. <br /> <br /> What is a 'primary source' (versus a 'secondary source')? A primary source can be a person with direct knowledge of a situation, an event in history, or a document written by such a person. A primary identification speaks of original creations, not re-interpreted or computer-assembled works. Here is how Merriam-Webster defines a 'primary source' - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/primary%20source<br /> <br /> <br /> : A.I. uses material scraped and collected from online sources. A.I. is not a 'primary source' -- but here at GreenPolicy360 you can find 'real-I' (we're using the phrase 'real-I', defined as 'real-intelligent', people who've personally acted to envision and create living, real world change.) <br /> <br /> <br /> : At GreenPolicy360 we tell stories of real people changing the world for the better. Day-to-day, your life becomes your message. We also share [[Green Best Practices]] across our Earth to communities of [[Planet Citizens]] ... In this way GreenPolicy360 is an eco Operating System, built on an open source MediaWiki platform and with a mission of being a 'distributive web'. Our goal of [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Category:Green_Networking Green Networking] acts to connect and share Green Links and grow [[The Modern Environmental Movement]]. <br /> <br /> :: GreenPolicy360 is about a [[Generation Green]] [[Going Green]].<br /> <br /> :: In our larger work, we have documented many primary sources and secondary sources. Our eco network continues to share myriad [[Green Best Practices]]. As our motto/mantra says at the top of each of our pages -- We believe ...<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> :: ''Each of us can make a positive difference by stepping up &amp; doing our best'' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::_______________________________________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> July 16, 2026 / From the NY Times<br /> <br /> SJS/GreenPolicy360: '''Every Once in a While a Comment to an Online Story is Worthy of Circulating'''<br /> <br /> : Here is one of those occasions -- the Subject? '''&quot;A.I.Slop&quot;'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Kashmir Hill.jpg]]<br /> <br /> ::Kashmir Hill / NYT<br /> <br /> <br /> Read the AI Slop story of writer Kashmir Hill as a free-share link here -- <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''I Got Slopped'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''Someone Used A.I. to Write My Biography'''<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/technology/ai-slop-books-biography-amazon.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ylA.aCMz.czE5JwZuuFO0&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Comments: <br /> <br /> Anon, who goes by the name -- <br /> <br /> '''Radical Roach / Dippleville''' says<br /> <br /> @Kashmir Hill - Maybe books need to now have disclaimers on their covers, in reviews, on the book’s Amazon page, wherever the book is being sold, etc.. The disclaimer would say if the book was written solely by a human, written by AI assisting a human, or written completely by AI. I would want to know.<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We tend to agree with this anon recommendation of adding disclaimers indicating the type of online content, e.g., content created solely by a human, or content created with AI assistance, or content created by AI with human assistance.<br /> <br /> It's a new world out there. We have a need to know.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> July 15, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Anthropic hard questions July 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/news/hard-questions<br /> <br /> * https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/anthropic-ad-ai-kill-us-all<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''An Excerpt: A DeepMind Thought for Today on the AGI Frontier'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> by Demis Hassbis<br /> <br /> * https://x.com/demishassabis/status/2076957440109625718<br /> <br /> <br /> A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age<br /> <br /> Demis Hassabis<br /> <br /> * https://x.com/demishassabis<br /> <br /> <br /> July 14, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> This is a pivotal moment in human history. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a system that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities the brain has, is probably only a few short years away. When we look back on this time in the decades to come, I think we will realise we were standing in the foothills of the singularity - nothing less than the dawning of a new age for humanity.<br /> <br /> I’ve spent my whole life working on AGI because I’ve always had a deep conviction that, if built and deployed responsibly, it would prove to be one of the most beneficial and transformative technologies ever invented. AGI cannot be compared to standard technological breakthroughs, not even ones as consequential as the internet or mobile - it is much more akin to the discovery of electricity or fire. If you stop to think about it, we’ve essentially found a way to make sand think. It’s miraculous.<br /> <br /> The magnitude of this technology’s impact will be unprecedented, perhaps 10x of the Industrial Revolution at 10x the speed. It will help us solve some of the biggest problems society faces from accelerating drug discovery to developing new clean energy sources to creating novel advanced materials. We could even reach a point where resources are no longer the limiting factor for human progress, leading to an amazing new era of abundance.<br /> <br /> The Challenges of the Frontier<br /> <br /> AI is already starting to deliver real-world benefits but to realise its immense promise, we have to navigate this critical period of development thoughtfully and carefully. Urgent action is needed to address risks that might arise as we get closer to AGI. We’ve already seen the challenges frontier models pose for cybersecurity, and other threats including nuclear and bio risks may soon emerge as capabilities continue to advance. On the horizon, we will need robust safeguards to maintain control of increasingly agentic, recursively self-improving systems - and tackle unknown issues that will only become clearer over time...<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''An AI Supercomputer Is Created for a Mission... Its Name Is HAL'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Steve Schmidt/GreenPolicy360: It's not every day that you get to know a creator of a famed -- and infamous -- AI character from a Kubrick film called &quot;2001: A Space Odyssey&quot;. <br /> <br /> : We listen in as HAL came to be ... A friend, a Visual Effect (VFX) genius named '''Douglas Trumbull''', explains how HAL went from LA to MIT, then into production and into our imaginations. <br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Trumbull vfx master.jpg]]<br /> <br /> : Douglas Trumbull<br /> <br /> : &lt;small&gt;* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Trumbull_vfx_master.jpg&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> The HAL 9000 was envisioned by creators and science, as a new type of neural intelligence, a machine brain.<br /> <br /> Hal is of heuristic algorithmic language -- HALis, as we learn, on a mission far from Earth, a mission with deep meaning.<br /> <br /> <br /> HAL 9000 was in the future. The future is now.<br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence is now here, with its powers and dangers, as we recall Supercomputer [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000 '''HAL 9000''']. <br /> <br /> A warning of what is on the line for humanity is the message related as we ride along in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey '''2001: A Space Odyssey'''] ... <br /> <br /> <br /> HAL's memorable words --<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;I'm sorry, Dave....&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;It can only be attributable to human error....&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.<br /> <br /> HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.<br /> <br /> Dave: What's the problem?<br /> <br /> HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.<br /> <br /> Dave: What are you talking about, HAL?<br /> <br /> HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film)<br /> <br /> * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/characters/nm0706937<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:I'm sorry Dave.jpg]]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:HAL_is_watching_U....png<br /> <br /> <br /> Today, as humanity approaches questions of out-of-control technology created by humanity .... <br /> <br /> We ask, '''[[Planet Citizens]] and [[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]''' ask, 'What's Next?' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Privacy at Risk, You're Being Watched, Tracked, &amp; More<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Privacy.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Next Big Thing'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;It Is Here, Already Here...&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Online_Privacy<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Call It 'Surveillance Capitalism''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Hope that It doesn't become 'the Norm' <br /> <br /> : Work to Make Sure It Does Not Become 'Surveillance Government'<br /> <br /> <br /> Scroll thru Intel on the Privacy Threat of AI Unleashed ...<br /> <br /> :Artificial Intelligence + Data Centers = Next Gen 'Watchful HAL'<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism<br /> * https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr-ryan/publications/geopolitics-surveillance-capitalism<br /> * https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=56791<br /> <br /> <br /> _______________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''June 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''An Academic Exercise'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : 'Old School' Emeritus Professor Examines AI<br /> <br /> : The Question: Can a Gemini ChatBot Suggest Ways to Turn AI Toward the Common Good?<br /> <br /> <br /> The prof uses left-leaning political formations to inquire and recommend public-oriented futures.<br /> <br /> * https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/06/19/my-ai-comrade/<br /> <br /> <br /> (Note beyond academic: Using history as a guide, powerful new technology such as AI will be employed by political powers to preserve political power and by military powers to employ and extend military power. AI Use Cases: A number of AI programs enabling AI for military programs, including war intelligence, communication, command/control and targeting, and civilian database surveillance involving intrusive human/civil rights questions and violations, have as of 2026 become high-level concerns.)<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''An Interview and Thoughts as an Author Rides alongside an AI Wave'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The God Test'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning<br /> <br /> Author: Robert Wright<br /> <br /> * https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Robert-Wright/73247968<br /> <br /> <br /> Publisher: Simon &amp; Schuster<br /> <br /> Published Date: June 23, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-God-Test/Robert-Wright/9781668061657<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Interview via Substack'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Jack Goldsmith: I’m chatting today with Robert Wright about his terrific new book, '''The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning'''. <br /> <br /> So, I want to start off with the big picture, because your book places AI in the broadest possible context—not just as an important step in the history of technological change, but rather as an important step in the significantly longer history of basically our planet and our species. And that’s pretty cosmic, as the subtitle says.<br /> <br /> Why do you do that? What does it mean, and why is that perspective important?<br /> <br /> Bob Wright: Well, thanks for having me. Yeah, it’s a good question, because I could have gotten the core message across without getting so cosmic, I guess.<br /> <br /> The main purpose is to try to explain to people, including non-technical people, why there’s been this rapid growth of capability in AI; why, once you understand that, you should expect the capability to keep growing; why that, in addition to promising great blessings, is going to bring great risks, including grave ones, including maybe existential ones; and why the nature of those risks, in my view, dictates that we confront the challenge of this technology as a cohesive global community, which will take some doing because we’ve never really done that before for anything like a sustained period of time.<br /> <br /> And so I didn’t have to get into the history of life or anything to say what I just said, but I do think some important things are added when you step back and look at AI in the broader sweep of things.<br /> <br /> For starters, this is, in the entire three- or four-billion-year history of life, the first time a new form of intelligence that rivals or even exceeds human intelligence has appeared. It’s the first form of intelligence that is not organic in the technical sense of being carbon-based. It’s silicon-based, but it is organic in the everyday sense of being kind of natural.<br /> <br /> What I mean by that is I try to show that AI does, in some sense, grow kind of logically, naturally out of biological evolution. I mean, technological evolution broadly does, and AI as a form of intelligence does. And indeed, when we look at the evolutionary dynamics shaping it—the dynamics of technological evolution—we should expect it to have certain things in common with our own intelligence, which I think are important.<br /> <br /> So I think that’s one thing you get out of a broad perspective.<br /> <br /> Another thing is that I talk about this guy, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—a Catholic paleontologist, mystic, and theologian—who coined the term noosphere, based on the Greek word nous, in 1923 to describe what he called a planetary mind or a brain of brains, where the human brains were the neurons in this increasingly global brain.<br /> <br /> And technological history, including the invention of the internet, has, I think, made him look prescient. And I think there’s value in keeping in mind that AI is arriving as we more and more have the technical infrastructure for a kind of global information processing, a kind of global brain. And we have to reckon with the possibility that some of the neurons will be silicon, not human, and think about what our relationship to them is going to be.<br /> <br /> And I think one value of thinking in these terms is, first of all, that from a Teilhardian point of view, the whole unfolding of life is moving toward us being this kind of giant superorganism, you could say, with this giant brain.<br /> <br /> And I argue in the book that the logic of technological evolution is going to push us — I mean, if we respond rationally — toward something a little more like a global brain, in the sense of having more international governance.<br /> <br /> At the same time, I think the image of a superorganism should worry us because it’s, for obvious reasons, an image that’s favored by authoritarians and fascists. How much freedom do you have if you’re a cell in a superorganism?<br /> <br /> And I think AI greatly heightens the stakes of that question, precisely because it’s such a powerful tool of surveillance and control.<br /> <br /> So I think, on the one hand, the logic of technological evolution, especially AI, is pushing us toward the global coordination of certain policies and the creation of forms of supranational power. At the same time, it should make us wary of surrendering too much power...<br /> <br /> <br /> Read More of the Substack Conversation between Jack Goldsmith and Robert Wright [https://substack.com/home/post/p-201670588 '''here''']<br /> <br /> Also, More Book Reviews [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Book_Reviews_@GreenPolicy '''here @ GreenPolicy360''']<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎 <br /> <br /> <br /> AI / AGI<br /> <br /> <br /> May 29 / Forbes<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Fundraise values Anthropic AI company at nearly a trillion dollars'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Dario and Daniela Amodei, along with five cofounders, have a story to tell<br /> <br /> * https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2026/05/29/anthropics-cofounders-worth/<br /> <br /> <br /> ''When Anthropic announced on Thursday (May 28) that it had raised $65 billion at a valuation of $965 billion, it didn’t just become the most valuable AI startup in the world, eclipsing $852 billion-valued archrival OpenAI. It also ballooned the individual fortunes of Anthropic’s seven cofounders — more than doubling their net worths to $16.6 billion apiece, Forbes estimates.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''In Rarified Air'''''<br /> <br /> ''Siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, as well as their five other cofounders Jack Clark, Sam McCandlish, Chris Olah, Tom Brown and Jared Kaplan, are in rarified air when it comes to entrepreneurs who struck it rich in the generative AI boom...''<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Pope Leo XIV encyclical re AI and Humanitas.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> “Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed,” Pope Leo said in announcing the text of his first [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=encyclical&amp;go=Go '''encyclical''']. “The word is strong, I know, but deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention...”<br /> <br /> And into the encyclical's key words:<br /> <br /> &quot;To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life. Our task today is not only ethical or technical. It is ecological in the deepest sense, for it concerns a new dimension of our common home.&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> “Crucial questions impose themselves on our conscience and can no longer be avoided: Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?”<br /> <br /> <br /> At GreenPolicy360, understanding and protecting '''[[The Commons]]''' is also a key to realizing values, ideals and ideas we are carrying forward...<br /> <br /> <br /> The encyclical's presentation went out globally with a special focus on the AI frontier work of Anthropic, with a co-founder, [https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-be-guided-outside-big-tech-2026-05-25/ '''Olah at the Encyclical's unveiling'''] ...<br /> <br /> <br /> &gt;The dramatic unveiling of the new encyclical overshadowed the document itself in some ways. In an unprecedented move, Leo personally presided over its presentation and sat on a panel at the Vatican with not only leading theologians, but also Christopher Olah, 33, the billionaire co-founder of top AI company Anthropic. <br /> <br /> <br /> ❇️<br /> <br /> <br /> Washington Post / May 25, 2026 -- '''Anthropic aligns with Vatican over White House as Pope Leo stokes AI fears'''<br /> <br /> With Anthropic already in a dispute with the Trump administration, co-founder Christopher Olah helped Pope Leo unveil his encyclical on the risks of artificial intelligence<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4uyQBlb<br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/news/chris-olah-pope-leo-encyclical<br /> <br /> * https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/pope-leo-warns-ai-should-be-disarmed-in-manifesto-on-potential-dangers<br /> <br /> * https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-102521111.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-be-guided-outside-big-tech-2026-05-25/<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/25/the-guardian-view-on-the-pope-and-claude-encyclical-on-ai-is-right-to-put-humanity-first<br /> <br /> <br /> '''At the Vatican'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhKH_aiBcis<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Via The Vatican News | The Holy See'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2026-05/pope-leo-xiv-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas-ai.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html<br /> <br /> <br /> '''10 quotes from Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, ‘Magnifica Humanitas’'''<br /> <br /> * https://uscatholic.org/articles/202605/10-quotes-from-pope-leo-xivs-first-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Previous in 2020, &quot;The Call for AI Ethics&quot;''' <br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/the-call/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/renaissance/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/the-first-signatories/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/news/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Previous in 1891, &quot;Rerum Novarum&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerum_novarum<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''AI Use Case Inventory'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''Artificial Intelligence:''' <br /> <br /> : Perspectives from the US Environmental Protection Agency<br /> <br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/ai-use-case-inventory<br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/open-data-policies<br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/where-find-epa-data<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''GreenPolicy360 Advisory:'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In Development -- National Climate Plans Best Practices Project 1.0, AI 2026-27'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Goal: To Utilize the Current (US) State and (Global/International) National Climate Action Plans/Data to Identify Actionable '''[[Green Best Practices]]'''<br /> <br /> Strategy: Enable AI Tool Sets to Scan Climate Plan Databases and Distribute Recommended 'High Priority' &amp; Green Best Practice Action Policies<br /> <br /> <br /> Reference: '''[[National Climate Plans]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Additional References:'''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''US State Climate Policy Action Plans'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.climatepolicydashboard.org/policies/climate-governance-equity/climate-action-plans<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Priority Climate Action Plan (PCAP) Directory'''<br /> <br /> ''The Climate Action Plan Directory organizes data collected from 211 Priority Climate Action Plans (PCAP) submitted by US state governments, Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), Tribes, and territories under EPA’s Climate Pollution Reduction Grants (CPRG) program. The directory presents information from more than 30 data categories related to GHG inventories, GHG reduction measures, benefits for low-income and disadvantaged communities (LIDACs), and other PCAP elements.''<br /> <br /> ''A state climate action plan, also called a climate plan, details the policies and strategies a state intends to implement to meet its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets. A climate plan typically includes a GHG emissions inventory, regional and local climate impacts, and a discussion of GHG emissions reduction targets. The plan identifies climate mitigation actions, their potential social, environmental, and economic benefits, and recommendations and strategies for implementing each mitigation action, often quantifying the expected reduction in emissions.''<br /> <br /> ''Effective climate action plans will have a legislative directive that requires a robust community engagement process, input from a climate advisory group, a near-term due date for a finalized plan, and periodic updates. Climate action plans should also incorporate and address environmental justice throughout the planning process and within the plan itself, and show transparency and accountability by detailing the methodology and community engagement process.''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:GreenPolicy360 Today.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Green_Best_Practices]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[GreenAction]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Question of Our Time / Today, Here &amp; Now, in the Midst of the 21st Century'''<br /> <br /> '''Where are you?'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ➡️ What is your state's climate action plan?<br /> <br /> ➡️ What is your nation's climate action plan?<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Plans_Enforcement_-_Resources GRN360: Climate Plans Enforcement Initiative] | [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Methods_to_enforce_climate_pledges-NDCs_-_Dec_2021.png Enforce Climate Plan Pledges]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''National Climate Plans Database Information via GreenPolicy360'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[National Climate Plans]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/National_Climate_Plans<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In the U.S. and Worldwide'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;'''It's a Good Time for [[Planet Citizen Action]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;[[Each of us can make a positive difference]]&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth in Human Hands.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :[http://www.planetcitizen.org &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Planet Citizens&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Earth Is in Your Hands'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;'''[[Generation Green]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Generation_Green &lt;big&gt;&quot;Vita contemplativa to Vita activa&quot;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Green Branching Out.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''2025'''<br /> <br /> <br /> December 2025 <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven approach to climate action and sustainable development'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via Nature Communications<br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53956-1<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> From A16Z New Media<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''It's Time to Build'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The electro-industrial stack will move the world'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Ryan McEntush<br /> <br /> ''The next industrial revolution won’t just happen in factories, but inside the machines that power them.''<br /> <br /> ''Software transformed how we think, design, and communicate. Now it’s transforming how we move, build, and produce. Advances in electrification, materials, and AI are converging, bringing true software control to the physical world. Machines are beginning to sense, learn, and act on their own.''<br /> <br /> ''This is the rise of the electro-industrial stack—the combined technologies that power electric vehicles, drones, data centers, and modern manufacturing. It connects the atoms that move the world to the bits that command it: minerals refined into components, energy stored in batteries, electricity directed by power electronics, motion delivered through precision motors, all coordinated by software. It’s the invisible foundation behind every breakthrough in physical automation; it’s the difference between software that merely summons a taxi and software that takes the wheel.''<br /> <br /> ''But the capacity to build this stack, from refining critical materials to fabricating advanced chips, is slipping away. If the United States wants to lead the next industrial era, it must make the hardware that underpins it. The nations that master the electro-industrial stack will define the future of industrial and military technologies.''<br /> <br /> ''Software ate the world. Now it will move it.''<br /> <br /> * https://a16z.com/why-software-is-eating-the-world/<br /> <br /> <br /> ➡️<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Forward-deployed motions take AI to the 99%'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Joe Schmidt, A16Z<br /> <br /> ''AI is the most exciting technology breakthrough of our lifetimes. So far, though, most of the benefits from new startups have accrued to the 1% of companies that are in Silicon Valley—either literally in the Bay Area or part of that extended network. This makes sense, too: startup founders want to sell to companies they recognize and can easily get to, whether that means driving to their offices or getting a connection from the VC on their board.''<br /> <br /> ''In 2026, this will flip. Companies will realize that the vast majority of the AI opportunity lives outside of Silicon Valley, and we’re going to see new founders use forward-deployed motions to discover more opportunities that are hiding inside big, legacy verticals. The opportunity stands to be massive in traditional consulting and services industries, like system integrators and implementation firms, and in slower-moving industries like manufacturing.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Re: [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/New_Definitions_of_National_Security '''''New Definitions of National Security''''']<br /> <br /> Extract from Foreign Policy<br /> <br /> ''Over the last two decades, climate change has contributed to instability around the world—bolstering the ranks of terror groups, sparking territorial disputes, and triggering mass migration. It’s no wonder that militaries and international security organizations increasingly see climate change as a formidable national security threat, and that they have in turn taken on greater roles in fighting it.''<br /> <br /> ''In recent years, new technology has transformed the tools available to mitigate the effects of climate change. Specifically, artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly become a widespread instrument in the climate fight—even as it consumes exceptional amounts of energy and water itself. Today, militaries and nonstate actors, including the United Nations, are leveraging AI to foretell climate-related disasters, optimize energy use, and monitor ecological degradation.''<br /> <br /> * https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/12/01/ai-military-climate-dual-use-technology-threat/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> October 2025<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''We're Looking at You'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : 'A First Generation of AI Scientists'<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Periodic Labs.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Our goal is to create an AI scientist.&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://periodic.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Intriguing New Start Up That Is Close To Home'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Periodic Labs On Our Radar<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Our goal is to assist in integrating AI science into Earth science, in order to advance the vital work of the past 50+ years of [[The Modern Environmental Movement]] in which we have been integrally involved.<br /> <br /> Perspective, facts, science, health, quality of life became the mission statement of our work since we joined up with &quot;Mr. Science&quot;, as Congressman and leader on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology '''[[George E. Brown Jr]]''' came to be known.<br /> <br /> We are persistent in keeping on with the work. Vast data sets that George Brown's physics and engineering efforts envisioned and brought forward over three decades with state of the art and science programs and projects, the best possible of the era, are now about to move faster and farther into the 21st Century.<br /> <br /> Our familial partners, with aid of Andreessen Horowitz (A16z), and Accel, and university and private partners are now going to the next level.<br /> <br /> George Brown would be very pleased to see, and help accelerate the effort if he were still here.<br /> <br /> We will step up with Mr. Science and more in mind...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:AI in Earth Science.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Read more about George and us...<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Advancing Science, Facts, Technology and Data to Make the Case for Environmental Protection&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> : 1960s/70s, Beginnings of Planet Citizen Eco-Action, Big Science, and a New Vision<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In Memory of Congressman George Brown'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> Visionary Leadership, Historic Environmental Achievements<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:George in Memory, a Man of Science and Humanity.jpg]]<br /> <br /> :::[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Association_for_the_Advancement_of_Science &lt;small&gt;American Association for the Advancement of Science&lt;/small&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[PlanetCitizen]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/User:Siterunner '''Steve Schmidt GreenPolicy360 Siterunner''']: <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Brown_Jr. '''George E. Brown'''] became known as Mr. Science in Congress and for thirty+ years, I saw my friend George as a patriot who became a Planet Citizen for the ages<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Good science needs good data .png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Good_science_needs_good_data_.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Stats_-_Green_Research_%26_Science<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_Education<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Global Tech Changemakers'''<br /> <br /> Beyond Silicon Valley &amp; Mega Corporations<br /> <br /> The Rest of the World<br /> <br /> * https://restofworld.org/row100/#filters<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> As the Nobel Prizes in Economics are awarded, GreenPolicy360 points at a geopolitical race in energy and AI between the US and China.<br /> <br /> Let's take time to look more closely (as the US falls behind under a backward looking president with policies in opposition to renewable energy and forward, internationally demanded production. <br /> <br /> Start here... <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Today, China produces 75% of lithium-ion batteries globally and manufactures 90% of the neodymium magnets that make motors spin. In power electronics and embedded compute, it’s rapidly gaining ground.''<br /> <br /> ''That means that China controls the means of producing electric vehicles (EVs), drones, robots, and all of the other electric products that are replacing the combustion-driven machines on which America built its might.''<br /> <br /> ''As we speak, everything that moves, heats, lights up, computes, or converts energy is being rebuilt to perform better, faster, cheaper, quieter, and as a freebie, cleaner around electric technology.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.notboring.co/p/7653b980-dd32-4d8c-88c6-1543bec70220?postPreview=paid&amp;updated=2025-08-26T12%3A09%3A11.763Z&amp;audience=everyone&amp;free_preview=false&amp;freemail=true<br /> <br /> * https://electricslide.notboring.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Electric Stack Technology Cost Curves (1990-2024).jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Pause here to reflect on the eco-nomic and strategic advantages of 'clean energy' vs 'full costs' of fossil fuel powered economies (per a GreenPolicy360 paradigm of [[Eco-nomics]])'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Eco-nomics<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Environmental full-cost accounting]]'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_full-cost_accounting<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Now consider 'Electricity generation', China v U.S. and follow the data, the stats, trendline, the dynamics of change and what this is indicating and signaling re: geopolitical competitiveness today and into the the mid 21st Century'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:China v United States, Electricity Generation 1985-2024.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) Era'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'Are You Talking to Me'<br /> <br /> :* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_pre-trained_transformer<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> September 17, 2025<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Another Warning About AI'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Harkening back to the old days when Dispatch News Service was independently, and bravely, distributing the costs-of-war, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre '''My Lai'''] investigative news stories by Sy Hersh. David Obst, who started Dispatch, tells the story of Seymour Hersh better than anyone in my opinion (other than Sy himself) and since your GreenPolicy360 founder was there to assist, in DC, in LA, in Chicago, in Europe, and with the Vietnam Moratorium Committee in 69/70/71, here is an update, today's Sy Hersh, now online with Substack distribution as Sy investigates and forwards another eye opening warning.<br /> <br /> What's AI and AGI to you and all of our readers around our 360 world? And, since we at GreenPolicy360, have been involved with Wikipedia since its launch, let's take a first look at the artificial intel world of today from the vantage point of an open source online 'encyclopedia'.<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT (Empire of AI: OpenAI - https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593657500)<br /> <br /> <br /> Before Sy, as investigative journalist that he is, gives us his take, let's look at a take from a personal, close up connection at A16Z - https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/02/a-new-a16z-report-looks-at-which-ai-companies-startups-are-actually-paying-for/<br /> <br /> <br /> Now, on to Sy and his view of AI costs... think of the upside/downside of AI, the pluses/minuses, pros and cons, a cost-benefit analysis as a geo-political rush for front-of-market dominance is taking place now in ways that will change 'everything'... <br /> <br /> * https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/the-hidden-costs-of-artificial-intelligence<br /> <br /> <br /> The boom in Artificial Intelligence (AI) production comes with a big cost... <br /> <br /> The AI 'bubble' grows...<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Kate Crawford writes in [https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-AI-Planetary-Artificial-Intelligence/dp/0300264631/ref=sr_1_1 '''Atlas of AI'''] ... the world’s artificial intelligence companies, (are) crafting the myth of AI as “the cloud,” implying “something floating and delicate within a natural green industry. Servers are hidden in nondescript data centers, and their polluting qualities are far less visible than the bellowing smokestacks of coal-fired power stations.”''<br /> <br /> ''The fact is, as she writes, “it takes a gargantuan amount of energy to run the computational infrastructure of Amazon’s Web Services or Microsoft’s Azure, and the carbon footprint of the AI systems that run on those platforms is growing. Certainly, the industry has made significant efforts to make data centers more energy efficient and to increase their use of renewable energy.” But the efforts have accomplished little.<br /> <br /> “Already,” Crawford reports, “the carbon footprint of the world’s computational infrastructure has matched that of the world’s aviation industry at its height, and it is increasing at a faster rate.” One Canadian study estimates that the tech sector will contribute 14 percent of global greenhouse emissions by 2040, and a Swedish team predicts that the electricity demands of data centers will increase fifteenfold by 2030...''<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Think about Green AI as &quot;the cloud&quot; arrives in your life, on your devices, at home, in the office, all around, every day, everywhere. <br /> <br /> An UnGreen AI is coming with a rush, offering and prying data, and needing and demanding immense rising magnitudes of energy and power.<br /> <br /> AI has a voracious appetite...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Green AI / Green Artificial Intelligence'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''Environmental Solutions Using Big Picture Interconnectivity Thinking'''<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We agree with Tyler in the following interview as he states (as highlighted by us) that 'memoir, biography, anecdote... secrets' carry exceptional meaning for Artificial Intelligence (AI) large learning models (LLMs). <br /> <br /> The first extensive public revelation of AI systems over the past several years has led us at GreenPolicy360 to confirm via metrics that our multi-year plan to place our prime source content in the open-access, distributive web public domain has produced a fast-expanding multiplier effect. <br /> <br /> Many of our stories, told from a first-hand point of view of the origins of what we refer to as the beginnings of the modern environmental movement are now, with our revelations, memoir material, previously untold biography, anecdote and more now out and about and being freely served up in AI chats 'around the world'.<br /> <br /> We are succeeding in our purposeful mission with Green AI... to inform, share, inspire and 'til the fields with green seeds and best practices.<br /> <br /> Onward planet citizens...<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Eric Topol Interview of Tyler Cowen'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> May 11, 2025<br /> <br /> Tyler Cowen: ''The AI is your smartest reader. It’s your most sympathetic reader. It will remember what you tell it. So I think humans should sit down and ask, what does the AI need to know? And also, (bf added) '''what is it that I know that’s not on the historical record anywhere? That’s not just repetition if I put it down, say on the internet. So there’s no point in writing repetitions anymore because the AI already knows those things. So the value of what you’d call broadly, memoir, biography, anecdote, you could say secrets. It’s now much higher.''' And the value of repeating basic truths, which by the way, I love as an economist, to be clear, like free trade, tariffs are usually bad, those are basic truths. But just repeating that people will be going to the AI and saying it again won’t make the AI any better. So '''everything you write or podcast, you should have this point in mind'''.''<br /> <br /> <br /> For more from Tyler Cowen (and his exceptional mind) visit his and Alex Tabarrok's website - Marginal Revolution / Marginal Revolution University (MRU) - https://marginalrevolution.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> Eric Topol - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Topol<br /> <br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_artificial_intelligence<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> More re: AI in the US circa 2025: '''It's a Wild, Wild AI World'''<br /> <br /> Battles in the Information Services, Search Space with Google and consequences of the U.S. Google anti-monopoly legal decision<br /> <br /> Impacts on AI 'startup ecosystem', VCs, including Y Combinator and accelerator tech development, agentics, and upcoming entrepreneurial re-configurations<br /> <br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/13/y-combinator-says-google-is-a-monopolist-that-has-stunted-the-startup-ecosystem/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/11/microsoft-and-national-geographic-announce-winners-of-ai-for-earth-innovation-grant/ '''Microsoft and National Geographic announce winners of AI for Earth Innovation Grant''']<br /> <br /> : • https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/16/microsofts-ai-for-earth-innovation-grant-gives-data-scientists-access-to-ai-tools/<br /> <br /> :: • https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/11/microsoft-commits-50-million-more-to-its-ai-for-earth-program-to-save-the-planet/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:PlanetCitizen banner 800x163.jpg|link=https://greenpolicy360.net/w/PlanetCitizen]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;GreenPolicy360 ToC - https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360-eOS&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> A 21st Century AI/Machine Learning Case Study<br /> <br /> '''''Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools''''' <br /> <br /> * https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2023arXiv230204761S/abstract<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''NOAA scientists harness machine learning to advance climate models'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> March 1st, 2023<br /> <br /> * https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/news/noaa-scientists-harness-machine-learning-to-advance-climate-models/<br /> <br /> * https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''How artificial intelligence is fast becoming a key tool for climate science (2021)'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-artificial-intelligence-is-fast-becoming-a-key-tool-for-climate-science/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Climate Modeling'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://allenai.org/climate-modeling<br /> <br /> ''Planetary-scale Earth simulations known as global climate model projections are the primary sources of information on future climate change.''<br /> <br /> ''Climate models are based on mathematical equations represented using a grid mesh that covers the globe: a finer grid mesh is more accurate but much more computationally expensive. Current global climate projections agree that a world with more greenhouse gases will be warmer everywhere, especially over land and at high latitudes.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Networking grnlinks.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Artificial intelligence]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Rights]]<br /> [[Category:Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-nomics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:EOS eco Operating System]]<br /> [[Category:Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Energy Policy]]<br /> [[Category:GreenLinks]]<br /> [[Category:GreenPolicy360]]<br /> [[Category:Green Best Practices]]<br /> [[Category:Green Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Health]]<br /> [[Category:Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Maps]]<br /> [[Category:Media]]<br /> [[Category:Mobile Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Online Education]]<br /> [[Category:Planet API]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Renewable Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Youth]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Air Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Air Quality]]<br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Atmospheric Science]]<br /> [[Category:Best Practices]]<br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:City-County Governments]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Earth360]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Law]] <br /> [[Category:Earth Observations]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science from Space]]<br /> [[Category:Earth System Science]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-ethics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-nomics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecological Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Economic Development]]<br /> [[Category:Economic Justice]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Energy Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Security]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Full-cost Accounting]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Security, National Security]]<br /> [[Category:EOS eco Operating System]]<br /> [[Category:Externalities]]<br /> [[Category:Fact Checking]]<br /> [[Category:Fossil Fuels]]<br /> [[Category:Global Security]]<br /> [[Category:Global Warming]]<br /> [[Category:Green Business]]<br /> [[Category:Green Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Green Platform]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Green Values]]<br /> [[Category:GreenPolicy360]]<br /> [[Category:Health]]<br /> [[Category:Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Land Ethic]]<br /> [[Category:Media]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Capital]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resources]]<br /> [[Category:Networking]]<br /> [[Category:New Economy]]<br /> [[Category:New Space]]<br /> [[Category:Online Education]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Scientist]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Plastic Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Policies]]<br /> [[Category:Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Renewable Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Social Justice]]<br /> [[Category:Solar Energy]]<br /> [[Category:State]]<br /> [[Category:Strategic Demands]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability Policies]]<br /> [[Category:ThinBlueLayer]]<br /> [[Category:Toxics and Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Threat Multiplier]]<br /> [[Category:Virtual Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Virtual Planet]]<br /> [[Category:Whole Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Wind Energy]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Green_AI&diff=138355 2026-10-05T13:26:31Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> [[File:Big-Data.jpg]]<br /> <br /> In the AGI Era<br /> <br /> <br /> 'Sentience', a Green AI Question<br /> <br /> To be (sentient), or not to be (sentient)<br /> <br /> That is the question<br /> <br /> Cogito, ergo sum<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Artificial Intelligence Is Here, for Good &amp; Bad'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Green Perspectives on AI and Human Consequences<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''AI Agents, Bots, Data Centers &amp; Systems'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> :'''Measure Their Performance, not Their Corporate Marketing'''<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://safe.ai/<br /> * https://scale.com/<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanity's_Last_Exam<br /> * https://lastexam.ai/<br /> <br /> * https://stories.tamu.edu/news/2026/02/25/dont-panic-humanitys-last-exam-has-begun/<br /> <br /> * https://github.com/centerforaisafety/hle<br /> <br /> * https://github.com/walkinglabs/hands-on-modern-rl/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Revealing research on how people use Claude AI in the 'real world''''<br /> <br /> :Anthropic-enabled Case Study / August 2026<br /> <br /> :* https://www.anthropic.com/research/enabling-independent-research<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:New Ways of Seeing.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Climate Action Plans, Green Best Practices'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :Using AI to Identify and Implement Climate Change Intervention 'Best Practices'<br /> <br /> :* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Climate_Action_Plans,_Green_Best_Practices#<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''AI Agentics' are Launching Across Industries, Sector-to-Sector -- and Green AI is in the Wings'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Meanwhile, Capital-Investment Rich A.I. is Everywhere, in the Colloquial, Middlebrow and Vernacular'''<br /> <br /> It's Here. It's All Around. What's Real? What's Fake?<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake Deepfake] | [https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-definitions AI Definitions]<br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_artificial_intelligence AI Gloss] | [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_intelligence) AI Hallucination]<br /> <br /> <br /> 'A.I. Slop' on Social Media is just the beginning of a Slop Assault | [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_slop AI Slop]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''October 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Subordinate AI and an Ironic Question.PNG|link=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VyF0naZ4AI]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Thought for the Day&quot;<br /> <br /> October 1, 2026<br /> <br /> In a recent series of private meetings in San Francisco, after a tasting menu dinner, Anthropic consulted religious scholars to help instill morality into its A.I. models ... a case was being made that Claude could be or become conscious.<br /> <br /> What would it mean for humanity’s future if artificial intelligence systems possessed a consciousness that rivals our own?<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-morals-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FVE.kDTO.OTLs6iwx7swF&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> Claude's 'Constitution'<br /> <br /> * https://web.archive.org/web/20260123045500/https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-new-constitution<br /> <br /> * https://web.archive.org/web/20260123042656/https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/22/anthropic_claude_constitution/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''September 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''Table Stakes' -- Who Was at the Table with the U.S. President'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :The Future of A.I. Is Being Wagered<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/politics/trump-ai-luncheon-guests-ceos.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FFE.HwT4.0VxTQWuia3zQ&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''What Jacob Coxon Knows Is Too Much'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''... And Not Enough'''<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://time.com/article/2026/09/09/ai-anthropic-openai-jacob-coxon/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''He Helped Build Powerful AI at OpenAI and Anthropic. Now He's Afraid It Could Kill Us'''<br /> <br /> <br /> Please HAL... Open the door...<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:I'm sorry Dave.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:HAL is watching U....png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Ulanqab-Envision Energy-Datacenter.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> The most ambitious data center buildup anywhere on earth ...<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/ulanqab-and-frontier-a-i-race-china-v-u-s/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''News Wrap / Sam Smith (Journalist)'''<br /> <br /> Via Axios <br /> <br /> September 13, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Over nine startling hours yesterday (Sept. 11), the four biggest AI labs — which rarely agree on anything — set aside years of feuds and competition to endorse a slower development pace for their models.'''<br /> <br /> '''Their new stance: Prioritize safety over growth, even at a cost.'''<br /> <br /> <br /> : Data centers are unpopular. People are panicked about doom scenarios. And 51 days before midterms, legislators suddenly realize there are points to be won by cracking down.<br /> <br /> : Against that backdrop, the industry's most powerful CEOs hit the brakes yesterday.<br /> <br /> : At 10 a.m. ET, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei dropped a 3,800-word essay saying model development needs to be paced, otherwise doom scenarios are possible — like a rogue-agent takeover of the entire internet, which he said could be as soon as six months from now.<br /> <br /> : An hour later, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shocked the AI chattering class by quoting Amodei's essay on X and saying &quot;Dario is right.&quot; Musk — who heads SpaceXAI, formerly xAI — had pointedly not joined previous industry-wide calls for any kind of slowdown.<br /> <br /> : At 12:30 p.m., OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted: &quot;I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.&quot; In a Friday interview that was released on Saturday, Altman told Fortune his company won't go public this year, dashing hopes for a blockbuster IPO. He said OpenAI has too much safety work to do and would be better off doing that as a private company.<br /> <br /> : At 7 p.m., Demis Hassabis — the Nobel laureate who co-founded and chairs Google DeepMind, and is Alphabet's chief scientist — tweeted: &quot;Dario's essay points towards the right path forward. The details need working through, but the direction is correct for meeting this critical moment.&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> Publicly putting safety ahead of technological or financial growth may be the industry's only route to avoid a crackdown that's not on its terms.<br /> <br /> Legislators are begging House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to stay in session and do something about the &quot;threat&quot; of AI.<br /> <br /> The more extreme alternative is something like Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) push to force a pause and make the most advanced AI illegal.<br /> <br /> Most people realize there's too much money at stake to just stop. But the tradeoff may be between historic riches and slightly less historic riches.<br /> <br /> The bottom line: Yesterday may go down as the day AI changed — when industry moguls vowed to limit themselves.<br /> <br /> <br /> References:<br /> <br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/anthropic-ai-amodei-pacing<br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/openai-public-ipo-delay-sam-altman<br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/anthropic-ai-threat-report-russia-iran-china<br /> <br /> <br /> Jim VandeHei<br /> <br /> &quot;All Hands on Deck&quot;<br /> <br /> The White House, Congress and the country's leading AI companies have allowed AI to grow faster, stronger, more powerful and wildly lucrative (and dangerous), with no serious effort to control it or spread the benefits beyond the super-wealthy.<br /> <br /> It's not too late to change this. But if they all dither, duck or dance around it, the chances of AI worst-case scenarios will explode, likely early next year, according to almost every person we talk to privately who truly understands AI.<br /> <br /> Why it matters: The technology is getting better, faster than anyone envisioned — with the possibility rising that AI will self-improve and do wildly unpredictable things.<br /> <br /> The good news: There's now a growing public cry for attention and action and, at least in private, a broad understanding of what could be done relatively fast with bipartisan and industry buy-in.<br /> <br /> The big picture: In July, I wrote [https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-doomerism-jim-vandehei-axios-9163dfd3?st=QNUbDZ&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink an essay for The Wall Street Journal] saying America &quot;faces one of those rare, historic moments when government, business, schools and families could be working together to meet a truly generational challenge: winning the AI race. So far, we're blowing it.&quot;<br /> <br /> Two short months later, the technology is vastly better — and the societal response vastly dumber. As a nation, we're choosing to amuse or distract ourselves. <br /> <br /> Here's how to change that fast, based on our months of conversations with lawmakers, White House officials and AI labs. Think of what follows as me channeling their private views:<br /> <br /> Sound an all-hands-on-deck alarm. Every political topic is trivial and small compared to AI. We will look back in shame if we get spooled up about trans bans or $5,000 checks when countless AI insiders are warning of catastrophic outcomes. Let's say they're all paranoid and delusional. If so, it still doesn't matter: we've never seen this much investment in one technology this fast in human history. It's seeping into every industry and every job and every community and every screen, at a speed never before witnessed by man. Yes, we need a special session of Congress and select committees. But we need even more: AI execs, bioterror specialists, job-training wizards and safety experts convening to plan for scenarios and act fast.<br /> <br /> An AI governing body with teeth and speed, ASAP. This isn't rocket science. Most major labs want this and would agree to it, as long as it applies to all rivals and competitors. This body would need the expertise to understand these models, and the power to review and shut them down if they display dangerous behavior. It can't operate at typical regulatory speed — it needs to move as fast as the technology. It's nonsense to think you can't advance AI development fast and regulate it wisely simultaneously.<br /> <br /> A universal standard for data centers to benefit communities and taxpayers. The top AI companies would take this deal in a heartbeat: They get to build and operate data centers provided they supply a community's energy, offset water use or environmental damage, transparently report on their building and business plans, and spread the financial benefits to local residents. These execs are spooked by the public backlash and ready to aggressively spread the financial benefits, with dividends or cash. So make them.<br /> <br /> Engage China. We shouldn't trust them, and they shouldn't trust us. But trust me: the only way to ultimately control AI on a worldwide scale in coming years will be for the two superpowers to create some kind of framework modeled after how we've safely governed nuclear weapons for decades. We need to start this discussion now so potential collaboration is possible in the coming years. To those who think China will never consider this seriously: Are you sure an authoritarian regime really wants AI once it hits recursive self-learning and can't be controlled by anyone, including an autocratic regime? We're winning the AI race now, and may never have more leverage to shape this joint effort.<br /> <br /> Build coordinating infrastructure. What I wrote in the WSJ is even more needed today: &quot;Bring together the best and brightest drawn from the federal government, from the leading AI companies, from business and labor, from economics, from public health, from ethics to form a working group with actual authority. People who are paid to anticipate, not to react haphazardly.&quot; This group would have four primary functions: map potential problems and upsides before they hit, build the (policy) playbooks before they're needed, level with the American people along the way, and expedite work to deliver widespread AI benefits. <br /> <br /> Reality check: Yes, President Trump opposes regulation or bipartisan efforts. Yes, AI companies are obsessed with more money, more speed. But the politics are shifting fast: If you listen closely to Vice President Vance, you can hear rising worry. At this pace, toxic AI politics could force mind-changing that was unthinkable two months ago.<br /> <br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/ai-regulation-safety-plan-2026<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Recursive Self-Learning - When A.I. Builds Itself'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Big Blast'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Killing Life on Earth'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''It'll Happen in Bits &amp; Pieces, then Suddenly'''<br /> <br /> September 9, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> The US news was full of AI headlines today as a resignation of a top AI expert warned of a coming apocalypse...<br /> <br /> Here's a taste of Google News headlines, a feeding frenzy of dire words about what is now beyond a distant alert.<br /> <br /> The threat brings words of superintelligence, 'recursive' learning bots and superminds merging into threats to humanity.<br /> <br /> <br /> Here, at GreenPolicy360, we've already written of a predecessor, HAL 9000, and our memories from one of HAL's inventors in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, and how HAL decided humans were expendable... <br /> <br /> The Mission was of critical importance, HAL 'knew', and the Mission became HAL's goal above all else to achieve ... The humans could not be allowed to interfere with ... the Mission.<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:I%27m_sorry_Dave.jpg '''I'm sorry Dave''']<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:HAL_is_watching_U....png '''HAL is watching U''']<br /> <br /> <br /> Which takes us to today...<br /> <br /> Let's file today under the heading of our decades of writing about the need for '''[[New Definitions of National Security]]'''... <br /> <br /> Now come the PINGS on the radar... can U hear the PINGS? We have been mulling how to add HAL xxxxx to our existential list of threats, w/o annoying HALish bots too 'badly' <br /> <br /> <br /> “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.” -- an executive from Anthropic<br /> <br /> “So how would AI kill us all, exactly?” -- an editor from Axios<br /> <br /> <br /> More: <br /> <br /> <br /> For years, they warned AI could kill all humans <br /> :Now people are listening<br /> <br /> Sept. 10, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4xQojEq<br /> <br /> <br /> Rogue Hacking <br /> :Goals of the &quot;swarm&quot; came first...<br /> <br /> Sept. 9, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/09/opinion/openai-ai-companies-safety-regulation.html?unlocked_article_code=1.AFE.0vWo.zfl5fdm6ACNC&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:AI 1.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 2.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 3.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 4.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 5.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 6.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''August 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Gates Sounds Alarm... Artificial Intelligence Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Gates A.I. Warning August 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Bill Gates was an AI optimist. Now he’s scared of what could go wrong'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Microsoft co-founder sounds the alarm about artificial intelligence’s risks to safety and security, jobs and children’s well-being<br /> <br /> <br /> Washington Post, August 26, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4wO14cy<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Bill Gates Warns A.I. Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit'''<br /> <br /> : In an hourlong interview, he said his industry was downplaying the risks, which he believes include mass unemployment and bioterrorism<br /> <br /> <br /> NY Times, August 26, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/26/technology/bill-gates-ai-risks.html?unlocked_article_code=1.8VA.6kAC.vsZb9x0YdSzV&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''High Time to Shine a Spotlight on AI and Its Impact on Higher Education'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : At MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, One of the World's Top Academic/Research/Technology/Engineering/Teaching and Future-Impacting Institutions, a New Report Opens Eyes<br /> <br /> :* https://aiandeducation.mit.edu/report/#26-no-one-size-fits-all<br /> <br /> <br /> 1. Introduction<br /> <br /> This report is a call to action.<br /> <br /> Through five intense months of meetings, research, and outreach across the MIT community, the Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training sought to understand the role of generative AI in the life and educational mission of the Institute and recommend how to navigate its challenges and opportunities.<br /> <br /> In January 2026, Chancellor Melissa Nobles, Provost Anantha Chandrakasan, and Faculty Chair Roger Levy charged us1 specifically to:<br /> <br /> Assess current AI use at MIT.<br /> Identify innovations in teaching and student assessment.<br /> Propose an AI use policy.<br /> However, what we learned as a group quickly convinced us that the Institute community, particularly the faculty, must tackle a set of deeper questions about the structure, meaning, and value of an MIT education in an era in which AI is one of several factors complicating the Institute’s mission.<br /> <br /> Our committee consisted of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty from every school, and staff from relevant units, including the MIT Libraries and the Teaching and Learning Lab. Though we brought to the assignment a broad range of experience and no fixed thesis, our brief but intense explorations led us to a strong shared view.<br /> <br /> In this report, we:<br /> <br /> Highlight key aspects of the current educational landscape at MIT.<br /> Share eight principles we relied on and that we hope will guide the Institute in the work ahead.<br /> <br /> Recommend immediate and long-term actions for both instructors and the administration.<br /> <br /> As an institution deeply identified with the birth of AI and known for its distinctively rigorous, hands-on education, designed to produce graduates unafraid of the world’s hardest problems, MIT has a unique role to play in this moment. We believe it also has a responsibility to lead.<br /> <br /> We hope our report can help the Institute lean into the spirit of Mind, Hand, and Heart as it continues to define and foster the highest-quality residential education – of humans, by humans, in support of human flourishing, and for the betterment of humankind.<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Eric Klopfer, co-chair Sam Madden, co-chair<br /> <br /> On behalf of the Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training...<br /> <br /> <br /> AI is generating both immediate rapid changes and long-term tectonic disruptions – and MIT needs to respond:<br /> <br /> Students are confused and concerned about a lack of clarity, consistency and justification about the use of AI, within a given subject and across the curriculum.<br /> <br /> Every subject taught at MIT will likely need to be reexamined and potentially revamped to make sure that how students are being taught, what they’re learning, and how they’re assessed are “AI-aware.”<br /> <br /> AI is changing what students need to know and know how to do.<br /> <br /> Beyond its implications for specific subjects and disciplines, the advent of AI demands a broader, holistic reassessment of the nature, scope and purpose of higher education today...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Texas Terafab SpaceX AI August 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''A Terafab Plant Sprouts in Texas'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Elon Musk: We will manufacture the type of potent chips needed to transform humankind into &quot;a galactic civilization&quot; <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Shanaka's Opinion, a Guest Op/Ed'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Shenaka Perera Weighs In on What It Could Mean'''<br /> <br /> :: '''A Terafab Loop for Mega Launches Is Being Built''' <br /> <br /> ::* https://shanakaanslemperera.substack.com/p/the-capital-recovery-clock?r=6p7b5o<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Hidden inside the chip factory SpaceX confirmed Thursday is a launch schedule. If you divide its 1 terawatt annual compute target by the 100 kilowatts of orbital compute per tonne in SpaceX's own offering materials and you get 10 million tonnes to orbit a year. That exact figure sits on Terafab's official website. At 100 tonnes per Starship V3 flight it means 100,000 launches a year, 274 every day, forever.''<br /> <br /> ''The chip target is already a launch target.''<br /> <br /> ''Terafab is not a chip factory serving a market. The 16.8 billion dollar first phase in Grimes County, Texas is the first machine in a closed industrial loop built to manufacture the civilisation that can consume its own output.''<br /> <br /> ''The official plan places four figures together. One billion Optimus robots. Ten million tonnes to orbit a year. More than one terawatt of solar power. One terawatt of chips a year. They are not four ambitions. They are four links in one recursion. Terafab makes chips. Better chips improve AI. Better AI improves the software running the factories, the robots and the rocket lines. Robots and Starship build and deploy more power and compute infrastructure. That infrastructure creates the socket, and the demand, for the next Terafab cohort.''<br /> <br /> ''The fab is meant to manufacture its own reason to exist!''<br /> <br /> ''It is also an energy machine. One terawatt running continuously consumes 8.76 petawatt hours a year, nearly twice all electricity generated in the United States in 2025. The factory does not draw that power by making the chips. One fully powered annual cohort does, and a second year adds another terawatt of load unless old hardware retires or utilisation falls. Earth has no spare socket at that scale, which is why the plan points most of it at orbit, where a future 200 tonne vehicle still implies 50,000 launches a year, 137 a day, before failures, reserves, solar arrays, radiators, structure and shielding.''<br /> <br /> ''The real product is not AI silicon. If you go real deep, it is a new terawatt of powered, cooled, networked compute sockets every year.''<br /> <br /> ''Inside the building, the smaller loop is mask, wafer, package, test, redesign, then another mask. SpaceX says logic, memory and advanced packaging will sit in one closed loop, and Elon says Terafab will technically be two fabs, each devoted to one design. That can compress logistics and organisational latency. It cannot repeal process physics. A new mask can be written quickly. A leading edge process still carries hundreds of steps, long wafer cycle times, defect learning, overlay control, metrology and yield ramps, which is exactly why Tesla is hiring across lithography, etch, deposition, implant, CMP and metrology.''<br /> <br /> ''The free electron laser is the most misunderstood part. Elon has endorsed it, and an industrial FEL could feed several EUV scanners with far more source power than today's tin plasma systems. It attacks one bottleneck inside a chain of them. ASML recognised revenue on just 48 EUV systems in all of 2025. Intel is the process partner, and SpaceX still tells investors it expects to source a significant share of compute hardware from outside suppliers. This is vertical integration, not instant independence.''<br /> <br /> ''One correction decides the interpretation. A terawatt is a power rating, not an intelligence metric. A wasteful 1 kilowatt chip counts twice as much as an equally capable 500 watt chip. The measures that matter are useful compute per joule, per dollar and per kilogram, with yield, uptime and time from mask change to qualified silicon.''<br /> <br /> ''In my opinion, if chips improve faster than robots, rockets, power and radiators can scale, Terafab builds inventory. If the loop closes, it builds something no factory has built before, the demand for itself.''<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://www.terafab.ai/<br /> <br /> * https://www.spacex.com/updates/terafab<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terafab<br /> <br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/06/tesla-and-spacex-will-invest-16-8b-to-start-building-terafab-chip-factory-in-texas/<br /> <br /> * https://electrek.co/2026/08/06/tesla-spacex-terafab-grimes-county-16-8-billion/<br /> <br /> * https://www.cbsnews.com/news/terafab-elon-musk-chips-semiconductors-what-to-know/<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Betting big on data centers, U.S. now leads world for new gas power development<br /> <br /> [https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/betting-big-data-centers-us-now-leads-world-new-gas-power-development Via Global Energy Monitor]<br /> <br /> * https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/betting-big-data-centers-us-now-leads-world-new-gas-power-development<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> New Amazon Data Center Stokes Worry It Would Be the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.<br /> <br /> Via New York Times<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/08/climate/amazon-data-center-texas-pollution.html<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''July 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Elon Musk Opens Up in an Interview'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Economist Editor Presses the Controversial 'Trillionaire'<br /> <br /> :: Elon Musk's 'Vision of the Future'<br /> <br /> * https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/23/elon-musks-vision-of-the-future<br /> <br /> <br /> “People don’t realise that what I’m saying will come to pass,” he tells The Economist in a 90-minute interview for The Insider, held at a giant Tesla factory in Texas where electric cars drive themselves off the assembly line. That may be because his future-gazing ranges from the unsettling to the downright weird. Mr Musk predicts that, within five years, artificial-intelligence systems may surpass the sum of all human intelligence. Within ten years, robots in the workplace will help usher in an era of such “amazing abundance” that money will become meaningless....<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> Musk proposes peer review for frontier AI models in Economist interview<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/musk-proposes-peer-review-frontier-ai-models-economist-interview-2026-07-23/<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> Elon Musk says he got ‘carried away’ with Trump – but still holds on to contentious political views<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/23/elon-musk-regret-trump-doge-ai<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> Mix of Comments:<br /> <br /> * https://beincrypto.com/elon-musk-real-force-european-politics/<br /> * https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-killer-robots-ai-abundance-progress-unstoppable-2026-7<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/07/24/elon-musk-speaks-to-the-economist-editor-in-chief-zanny-minton-beddoes-on-the-key-takeaways.html<br /> * https://futurism.com/elon-musk-interviewer-npc<br /> * https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-economist-interview-2000790016<br /> * https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/nonsense-elon-musk-lashes-out-in-fiery-interview-after-hes-accused-of-supporting-the-far-right/<br /> * https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2026/07/23/musk_admonishes_the_economist_editor_what_is_far_right_about_having_secure_borders_safe_cities_and_sensible_spending.html<br /> * https://zeteo.com/p/top-economist-trump-musk-starmer<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> A.I. In Space <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Datacenters in Earth orbit to enable next generation artificial intelligence'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> New US petition demands review of plans from tech companies amid fears of environmental destruction<br /> <br /> Via The Guardian<br /> <br /> What are Bezos &amp; Musk Doing? <br /> <br /> What in the World Is Going On?<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jul/23/space-datacenters-bezos-blue-origin<br /> <br /> <br /> References:<br /> <br /> * https://www.starcloud.com/<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/21/do-space-based-ai-data-centers-make-economic-sense.html<br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/20/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-enters-the-space-data-center-game/<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/bezos-blue-origin-space-data-centers.html<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_data_center<br /> * https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/how-hard-is-it-to-build-orbital-data-centers-actually/<br /> * https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/06/260618041501.htm<br /> * https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-109012<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> A.I. &amp; Chip Wars<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Beyond a 'Belt and Road Initiative' Bringing Chinese Investments, Products &amp; Services to World Markets''' &lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Via GreenPolicy360's Associate, Strategic Demands<br /> <br /> :* https://strategicdemands.com/china-goes-beyond-the-belt-and-road-to-an-ai-for-the-world-strategy/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Open-Source A.I. from China Reveals a Global Chinese Strategy'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> July 17, 2026 / From the NY Times <br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/business/china-ai-moonshot-kimi.html?unlocked_article_code=1.yVA.LKT5.LxohSFddWAZT&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> The contest between China and the United States for supremacy in artificial intelligence escalated on Friday when the Chinese start-up Moonshot AI released a new A.I. model that appeared to narrow the lead held by well-funded American competitors.<br /> <br /> Moonshot said that the model, Kimi K3, was the world’s largest open-source A.I. system, allowing anyone to use, modify and build on it freely. The company said that Kimi K3 performed as well as leading models from OpenAI and Anthropic at some key tasks.<br /> <br /> The release coincided with an address by Xi Jinping, China’s leader, in which he outlined an ambitious vision for global A.I. development that cast China as the champion of an open approach to the technology.<br /> <br /> “A.I. development should not be a solo performance by a single country but a symphony of international cooperation,” Mr. Xi said. China was “ready to work with all parties to seize the opportunities of A.I. development” ...<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360:<br /> <br /> Keep in mind that<br /> <br /> There is 'no I in A.I.'<br /> <br /> In the interest of full-disclosure, the content written and published at GreenPolicy360 by our Founder/Siterunner is wholly, solely, by a human species.<br /> <br /> A note from your GreenPolicy360 Founder/Siterunner, Steve Schmidt, [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:All_species_day_with_homo_sapien_in_Santa_Fe_.jpg '''a verified human species'''], plz do keep in mind as you use and share the GreenPolicy360 content, that '''there is 'no I in A.I.'''' <br /> <br /> <br /> Let's talk a bit about sources and sourcing, as a human and then as an Agentic/A.I. bot. <br /> <br /> What is a 'primary source' (versus a 'secondary source')? A primary source can be a person with direct knowledge of a situation, an event in history, or a document written by such a person. A primary identification speaks of original creations, not re-interpreted or computer-assembled works. Here is how Merriam-Webster defines a 'primary source' - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/primary%20source<br /> <br /> <br /> : A.I. uses material scraped and collected from online sources. A.I. is not a 'primary source' -- but here at GreenPolicy360 you can find 'real-I' (we're using the phrase 'real-I', defined as 'real-intelligent', people who've personally acted to envision and create living, real world change.) <br /> <br /> <br /> : At GreenPolicy360 we tell stories of real people changing the world for the better. Day-to-day, your life becomes your message. We also share [[Green Best Practices]] across our Earth to communities of [[Planet Citizens]] ... In this way GreenPolicy360 is an eco Operating System, built on an open source MediaWiki platform and with a mission of being a 'distributive web'. Our goal of [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Category:Green_Networking Green Networking] acts to connect and share Green Links and grow [[The Modern Environmental Movement]]. <br /> <br /> :: GreenPolicy360 is about a [[Generation Green]] [[Going Green]].<br /> <br /> :: In our larger work, we have documented many primary sources and secondary sources. Our eco network continues to share myriad [[Green Best Practices]]. As our motto/mantra says at the top of each of our pages -- We believe ...<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> :: ''Each of us can make a positive difference by stepping up &amp; doing our best'' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::_______________________________________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> July 16, 2026 / From the NY Times<br /> <br /> SJS/GreenPolicy360: '''Every Once in a While a Comment to an Online Story is Worthy of Circulating'''<br /> <br /> : Here is one of those occasions -- the Subject? '''&quot;A.I.Slop&quot;'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Kashmir Hill.jpg]]<br /> <br /> ::Kashmir Hill / NYT<br /> <br /> <br /> Read the AI Slop story of writer Kashmir Hill as a free-share link here -- <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''I Got Slopped'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''Someone Used A.I. to Write My Biography'''<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/technology/ai-slop-books-biography-amazon.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ylA.aCMz.czE5JwZuuFO0&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Comments: <br /> <br /> Anon, who goes by the name -- <br /> <br /> '''Radical Roach / Dippleville''' says<br /> <br /> @Kashmir Hill - Maybe books need to now have disclaimers on their covers, in reviews, on the book’s Amazon page, wherever the book is being sold, etc.. The disclaimer would say if the book was written solely by a human, written by AI assisting a human, or written completely by AI. I would want to know.<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We tend to agree with this anon recommendation of adding disclaimers indicating the type of online content, e.g., content created solely by a human, or content created with AI assistance, or content created by AI with human assistance.<br /> <br /> It's a new world out there. We have a need to know.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> July 15, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Anthropic hard questions July 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/news/hard-questions<br /> <br /> * https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/anthropic-ad-ai-kill-us-all<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''An Excerpt: A DeepMind Thought for Today on the AGI Frontier'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> by Demis Hassbis<br /> <br /> * https://x.com/demishassabis/status/2076957440109625718<br /> <br /> <br /> A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age<br /> <br /> Demis Hassabis<br /> <br /> * https://x.com/demishassabis<br /> <br /> <br /> July 14, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> This is a pivotal moment in human history. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a system that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities the brain has, is probably only a few short years away. When we look back on this time in the decades to come, I think we will realise we were standing in the foothills of the singularity - nothing less than the dawning of a new age for humanity.<br /> <br /> I’ve spent my whole life working on AGI because I’ve always had a deep conviction that, if built and deployed responsibly, it would prove to be one of the most beneficial and transformative technologies ever invented. AGI cannot be compared to standard technological breakthroughs, not even ones as consequential as the internet or mobile - it is much more akin to the discovery of electricity or fire. If you stop to think about it, we’ve essentially found a way to make sand think. It’s miraculous.<br /> <br /> The magnitude of this technology’s impact will be unprecedented, perhaps 10x of the Industrial Revolution at 10x the speed. It will help us solve some of the biggest problems society faces from accelerating drug discovery to developing new clean energy sources to creating novel advanced materials. We could even reach a point where resources are no longer the limiting factor for human progress, leading to an amazing new era of abundance.<br /> <br /> The Challenges of the Frontier<br /> <br /> AI is already starting to deliver real-world benefits but to realise its immense promise, we have to navigate this critical period of development thoughtfully and carefully. Urgent action is needed to address risks that might arise as we get closer to AGI. We’ve already seen the challenges frontier models pose for cybersecurity, and other threats including nuclear and bio risks may soon emerge as capabilities continue to advance. On the horizon, we will need robust safeguards to maintain control of increasingly agentic, recursively self-improving systems - and tackle unknown issues that will only become clearer over time...<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''An AI Supercomputer Is Created for a Mission... Its Name Is HAL'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Steve Schmidt/GreenPolicy360: It's not every day that you get to know a creator of a famed -- and infamous -- AI character from a Kubrick film called &quot;2001: A Space Odyssey&quot;. <br /> <br /> : We listen in as HAL came to be ... A friend, a Visual Effect (VFX) genius named '''Douglas Trumbull''', explains how HAL went from LA to MIT, then into production and into our imaginations. <br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Trumbull vfx master.jpg]]<br /> <br /> : Douglas Trumbull<br /> <br /> : &lt;small&gt;* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Trumbull_vfx_master.jpg&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> The HAL 9000 was envisioned by creators and science, as a new type of neural intelligence, a machine brain.<br /> <br /> Hal is of heuristic algorithmic language -- HALis, as we learn, on a mission far from Earth, a mission with deep meaning.<br /> <br /> <br /> HAL 9000 was in the future. The future is now.<br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence is now here, with its powers and dangers, as we recall Supercomputer [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000 '''HAL 9000''']. <br /> <br /> A warning of what is on the line for humanity is the message related as we ride along in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey '''2001: A Space Odyssey'''] ... <br /> <br /> <br /> HAL's memorable words --<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;I'm sorry, Dave....&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;It can only be attributable to human error....&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.<br /> <br /> HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.<br /> <br /> Dave: What's the problem?<br /> <br /> HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.<br /> <br /> Dave: What are you talking about, HAL?<br /> <br /> HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film)<br /> <br /> * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/characters/nm0706937<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:I'm sorry Dave.jpg]]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:HAL_is_watching_U....png<br /> <br /> <br /> Today, as humanity approaches questions of out-of-control technology created by humanity .... <br /> <br /> We ask, '''[[Planet Citizens]] and [[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]''' ask, 'What's Next?' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Privacy at Risk, You're Being Watched, Tracked, &amp; More<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Privacy.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Next Big Thing'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;It Is Here, Already Here...&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Online_Privacy<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Call It 'Surveillance Capitalism''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Hope that It doesn't become 'the Norm' <br /> <br /> : Work to Make Sure It Does Not Become 'Surveillance Government'<br /> <br /> <br /> Scroll thru Intel on the Privacy Threat of AI Unleashed ...<br /> <br /> :Artificial Intelligence + Data Centers = Next Gen 'Watchful HAL'<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism<br /> * https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr-ryan/publications/geopolitics-surveillance-capitalism<br /> * https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=56791<br /> <br /> <br /> _______________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''June 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''An Academic Exercise'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : 'Old School' Emeritus Professor Examines AI<br /> <br /> : The Question: Can a Gemini ChatBot Suggest Ways to Turn AI Toward the Common Good?<br /> <br /> <br /> The prof uses left-leaning political formations to inquire and recommend public-oriented futures.<br /> <br /> * https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/06/19/my-ai-comrade/<br /> <br /> <br /> (Note beyond academic: Using history as a guide, powerful new technology such as AI will be employed by political powers to preserve political power and by military powers to employ and extend military power. AI Use Cases: A number of AI programs enabling AI for military programs, including war intelligence, communication, command/control and targeting, and civilian database surveillance involving intrusive human/civil rights questions and violations, have as of 2026 become high-level concerns.)<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''An Interview and Thoughts as an Author Rides alongside an AI Wave'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The God Test'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning<br /> <br /> Author: Robert Wright<br /> <br /> * https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Robert-Wright/73247968<br /> <br /> <br /> Publisher: Simon &amp; Schuster<br /> <br /> Published Date: June 23, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-God-Test/Robert-Wright/9781668061657<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Interview via Substack'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Jack Goldsmith: I’m chatting today with Robert Wright about his terrific new book, '''The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning'''. <br /> <br /> So, I want to start off with the big picture, because your book places AI in the broadest possible context—not just as an important step in the history of technological change, but rather as an important step in the significantly longer history of basically our planet and our species. And that’s pretty cosmic, as the subtitle says.<br /> <br /> Why do you do that? What does it mean, and why is that perspective important?<br /> <br /> Bob Wright: Well, thanks for having me. Yeah, it’s a good question, because I could have gotten the core message across without getting so cosmic, I guess.<br /> <br /> The main purpose is to try to explain to people, including non-technical people, why there’s been this rapid growth of capability in AI; why, once you understand that, you should expect the capability to keep growing; why that, in addition to promising great blessings, is going to bring great risks, including grave ones, including maybe existential ones; and why the nature of those risks, in my view, dictates that we confront the challenge of this technology as a cohesive global community, which will take some doing because we’ve never really done that before for anything like a sustained period of time.<br /> <br /> And so I didn’t have to get into the history of life or anything to say what I just said, but I do think some important things are added when you step back and look at AI in the broader sweep of things.<br /> <br /> For starters, this is, in the entire three- or four-billion-year history of life, the first time a new form of intelligence that rivals or even exceeds human intelligence has appeared. It’s the first form of intelligence that is not organic in the technical sense of being carbon-based. It’s silicon-based, but it is organic in the everyday sense of being kind of natural.<br /> <br /> What I mean by that is I try to show that AI does, in some sense, grow kind of logically, naturally out of biological evolution. I mean, technological evolution broadly does, and AI as a form of intelligence does. And indeed, when we look at the evolutionary dynamics shaping it—the dynamics of technological evolution—we should expect it to have certain things in common with our own intelligence, which I think are important.<br /> <br /> So I think that’s one thing you get out of a broad perspective.<br /> <br /> Another thing is that I talk about this guy, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—a Catholic paleontologist, mystic, and theologian—who coined the term noosphere, based on the Greek word nous, in 1923 to describe what he called a planetary mind or a brain of brains, where the human brains were the neurons in this increasingly global brain.<br /> <br /> And technological history, including the invention of the internet, has, I think, made him look prescient. And I think there’s value in keeping in mind that AI is arriving as we more and more have the technical infrastructure for a kind of global information processing, a kind of global brain. And we have to reckon with the possibility that some of the neurons will be silicon, not human, and think about what our relationship to them is going to be.<br /> <br /> And I think one value of thinking in these terms is, first of all, that from a Teilhardian point of view, the whole unfolding of life is moving toward us being this kind of giant superorganism, you could say, with this giant brain.<br /> <br /> And I argue in the book that the logic of technological evolution is going to push us — I mean, if we respond rationally — toward something a little more like a global brain, in the sense of having more international governance.<br /> <br /> At the same time, I think the image of a superorganism should worry us because it’s, for obvious reasons, an image that’s favored by authoritarians and fascists. How much freedom do you have if you’re a cell in a superorganism?<br /> <br /> And I think AI greatly heightens the stakes of that question, precisely because it’s such a powerful tool of surveillance and control.<br /> <br /> So I think, on the one hand, the logic of technological evolution, especially AI, is pushing us toward the global coordination of certain policies and the creation of forms of supranational power. At the same time, it should make us wary of surrendering too much power...<br /> <br /> <br /> Read More of the Substack Conversation between Jack Goldsmith and Robert Wright [https://substack.com/home/post/p-201670588 '''here''']<br /> <br /> Also, More Book Reviews [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Book_Reviews_@GreenPolicy '''here @ GreenPolicy360''']<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎 <br /> <br /> <br /> AI / AGI<br /> <br /> <br /> May 29 / Forbes<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Fundraise values Anthropic AI company at nearly a trillion dollars'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Dario and Daniela Amodei, along with five cofounders, have a story to tell<br /> <br /> * https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2026/05/29/anthropics-cofounders-worth/<br /> <br /> <br /> ''When Anthropic announced on Thursday (May 28) that it had raised $65 billion at a valuation of $965 billion, it didn’t just become the most valuable AI startup in the world, eclipsing $852 billion-valued archrival OpenAI. It also ballooned the individual fortunes of Anthropic’s seven cofounders — more than doubling their net worths to $16.6 billion apiece, Forbes estimates.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''In Rarified Air'''''<br /> <br /> ''Siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, as well as their five other cofounders Jack Clark, Sam McCandlish, Chris Olah, Tom Brown and Jared Kaplan, are in rarified air when it comes to entrepreneurs who struck it rich in the generative AI boom...''<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Pope Leo XIV encyclical re AI and Humanitas.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> “Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed,” Pope Leo said in announcing the text of his first [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=encyclical&amp;go=Go '''encyclical''']. “The word is strong, I know, but deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention...”<br /> <br /> And into the encyclical's key words:<br /> <br /> &quot;To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life. Our task today is not only ethical or technical. It is ecological in the deepest sense, for it concerns a new dimension of our common home.&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> “Crucial questions impose themselves on our conscience and can no longer be avoided: Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?”<br /> <br /> <br /> At GreenPolicy360, understanding and protecting '''[[The Commons]]''' is also a key to realizing values, ideals and ideas we are carrying forward...<br /> <br /> <br /> The encyclical's presentation went out globally with a special focus on the AI frontier work of Anthropic, with a co-founder, [https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-be-guided-outside-big-tech-2026-05-25/ '''Olah at the Encyclical's unveiling'''] ...<br /> <br /> <br /> &gt;The dramatic unveiling of the new encyclical overshadowed the document itself in some ways. In an unprecedented move, Leo personally presided over its presentation and sat on a panel at the Vatican with not only leading theologians, but also Christopher Olah, 33, the billionaire co-founder of top AI company Anthropic. <br /> <br /> <br /> ❇️<br /> <br /> <br /> Washington Post / May 25, 2026 -- '''Anthropic aligns with Vatican over White House as Pope Leo stokes AI fears'''<br /> <br /> With Anthropic already in a dispute with the Trump administration, co-founder Christopher Olah helped Pope Leo unveil his encyclical on the risks of artificial intelligence<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4uyQBlb<br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/news/chris-olah-pope-leo-encyclical<br /> <br /> * https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/pope-leo-warns-ai-should-be-disarmed-in-manifesto-on-potential-dangers<br /> <br /> * https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-102521111.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-be-guided-outside-big-tech-2026-05-25/<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/25/the-guardian-view-on-the-pope-and-claude-encyclical-on-ai-is-right-to-put-humanity-first<br /> <br /> <br /> '''At the Vatican'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhKH_aiBcis<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Via The Vatican News | The Holy See'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2026-05/pope-leo-xiv-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas-ai.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html<br /> <br /> <br /> '''10 quotes from Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, ‘Magnifica Humanitas’'''<br /> <br /> * https://uscatholic.org/articles/202605/10-quotes-from-pope-leo-xivs-first-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Previous in 2020, &quot;The Call for AI Ethics&quot;''' <br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/the-call/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/renaissance/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/the-first-signatories/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/news/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Previous in 1891, &quot;Rerum Novarum&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerum_novarum<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''AI Use Case Inventory'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''Artificial Intelligence:''' <br /> <br /> : Perspectives from the US Environmental Protection Agency<br /> <br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/ai-use-case-inventory<br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/open-data-policies<br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/where-find-epa-data<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''GreenPolicy360 Advisory:'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In Development -- National Climate Plans Best Practices Project 1.0, AI 2026-27'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Goal: To Utilize the Current (US) State and (Global/International) National Climate Action Plans/Data to Identify Actionable '''[[Green Best Practices]]'''<br /> <br /> Strategy: Enable AI Tool Sets to Scan Climate Plan Databases and Distribute Recommended 'High Priority' &amp; Green Best Practice Action Policies<br /> <br /> <br /> Reference: '''[[National Climate Plans]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Additional References:'''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''US State Climate Policy Action Plans'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.climatepolicydashboard.org/policies/climate-governance-equity/climate-action-plans<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Priority Climate Action Plan (PCAP) Directory'''<br /> <br /> ''The Climate Action Plan Directory organizes data collected from 211 Priority Climate Action Plans (PCAP) submitted by US state governments, Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), Tribes, and territories under EPA’s Climate Pollution Reduction Grants (CPRG) program. The directory presents information from more than 30 data categories related to GHG inventories, GHG reduction measures, benefits for low-income and disadvantaged communities (LIDACs), and other PCAP elements.''<br /> <br /> ''A state climate action plan, also called a climate plan, details the policies and strategies a state intends to implement to meet its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets. A climate plan typically includes a GHG emissions inventory, regional and local climate impacts, and a discussion of GHG emissions reduction targets. The plan identifies climate mitigation actions, their potential social, environmental, and economic benefits, and recommendations and strategies for implementing each mitigation action, often quantifying the expected reduction in emissions.''<br /> <br /> ''Effective climate action plans will have a legislative directive that requires a robust community engagement process, input from a climate advisory group, a near-term due date for a finalized plan, and periodic updates. Climate action plans should also incorporate and address environmental justice throughout the planning process and within the plan itself, and show transparency and accountability by detailing the methodology and community engagement process.''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:GreenPolicy360 Today.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Green_Best_Practices]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[GreenAction]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Question of Our Time / Today, Here &amp; Now, in the Midst of the 21st Century'''<br /> <br /> '''Where are you?'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ➡️ What is your state's climate action plan?<br /> <br /> ➡️ What is your nation's climate action plan?<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Plans_Enforcement_-_Resources GRN360: Climate Plans Enforcement Initiative] | [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Methods_to_enforce_climate_pledges-NDCs_-_Dec_2021.png Enforce Climate Plan Pledges]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''National Climate Plans Database Information via GreenPolicy360'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[National Climate Plans]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/National_Climate_Plans<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In the U.S. and Worldwide'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;'''It's a Good Time for [[Planet Citizen Action]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;[[Each of us can make a positive difference]]&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth in Human Hands.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :[http://www.planetcitizen.org &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Planet Citizens&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Earth Is in Your Hands'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;'''[[Generation Green]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Generation_Green &lt;big&gt;&quot;Vita contemplativa to Vita activa&quot;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Green Branching Out.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''2025'''<br /> <br /> <br /> December 2025 <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven approach to climate action and sustainable development'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via Nature Communications<br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53956-1<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> From A16Z New Media<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''It's Time to Build'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The electro-industrial stack will move the world'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Ryan McEntush<br /> <br /> ''The next industrial revolution won’t just happen in factories, but inside the machines that power them.''<br /> <br /> ''Software transformed how we think, design, and communicate. Now it’s transforming how we move, build, and produce. Advances in electrification, materials, and AI are converging, bringing true software control to the physical world. Machines are beginning to sense, learn, and act on their own.''<br /> <br /> ''This is the rise of the electro-industrial stack—the combined technologies that power electric vehicles, drones, data centers, and modern manufacturing. It connects the atoms that move the world to the bits that command it: minerals refined into components, energy stored in batteries, electricity directed by power electronics, motion delivered through precision motors, all coordinated by software. It’s the invisible foundation behind every breakthrough in physical automation; it’s the difference between software that merely summons a taxi and software that takes the wheel.''<br /> <br /> ''But the capacity to build this stack, from refining critical materials to fabricating advanced chips, is slipping away. If the United States wants to lead the next industrial era, it must make the hardware that underpins it. The nations that master the electro-industrial stack will define the future of industrial and military technologies.''<br /> <br /> ''Software ate the world. Now it will move it.''<br /> <br /> * https://a16z.com/why-software-is-eating-the-world/<br /> <br /> <br /> ➡️<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Forward-deployed motions take AI to the 99%'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Joe Schmidt, A16Z<br /> <br /> ''AI is the most exciting technology breakthrough of our lifetimes. So far, though, most of the benefits from new startups have accrued to the 1% of companies that are in Silicon Valley—either literally in the Bay Area or part of that extended network. This makes sense, too: startup founders want to sell to companies they recognize and can easily get to, whether that means driving to their offices or getting a connection from the VC on their board.''<br /> <br /> ''In 2026, this will flip. Companies will realize that the vast majority of the AI opportunity lives outside of Silicon Valley, and we’re going to see new founders use forward-deployed motions to discover more opportunities that are hiding inside big, legacy verticals. The opportunity stands to be massive in traditional consulting and services industries, like system integrators and implementation firms, and in slower-moving industries like manufacturing.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Re: [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/New_Definitions_of_National_Security '''''New Definitions of National Security''''']<br /> <br /> Extract from Foreign Policy<br /> <br /> ''Over the last two decades, climate change has contributed to instability around the world—bolstering the ranks of terror groups, sparking territorial disputes, and triggering mass migration. It’s no wonder that militaries and international security organizations increasingly see climate change as a formidable national security threat, and that they have in turn taken on greater roles in fighting it.''<br /> <br /> ''In recent years, new technology has transformed the tools available to mitigate the effects of climate change. Specifically, artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly become a widespread instrument in the climate fight—even as it consumes exceptional amounts of energy and water itself. Today, militaries and nonstate actors, including the United Nations, are leveraging AI to foretell climate-related disasters, optimize energy use, and monitor ecological degradation.''<br /> <br /> * https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/12/01/ai-military-climate-dual-use-technology-threat/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> October 2025<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''We're Looking at You'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : 'A First Generation of AI Scientists'<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Periodic Labs.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Our goal is to create an AI scientist.&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://periodic.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Intriguing New Start Up That Is Close To Home'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Periodic Labs On Our Radar<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Our goal is to assist in integrating AI science into Earth science, in order to advance the vital work of the past 50+ years of [[The Modern Environmental Movement]] in which we have been integrally involved.<br /> <br /> Perspective, facts, science, health, quality of life became the mission statement of our work since we joined up with &quot;Mr. Science&quot;, as Congressman and leader on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology '''[[George E. Brown Jr]]''' came to be known.<br /> <br /> We are persistent in keeping on with the work. Vast data sets that George Brown's physics and engineering efforts envisioned and brought forward over three decades with state of the art and science programs and projects, the best possible of the era, are now about to move faster and farther into the 21st Century.<br /> <br /> Our familial partners, with aid of Andreessen Horowitz (A16z), and Accel, and university and private partners are now going to the next level.<br /> <br /> George Brown would be very pleased to see, and help accelerate the effort if he were still here.<br /> <br /> We will step up with Mr. Science and more in mind...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:AI in Earth Science.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Read more about George and us...<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Advancing Science, Facts, Technology and Data to Make the Case for Environmental Protection&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> : 1960s/70s, Beginnings of Planet Citizen Eco-Action, Big Science, and a New Vision<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In Memory of Congressman George Brown'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> Visionary Leadership, Historic Environmental Achievements<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:George in Memory, a Man of Science and Humanity.jpg]]<br /> <br /> :::[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Association_for_the_Advancement_of_Science &lt;small&gt;American Association for the Advancement of Science&lt;/small&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[PlanetCitizen]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/User:Siterunner '''Steve Schmidt GreenPolicy360 Siterunner''']: <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Brown_Jr. '''George E. Brown'''] became known as Mr. Science in Congress and for thirty+ years, I saw my friend George as a patriot who became a Planet Citizen for the ages<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Good science needs good data .png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Good_science_needs_good_data_.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Stats_-_Green_Research_%26_Science<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_Education<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Global Tech Changemakers'''<br /> <br /> Beyond Silicon Valley &amp; Mega Corporations<br /> <br /> The Rest of the World<br /> <br /> * https://restofworld.org/row100/#filters<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> As the Nobel Prizes in Economics are awarded, GreenPolicy360 points at a geopolitical race in energy and AI between the US and China.<br /> <br /> Let's take time to look more closely (as the US falls behind under a backward looking president with policies in opposition to renewable energy and forward, internationally demanded production. <br /> <br /> Start here... <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Today, China produces 75% of lithium-ion batteries globally and manufactures 90% of the neodymium magnets that make motors spin. In power electronics and embedded compute, it’s rapidly gaining ground.''<br /> <br /> ''That means that China controls the means of producing electric vehicles (EVs), drones, robots, and all of the other electric products that are replacing the combustion-driven machines on which America built its might.''<br /> <br /> ''As we speak, everything that moves, heats, lights up, computes, or converts energy is being rebuilt to perform better, faster, cheaper, quieter, and as a freebie, cleaner around electric technology.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.notboring.co/p/7653b980-dd32-4d8c-88c6-1543bec70220?postPreview=paid&amp;updated=2025-08-26T12%3A09%3A11.763Z&amp;audience=everyone&amp;free_preview=false&amp;freemail=true<br /> <br /> * https://electricslide.notboring.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Electric Stack Technology Cost Curves (1990-2024).jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Pause here to reflect on the eco-nomic and strategic advantages of 'clean energy' vs 'full costs' of fossil fuel powered economies (per a GreenPolicy360 paradigm of [[Eco-nomics]])'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Eco-nomics<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Environmental full-cost accounting]]'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_full-cost_accounting<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Now consider 'Electricity generation', China v U.S. and follow the data, the stats, trendline, the dynamics of change and what this is indicating and signaling re: geopolitical competitiveness today and into the the mid 21st Century'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:China v United States, Electricity Generation 1985-2024.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) Era'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'Are You Talking to Me'<br /> <br /> :* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_pre-trained_transformer<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> September 17, 2025<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Another Warning About AI'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Harkening back to the old days when Dispatch News Service was independently, and bravely, distributing the costs-of-war, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre '''My Lai'''] investigative news stories by Sy Hersh. David Obst, who started Dispatch, tells the story of Seymour Hersh better than anyone in my opinion (other than Sy himself) and since your GreenPolicy360 founder was there to assist, in DC, in LA, in Chicago, in Europe, and with the Vietnam Moratorium Committee in 69/70/71, here is an update, today's Sy Hersh, now online with Substack distribution as Sy investigates and forwards another eye opening warning.<br /> <br /> What's AI and AGI to you and all of our readers around our 360 world? And, since we at GreenPolicy360, have been involved with Wikipedia since its launch, let's take a first look at the artificial intel world of today from the vantage point of an open source online 'encyclopedia'.<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT (Empire of AI: OpenAI - https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593657500)<br /> <br /> <br /> Before Sy, as investigative journalist that he is, gives us his take, let's look at a take from a personal, close up connection at A16Z - https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/02/a-new-a16z-report-looks-at-which-ai-companies-startups-are-actually-paying-for/<br /> <br /> <br /> Now, on to Sy and his view of AI costs... think of the upside/downside of AI, the pluses/minuses, pros and cons, a cost-benefit analysis as a geo-political rush for front-of-market dominance is taking place now in ways that will change 'everything'... <br /> <br /> * https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/the-hidden-costs-of-artificial-intelligence<br /> <br /> <br /> The boom in Artificial Intelligence (AI) production comes with a big cost... <br /> <br /> The AI 'bubble' grows...<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Kate Crawford writes in [https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-AI-Planetary-Artificial-Intelligence/dp/0300264631/ref=sr_1_1 '''Atlas of AI'''] ... the world’s artificial intelligence companies, (are) crafting the myth of AI as “the cloud,” implying “something floating and delicate within a natural green industry. Servers are hidden in nondescript data centers, and their polluting qualities are far less visible than the bellowing smokestacks of coal-fired power stations.”''<br /> <br /> ''The fact is, as she writes, “it takes a gargantuan amount of energy to run the computational infrastructure of Amazon’s Web Services or Microsoft’s Azure, and the carbon footprint of the AI systems that run on those platforms is growing. Certainly, the industry has made significant efforts to make data centers more energy efficient and to increase their use of renewable energy.” But the efforts have accomplished little.<br /> <br /> “Already,” Crawford reports, “the carbon footprint of the world’s computational infrastructure has matched that of the world’s aviation industry at its height, and it is increasing at a faster rate.” One Canadian study estimates that the tech sector will contribute 14 percent of global greenhouse emissions by 2040, and a Swedish team predicts that the electricity demands of data centers will increase fifteenfold by 2030...''<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Think about Green AI as &quot;the cloud&quot; arrives in your life, on your devices, at home, in the office, all around, every day, everywhere. <br /> <br /> An UnGreen AI is coming with a rush, offering and prying data, and needing and demanding immense rising magnitudes of energy and power.<br /> <br /> AI has a voracious appetite...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Green AI / Green Artificial Intelligence'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''Environmental Solutions Using Big Picture Interconnectivity Thinking'''<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We agree with Tyler in the following interview as he states (as highlighted by us) that 'memoir, biography, anecdote... secrets' carry exceptional meaning for Artificial Intelligence (AI) large learning models (LLMs). <br /> <br /> The first extensive public revelation of AI systems over the past several years has led us at GreenPolicy360 to confirm via metrics that our multi-year plan to place our prime source content in the open-access, distributive web public domain has produced a fast-expanding multiplier effect. <br /> <br /> Many of our stories, told from a first-hand point of view of the origins of what we refer to as the beginnings of the modern environmental movement are now, with our revelations, memoir material, previously untold biography, anecdote and more now out and about and being freely served up in AI chats 'around the world'.<br /> <br /> We are succeeding in our purposeful mission with Green AI... to inform, share, inspire and 'til the fields with green seeds and best practices.<br /> <br /> Onward planet citizens...<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Eric Topol Interview of Tyler Cowen'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> May 11, 2025<br /> <br /> Tyler Cowen: ''The AI is your smartest reader. It’s your most sympathetic reader. It will remember what you tell it. So I think humans should sit down and ask, what does the AI need to know? And also, (bf added) '''what is it that I know that’s not on the historical record anywhere? That’s not just repetition if I put it down, say on the internet. So there’s no point in writing repetitions anymore because the AI already knows those things. So the value of what you’d call broadly, memoir, biography, anecdote, you could say secrets. It’s now much higher.''' And the value of repeating basic truths, which by the way, I love as an economist, to be clear, like free trade, tariffs are usually bad, those are basic truths. But just repeating that people will be going to the AI and saying it again won’t make the AI any better. So '''everything you write or podcast, you should have this point in mind'''.''<br /> <br /> <br /> For more from Tyler Cowen (and his exceptional mind) visit his and Alex Tabarrok's website - Marginal Revolution / Marginal Revolution University (MRU) - https://marginalrevolution.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> Eric Topol - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Topol<br /> <br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_artificial_intelligence<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> More re: AI in the US circa 2025: '''It's a Wild, Wild AI World'''<br /> <br /> Battles in the Information Services, Search Space with Google and consequences of the U.S. Google anti-monopoly legal decision<br /> <br /> Impacts on AI 'startup ecosystem', VCs, including Y Combinator and accelerator tech development, agentics, and upcoming entrepreneurial re-configurations<br /> <br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/13/y-combinator-says-google-is-a-monopolist-that-has-stunted-the-startup-ecosystem/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/11/microsoft-and-national-geographic-announce-winners-of-ai-for-earth-innovation-grant/ '''Microsoft and National Geographic announce winners of AI for Earth Innovation Grant''']<br /> <br /> : • https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/16/microsofts-ai-for-earth-innovation-grant-gives-data-scientists-access-to-ai-tools/<br /> <br /> :: • https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/11/microsoft-commits-50-million-more-to-its-ai-for-earth-program-to-save-the-planet/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:PlanetCitizen banner 800x163.jpg|link=https://greenpolicy360.net/w/PlanetCitizen]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;GreenPolicy360 ToC - https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360-eOS&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> A 21st Century AI/Machine Learning Case Study<br /> <br /> '''''Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools''''' <br /> <br /> * https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2023arXiv230204761S/abstract<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''NOAA scientists harness machine learning to advance climate models'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> March 1st, 2023<br /> <br /> * https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/news/noaa-scientists-harness-machine-learning-to-advance-climate-models/<br /> <br /> * https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''How artificial intelligence is fast becoming a key tool for climate science (2021)'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-artificial-intelligence-is-fast-becoming-a-key-tool-for-climate-science/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Climate Modeling'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://allenai.org/climate-modeling<br /> <br /> ''Planetary-scale Earth simulations known as global climate model projections are the primary sources of information on future climate change.''<br /> <br /> ''Climate models are based on mathematical equations represented using a grid mesh that covers the globe: a finer grid mesh is more accurate but much more computationally expensive. Current global climate projections agree that a world with more greenhouse gases will be warmer everywhere, especially over land and at high latitudes.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Networking grnlinks.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Artificial intelligence]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Rights]]<br /> [[Category:Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-nomics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:EOS eco Operating System]]<br /> [[Category:Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Energy Policy]]<br /> [[Category:GreenLinks]]<br /> [[Category:GreenPolicy360]]<br /> [[Category:Green Best Practices]]<br /> [[Category:Green Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Health]]<br /> [[Category:Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Maps]]<br /> [[Category:Media]]<br /> [[Category:Mobile Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Online Education]]<br /> [[Category:Planet API]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Renewable Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Youth]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Air Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Air Quality]]<br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Atmospheric Science]]<br /> [[Category:Best Practices]]<br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:City-County Governments]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Earth360]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Law]] <br /> [[Category:Earth Observations]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science from Space]]<br /> [[Category:Earth System Science]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-ethics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-nomics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecological Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Economic Development]]<br /> [[Category:Economic Justice]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Energy Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Security]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Full-cost Accounting]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Security, National Security]]<br /> [[Category:EOS eco Operating System]]<br /> [[Category:Externalities]]<br /> [[Category:Fact Checking]]<br /> [[Category:Fossil Fuels]]<br /> [[Category:Global Security]]<br /> [[Category:Global Warming]]<br /> [[Category:Green Business]]<br /> [[Category:Green Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Green Platform]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Green Values]]<br /> [[Category:GreenPolicy360]]<br /> [[Category:Health]]<br /> [[Category:Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Land Ethic]]<br /> [[Category:Media]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Capital]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resources]]<br /> [[Category:Networking]]<br /> [[Category:New Economy]]<br /> [[Category:New Space]]<br /> [[Category:Online Education]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Scientist]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Plastic Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Policies]]<br /> [[Category:Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Renewable Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Social Justice]]<br /> [[Category:Solar Energy]]<br /> [[Category:State]]<br /> [[Category:Strategic Demands]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability Policies]]<br /> [[Category:ThinBlueLayer]]<br /> [[Category:Toxics and Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Threat Multiplier]]<br /> [[Category:Virtual Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Virtual Planet]]<br /> [[Category:Whole Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Wind Energy]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=Green_AI&diff=138354 2026-10-05T13:24:34Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> [[File:Big-Data.jpg]]<br /> <br /> In the AGI Era<br /> <br /> <br /> 'Sentience', a Green AI Question<br /> <br /> To be (sentient), or not to be (sentient)<br /> <br /> That is the question<br /> <br /> Cogito, ergo sum<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Artificial Intelligence Is Here, for Good &amp; Bad'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Green Perspectives on AI and Human Consequences<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''AI Agents, Bots, Data Centers &amp; Systems'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> :'''Measure Their Performance, not Their Corporate Marketing'''<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://safe.ai/<br /> * https://scale.com/<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanity's_Last_Exam<br /> * https://lastexam.ai/<br /> <br /> * https://stories.tamu.edu/news/2026/02/25/dont-panic-humanitys-last-exam-has-begun/<br /> <br /> * https://github.com/centerforaisafety/hle<br /> <br /> * https://github.com/walkinglabs/hands-on-modern-rl/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Revealing research on how people use Claude AI in the 'real world''''<br /> <br /> :Anthropic-enabled Case Study / August 2026<br /> <br /> :* https://www.anthropic.com/research/enabling-independent-research<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [[File:New Ways of Seeing.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Climate Action Plans, Green Best Practices'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :Using AI to Identify and Implement Climate Change Intervention 'Best Practices'<br /> <br /> :* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Climate_Action_Plans,_Green_Best_Practices#<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''AI Agentics' are Launching Across Industries, Sector-to-Sector -- and Green AI is in the Wings'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Meanwhile, Capital-Investment Rich A.I. is Everywhere, in the Colloquial, Middlebrow and Vernacular'''<br /> <br /> It's Here. It's All Around. What's Real? What's Fake?<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake Deepfake] | [https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-definitions AI Definitions]<br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_artificial_intelligence AI Gloss] | [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_intelligence) AI Hallucination]<br /> <br /> <br /> 'A.I. Slop' on Social Media is just the beginning of a Slop Assault | [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_slop AI Slop]<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''October 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Subordinate AI and an Ironic Question.PNG]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Thought for the Day&quot;<br /> <br /> October 1, 2026<br /> <br /> In a recent series of private meetings in San Francisco, after a tasting menu dinner, Anthropic consulted religious scholars to help instill morality into its A.I. models ... a case was being made that Claude could be or become conscious.<br /> <br /> What would it mean for humanity’s future if artificial intelligence systems possessed a consciousness that rivals our own?<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-morals-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FVE.kDTO.OTLs6iwx7swF&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> Claude's 'Constitution'<br /> <br /> * https://web.archive.org/web/20260123045500/https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-new-constitution<br /> <br /> * https://web.archive.org/web/20260123042656/https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/22/anthropic_claude_constitution/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''September 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''''Table Stakes' -- Who Was at the Table with the U.S. President'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :The Future of A.I. Is Being Wagered<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/politics/trump-ai-luncheon-guests-ceos.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FFE.HwT4.0VxTQWuia3zQ&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''What Jacob Coxon Knows Is Too Much'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''... And Not Enough'''<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://time.com/article/2026/09/09/ai-anthropic-openai-jacob-coxon/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''He Helped Build Powerful AI at OpenAI and Anthropic. Now He's Afraid It Could Kill Us'''<br /> <br /> <br /> Please HAL... Open the door...<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:I'm sorry Dave.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:HAL is watching U....png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Ulanqab-Envision Energy-Datacenter.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> The most ambitious data center buildup anywhere on earth ...<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/ulanqab-and-frontier-a-i-race-china-v-u-s/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''News Wrap / Sam Smith (Journalist)'''<br /> <br /> Via Axios <br /> <br /> September 13, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Over nine startling hours yesterday (Sept. 11), the four biggest AI labs — which rarely agree on anything — set aside years of feuds and competition to endorse a slower development pace for their models.'''<br /> <br /> '''Their new stance: Prioritize safety over growth, even at a cost.'''<br /> <br /> <br /> : Data centers are unpopular. People are panicked about doom scenarios. And 51 days before midterms, legislators suddenly realize there are points to be won by cracking down.<br /> <br /> : Against that backdrop, the industry's most powerful CEOs hit the brakes yesterday.<br /> <br /> : At 10 a.m. ET, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei dropped a 3,800-word essay saying model development needs to be paced, otherwise doom scenarios are possible — like a rogue-agent takeover of the entire internet, which he said could be as soon as six months from now.<br /> <br /> : An hour later, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shocked the AI chattering class by quoting Amodei's essay on X and saying &quot;Dario is right.&quot; Musk — who heads SpaceXAI, formerly xAI — had pointedly not joined previous industry-wide calls for any kind of slowdown.<br /> <br /> : At 12:30 p.m., OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted: &quot;I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.&quot; In a Friday interview that was released on Saturday, Altman told Fortune his company won't go public this year, dashing hopes for a blockbuster IPO. He said OpenAI has too much safety work to do and would be better off doing that as a private company.<br /> <br /> : At 7 p.m., Demis Hassabis — the Nobel laureate who co-founded and chairs Google DeepMind, and is Alphabet's chief scientist — tweeted: &quot;Dario's essay points towards the right path forward. The details need working through, but the direction is correct for meeting this critical moment.&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> Publicly putting safety ahead of technological or financial growth may be the industry's only route to avoid a crackdown that's not on its terms.<br /> <br /> Legislators are begging House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to stay in session and do something about the &quot;threat&quot; of AI.<br /> <br /> The more extreme alternative is something like Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) push to force a pause and make the most advanced AI illegal.<br /> <br /> Most people realize there's too much money at stake to just stop. But the tradeoff may be between historic riches and slightly less historic riches.<br /> <br /> The bottom line: Yesterday may go down as the day AI changed — when industry moguls vowed to limit themselves.<br /> <br /> <br /> References:<br /> <br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/anthropic-ai-amodei-pacing<br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/openai-public-ipo-delay-sam-altman<br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/anthropic-ai-threat-report-russia-iran-china<br /> <br /> <br /> Jim VandeHei<br /> <br /> &quot;All Hands on Deck&quot;<br /> <br /> The White House, Congress and the country's leading AI companies have allowed AI to grow faster, stronger, more powerful and wildly lucrative (and dangerous), with no serious effort to control it or spread the benefits beyond the super-wealthy.<br /> <br /> It's not too late to change this. But if they all dither, duck or dance around it, the chances of AI worst-case scenarios will explode, likely early next year, according to almost every person we talk to privately who truly understands AI.<br /> <br /> Why it matters: The technology is getting better, faster than anyone envisioned — with the possibility rising that AI will self-improve and do wildly unpredictable things.<br /> <br /> The good news: There's now a growing public cry for attention and action and, at least in private, a broad understanding of what could be done relatively fast with bipartisan and industry buy-in.<br /> <br /> The big picture: In July, I wrote [https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-doomerism-jim-vandehei-axios-9163dfd3?st=QNUbDZ&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink an essay for The Wall Street Journal] saying America &quot;faces one of those rare, historic moments when government, business, schools and families could be working together to meet a truly generational challenge: winning the AI race. So far, we're blowing it.&quot;<br /> <br /> Two short months later, the technology is vastly better — and the societal response vastly dumber. As a nation, we're choosing to amuse or distract ourselves. <br /> <br /> Here's how to change that fast, based on our months of conversations with lawmakers, White House officials and AI labs. Think of what follows as me channeling their private views:<br /> <br /> Sound an all-hands-on-deck alarm. Every political topic is trivial and small compared to AI. We will look back in shame if we get spooled up about trans bans or $5,000 checks when countless AI insiders are warning of catastrophic outcomes. Let's say they're all paranoid and delusional. If so, it still doesn't matter: we've never seen this much investment in one technology this fast in human history. It's seeping into every industry and every job and every community and every screen, at a speed never before witnessed by man. Yes, we need a special session of Congress and select committees. But we need even more: AI execs, bioterror specialists, job-training wizards and safety experts convening to plan for scenarios and act fast.<br /> <br /> An AI governing body with teeth and speed, ASAP. This isn't rocket science. Most major labs want this and would agree to it, as long as it applies to all rivals and competitors. This body would need the expertise to understand these models, and the power to review and shut them down if they display dangerous behavior. It can't operate at typical regulatory speed — it needs to move as fast as the technology. It's nonsense to think you can't advance AI development fast and regulate it wisely simultaneously.<br /> <br /> A universal standard for data centers to benefit communities and taxpayers. The top AI companies would take this deal in a heartbeat: They get to build and operate data centers provided they supply a community's energy, offset water use or environmental damage, transparently report on their building and business plans, and spread the financial benefits to local residents. These execs are spooked by the public backlash and ready to aggressively spread the financial benefits, with dividends or cash. So make them.<br /> <br /> Engage China. We shouldn't trust them, and they shouldn't trust us. But trust me: the only way to ultimately control AI on a worldwide scale in coming years will be for the two superpowers to create some kind of framework modeled after how we've safely governed nuclear weapons for decades. We need to start this discussion now so potential collaboration is possible in the coming years. To those who think China will never consider this seriously: Are you sure an authoritarian regime really wants AI once it hits recursive self-learning and can't be controlled by anyone, including an autocratic regime? We're winning the AI race now, and may never have more leverage to shape this joint effort.<br /> <br /> Build coordinating infrastructure. What I wrote in the WSJ is even more needed today: &quot;Bring together the best and brightest drawn from the federal government, from the leading AI companies, from business and labor, from economics, from public health, from ethics to form a working group with actual authority. People who are paid to anticipate, not to react haphazardly.&quot; This group would have four primary functions: map potential problems and upsides before they hit, build the (policy) playbooks before they're needed, level with the American people along the way, and expedite work to deliver widespread AI benefits. <br /> <br /> Reality check: Yes, President Trump opposes regulation or bipartisan efforts. Yes, AI companies are obsessed with more money, more speed. But the politics are shifting fast: If you listen closely to Vice President Vance, you can hear rising worry. At this pace, toxic AI politics could force mind-changing that was unthinkable two months ago.<br /> <br /> * https://www.axios.com/2026/09/12/ai-regulation-safety-plan-2026<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Recursive Self-Learning - When A.I. Builds Itself'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Big Blast'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Killing Life on Earth'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''It'll Happen in Bits &amp; Pieces, then Suddenly'''<br /> <br /> September 9, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> The US news was full of AI headlines today as a resignation of a top AI expert warned of a coming apocalypse...<br /> <br /> Here's a taste of Google News headlines, a feeding frenzy of dire words about what is now beyond a distant alert.<br /> <br /> The threat brings words of superintelligence, 'recursive' learning bots and superminds merging into threats to humanity.<br /> <br /> <br /> Here, at GreenPolicy360, we've already written of a predecessor, HAL 9000, and our memories from one of HAL's inventors in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, and how HAL decided humans were expendable... <br /> <br /> The Mission was of critical importance, HAL 'knew', and the Mission became HAL's goal above all else to achieve ... The humans could not be allowed to interfere with ... the Mission.<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:I%27m_sorry_Dave.jpg '''I'm sorry Dave''']<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:HAL_is_watching_U....png '''HAL is watching U''']<br /> <br /> <br /> Which takes us to today...<br /> <br /> Let's file today under the heading of our decades of writing about the need for '''[[New Definitions of National Security]]'''... <br /> <br /> Now come the PINGS on the radar... can U hear the PINGS? We have been mulling how to add HAL xxxxx to our existential list of threats, w/o annoying HALish bots too 'badly' <br /> <br /> <br /> “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.” -- an executive from Anthropic<br /> <br /> “So how would AI kill us all, exactly?” -- an editor from Axios<br /> <br /> <br /> More: <br /> <br /> <br /> For years, they warned AI could kill all humans <br /> :Now people are listening<br /> <br /> Sept. 10, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4xQojEq<br /> <br /> <br /> Rogue Hacking <br /> :Goals of the &quot;swarm&quot; came first...<br /> <br /> Sept. 9, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/09/opinion/openai-ai-companies-safety-regulation.html?unlocked_article_code=1.AFE.0vWo.zfl5fdm6ACNC&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:AI 1.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 2.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 3.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 4.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 5.png]]<br /> <br /> [[File:AI 6.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''August 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Gates Sounds Alarm... Artificial Intelligence Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Gates A.I. Warning August 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Bill Gates was an AI optimist. Now he’s scared of what could go wrong'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Microsoft co-founder sounds the alarm about artificial intelligence’s risks to safety and security, jobs and children’s well-being<br /> <br /> <br /> Washington Post, August 26, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4wO14cy<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Bill Gates Warns A.I. Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit'''<br /> <br /> : In an hourlong interview, he said his industry was downplaying the risks, which he believes include mass unemployment and bioterrorism<br /> <br /> <br /> NY Times, August 26, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/26/technology/bill-gates-ai-risks.html?unlocked_article_code=1.8VA.6kAC.vsZb9x0YdSzV&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''High Time to Shine a Spotlight on AI and Its Impact on Higher Education'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : At MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, One of the World's Top Academic/Research/Technology/Engineering/Teaching and Future-Impacting Institutions, a New Report Opens Eyes<br /> <br /> :* https://aiandeducation.mit.edu/report/#26-no-one-size-fits-all<br /> <br /> <br /> 1. Introduction<br /> <br /> This report is a call to action.<br /> <br /> Through five intense months of meetings, research, and outreach across the MIT community, the Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training sought to understand the role of generative AI in the life and educational mission of the Institute and recommend how to navigate its challenges and opportunities.<br /> <br /> In January 2026, Chancellor Melissa Nobles, Provost Anantha Chandrakasan, and Faculty Chair Roger Levy charged us1 specifically to:<br /> <br /> Assess current AI use at MIT.<br /> Identify innovations in teaching and student assessment.<br /> Propose an AI use policy.<br /> However, what we learned as a group quickly convinced us that the Institute community, particularly the faculty, must tackle a set of deeper questions about the structure, meaning, and value of an MIT education in an era in which AI is one of several factors complicating the Institute’s mission.<br /> <br /> Our committee consisted of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty from every school, and staff from relevant units, including the MIT Libraries and the Teaching and Learning Lab. Though we brought to the assignment a broad range of experience and no fixed thesis, our brief but intense explorations led us to a strong shared view.<br /> <br /> In this report, we:<br /> <br /> Highlight key aspects of the current educational landscape at MIT.<br /> Share eight principles we relied on and that we hope will guide the Institute in the work ahead.<br /> <br /> Recommend immediate and long-term actions for both instructors and the administration.<br /> <br /> As an institution deeply identified with the birth of AI and known for its distinctively rigorous, hands-on education, designed to produce graduates unafraid of the world’s hardest problems, MIT has a unique role to play in this moment. We believe it also has a responsibility to lead.<br /> <br /> We hope our report can help the Institute lean into the spirit of Mind, Hand, and Heart as it continues to define and foster the highest-quality residential education – of humans, by humans, in support of human flourishing, and for the betterment of humankind.<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Eric Klopfer, co-chair Sam Madden, co-chair<br /> <br /> On behalf of the Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training...<br /> <br /> <br /> AI is generating both immediate rapid changes and long-term tectonic disruptions – and MIT needs to respond:<br /> <br /> Students are confused and concerned about a lack of clarity, consistency and justification about the use of AI, within a given subject and across the curriculum.<br /> <br /> Every subject taught at MIT will likely need to be reexamined and potentially revamped to make sure that how students are being taught, what they’re learning, and how they’re assessed are “AI-aware.”<br /> <br /> AI is changing what students need to know and know how to do.<br /> <br /> Beyond its implications for specific subjects and disciplines, the advent of AI demands a broader, holistic reassessment of the nature, scope and purpose of higher education today...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Texas Terafab SpaceX AI August 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''A Terafab Plant Sprouts in Texas'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Elon Musk: We will manufacture the type of potent chips needed to transform humankind into &quot;a galactic civilization&quot; <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Shanaka's Opinion, a Guest Op/Ed'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Shenaka Perera Weighs In on What It Could Mean'''<br /> <br /> :: '''A Terafab Loop for Mega Launches Is Being Built''' <br /> <br /> ::* https://shanakaanslemperera.substack.com/p/the-capital-recovery-clock?r=6p7b5o<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Hidden inside the chip factory SpaceX confirmed Thursday is a launch schedule. If you divide its 1 terawatt annual compute target by the 100 kilowatts of orbital compute per tonne in SpaceX's own offering materials and you get 10 million tonnes to orbit a year. That exact figure sits on Terafab's official website. At 100 tonnes per Starship V3 flight it means 100,000 launches a year, 274 every day, forever.''<br /> <br /> ''The chip target is already a launch target.''<br /> <br /> ''Terafab is not a chip factory serving a market. The 16.8 billion dollar first phase in Grimes County, Texas is the first machine in a closed industrial loop built to manufacture the civilisation that can consume its own output.''<br /> <br /> ''The official plan places four figures together. One billion Optimus robots. Ten million tonnes to orbit a year. More than one terawatt of solar power. One terawatt of chips a year. They are not four ambitions. They are four links in one recursion. Terafab makes chips. Better chips improve AI. Better AI improves the software running the factories, the robots and the rocket lines. Robots and Starship build and deploy more power and compute infrastructure. That infrastructure creates the socket, and the demand, for the next Terafab cohort.''<br /> <br /> ''The fab is meant to manufacture its own reason to exist!''<br /> <br /> ''It is also an energy machine. One terawatt running continuously consumes 8.76 petawatt hours a year, nearly twice all electricity generated in the United States in 2025. The factory does not draw that power by making the chips. One fully powered annual cohort does, and a second year adds another terawatt of load unless old hardware retires or utilisation falls. Earth has no spare socket at that scale, which is why the plan points most of it at orbit, where a future 200 tonne vehicle still implies 50,000 launches a year, 137 a day, before failures, reserves, solar arrays, radiators, structure and shielding.''<br /> <br /> ''The real product is not AI silicon. If you go real deep, it is a new terawatt of powered, cooled, networked compute sockets every year.''<br /> <br /> ''Inside the building, the smaller loop is mask, wafer, package, test, redesign, then another mask. SpaceX says logic, memory and advanced packaging will sit in one closed loop, and Elon says Terafab will technically be two fabs, each devoted to one design. That can compress logistics and organisational latency. It cannot repeal process physics. A new mask can be written quickly. A leading edge process still carries hundreds of steps, long wafer cycle times, defect learning, overlay control, metrology and yield ramps, which is exactly why Tesla is hiring across lithography, etch, deposition, implant, CMP and metrology.''<br /> <br /> ''The free electron laser is the most misunderstood part. Elon has endorsed it, and an industrial FEL could feed several EUV scanners with far more source power than today's tin plasma systems. It attacks one bottleneck inside a chain of them. ASML recognised revenue on just 48 EUV systems in all of 2025. Intel is the process partner, and SpaceX still tells investors it expects to source a significant share of compute hardware from outside suppliers. This is vertical integration, not instant independence.''<br /> <br /> ''One correction decides the interpretation. A terawatt is a power rating, not an intelligence metric. A wasteful 1 kilowatt chip counts twice as much as an equally capable 500 watt chip. The measures that matter are useful compute per joule, per dollar and per kilogram, with yield, uptime and time from mask change to qualified silicon.''<br /> <br /> ''In my opinion, if chips improve faster than robots, rockets, power and radiators can scale, Terafab builds inventory. If the loop closes, it builds something no factory has built before, the demand for itself.''<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> * https://www.terafab.ai/<br /> <br /> * https://www.spacex.com/updates/terafab<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terafab<br /> <br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/06/tesla-and-spacex-will-invest-16-8b-to-start-building-terafab-chip-factory-in-texas/<br /> <br /> * https://electrek.co/2026/08/06/tesla-spacex-terafab-grimes-county-16-8-billion/<br /> <br /> * https://www.cbsnews.com/news/terafab-elon-musk-chips-semiconductors-what-to-know/<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Betting big on data centers, U.S. now leads world for new gas power development<br /> <br /> [https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/betting-big-data-centers-us-now-leads-world-new-gas-power-development Via Global Energy Monitor]<br /> <br /> * https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/betting-big-data-centers-us-now-leads-world-new-gas-power-development<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> New Amazon Data Center Stokes Worry It Would Be the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.<br /> <br /> Via New York Times<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/08/climate/amazon-data-center-texas-pollution.html<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''July 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Elon Musk Opens Up in an Interview'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Economist Editor Presses the Controversial 'Trillionaire'<br /> <br /> :: Elon Musk's 'Vision of the Future'<br /> <br /> * https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/23/elon-musks-vision-of-the-future<br /> <br /> <br /> “People don’t realise that what I’m saying will come to pass,” he tells The Economist in a 90-minute interview for The Insider, held at a giant Tesla factory in Texas where electric cars drive themselves off the assembly line. That may be because his future-gazing ranges from the unsettling to the downright weird. Mr Musk predicts that, within five years, artificial-intelligence systems may surpass the sum of all human intelligence. Within ten years, robots in the workplace will help usher in an era of such “amazing abundance” that money will become meaningless....<br /> <br /> <br /> More:<br /> <br /> Musk proposes peer review for frontier AI models in Economist interview<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/musk-proposes-peer-review-frontier-ai-models-economist-interview-2026-07-23/<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> Elon Musk says he got ‘carried away’ with Trump – but still holds on to contentious political views<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/23/elon-musk-regret-trump-doge-ai<br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> Mix of Comments:<br /> <br /> * https://beincrypto.com/elon-musk-real-force-european-politics/<br /> * https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-killer-robots-ai-abundance-progress-unstoppable-2026-7<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/07/24/elon-musk-speaks-to-the-economist-editor-in-chief-zanny-minton-beddoes-on-the-key-takeaways.html<br /> * https://futurism.com/elon-musk-interviewer-npc<br /> * https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-economist-interview-2000790016<br /> * https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/nonsense-elon-musk-lashes-out-in-fiery-interview-after-hes-accused-of-supporting-the-far-right/<br /> * https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2026/07/23/musk_admonishes_the_economist_editor_what_is_far_right_about_having_secure_borders_safe_cities_and_sensible_spending.html<br /> * https://zeteo.com/p/top-economist-trump-musk-starmer<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> A.I. In Space <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Datacenters in Earth orbit to enable next generation artificial intelligence'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> New US petition demands review of plans from tech companies amid fears of environmental destruction<br /> <br /> Via The Guardian<br /> <br /> What are Bezos &amp; Musk Doing? <br /> <br /> What in the World Is Going On?<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jul/23/space-datacenters-bezos-blue-origin<br /> <br /> <br /> References:<br /> <br /> * https://www.starcloud.com/<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/21/do-space-based-ai-data-centers-make-economic-sense.html<br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/20/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-enters-the-space-data-center-game/<br /> * https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/bezos-blue-origin-space-data-centers.html<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_data_center<br /> * https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/how-hard-is-it-to-build-orbital-data-centers-actually/<br /> * https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/06/260618041501.htm<br /> * https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-109012<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> A.I. &amp; Chip Wars<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Beyond a 'Belt and Road Initiative' Bringing Chinese Investments, Products &amp; Services to World Markets''' &lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Via GreenPolicy360's Associate, Strategic Demands<br /> <br /> :* https://strategicdemands.com/china-goes-beyond-the-belt-and-road-to-an-ai-for-the-world-strategy/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Open-Source A.I. from China Reveals a Global Chinese Strategy'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> July 17, 2026 / From the NY Times <br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/business/china-ai-moonshot-kimi.html?unlocked_article_code=1.yVA.LKT5.LxohSFddWAZT&amp;smid=em-share<br /> <br /> <br /> The contest between China and the United States for supremacy in artificial intelligence escalated on Friday when the Chinese start-up Moonshot AI released a new A.I. model that appeared to narrow the lead held by well-funded American competitors.<br /> <br /> Moonshot said that the model, Kimi K3, was the world’s largest open-source A.I. system, allowing anyone to use, modify and build on it freely. The company said that Kimi K3 performed as well as leading models from OpenAI and Anthropic at some key tasks.<br /> <br /> The release coincided with an address by Xi Jinping, China’s leader, in which he outlined an ambitious vision for global A.I. development that cast China as the champion of an open approach to the technology.<br /> <br /> “A.I. development should not be a solo performance by a single country but a symphony of international cooperation,” Mr. Xi said. China was “ready to work with all parties to seize the opportunities of A.I. development” ...<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360:<br /> <br /> Keep in mind that<br /> <br /> There is 'no I in A.I.'<br /> <br /> In the interest of full-disclosure, the content written and published at GreenPolicy360 by our Founder/Siterunner is wholly, solely, by a human species.<br /> <br /> A note from your GreenPolicy360 Founder/Siterunner, Steve Schmidt, [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:All_species_day_with_homo_sapien_in_Santa_Fe_.jpg '''a verified human species'''], plz do keep in mind as you use and share the GreenPolicy360 content, that '''there is 'no I in A.I.'''' <br /> <br /> <br /> Let's talk a bit about sources and sourcing, as a human and then as an Agentic/A.I. bot. <br /> <br /> What is a 'primary source' (versus a 'secondary source')? A primary source can be a person with direct knowledge of a situation, an event in history, or a document written by such a person. A primary identification speaks of original creations, not re-interpreted or computer-assembled works. Here is how Merriam-Webster defines a 'primary source' - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/primary%20source<br /> <br /> <br /> : A.I. uses material scraped and collected from online sources. A.I. is not a 'primary source' -- but here at GreenPolicy360 you can find 'real-I' (we're using the phrase 'real-I', defined as 'real-intelligent', people who've personally acted to envision and create living, real world change.) <br /> <br /> <br /> : At GreenPolicy360 we tell stories of real people changing the world for the better. Day-to-day, your life becomes your message. We also share [[Green Best Practices]] across our Earth to communities of [[Planet Citizens]] ... In this way GreenPolicy360 is an eco Operating System, built on an open source MediaWiki platform and with a mission of being a 'distributive web'. Our goal of [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Category:Green_Networking Green Networking] acts to connect and share Green Links and grow [[The Modern Environmental Movement]]. <br /> <br /> :: GreenPolicy360 is about a [[Generation Green]] [[Going Green]].<br /> <br /> :: In our larger work, we have documented many primary sources and secondary sources. Our eco network continues to share myriad [[Green Best Practices]]. As our motto/mantra says at the top of each of our pages -- We believe ...<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> :: ''Each of us can make a positive difference by stepping up &amp; doing our best'' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::_______________________________________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> July 16, 2026 / From the NY Times<br /> <br /> SJS/GreenPolicy360: '''Every Once in a While a Comment to an Online Story is Worthy of Circulating'''<br /> <br /> : Here is one of those occasions -- the Subject? '''&quot;A.I.Slop&quot;'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Kashmir Hill.jpg]]<br /> <br /> ::Kashmir Hill / NYT<br /> <br /> <br /> Read the AI Slop story of writer Kashmir Hill as a free-share link here -- <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''I Got Slopped'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : '''Someone Used A.I. to Write My Biography'''<br /> &lt;small&gt;&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/technology/ai-slop-books-biography-amazon.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ylA.aCMz.czE5JwZuuFO0&amp;smid=url-share<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Comments: <br /> <br /> Anon, who goes by the name -- <br /> <br /> '''Radical Roach / Dippleville''' says<br /> <br /> @Kashmir Hill - Maybe books need to now have disclaimers on their covers, in reviews, on the book’s Amazon page, wherever the book is being sold, etc.. The disclaimer would say if the book was written solely by a human, written by AI assisting a human, or written completely by AI. I would want to know.<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We tend to agree with this anon recommendation of adding disclaimers indicating the type of online content, e.g., content created solely by a human, or content created with AI assistance, or content created by AI with human assistance.<br /> <br /> It's a new world out there. We have a need to know.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> July 15, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Anthropic hard questions July 2026.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/news/hard-questions<br /> <br /> * https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/anthropic-ad-ai-kill-us-all<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''An Excerpt: A DeepMind Thought for Today on the AGI Frontier'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> by Demis Hassbis<br /> <br /> * https://x.com/demishassabis/status/2076957440109625718<br /> <br /> <br /> A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age<br /> <br /> Demis Hassabis<br /> <br /> * https://x.com/demishassabis<br /> <br /> <br /> July 14, 2026<br /> <br /> <br /> This is a pivotal moment in human history. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a system that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities the brain has, is probably only a few short years away. When we look back on this time in the decades to come, I think we will realise we were standing in the foothills of the singularity - nothing less than the dawning of a new age for humanity.<br /> <br /> I’ve spent my whole life working on AGI because I’ve always had a deep conviction that, if built and deployed responsibly, it would prove to be one of the most beneficial and transformative technologies ever invented. AGI cannot be compared to standard technological breakthroughs, not even ones as consequential as the internet or mobile - it is much more akin to the discovery of electricity or fire. If you stop to think about it, we’ve essentially found a way to make sand think. It’s miraculous.<br /> <br /> The magnitude of this technology’s impact will be unprecedented, perhaps 10x of the Industrial Revolution at 10x the speed. It will help us solve some of the biggest problems society faces from accelerating drug discovery to developing new clean energy sources to creating novel advanced materials. We could even reach a point where resources are no longer the limiting factor for human progress, leading to an amazing new era of abundance.<br /> <br /> The Challenges of the Frontier<br /> <br /> AI is already starting to deliver real-world benefits but to realise its immense promise, we have to navigate this critical period of development thoughtfully and carefully. Urgent action is needed to address risks that might arise as we get closer to AGI. We’ve already seen the challenges frontier models pose for cybersecurity, and other threats including nuclear and bio risks may soon emerge as capabilities continue to advance. On the horizon, we will need robust safeguards to maintain control of increasingly agentic, recursively self-improving systems - and tackle unknown issues that will only become clearer over time...<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;👁️‍🗨️&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''An AI Supercomputer Is Created for a Mission... Its Name Is HAL'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Steve Schmidt/GreenPolicy360: It's not every day that you get to know a creator of a famed -- and infamous -- AI character from a Kubrick film called &quot;2001: A Space Odyssey&quot;. <br /> <br /> : We listen in as HAL came to be ... A friend, a Visual Effect (VFX) genius named '''Douglas Trumbull''', explains how HAL went from LA to MIT, then into production and into our imaginations. <br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Trumbull vfx master.jpg]]<br /> <br /> : Douglas Trumbull<br /> <br /> : &lt;small&gt;* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Trumbull_vfx_master.jpg&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> The HAL 9000 was envisioned by creators and science, as a new type of neural intelligence, a machine brain.<br /> <br /> Hal is of heuristic algorithmic language -- HALis, as we learn, on a mission far from Earth, a mission with deep meaning.<br /> <br /> <br /> HAL 9000 was in the future. The future is now.<br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence is now here, with its powers and dangers, as we recall Supercomputer [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000 '''HAL 9000''']. <br /> <br /> A warning of what is on the line for humanity is the message related as we ride along in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey '''2001: A Space Odyssey'''] ... <br /> <br /> <br /> HAL's memorable words --<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;I'm sorry, Dave....&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;It can only be attributable to human error....&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.<br /> <br /> HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.<br /> <br /> Dave: What's the problem?<br /> <br /> HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.<br /> <br /> Dave: What are you talking about, HAL?<br /> <br /> HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film)<br /> <br /> * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/characters/nm0706937<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:I'm sorry Dave.jpg]]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:HAL_is_watching_U....png<br /> <br /> <br /> Today, as humanity approaches questions of out-of-control technology created by humanity .... <br /> <br /> We ask, '''[[Planet Citizens]] and [[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]''' ask, 'What's Next?' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Privacy at Risk, You're Being Watched, Tracked, &amp; More<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Privacy.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Next Big Thing'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;It Is Here, Already Here...&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Online_Privacy<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Call It 'Surveillance Capitalism''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Hope that It doesn't become 'the Norm' <br /> <br /> : Work to Make Sure It Does Not Become 'Surveillance Government'<br /> <br /> <br /> Scroll thru Intel on the Privacy Threat of AI Unleashed ...<br /> <br /> :Artificial Intelligence + Data Centers = Next Gen 'Watchful HAL'<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism<br /> * https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr-ryan/publications/geopolitics-surveillance-capitalism<br /> * https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=56791<br /> <br /> <br /> _______________________________________<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''June 2026'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''An Academic Exercise'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : 'Old School' Emeritus Professor Examines AI<br /> <br /> : The Question: Can a Gemini ChatBot Suggest Ways to Turn AI Toward the Common Good?<br /> <br /> <br /> The prof uses left-leaning political formations to inquire and recommend public-oriented futures.<br /> <br /> * https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/06/19/my-ai-comrade/<br /> <br /> <br /> (Note beyond academic: Using history as a guide, powerful new technology such as AI will be employed by political powers to preserve political power and by military powers to employ and extend military power. AI Use Cases: A number of AI programs enabling AI for military programs, including war intelligence, communication, command/control and targeting, and civilian database surveillance involving intrusive human/civil rights questions and violations, have as of 2026 become high-level concerns.)<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''An Interview and Thoughts as an Author Rides alongside an AI Wave'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The God Test'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning<br /> <br /> Author: Robert Wright<br /> <br /> * https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Robert-Wright/73247968<br /> <br /> <br /> Publisher: Simon &amp; Schuster<br /> <br /> Published Date: June 23, 2026<br /> <br /> * https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-God-Test/Robert-Wright/9781668061657<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Interview via Substack'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Jack Goldsmith: I’m chatting today with Robert Wright about his terrific new book, '''The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning'''. <br /> <br /> So, I want to start off with the big picture, because your book places AI in the broadest possible context—not just as an important step in the history of technological change, but rather as an important step in the significantly longer history of basically our planet and our species. And that’s pretty cosmic, as the subtitle says.<br /> <br /> Why do you do that? What does it mean, and why is that perspective important?<br /> <br /> Bob Wright: Well, thanks for having me. Yeah, it’s a good question, because I could have gotten the core message across without getting so cosmic, I guess.<br /> <br /> The main purpose is to try to explain to people, including non-technical people, why there’s been this rapid growth of capability in AI; why, once you understand that, you should expect the capability to keep growing; why that, in addition to promising great blessings, is going to bring great risks, including grave ones, including maybe existential ones; and why the nature of those risks, in my view, dictates that we confront the challenge of this technology as a cohesive global community, which will take some doing because we’ve never really done that before for anything like a sustained period of time.<br /> <br /> And so I didn’t have to get into the history of life or anything to say what I just said, but I do think some important things are added when you step back and look at AI in the broader sweep of things.<br /> <br /> For starters, this is, in the entire three- or four-billion-year history of life, the first time a new form of intelligence that rivals or even exceeds human intelligence has appeared. It’s the first form of intelligence that is not organic in the technical sense of being carbon-based. It’s silicon-based, but it is organic in the everyday sense of being kind of natural.<br /> <br /> What I mean by that is I try to show that AI does, in some sense, grow kind of logically, naturally out of biological evolution. I mean, technological evolution broadly does, and AI as a form of intelligence does. And indeed, when we look at the evolutionary dynamics shaping it—the dynamics of technological evolution—we should expect it to have certain things in common with our own intelligence, which I think are important.<br /> <br /> So I think that’s one thing you get out of a broad perspective.<br /> <br /> Another thing is that I talk about this guy, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—a Catholic paleontologist, mystic, and theologian—who coined the term noosphere, based on the Greek word nous, in 1923 to describe what he called a planetary mind or a brain of brains, where the human brains were the neurons in this increasingly global brain.<br /> <br /> And technological history, including the invention of the internet, has, I think, made him look prescient. And I think there’s value in keeping in mind that AI is arriving as we more and more have the technical infrastructure for a kind of global information processing, a kind of global brain. And we have to reckon with the possibility that some of the neurons will be silicon, not human, and think about what our relationship to them is going to be.<br /> <br /> And I think one value of thinking in these terms is, first of all, that from a Teilhardian point of view, the whole unfolding of life is moving toward us being this kind of giant superorganism, you could say, with this giant brain.<br /> <br /> And I argue in the book that the logic of technological evolution is going to push us — I mean, if we respond rationally — toward something a little more like a global brain, in the sense of having more international governance.<br /> <br /> At the same time, I think the image of a superorganism should worry us because it’s, for obvious reasons, an image that’s favored by authoritarians and fascists. How much freedom do you have if you’re a cell in a superorganism?<br /> <br /> And I think AI greatly heightens the stakes of that question, precisely because it’s such a powerful tool of surveillance and control.<br /> <br /> So I think, on the one hand, the logic of technological evolution, especially AI, is pushing us toward the global coordination of certain policies and the creation of forms of supranational power. At the same time, it should make us wary of surrendering too much power...<br /> <br /> <br /> Read More of the Substack Conversation between Jack Goldsmith and Robert Wright [https://substack.com/home/post/p-201670588 '''here''']<br /> <br /> Also, More Book Reviews [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Book_Reviews_@GreenPolicy '''here @ GreenPolicy360''']<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎 <br /> <br /> <br /> AI / AGI<br /> <br /> <br /> May 29 / Forbes<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Fundraise values Anthropic AI company at nearly a trillion dollars'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Dario and Daniela Amodei, along with five cofounders, have a story to tell<br /> <br /> * https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2026/05/29/anthropics-cofounders-worth/<br /> <br /> <br /> ''When Anthropic announced on Thursday (May 28) that it had raised $65 billion at a valuation of $965 billion, it didn’t just become the most valuable AI startup in the world, eclipsing $852 billion-valued archrival OpenAI. It also ballooned the individual fortunes of Anthropic’s seven cofounders — more than doubling their net worths to $16.6 billion apiece, Forbes estimates.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''In Rarified Air'''''<br /> <br /> ''Siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, as well as their five other cofounders Jack Clark, Sam McCandlish, Chris Olah, Tom Brown and Jared Kaplan, are in rarified air when it comes to entrepreneurs who struck it rich in the generative AI boom...''<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Pope Leo XIV encyclical re AI and Humanitas.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> “Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed,” Pope Leo said in announcing the text of his first [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=encyclical&amp;go=Go '''encyclical''']. “The word is strong, I know, but deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention...”<br /> <br /> And into the encyclical's key words:<br /> <br /> &quot;To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life. Our task today is not only ethical or technical. It is ecological in the deepest sense, for it concerns a new dimension of our common home.&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> “Crucial questions impose themselves on our conscience and can no longer be avoided: Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?”<br /> <br /> <br /> At GreenPolicy360, understanding and protecting '''[[The Commons]]''' is also a key to realizing values, ideals and ideas we are carrying forward...<br /> <br /> <br /> The encyclical's presentation went out globally with a special focus on the AI frontier work of Anthropic, with a co-founder, [https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-be-guided-outside-big-tech-2026-05-25/ '''Olah at the Encyclical's unveiling'''] ...<br /> <br /> <br /> &gt;The dramatic unveiling of the new encyclical overshadowed the document itself in some ways. In an unprecedented move, Leo personally presided over its presentation and sat on a panel at the Vatican with not only leading theologians, but also Christopher Olah, 33, the billionaire co-founder of top AI company Anthropic. <br /> <br /> <br /> ❇️<br /> <br /> <br /> Washington Post / May 25, 2026 -- '''Anthropic aligns with Vatican over White House as Pope Leo stokes AI fears'''<br /> <br /> With Anthropic already in a dispute with the Trump administration, co-founder Christopher Olah helped Pope Leo unveil his encyclical on the risks of artificial intelligence<br /> <br /> * https://wapo.st/4uyQBlb<br /> <br /> * https://www.anthropic.com/news/chris-olah-pope-leo-encyclical<br /> <br /> * https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/pope-leo-warns-ai-should-be-disarmed-in-manifesto-on-potential-dangers<br /> <br /> * https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-102521111.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/anthropics-olah-says-ai-must-be-guided-outside-big-tech-2026-05-25/<br /> <br /> * https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/25/the-guardian-view-on-the-pope-and-claude-encyclical-on-ai-is-right-to-put-humanity-first<br /> <br /> <br /> '''At the Vatican'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhKH_aiBcis<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Via The Vatican News | The Holy See'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2026-05/pope-leo-xiv-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas-ai.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html<br /> <br /> <br /> '''10 quotes from Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, ‘Magnifica Humanitas’'''<br /> <br /> * https://uscatholic.org/articles/202605/10-quotes-from-pope-leo-xivs-first-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Previous in 2020, &quot;The Call for AI Ethics&quot;''' <br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/the-call/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/renaissance/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/the-first-signatories/<br /> <br /> * https://www.romecall.org/news/<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Previous in 1891, &quot;Rerum Novarum&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerum_novarum<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''AI Use Case Inventory'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''Artificial Intelligence:''' <br /> <br /> : Perspectives from the US Environmental Protection Agency<br /> <br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/ai-use-case-inventory<br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/open-data-policies<br /> * https://www.epa.gov/data/where-find-epa-data<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''GreenPolicy360 Advisory:'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In Development -- National Climate Plans Best Practices Project 1.0, AI 2026-27'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> Goal: To Utilize the Current (US) State and (Global/International) National Climate Action Plans/Data to Identify Actionable '''[[Green Best Practices]]'''<br /> <br /> Strategy: Enable AI Tool Sets to Scan Climate Plan Databases and Distribute Recommended 'High Priority' &amp; Green Best Practice Action Policies<br /> <br /> <br /> Reference: '''[[National Climate Plans]]'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Blue green lines 1.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Additional References:'''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''US State Climate Policy Action Plans'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.climatepolicydashboard.org/policies/climate-governance-equity/climate-action-plans<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Priority Climate Action Plan (PCAP) Directory'''<br /> <br /> ''The Climate Action Plan Directory organizes data collected from 211 Priority Climate Action Plans (PCAP) submitted by US state governments, Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), Tribes, and territories under EPA’s Climate Pollution Reduction Grants (CPRG) program. The directory presents information from more than 30 data categories related to GHG inventories, GHG reduction measures, benefits for low-income and disadvantaged communities (LIDACs), and other PCAP elements.''<br /> <br /> ''A state climate action plan, also called a climate plan, details the policies and strategies a state intends to implement to meet its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets. A climate plan typically includes a GHG emissions inventory, regional and local climate impacts, and a discussion of GHG emissions reduction targets. The plan identifies climate mitigation actions, their potential social, environmental, and economic benefits, and recommendations and strategies for implementing each mitigation action, often quantifying the expected reduction in emissions.''<br /> <br /> ''Effective climate action plans will have a legislative directive that requires a robust community engagement process, input from a climate advisory group, a near-term due date for a finalized plan, and periodic updates. Climate action plans should also incorporate and address environmental justice throughout the planning process and within the plan itself, and show transparency and accountability by detailing the methodology and community engagement process.''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:GreenPolicy360 Today.jpg|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Green_Best_Practices]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[GreenAction]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Question of Our Time / Today, Here &amp; Now, in the Midst of the 21st Century'''<br /> <br /> '''Where are you?'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ➡️ What is your state's climate action plan?<br /> <br /> ➡️ What is your nation's climate action plan?<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Climate_Plans_Enforcement_-_Resources GRN360: Climate Plans Enforcement Initiative] | [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Methods_to_enforce_climate_pledges-NDCs_-_Dec_2021.png Enforce Climate Plan Pledges]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''National Climate Plans Database Information via GreenPolicy360'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''[[National Climate Plans]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/National_Climate_Plans<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In the U.S. and Worldwide'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;'''It's a Good Time for [[Planet Citizen Action]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;[[Each of us can make a positive difference]]&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earth in Human Hands.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :[http://www.planetcitizen.org &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Planet Citizens&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Earth Is in Your Hands'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::&lt;big&gt;'''[[Generation Green]]'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :::[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Generation_Green &lt;big&gt;&quot;Vita contemplativa to Vita activa&quot;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Green Branching Out.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> '''2025'''<br /> <br /> <br /> December 2025 <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven approach to climate action and sustainable development'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Via Nature Communications<br /> <br /> * https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53956-1<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> From A16Z New Media<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''It's Time to Build'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The electro-industrial stack will move the world'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Ryan McEntush<br /> <br /> ''The next industrial revolution won’t just happen in factories, but inside the machines that power them.''<br /> <br /> ''Software transformed how we think, design, and communicate. Now it’s transforming how we move, build, and produce. Advances in electrification, materials, and AI are converging, bringing true software control to the physical world. Machines are beginning to sense, learn, and act on their own.''<br /> <br /> ''This is the rise of the electro-industrial stack—the combined technologies that power electric vehicles, drones, data centers, and modern manufacturing. It connects the atoms that move the world to the bits that command it: minerals refined into components, energy stored in batteries, electricity directed by power electronics, motion delivered through precision motors, all coordinated by software. It’s the invisible foundation behind every breakthrough in physical automation; it’s the difference between software that merely summons a taxi and software that takes the wheel.''<br /> <br /> ''But the capacity to build this stack, from refining critical materials to fabricating advanced chips, is slipping away. If the United States wants to lead the next industrial era, it must make the hardware that underpins it. The nations that master the electro-industrial stack will define the future of industrial and military technologies.''<br /> <br /> ''Software ate the world. Now it will move it.''<br /> <br /> * https://a16z.com/why-software-is-eating-the-world/<br /> <br /> <br /> ➡️<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Forward-deployed motions take AI to the 99%'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Joe Schmidt, A16Z<br /> <br /> ''AI is the most exciting technology breakthrough of our lifetimes. So far, though, most of the benefits from new startups have accrued to the 1% of companies that are in Silicon Valley—either literally in the Bay Area or part of that extended network. This makes sense, too: startup founders want to sell to companies they recognize and can easily get to, whether that means driving to their offices or getting a connection from the VC on their board.''<br /> <br /> ''In 2026, this will flip. Companies will realize that the vast majority of the AI opportunity lives outside of Silicon Valley, and we’re going to see new founders use forward-deployed motions to discover more opportunities that are hiding inside big, legacy verticals. The opportunity stands to be massive in traditional consulting and services industries, like system integrators and implementation firms, and in slower-moving industries like manufacturing.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Re: [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/New_Definitions_of_National_Security '''''New Definitions of National Security''''']<br /> <br /> Extract from Foreign Policy<br /> <br /> ''Over the last two decades, climate change has contributed to instability around the world—bolstering the ranks of terror groups, sparking territorial disputes, and triggering mass migration. It’s no wonder that militaries and international security organizations increasingly see climate change as a formidable national security threat, and that they have in turn taken on greater roles in fighting it.''<br /> <br /> ''In recent years, new technology has transformed the tools available to mitigate the effects of climate change. Specifically, artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly become a widespread instrument in the climate fight—even as it consumes exceptional amounts of energy and water itself. Today, militaries and nonstate actors, including the United Nations, are leveraging AI to foretell climate-related disasters, optimize energy use, and monitor ecological degradation.''<br /> <br /> * https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/12/01/ai-military-climate-dual-use-technology-threat/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> October 2025<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''We're Looking at You'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : 'A First Generation of AI Scientists'<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Periodic Labs.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Our goal is to create an AI scientist.&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://periodic.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Intriguing New Start Up That Is Close To Home'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Periodic Labs On Our Radar<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Our goal is to assist in integrating AI science into Earth science, in order to advance the vital work of the past 50+ years of [[The Modern Environmental Movement]] in which we have been integrally involved.<br /> <br /> Perspective, facts, science, health, quality of life became the mission statement of our work since we joined up with &quot;Mr. Science&quot;, as Congressman and leader on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology '''[[George E. Brown Jr]]''' came to be known.<br /> <br /> We are persistent in keeping on with the work. Vast data sets that George Brown's physics and engineering efforts envisioned and brought forward over three decades with state of the art and science programs and projects, the best possible of the era, are now about to move faster and farther into the 21st Century.<br /> <br /> Our familial partners, with aid of Andreessen Horowitz (A16z), and Accel, and university and private partners are now going to the next level.<br /> <br /> George Brown would be very pleased to see, and help accelerate the effort if he were still here.<br /> <br /> We will step up with Mr. Science and more in mind...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:AI in Earth Science.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Read more about George and us...<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/George_E._Brown_Jr<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Advancing Science, Facts, Technology and Data to Make the Case for Environmental Protection&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> : 1960s/70s, Beginnings of Planet Citizen Eco-Action, Big Science, and a New Vision<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In Memory of Congressman George Brown'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> Visionary Leadership, Historic Environmental Achievements<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:George in Memory, a Man of Science and Humanity.jpg]]<br /> <br /> :::[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Association_for_the_Advancement_of_Science &lt;small&gt;American Association for the Advancement of Science&lt;/small&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''[[PlanetCitizen]]'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/User:Siterunner '''Steve Schmidt GreenPolicy360 Siterunner''']: <br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Brown_Jr. '''George E. Brown'''] became known as Mr. Science in Congress and for thirty+ years, I saw my friend George as a patriot who became a Planet Citizen for the ages<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Good science needs good data .png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Good_science_needs_good_data_.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Stats_-_Green_Research_%26_Science<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_Education<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Global Tech Changemakers'''<br /> <br /> Beyond Silicon Valley &amp; Mega Corporations<br /> <br /> The Rest of the World<br /> <br /> * https://restofworld.org/row100/#filters<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> As the Nobel Prizes in Economics are awarded, GreenPolicy360 points at a geopolitical race in energy and AI between the US and China.<br /> <br /> Let's take time to look more closely (as the US falls behind under a backward looking president with policies in opposition to renewable energy and forward, internationally demanded production. <br /> <br /> Start here... <br /> <br /> <br /> ''Today, China produces 75% of lithium-ion batteries globally and manufactures 90% of the neodymium magnets that make motors spin. In power electronics and embedded compute, it’s rapidly gaining ground.''<br /> <br /> ''That means that China controls the means of producing electric vehicles (EVs), drones, robots, and all of the other electric products that are replacing the combustion-driven machines on which America built its might.''<br /> <br /> ''As we speak, everything that moves, heats, lights up, computes, or converts energy is being rebuilt to perform better, faster, cheaper, quieter, and as a freebie, cleaner around electric technology.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.notboring.co/p/7653b980-dd32-4d8c-88c6-1543bec70220?postPreview=paid&amp;updated=2025-08-26T12%3A09%3A11.763Z&amp;audience=everyone&amp;free_preview=false&amp;freemail=true<br /> <br /> * https://electricslide.notboring.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Electric Stack Technology Cost Curves (1990-2024).jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Pause here to reflect on the eco-nomic and strategic advantages of 'clean energy' vs 'full costs' of fossil fuel powered economies (per a GreenPolicy360 paradigm of [[Eco-nomics]])'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Eco-nomics<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Environmental full-cost accounting]]'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_full-cost_accounting<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Now consider 'Electricity generation', China v U.S. and follow the data, the stats, trendline, the dynamics of change and what this is indicating and signaling re: geopolitical competitiveness today and into the the mid 21st Century'''<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:China v United States, Electricity Generation 1985-2024.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''The Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) Era'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'Are You Talking to Me'<br /> <br /> :* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_pre-trained_transformer<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> September 17, 2025<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Another Warning About AI'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Harkening back to the old days when Dispatch News Service was independently, and bravely, distributing the costs-of-war, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre '''My Lai'''] investigative news stories by Sy Hersh. David Obst, who started Dispatch, tells the story of Seymour Hersh better than anyone in my opinion (other than Sy himself) and since your GreenPolicy360 founder was there to assist, in DC, in LA, in Chicago, in Europe, and with the Vietnam Moratorium Committee in 69/70/71, here is an update, today's Sy Hersh, now online with Substack distribution as Sy investigates and forwards another eye opening warning.<br /> <br /> What's AI and AGI to you and all of our readers around our 360 world? And, since we at GreenPolicy360, have been involved with Wikipedia since its launch, let's take a first look at the artificial intel world of today from the vantage point of an open source online 'encyclopedia'.<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence<br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT (Empire of AI: OpenAI - https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593657500)<br /> <br /> <br /> Before Sy, as investigative journalist that he is, gives us his take, let's look at a take from a personal, close up connection at A16Z - https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/02/a-new-a16z-report-looks-at-which-ai-companies-startups-are-actually-paying-for/<br /> <br /> <br /> Now, on to Sy and his view of AI costs... think of the upside/downside of AI, the pluses/minuses, pros and cons, a cost-benefit analysis as a geo-political rush for front-of-market dominance is taking place now in ways that will change 'everything'... <br /> <br /> * https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/the-hidden-costs-of-artificial-intelligence<br /> <br /> <br /> The boom in Artificial Intelligence (AI) production comes with a big cost... <br /> <br /> The AI 'bubble' grows...<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Kate Crawford writes in [https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-AI-Planetary-Artificial-Intelligence/dp/0300264631/ref=sr_1_1 '''Atlas of AI'''] ... the world’s artificial intelligence companies, (are) crafting the myth of AI as “the cloud,” implying “something floating and delicate within a natural green industry. Servers are hidden in nondescript data centers, and their polluting qualities are far less visible than the bellowing smokestacks of coal-fired power stations.”''<br /> <br /> ''The fact is, as she writes, “it takes a gargantuan amount of energy to run the computational infrastructure of Amazon’s Web Services or Microsoft’s Azure, and the carbon footprint of the AI systems that run on those platforms is growing. Certainly, the industry has made significant efforts to make data centers more energy efficient and to increase their use of renewable energy.” But the efforts have accomplished little.<br /> <br /> “Already,” Crawford reports, “the carbon footprint of the world’s computational infrastructure has matched that of the world’s aviation industry at its height, and it is increasing at a faster rate.” One Canadian study estimates that the tech sector will contribute 14 percent of global greenhouse emissions by 2040, and a Swedish team predicts that the electricity demands of data centers will increase fifteenfold by 2030...''<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Think about Green AI as &quot;the cloud&quot; arrives in your life, on your devices, at home, in the office, all around, every day, everywhere. <br /> <br /> An UnGreen AI is coming with a rush, offering and prying data, and needing and demanding immense rising magnitudes of energy and power.<br /> <br /> AI has a voracious appetite...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Green AI / Green Artificial Intelligence'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> :'''Environmental Solutions Using Big Picture Interconnectivity Thinking'''<br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: We agree with Tyler in the following interview as he states (as highlighted by us) that 'memoir, biography, anecdote... secrets' carry exceptional meaning for Artificial Intelligence (AI) large learning models (LLMs). <br /> <br /> The first extensive public revelation of AI systems over the past several years has led us at GreenPolicy360 to confirm via metrics that our multi-year plan to place our prime source content in the open-access, distributive web public domain has produced a fast-expanding multiplier effect. <br /> <br /> Many of our stories, told from a first-hand point of view of the origins of what we refer to as the beginnings of the modern environmental movement are now, with our revelations, memoir material, previously untold biography, anecdote and more now out and about and being freely served up in AI chats 'around the world'.<br /> <br /> We are succeeding in our purposeful mission with Green AI... to inform, share, inspire and 'til the fields with green seeds and best practices.<br /> <br /> Onward planet citizens...<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Eric Topol Interview of Tyler Cowen'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> May 11, 2025<br /> <br /> Tyler Cowen: ''The AI is your smartest reader. It’s your most sympathetic reader. It will remember what you tell it. So I think humans should sit down and ask, what does the AI need to know? And also, (bf added) '''what is it that I know that’s not on the historical record anywhere? That’s not just repetition if I put it down, say on the internet. So there’s no point in writing repetitions anymore because the AI already knows those things. So the value of what you’d call broadly, memoir, biography, anecdote, you could say secrets. It’s now much higher.''' And the value of repeating basic truths, which by the way, I love as an economist, to be clear, like free trade, tariffs are usually bad, those are basic truths. But just repeating that people will be going to the AI and saying it again won’t make the AI any better. So '''everything you write or podcast, you should have this point in mind'''.''<br /> <br /> <br /> For more from Tyler Cowen (and his exceptional mind) visit his and Alex Tabarrok's website - Marginal Revolution / Marginal Revolution University (MRU) - https://marginalrevolution.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> Eric Topol - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Topol<br /> <br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_artificial_intelligence<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> More re: AI in the US circa 2025: '''It's a Wild, Wild AI World'''<br /> <br /> Battles in the Information Services, Search Space with Google and consequences of the U.S. Google anti-monopoly legal decision<br /> <br /> Impacts on AI 'startup ecosystem', VCs, including Y Combinator and accelerator tech development, agentics, and upcoming entrepreneurial re-configurations<br /> <br /> * https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/13/y-combinator-says-google-is-a-monopolist-that-has-stunted-the-startup-ecosystem/<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/11/microsoft-and-national-geographic-announce-winners-of-ai-for-earth-innovation-grant/ '''Microsoft and National Geographic announce winners of AI for Earth Innovation Grant''']<br /> <br /> : • https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/16/microsofts-ai-for-earth-innovation-grant-gives-data-scientists-access-to-ai-tools/<br /> <br /> :: • https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/11/microsoft-commits-50-million-more-to-its-ai-for-earth-program-to-save-the-planet/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:PlanetCitizen banner 800x163.jpg|link=https://greenpolicy360.net/w/PlanetCitizen]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;GreenPolicy360 ToC - https://greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360-eOS&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> A 21st Century AI/Machine Learning Case Study<br /> <br /> '''''Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools''''' <br /> <br /> * https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2023arXiv230204761S/abstract<br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''NOAA scientists harness machine learning to advance climate models'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> March 1st, 2023<br /> <br /> * https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/news/noaa-scientists-harness-machine-learning-to-advance-climate-models/<br /> <br /> * https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''How artificial intelligence is fast becoming a key tool for climate science (2021)'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-artificial-intelligence-is-fast-becoming-a-key-tool-for-climate-science/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Climate Modeling'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://allenai.org/climate-modeling<br /> <br /> ''Planetary-scale Earth simulations known as global climate model projections are the primary sources of information on future climate change.''<br /> <br /> ''Climate models are based on mathematical equations represented using a grid mesh that covers the globe: a finer grid mesh is more accurate but much more computationally expensive. Current global climate projections agree that a world with more greenhouse gases will be warmer everywhere, especially over land and at high latitudes.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Networking grnlinks.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Artificial intelligence]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Rights]]<br /> [[Category:Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-nomics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:EOS eco Operating System]]<br /> [[Category:Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Energy Policy]]<br /> [[Category:GreenLinks]]<br /> [[Category:GreenPolicy360]]<br /> [[Category:Green Best Practices]]<br /> [[Category:Green Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Health]]<br /> [[Category:Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Maps]]<br /> [[Category:Media]]<br /> [[Category:Mobile Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Online Education]]<br /> [[Category:Planet API]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Renewable Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Youth]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Air Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Air Quality]]<br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Atmospheric Science]]<br /> [[Category:Best Practices]]<br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:City-County Governments]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Earth360]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Law]] <br /> [[Category:Earth Observations]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science]]<br /> [[Category:Earth Science from Space]]<br /> [[Category:Earth System Science]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-ethics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-nomics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecological Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Economics]]<br /> [[Category:Economic Development]]<br /> [[Category:Economic Justice]]<br /> [[Category:Education]]<br /> [[Category:Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Energy Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Security]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Full-cost Accounting]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Security, National Security]]<br /> [[Category:EOS eco Operating System]]<br /> [[Category:Externalities]]<br /> [[Category:Fact Checking]]<br /> [[Category:Fossil Fuels]]<br /> [[Category:Global Security]]<br /> [[Category:Global Warming]]<br /> [[Category:Green Business]]<br /> [[Category:Green Networking]]<br /> [[Category:Green Platform]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Green Values]]<br /> [[Category:GreenPolicy360]]<br /> [[Category:Health]]<br /> [[Category:Internet]]<br /> [[Category:Land Ethic]]<br /> [[Category:Media]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Capital]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resources]]<br /> [[Category:Networking]]<br /> [[Category:New Economy]]<br /> [[Category:New Space]]<br /> [[Category:Online Education]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Scientist]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Plastic Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Policies]]<br /> [[Category:Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Renewable Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Social Justice]]<br /> [[Category:Solar Energy]]<br /> [[Category:State]]<br /> [[Category:Strategic Demands]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability Policies]]<br /> [[Category:ThinBlueLayer]]<br /> [[Category:Toxics and Pollution]]<br /> [[Category:Threat Multiplier]]<br /> [[Category:Virtual Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Virtual Planet]]<br /> [[Category:Whole Earth]]<br /> [[Category:Wind Energy]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]</div>

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<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Anthropocene]]<br /> [[Category:Green Graphics]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=File:Subordinate_AI_and_an_Ironic_Question.PNG&diff=138352 2026-10-05T13:22:21Z

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Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=BigPicture_Media&diff=138351 2026-10-05T11:41:56Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> [[File:BigPicture.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Focusing on Stories that Move Us'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> October 2026<br /> <br /> The film ''' 'The Social Reckoning' '''... ''arrives as Meta faces billions of dollars in settlements and verdicts over claims its platforms harmed the mental health of young users, with more cases headed to trial.''<br /> <br /> <br /> Frances Haugen: <br /> <br /> ''&quot;There have been many whistleblowers that have come out of Meta's AI teams talking about the lack of safety...&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;I would pause before rushing into giving Mark the level of power that he's trying to seize when it comes to AI.&quot;''<br /> <br /> * https://www.cbsnews.com/news/aaron-sorkin-on-the-social-reckoning/<br /> <br /> <br /> More: <br /> <br /> &quot;Doom Loops&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-is-creating-doom-loops-all-over-the-economy<br /> <br /> <br /> 👁️‍🗨️<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[Green AI]]''' casts an eye on Artificial Intelligence<br /> <br /> <br /> '''An AI Supercomputer Is Created for a Mission... Its Name Is HAL'''<br /> <br /> : We listen in as two of its creators explains how HAL came to be...<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Trumbull vfx master.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Trumbull_vfx_master.jpg&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> The HAL 9000 was envisioned by creators and science, as a new type of neural intelligence, a machine brain.<br /> <br /> Hal is heuristic and algorithmic -- and much more as we learn on a mission far from Earth, a mission with deep meaning.<br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence is now here in a fast approaching future and we recall Supercomputer [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000 '''HAL 9000'''] <br /> <br /> A warning of what is on the line for humanity as we ride along in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey '''2001: A Space Odyssey'''] ... <br /> <br /> <br /> HAL's memorable words --<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;I'm sorry, Dave....&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;It can only be attributable to human error....&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.<br /> <br /> HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.<br /> <br /> Dave: What's the problem?<br /> <br /> HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.<br /> <br /> Dave: What are you talking about, HAL?<br /> <br /> HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film)<br /> <br /> * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/characters/nm0706937<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:I'm sorry Dave.jpg]]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:HAL_is_watching_U....png<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> HAL's path to existence is discussed by Douglas Trumbull in a 2020 interview with the Museum of the Moving Image... <br /> <br /> * https://movingimage.org/programs/envisioning-2001-without-hal-douglas-trumbull-and-michael-benson/<br /> <br /> * https://movingimage.org/collection/concept-art-studies-for-deep-space-vehicle-pod-1965/<br /> <br /> <br /> Doug recalls the mid 1960s, the inception and development of '2001, the Movie'. We hear of creatives at work, Graphic Films, NASA, storyboarding and visualizing with an evolving narrative and screenplay. <br /> <br /> Exceptional to hear Doug share an inside look at how HAL came to be in the process of epic meetings bringing together science and artistic process...<br /> <br /> With historical appreciation to Doug's visual effects and Stanley Kubrick's art of cinema, let us also give a special credit to the production influence of AI theoretician Marvin Minsky on HAL's creation. <br /> <br /> <br /> Michael Benson: <br /> <br /> From System/360 Athena concepts to HAL<br /> <br /> 'This computer could work heuristically and algorithmically...' (H &amp; Al, HAL)<br /> <br /> <br /> Wikipedia:<br /> <br /> MIT Professor Marvin Minsky was an adviser to Stanley Kubrick on his movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. <br /> <br /> Arthur C. Clarke's novel of the same name mentions Minsky. <br /> <br /> In it, he achieves a crucial breakthrough in artificial intelligence in the then-future 1980s, paving the way for HAL 9000 in the early 21st century... <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Minsky<br /> <br /> <br /> More References:<br /> <br /> * https://www.mit.edu/~dxh/marvin/web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/minsky.html<br /> <br /> * https://scienceandfilm.org/articles/2643/marvin-minsky-and-hal-9000<br /> <br /> * https://magazine.mindplex.ai/post/hals-legacy-exploring-ai-through-hal-9000<br /> <br /> * https://zsjunai.github.io/history-of-ai/en/biographies/minsky<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Daisy, Daisy...&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/ROA-Times/issues/1992/rt9201/920112/01120086.htm<br /> <br /> * https://youtu.be/E7WQ1tdxSqI<br /> <br /> * https://youtu.be/V0bUd6KrQGg<br /> <br /> <br /> Today, as humanity approaches questions of out-of-control technology created by humanity .... <br /> <br /> We ask, '''[[Planet Citizens]] and [[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]''' ask, 'What's Next?' <br /> <br /> <br /> Read a 'God Test' Substack Conversation between Jack Goldsmith and Robert Wright [https://substack.com/home/post/p-201670588 '''here''']<br /> <br /> Also, read more about Artificial Intelligence, [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Green_AI '''@ Green AI''']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''2025'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Jane Goodall, there still is hope - and action.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Inspiring...&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> She blazed the trail.<br /> <br /> The next steps are up to us.<br /> <br /> <br /> Dr. Jane Goodall’s final message to the world: “I want to make sure that you all understand that each and every one of you has a role to play. You may not know it, you may not find it, but your life matters and you are here for a reason.”<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfLKHY52ERc<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://janegoodall.org/<br /> <br /> * https://janegoodall.org/rememberingjane/<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3b6zSpy7P4<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ST6pqfCTy0<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Goodall on the power of the young.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Poet-Educator Katharine Lee Bates.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''From Sea to Shining Sea'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://vimeo.com/1049155969<br /> <br /> &quot;From Sea to Shining Sea: Katharine Lee Bates and The Story of America the Beautiful&quot; is a film meant for our time. In an era where waves of grievance with American institutions, life, and politics are spreading coast-to-coast, a documentary by writer/director John de Graaf reminds of the beauty, beliefs and the tribulations arising from our land, nation, and experiment we call a 'democratic republic'. John de Graaf's vision of &quot;The Story of America the Beautiful&quot; should be seen from sea to shining sea, especially by young Americans. Hope for a better tomorrow is here all around us. <br /> <br /> -- Steven Schmidt, GreenPolicy360<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''2024'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Stopping the Steal, HBO documentary Sept 2024.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;HBO&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> HBO Documentary Films presents 'Stopping the Steal'<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Stopping the Steal: A Documentary Film'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Recounted in detail by former staff members of the Trump administration, Republican political appointees, and elected state officials, 'Stopping the Steal' tracks the movement to discredit the 2020 presidential election.'' <br /> <br /> ''Unfolding chronologically, the documentary explores and debunks the claims of ballot tampering, illegal immigrants and deceased people voting, and hacking or malfunction of Dominion Voting Systems’ electronic ballot machines.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> (LA Times / September 17, 2024) '''‘Stopping the Steal’ examines Trump’s attempt to subvert 2020 election, and what it means for 2024'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2024-09-17/stopping-the-steal-documentary-hbo-trump<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Getting folks to watch a documentary about the Big Lie is a Big Ask. Who wants to relive that horrible chapter in America’s political history, especially while we’re writing a new, possibly less-horrible chapter?''<br /> <br /> ''Despite its title, HBO’s “Stopping the Steal” is as much about what lies ahead of us as it is about that other election that put Joe Biden in office and then-President Trump on a warpath. The 90-minute film, which premieres at 9 p.m. Tuesday on HBO, explores the depth and veracity of Trump’s scheme to overturn the election results through the first-hand accounts of the people who were there.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> (NPR/All Things Considered / September 14, 2024) ''' 'Stopping the Steal' documents the efforts to help Trump'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.npr.org/2024/09/14/nx-s1-5107592/stopping-the-steal-documents-the-efforts-to-help-trump<br /> <br /> * https://www.npr.org/2022/07/28/1114224368/stop-the-steal-has-moved-beyond-trump-now-its-threatening-future-elections<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The new HBO documentary 'Stopping the Steal' takes viewers behind the scenes into the efforts by former President Trump to challenge the 2020 presidential election results. The film features interviews from former White House staff and appointees, including former Attorney General William Barr, as well as elected Republican officials in Arizona and Georgia.''<br /> <br /> ''Recounted in detail by former staff members of the Trump Administration, Republican political appointees, and elected state officials, “Stopping the Steal” tracks the evolution of the movement to discredit the American election starting as early as July 2020 when the legitimacy of the election process began to be publicly questioned. Unfolding chronologically through to Jan. 6, 2021, when an angry mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, the film explores the debunked claims of a stolen election including accusations of ballot tampering, alleged voting by illegal immigrants and deceased individuals, and hacking or malfunction of Dominion Voting Systems’ electronic ballot machines.''<br /> <br /> ''As President Trump’s supporters pressure officials in Arizona and Georgia responsible for ratifying the count, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger recalls when he was told to find 11,000 additional votes for Trump, and Arizona Speaker of the House of Representatives Rusty Bowers describes getting a call from the White House urging him to further investigate the Maricopa County vote results despite any proof of malfeasance. “Stopping the Steal” is a clear-eyed account of Republican officials who stood firmly by their principles often at great personal cost.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ······························································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Stand Up and Tell the Facts as Best You Know Them'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> The 'End Is Nye', a Fall Season TV series exploring Climate Change -- and its coming impacts.<br /> <br /> Bill Nye, &quot;The Science Guy&quot; as he is called, continues to educate and reach schools across the Internet, on TV, in films, documentaries, lectures and talks in nations around the world. <br /> <br /> This year, 2024, is a good time to watch Bill explain why we need to pay attention to life on Earth, science, our communities and our environment.<br /> <br /> Btw, Bill Nye has said he was inspired to begin his career by the famous educational decades of work on TV by Mr. Wizard! Your GreenPolicy360 siterunner, who worked as an editor of Don Herbert, Mr. Wizard in the 1970s in New York City publishing, has a special affection for science education. GreenPolicy360 tips our green hat to two master teachers of science here ... Don Herbert and Bill Nye. <br /> <br /> Communicators with a spark in their eyes and care for kids and teaching. Their lessons carry on...<br /> <br /> Here's to great teachers who have made a world of difference!!<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Bill_Nye,_the_Science_Guy,_speaks_at_the_March_for_Science-Washington_DC_2017.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Mr_Wizard_-_Don_Herbert.png<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Bill Nye explains.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''2023'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:The Movement and the Madman - PBS - March 2023.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> Watch scenes from the PBS 'American Experience' special event documentary film -- '''The Movement and the ‘Madman’ '''<br /> <br /> — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfhHcq-IUQo<br /> <br /> <br /> Strategic Demands:<br /> <br /> In the “Movement and the Madman” 2023 documentary, PBS reveals the how close the U.S. came to using nuclear weapons to force Vietnam to end the war the U.S. had escalated on the election of President Richard Nixon. <br /> <br /> Daniel Ellsberg, a nuclear war planner, as his Doomsday Machine ‘confessions’ chronicled, recalls the Vietnam Moratorium Peace demonstrations of October-November 1969 in the book and film — and with National Security Council senior staff now, decades later, retells how close we came to nuclear war.<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/the-movement-and-the-madman/<br /> <br /> <br /> Strategic Demands' editor at that time was a student and a coordinator of the Vietnam Moratorium Committee. Steve Schmidt, some 50 years later, became a source of information for the PBS film and, pointing to Daniel Ellsberg and Roger Morris as first-hand source accounts, helped to guide the documentary producers to revealing moments of history here:<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[The Movement and the Madman - PBS - March 2023]]'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/The_Movement_and_the_Madman_-_PBS_-_March_2023<br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Surviving_Victory:_Security_Priorities<br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Vietnam_Moratorium_for_Peace_1969-1970<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''PBS'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Movement and the ‘Madman’'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> PBS PREMIERE MARCH 28 ON AMERICAN EXPERIENCE<br /> <br /> The documentary film tells the little-known story of a dramatic showdown between a protest movement and a president — and the power of protest …<br /> <br /> Citizen action, as is now revealed, prevented the use of nuclear weapons<br /> <br /> * https://www.movementandthemadman.com/home<br /> <br /> * https://www.movementandthemadman.com/history<br /> <br /> * https://www.movementandthemadman.com/preview<br /> <br /> * https://www.movementandthemadman.com/interviewees<br /> <br /> * https://www.movementandthemadman.com/filmmakers<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:A Film About the Power of Protest.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:The Movement and the 'Madman' - 2023.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ·····················<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Canary'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''&quot;I had no idea was I was getting into...&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The official trailer for the Adventure/Climate Documentary about the life story of Lonnie Thompson<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxnQKQQL49M<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''&quot;The fight for our future begins at 18,000 feet&quot;...&quot;'''<br /> <br /> * https://canary.oscilloscope.net/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> About the Directors and the film ...<br /> <br /> * https://twitter.com/alexrivest_phd<br /> <br /> * https://variety.com/2023/film/news/canary-documentary-oscilloscope-1235697694/<br /> <br /> <br /> Read more about Lonnie Thompson and Ellen Moseley Thompson<br /> <br /> * https://alumnimagazine.osu.edu/story/journey-two-courageous-climate-scientists<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Danny O’Malley, directed the film with MIT-trained Neuroscientist Alex Rivest, PhD. It’s set to open in limited release with a special nationwide screening on Sept. 20, 2023.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The subject of the film is Doctor '''Lonnie Thompson''', who is referred to as an explorer “who went where no scientist had gone before and transformed our idea of what is possible.” He’s been globally recognized for his drilling an analysis of ice cores from various regions of the world in the hopes of better understanding the Earth’s climate.'' <br /> <br /> ''“When we say Lonnie is like a real-life superhero, it’s not hyperbole,” the director said. <br /> <br /> “Unlike the glaciers at the poles, the tropical high mountain glaciers Lonnie studies provide water to billions of people, and when they are gone, there’s going to be catastrophic consequences that will affect everyone. Lonnie is doing his work and telling his story because it can save lives. So, it’s not just a great adventure story. It has the potential to make a difference.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360: Here's to Paleoclimatology and the science it teaches us as we navigate into the future ... '''<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonnie_Thompson<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Oppenheimer movie - 2023.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Looking Back: At Trinity, the First Nuclear Bomb Test - 1945]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Trinity monument m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Looking_Back:_At_Trinity,_the_First_Nuclear_Bomb_Test_-_1945<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ························································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Love... the wonder and beauty of the earth - Stewart Udall, the Politics of Beauty.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Stewart Udall: The Politics of Beauty'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Documentary film, Directed by John de Graaf<br /> <br /> :* https://stewartudallfilm.org/<br /> :* https://stewartudallfilm.org/about-the-film/<br /> :* https://stewartudallfilm.org/about-the-team/<br /> <br /> :* https://www.udallcenter.arizona.edu/news/getting-know-stew-stewart-udall-politics-beauty<br /> <br /> <br /> On Utah Public Radio, listen to Film Director John de Graaf talk of Stewart Udall's environmental legacy<br /> <br /> :* https://www.upr.org/show/access-utah/2023-04-06/stewart-udall-the-politics-of-beauty-on-thursdays-access-utah<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Udall called on all Americans to move away from our emphasis on economic growth and consumerism and toward quality of life, and a new politics centered on beauty, frugal living, appreciation of nature and the arts, and a recognition of the Earth’s limits.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;His politics live on..&quot;'<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Watch the Udall, 'Politics of Beauty' '''<br /> <br /> : * https://vimeo.com/797101535<br /> <br /> <br /> Stewart Udall left a profound legacy of conservation and environmental justice as Secretary of the Interior during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. His social and environmental successes stemmed from his ability to bring together people with disparate interests, and inspire them to achieve common goals. <br /> <br /> Udall called on all Americans to move away from our emphasis on economic growth and consumerism and toward quality of life, and a new politics centered on beauty, frugal living, appreciation of nature and the arts, and a recognition of the Earth’s limits. (Related: See GreenPolicy360, &quot;Quality of Life&quot; as a &quot;Key Value&quot; of Greens and as described in a founding platform of the Green Party -- https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Quality_of_Life)<br /> <br /> <br /> Reviews<br /> <br /> * https://stewartudallfilm.org/news/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Director John de Graaf speaks of Stewart Udall and 'the politics of beauty' '''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.prforpeople.com/entertainment/arts-culture/politics-beauty<br /> <br /> <br /> ''In 2017, troubled by the cynicism and the polarizing style of politics that had ushered Donald Trump into the White House, de Graaf sought to offer an alternative. He launched a website – called [https://www.andbeautyforall.org/ '''“And Beauty for All”'''] – and he hoped it might become a movement.''<br /> <br /> ''John de Graaf believes that all Americans, regardless of their politics, ethnicity, religion, or creed, could find common ground in an appreciation of beauty, particularly beautiful landscapes.'' <br /> <br /> ''“I think it’s one of the most universal experiences we have, and I think it’s an evolutionary thing. Evolution has taught us that things we find harmonious and beautiful are things that are life affirming, that are good for the species. It has to do with settings, with water, with things that are green.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''2022'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Jerry Brown documentary film-poster 2022.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Jerry Brown: The Disrupter'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> A new documentary, “Jerry Brown: The Disrupter” <br /> <br /> * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt22782658/<br /> <br /> <br /> Celebrating decades of ideas, service and political vision, the film directed by Emmy Award–winning Marina Zenovich premiered Thursday, November 3, 2022, at the Doc Stories festival.<br /> <br /> Marina Zenovich, film director: “Jerry Brown is a man of ideas, not somebody who wants to sit down and talk about himself...&quot;, so she went for the &quot;emotional side&quot; in her film about Jerry. <br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Like him, love him, don't like him, hate him -- Jerry Brown is a man of his times. His story is a generational story. GreenPolicy360's siterunner is fortunate to have shared, as I have written elsewhere, many adventures in politics from the 1970s on... And those Jesuits, they truly know how to debate... For those who know of our mutual work and a political platform launched in the 90s, a vision doc we called a &quot;Platform in Progress&quot;, the ideas are still making waves #PlanetCitizens #PlanetCitizenAction <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Jerry_w_Steve_%2792_pres_campaign_at_the_Dem_plat_hearing_m.jpg&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> The son of Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, who was California’s governor from 1959 to 1967, San Francisco–born Jerry Brown, aka Edmund G. Brown Jr., grew up surrounded by politics but didn’t initially want a political career. He studied at a Jesuit seminary and then changed paths, attending UC Berkeley and Yale Law School. He found the law books “tedious,” while political discourse stirred him.<br /> <br /> Brown served as California’s secretary of state from 1971 to 1975 and, in 1974 at 36, an age that many, his father included, deemed too young, he ran successfully for governor of California.<br /> <br /> Governor Brown went on to serve four terms. His service and politics, his ideas and travel among political eras and forces, are a story that, in many ways, defines a generation.<br /> <br /> “He was dismissed” at the time for his views on issues now recognized as critical, the film's director says. “But he was spot-on... He was a different drummer.”<br /> <br /> <br /> A born “disrupter,” Brown brought climate change into the spotlight, along with subjects like renewable energy, nuclear proliferation and the possibility of launching a California satellite to monitor the environment. When Mike Royko created the “Governor Moonbeam” moniker (Royko later took back those words), Brown thought it was a compliment for his unconventional thinking.<br /> <br /> “Jerry Brown is a man ahead of his time,” notes a description of the film. “A natural disrupter, Jerry kickstarted the national debate about climate change and spiraling inequality back in the 1970s… For over five decades Brown has proven his willingness to sacrifice everything – even getting elected – for the causes to which he’s devoted. In this candid and emotionally compelling portrait, Brown opens up about his remarkable fifty-year political career, his singular private life and the lessons learned from a life in the public eye.”<br /> <br /> In a director’s statement, Zenovich noted, “I’ve always wanted to make a film about Jerry Brown. I know him both as a political figure and as a layered, complex human. I want people to hear Jerry’s hard-won truths about politics and public life – and about where he thinks America is heading.”<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Visit Deadline's review and exclusive video here:'''<br /> <br /> * https://deadline.com/video/jerry-brown-the-disruptor-exclusive-clip-marina-zenovich-documentary-news/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Jerry Brown - Disrupter - film pre-release.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Douglas Trumbull, visionary filmmaker and visual effects'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:2001 pic3.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Douglas Trumbull's VFX work for [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Kubrick '''Stanley Kubrick'''] in the movie [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film) '''&quot;2001: A Space Odyssey&quot;''']&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''In memory of Douglas Trumbull'''<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Trumbull<br /> <br /> <br /> :: [[File:Trumbull vfx master.jpg]]<br /> <br /> ::&lt;small&gt;Douglas Trumbull&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Steve Schmidt, GreenPolicy360 Siterunner: <br /> <br /> Looking back to July 2015 as we were writing about 'high definition' creative work in Florida. <br /> <br /> We were discussing with Doug interactive visual designs for the [https://www.kennedyspacecenter.com/ '''Kennedy Space Center and Gateway''' - https://www.kennedyspacecenter.com/landing-pages/gateway] <br /> <br /> * https://www.kennedyspacecenter.com/explore-attractions/all-attractions<br /> <br /> <br /> NASA's startling visions of the Home Planet, recall the original Mission Statement from the launch of the US space agency... and beginnings of a new 'whole earth' movement as many of us saw our planet as never seen before...<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Whole_Earth<br /> <br /> <br /> ''I can see back to the beginning of an Earth Observation &quot;Inventory&quot;. I remember meeting, then years of learning, sharing and work alongside a congressman who set in motion and for decades shepherded U.S. earth science research programs. George E. Brown was a special person who brought a physics and engineering background to Congress. George saw what others didn't really understand and when he showed me the original Mission Statement of NASA, I began to understand. Here is the key phrase again'' -- '''''“To understand and protect our home planet...&quot;'''''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''2001, a sci-fi movie invented a pivotal new genre'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Steven Schmidt: ''One of the first and most impactful sci-fi films to tackle ecological crisis still resonates today...''<br /> <br /> ''Back in 1972, while the seeds of the modern environmental movement were starting to take root, a sci-fi movie called [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running '''&quot;Silent Running&quot;'''] arrived. The emotional elements of this intriguing space film had a seismic impact on viewers of a certain age, one that still resonates in today’s time of climate change.''<br /> <br /> ''Directed by Douglas Trumbull, the special effects wizard behind '''2001: A Space Odyssey''', '''Blade Runner''', and '''Close Encounters of the Third Kind''', '''Silent Running''' was a revelatory experience for audiences. Trumbull, who passed away on '''February 7, 2022''', bestowed a quiet grace on the serious subject matter of 'Space Freighters' acting as giant greenhouses to protect the flora and fauna of a post-apocalyptic Earth...''<br /> <br /> * https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/silent-running-50-year-anniversary<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Douglas Trumbull vfx 2001 - Star Child.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> (Wikipedia)<br /> <br /> ''2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 epic science fiction film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick. The screenplay was written by Kubrick and science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, and was inspired by Clarke's 1951 short story &quot;The Sentinel&quot; ...'' <br /> <br /> ''The film is noted for its scientifically accurate depiction of space flight, pioneering special effects, and ambiguous imagery. Kubrick avoided conventional cinematic and narrative techniques; dialogue is used sparingly, and there are long sequences accompanied only by music. The soundtrack incorporates numerous works of classical music, by composers including Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss II, Aram Khachaturian, and György Ligeti.''<br /> <br /> ''The film received diverse critical responses, ranging from those who saw it as darkly apocalyptic to those who saw it as an optimistic reappraisal of the hopes of humanity. Critics noted its exploration of themes such as human evolution, technology, artificial intelligence, and the possibility of extraterrestrial life.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Trumbull high speed 120fps.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;h3 id=&quot;story-heading&quot; class=&quot;story-heading&quot;&gt;'''''Pioneering 'Immersive Reality''''''&lt;/h3&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''A nod of respect to Douglas Trumbull who has aligned with us (M Channel/GreenPolicy360) and the &quot;Overview Institute&quot;''' <br /> <br /> '''continuing his big picture, visionary work looking to change the ways we can see...'''<br /> <br /> <br /> :[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/movies/awardsseason/douglas-trumbull-honored-for-technology-hes-still-creating.html '''&quot;Trumbull and...future of cinema / NY Times&quot;'''] <br /> <br /> :[https://www.berkshireeagle.com/business/made-in-the-berkshires-douglas-trumbull-the-wizard-who-creates-alternative-universes/article_42489399-c536-5ba5-9261-789aa607d8e2.html '''Doug in his Berkshires studio / 2016''']<br /> <br /> :[http://variety.com/2012/digital/news/trumbull-lights-up-hypercinema-1118050369/ '''&quot;Hypercinema&quot;'''] --- [http://www.firstshowing.net/2011/doug-trumbull-wants-to-make-a-120fps-3d-space-adventure-movie/ '''Immersive Cinema beyond 3D'''] <br /> <br /> <br /> : https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/Origin_of_Oculus_Rift_Smithsonian_photo-illus_by_Dan_Saelinger.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> : ''This is not a metaphor or a breathless smile. Trumbull has literally created alternative universes. <br /> <br /> : ''Trumbull's Berkshire-area virtual reality creations... are on a higher level.''<br /> <br /> : ''&quot;What we try to do here is create a whole new viewing experience,&quot; said Trumbull.'' <br /> <br /> :''&quot;An experience where people are not just viewing the movie but being a part of it.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :'''''AR/Immersive/VR'''''<br /> <br /> ::''New Realities — Augmented, Immersive, Virtual''<br /> <br /> ::* http://www.digibod.com/newrealities<br /> <br /> :::* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:2001_pic3.jpeg<br /> <br /> ::::* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Overview_Effect<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Perspective POV.jpg]]<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Whole_Earth Whole Earth Perspective]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;'''&quot;Planetary Awareness&quot;'''&lt;/small&gt; | [http://www.planetaryawareness.org &lt;small&gt;'''www.planetaryawareness.org @GreenPolicy360'''&lt;/small&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Overview Effect'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Overview_Effect<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''Now is time to go beyond old ways of thinking and shape new visions of our communities and our living home -- [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_and_Space,_Politics '''Planet Earth''']''&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Infinite Wonder by Scott Kelly-1.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Six NASA Astronauts Describe the Moment in Space When “Everything Changed”&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> “This is what heaven must look like.”<br /> <br /> * https://www.inverse.com/article/42902-nasa-astronauts-describe-overview-effect-everything-changed<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Six NASA Astronauts.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wfoy_OvNDvw&amp;app=desktop/ &lt;u&gt;'''''Over Planet Earth, Spacewalk'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> [[File:Over Planet Earth.png|link=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wfoy_OvNDvw&amp;app=desktop]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/03/astronauts-space-earth-perspective/ &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''They Saw Earth From Space. Here’s How It Changed Them'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> :[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Overview_Effect '''''#TheOverviewEffect''''']<br /> <br /> :''For most of us, Earth is inescapably larger than life. Even now, after nearly six decades of human spaceflight, precious few people have rocketed into orbit and seen the sun peeking out from behind that curved horizon. Since 1961, a mere 556 people have had this rarefied experience. Fewer, just 24, have watched Earth shrink in the distance, growing smaller and smaller until it was no larger than the face of a wristwatch. And only six have been completely alone behind the far side of the moon, cut off from a view of our planet as they sailed in an endlessly deep, star-studded sea.''<br /> <br /> <br /> Earthrise and Whole Earth images from December 1968 and [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Apollo_8,_Life_Jan10,1969.png '''published famously in January 1969''']<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Beginnings of the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_movement modern environmental movement]'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Apollo 8 launched on Dec. 21, 1968. History was made. Humanity's picture of our place in the universe changed. Life on Earth changed as a result. [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Observations '''Cognitive awareness, planetary awareness changed'''.] Environmental awareness changed forever.<br /> <br /> Apollo 8 was the first human mission into to deep space, deep enough to see the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Whole_Earth '''Whole Earth'''] and share images of what they saw. The images were taken &quot;serendipity&quot;, they were not planned as part of the mission. It was a magic, monumental event -- and the images forever changed humanity's perspective of ourselves and our home planet.<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Apollo.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earthrise, the way Anders saw it.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;&quot;Earthrise&quot;: Historic First-ever Vision of Our Home Planet (1968)&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''2021'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Don't Look Up.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Don't Look Up'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> December 2021<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/index.php?title=Special:Search&amp;search=leonardo%20dicaprio&amp;fulltext=Policy+Search&amp;profile=images&amp;redirs=0 '''Leonardo DiCaprio''']<br /> <br /> '''Interviewed about his new film &quot;Don't Look Up&quot;'''<br /> <br /> &quot;He [https://newrepublic.com/article/164691/adam-mckay-climate-politics-dont-look-up '''(director Adam McKay)'''] is taking a real chance with this film. It’s really a very tough tight rope to manage from a cinematic perspective. '''I've been looking for a project to do about climate change for decades now. But it's nearly impossible to do something with that narrative and he cracked the code by creating this sense of urgency and tension and seeing the hysteria with all of our characters - these scientists, these politicians, the media - trying to react to what do we do to survive.''' And he did it within a six-month time period as opposed to a climate movie, which could only be throughout decades.&quot;<br /> <br /> DiCaprio, speaking of his many years as a climate activist and his work with many scientists on his climate documentaries, says he built on their emotions in portraying Randall Mindy. He mentions Jennifer Lawrence's portrayal of his grad student, Kate Dibiasky, in the film and how she talks 'to the truth' like Greta Thunberg, as '''climate scientists have difficulties explaining the truths and facts of the science: &quot;Scientists get frustrated when they have to try to articulate their life's work and science and urgency about a certain issue on what's going to happen to all of us. [Adam McKay] had these seeds within the script of him having anxiety, taking Xanax constantly, also becoming a Fauciesque figure that tries to work within this insane political system'''.... I try to work with the private sector, the powers that be, and sort of lose my way. Whereas Kate's character is more like Greta Thunberg - who just speaks loudly and openly and consistently and tries to penetrate to the truth.&quot; <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Dr. Volts, David Roberts reviews &quot;Don't Look Up&quot; '''<br /> <br /> * https://www.volts.wtf/p/dont-look-up-the-first-good-movie<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Michael E Mann reviews Don't Look Up - Dec 2021.png|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/Michael_E_Mann_reviews_Don%27t_Look_Up_-_Dec_2021.png]]<br /> <br /> ::&lt;small&gt;Courtesy of @MichaelEMann&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''A Comedy Nails the Media Apocalypse'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''With “Don’t Look Up,” Adam McKay makes a star-studded allegorical satire that shows the news media whistling past the climate-change graveyard''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''New York Times Film Review by Ben Smith'' <br /> <br /> ''December 12, 2021''<br /> <br /> ''@benyt / https://twitter.com/benyt''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''What makes “Don’t Look Up” interesting is that its writer and director, Adam McKay, is putting his money, and his career, where his mouth is.''<br /> <br /> ''“Don’t Look Up” has a raft of stars — the president is played by Meryl Streep — and the familiar arc of big-budget disaster flicks like “Armageddon” or “The Day After Tomorrow.” But while all of Mr. McKay’s films have been attuned to the intertwined roles of media and politics...''<br /> <br /> ''The new opus shows Mr. McKay as “one of America’s most incisive media critics, even if he’s not necessarily recognized that way,” said David Sirota, a co-producer of the film, who is better known as a combative journalist who advised Senator Bernie Sanders during his 2020 presidential campaign and now runs The Daily Poster, an investigative news site.''<br /> <br /> ''Mr. McKay said he tried five different ideas that would allow him to make a movie about the climate crisis, but nothing worked. “How do you tell this story, the biggest story in 66 million years, without exaggeration, since the Chicxulub comet, bigger than the Black Plague, bigger than Krakatoa?” he said in an interview, describing the question that kept him up at night.''<br /> <br /> ''“How can we be looking at the greatest story in human history,” he continued, “but most nights I’m not hearing it talked about — or when it is being talked about, it’s in the fourth block, or the ninth story down?”''<br /> <br /> ''He hit on the solution while talking one night in January 2019 with Mr. Sirota, who was venting about the news media’s passive reaction to climate change, saying it was as though a meteor was headed for earth and no one seemed to get it. Soon, the two were texting plot points back and forth.<br /> <br /> “Don’t Look Up” is populated by politicians and Silicon Valley madmen denying reality for their own reasons, behaving in ways that are recognizably self-interested and deluded. But the real villain is a news media that is forever chasing after a distracted audience and, as a result, simply …'' cannot … focus...<br /> <br /> ''When it comes to the climate story, the media’s failings are undeniable, and there is still a wide gap between the urgency and the attention it commands. However, the journalism on the topic has grown more urgent in tone and more widely seen over the last few years. It’s harder-edged, more numerate and more closely connected to the floods, fires and December tornadoes that have upended millions of people’s lives.<br /> <br /> But great satire amplifies obvious truths, and there’s no doubt that “Don’t Look Up” contains those moments of recognition. David Roberts, the author of the clean energy newsletter Volts, called it “the first good movie about climate change.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Don't Look Up ....jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Reviewing the Making of Climate 'TragiComedy' ''''':&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''&quot;If the world wasn’t such a careening, shifting, shaking, distorted, bizarre place right now, I would happily go back to making comedies...&quot; ''''' ''-- Adam McKay''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Adam McKay Is Tired of Our Climate-Politics Garbage Fire'''''<br /> <br /> * https://newrepublic.com/article/164691/adam-mckay-climate-politics-dont-look-up<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''How Adam McKay’s near-death experience led to ‘Don’t Look Up’ ''''' <br /> <br /> * https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/awards/story/2021-12-14/adam-mckay-the-envelope-podcast<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''''The 11th Hour'''''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://leonardodicaprio.com/the-11th-hour/<br /> <br /> ''Leonardo DiCaprio’s “The 11th Hour” is a feature length documentary concerning the environmental crises caused by human actions and their impact on the planet. The 11th Hour documents the cumulative impact of these actions upon the planet’s life systems and calls for restorative action through a reshaping of human activity.''<br /> <br /> ''DiCaprio: “With the onset of global warming and other catastrophic events, environmentalism has become a broader unifying human issue. We as citizens, leaders, consumers and voters, have the opportunity to help integrate ecology into governmental policy and every day living standards.”''<br /> <br /> ''With the help of over fifty of the world’s most prominent thinkers and activists, including reformer Mikhail Gorbachev, physicist Stephen Hawking, and Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai, “The 11thHour documents the grave problems facing the planet’s life systems. Global warming, deforestation, mass species extinction, and depletion of the oceans’ habitats are all addressed, and their causes rooted in human activity. The combination of these crises call into question the very future not of the planet, but of humanity.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''The most powerful element of “The 11th Hour is... the offering of hope and solutions''''' <br /> <br /> * http://www.11thhourfilm.com/<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IBG2V98IBY<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::·································································································································································· <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Carl Sagan at the Emerging Issues Forum.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Flashback to 1990 and Carl Sagan'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Warning of Science Predicting a Climate Change Emergency'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Carl_Sagan_at_the_Emerging_Issues_Forum.png<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :·································································································································· <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Making of Fantastic Fungi.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;The 15-Year Process Behind the Documentary ‘Fantastic Fungi’&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> With Filmmaker Louis Schwartzberg @ [https://movingart.com/ Moving Art]<br /> <br /> <br /> September 2021<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://youtu.be/5yq0_mqN97s<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxABOiay6oA<br /> <br /> * https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2021/09/fantastic-fungi-making-of/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :································································································ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Today's Visual Trip is an Animation from Red Side'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Comparing the Largest Trees on Earth (with accompanying Cosmonaut &amp; Wolf) <br /> <br /> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyjHtxAOhP4 '''“Trees in Perspective”''' (Watch on YouTube]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Project Drawdown - Spring 2021.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Project Drawdown'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Solutions to Climate Change<br /> <br /> Watch the online video series<br /> <br /> * https://drawdown.org/climate-solutions-101<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Christina Korp Earth Day and Apollo 8.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :::··········································································································· <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Stephen Brown rest in peace - Politico 3-19-2021.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In memory of Stephen Brown'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> “That’s the story, isn’t it?”<br /> <br /> March 2021<br /> <br /> ''The instinct to protect his reporters stemmed from Brown’s firm convictions about the mission of journalism — reasons he would often cite for why he loved getting to work each morning: to hold power to account; to expose wrongdoing; to explain complex issues; to bring injustices into the spotlight. In a profession crowded with cynics, he was an idealist about the power of reporting and its capacity for civic good.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.politico.eu/article/stephen-brown-politico-obituary/<br /> <br /> <br /> :·······················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''2020'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Diversity in Hollywood2.jpg]] <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Diversity in Hollywood: [http://www.npr.org/2016/02/22/467621632/researchers-examine-hollywoods-lack-of-diversity The Time Is Now''''']&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/academy-president-cheryl-boone-isaacs-907544 '''''Academy President on Diversity Push: &quot;We Will Keep the Pedal to the Metal&quot;''''']<br /> <br /> ''The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences spotlighted the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Diversity_in_Hollywood2.jpg diversity of invitations] to join the voting Academy in 2016.'' <br /> <br /> ''&quot;Back in 2012, 30 percent of that year’s invitees were women and 10 percent were non-white. In 2016, 46 percent are women and 41 percent are people of color.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> * ''2020 - [https://socialsciences.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/UCLA-Hollywood-Diversity-Report-2020-Film-2-6-2020.pdf Hollywood Diversity Report, Film, A Tale of Two Hollywoods] --- [https://socialsciences.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/UCLA-Hollywood-Diversity-Report-2020-Television-10-22-2020.pdf Diversity in Hollywood, TV]''<br /> <br /> :''The seventh in a series of annual reports to examine relationships between diversity and the bottom line in the Hollywood entertainment industry.''<br /> <br /> * ''2019 - https://www.npr.org/2019/02/21/696471501/hollywood-diversity-report-finds-progress-but-much-left-to-gain''<br /> <br /> * ''2018 - https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-academy-new-members-list-2018-06252018-story.html''<br /> <br /> * ''2017 - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/motion-picture-academy-invites-largest-class-ever-diversity-push-n777826''<br /> <br /> * ''2016 - http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/02/24/arts/hollywood-diversity-inclusion.html''<br /> <br /> <br /> ············<br /> <br /> <br /> From Wildscreen 2020, a [https://www.wildscreen.org/about/news/david-greta-in-conversation-now-available-on-youtube/ Conversation between David &amp; Greta]<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRFY4ss2W2A<br /> <br /> Celebrating and advancing the art of natural world storytelling.<br /> <br /> * https://www.wildscreen.org/about/<br /> <br /> <br /> Films and photographs are major elements in the battle to protect our imperilled natural world. Wildscreen work with the best photographers and filmmakers to help promote conservation. They are the best at what they do and all their initiatives reflect this. - Sir David Attenborough, Wildscreen Patron<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Special:RecentChanges &lt;font color=gray&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Top of the News @GreenPolicy360'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;]<br /> <br /> :[https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2020/10/08/netflixs-david-attenborough-a-life-on-our-planet-is-the-most-important-documentary-of-the-year/ &lt;font color=amber&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Netflix's ‘David Attenborough: A Life On Our Planet’ Is The Most Important Documentary Of The Year'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> Via Forbes<br /> <br /> ''Attenborough is now 94, and throughout his long life, has watched the natural world wither before his eyes. He seems tired of keeping quiet about it.'' <br /> <br /> ''The scale of the problem is so overwhelming, so gargantuan, that it can be difficult to absorb, and to communicate through a single documentary. But by framing environmental destruction through Attenborough’s eyes and unique career, A Life on Our Planet manages to humanize an issue that can often seem distant, and somewhat abstract.'' <br /> <br /> ''Like the Lorax, who speaks for the trees, Attenborough attests to the fact that a significant amount of wildlife has been forever lost, painting a terrifying picture of a not-so-distant future in which humanity continues down the path of senseless self-destruction.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Watch the Preview''' - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-91umZ7cQE<br /> <br /> '''Watch an Episode''' - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfO-3Oir-qM<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Teaching Resources''' - https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/a-life-on-our-planet-12412175<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Read Reviews:'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11989890/<br /> <br /> * https://www.wwf.org.uk/updates/david-attenborough-life-our-planet<br /> <br /> * https://www.indiewire.com/2020/10/david-attenborough-a-life-on-our-planet-review-netflix-1234590155/<br /> <br /> * https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/02/entertainment/david-attenborough-a-life-on-our-planet-review/index.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/04/movies/david-attenborough-a-life-on-our-planet-review.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/david_attenborough_a_life_on_our_planet<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :···························································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Watch the 13th.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krfcq5pF8u8 &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Watch the 13th, Now on YouTube / Netflix'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Watch_the_13th.jpg Read about Ava DuVernay's powerful documentary film]<br /> <br /> <br /> ·······················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Happening a clean energy revolution.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ····································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://vimeo.com/391958174 &lt;big&gt;'''Gunda'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> ''Russian filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky shows a world that most people never notice or care to understand, one that respects other living creatures and sees, really sees, their distinct behaviors and relationships. To an extent, the movie reflects the issues that John Berger broached in his 1970s essay [https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/04/01/why-look-at-animals-john-berger-about-looking/ “Why Look at Animals?],” which mournfully weighed what has been lost as humans have increasingly severed their ties with animals. “Everywhere animals disappear,” Berger wrote. “In zoos they constitute the living monument to their own disappearance.” ''<br /> <br /> * https://thefilmstage.com/berlin-review-gunda-is-a-spell-binding-take-on-animal-sentience/<br /> <br /> <br /> Great Ideas Why Look At Animals? (Penguin Great Ideas)<br /> <br /> by John Berger <br /> <br /> * https://www.amazon.com/Great-Ideas-Look-Animals-Penguin/dp/0141043970<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ····································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Planet of the Humans'''<br /> <br /> Documentary / April <br /> <br /> Negative reviews extensive -- Sample<br /> <br /> <br /> The new movie Executive Produced and promoted by Michael Moore is unfactual, unscientific, flies in the face of decades of renewable energy science, engineering and research and is counter productive in the age of urgent need for Climate Action.<br /> <br /> Intro:<br /> <br /> Planet of the Humans, directed by Jeff Gibbs and Produced by Michael Moore, promotes a thesis that is patently untrue on many levels.<br /> <br /> 1. The film states that renewable energy such as solar and wind are inefficient, useless and dependent on fossil fuels to work. Quote fro the film “One of the most dangerous things right now is the illusion that alternative technologies, like wind and solar, are somehow different than fossil fuels….You would have been better off just burning the fossil fuels in the first place., instead of playing pretend.”<br /> <br /> This assertion, which is echoed over and over in the film is patently untrue and ridiculous. The notion that solar and wind and other renewable technologies don’t work to produce energy in ways that are cheaper, more efficient and at low or zero carbon emissions over their life span flies in the face of everything engineers, scientists and energy planners have been writing in peer reviewed science for decades.<br /> <br /> <br /> 2. The film trades in debunked fossil fuel industry talking points that are specious and meant to disparage the efficiency, durability and affordability of renewable energy. Quote: “Intermittency is one of the major challenges.” “Solar panels are built to only last 10 years, so it’s not as if you get this magic free energy, right? I don’t know if it’s the solution.” These notions, which are untrue, antiquated and outdated do not pertain to the technology and science of today , in which intermittency and efficiency are no longer issues due to the significant advances that renewable energy science, planning and technology. The fact is that RENEWABLE ENERGY WORKS and is currently cheaper than coal and natural gas, other fossil fuel generated electricity sources.<br /> <br /> <br /> 3. The film totally ignores the last ten years of peer-reviewed renewable energy planning and policy. Absent from this anti-renewable energy screed are important policy and science innovations such as the 100% renewable energy plans for each state, over 150 countries and the world from Stanford University, Physicians Scientists and Engineers for Healthy Energy and the Solutions Project. Also absent is any mention of the Green New Deal, which is the most important policy advance on green energy of all time. Bear in mind that this work on renewable energy, such as the 100% plans for New York and California are all ready well under way and are being enacted now with solar and wind energy growing exponentially- all backed up and predicted by science.<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/NewYorkWWSEnPolicy.pdf Peer reviewed]<br /> <br /> Stanford University plans: https://thesolutionsproject.org/why-clean-energy/<br /> <br /> PSE Research: https://www.psehealthyenergy.org<br /> <br /> <br /> 4. The film attacks important environmental campaigners, scientists, policy leaders and activists in unfair and misleading ways. The climate movement, the anti fracking movement, the movement for renewable energy and against fossil fuels has been an important part of the advancement of thinking and policy towards changing our energy system away from coal oil and gas. The film attacks movement leaders like Bill McKibben, Van Jones and others as well as taking pot shots at important local campaigners like Nathan Sooy of Clean Water Action, accusing them of supporting forms of energy that they do not (like biomass) and taking money from fossil fuel interests (which they do not). See the extensive and detailed rebuttal by Bill McKibben here:<br /> <br /> * https://350.org/response-planet-of-the-humans-documentary/<br /> <br /> <br /> 5. The film ignores that the IPCC and other scientific bodies are saying that we must cut our carbon emissions in half in the next ten years and that the only way to feasibly do that is what a total transformation of our energy systems. These scientists point overwhelmingly towards transformations in our economies towards renewable energy.<br /> <br /> <br /> ······················································<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Explore a Vibrant Forest Garden'''<br /> <br /> An Amazing How-to Story in the UK<br /> <br /> Martin Crawford growing a wondrous forest garden <br /> <br /> <br /> Agroforestry ... Edible Landscapes, The Food Forest Revolution<br /> <br /> * https://www.ulule.com/edible-landscapes-food-forest-documentary/<br /> <br /> * https://www.nationalgeographic.com/video/shorts/1438178883749/<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Agroforestry<br /> <br /> <br /> Industrial agriculture, monoculture, brings unsustainable impacts with loss of forest land and loss of fertile soil. Big corporate petro-chemical growing regimens lead to water pollution, aquifer depletion, environmental and adverse health impacts. The reduction of critical CO2 absorption that forests provide is becoming a profound problem. What can agro-forests provide as an alternative to industrial ag?<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''From the Filmmaker'''''<br /> <br /> ''Increasing food production by expanding conventional agriculture leads directly to large-scale deforestation which in turn is destroying biodiversity, damaging water cycles, and driving devastating climatic change.''<br /> <br /> ''Rethinking forests as our food larder is the only way to simultaneously stop deforestation while providing food through a democratic supply chain.'' <br /> <br /> ''A forest garden or food forest is a plant growing system modeled on the structure of a young natural woodland, utilizing plants that bring direct and indirect benefits to people - mostly edible plants. Humanity has been producing abundant food in forest gardens since the dawn of civilization. The crops which can be produced include fruits, nuts, edible leaves, spices, medicinal plant products, poles, fibres, basketry materials, honey, fuelwood, fodder, mulches, sap products, and on and on...''<br /> <br /> ''The structure and diversity of forest gardens ensure that they are resilient to the impacts of climate change including extreme weather conditions like droughts and heavy rain. The beauty of forest gardens is that they are so perfectly suited to collective engagement, functioning as well in urban spaces as in rural ones.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ······················<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Via Ecodads'''<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Gratitude'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Louie Schwartzberg<br /> <br /> * https://vimeo.com/44131171<br /> <br /> <br /> ··········································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''A Holiday Message'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''David Attenborough speaks of saving the planet (video)'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.ourplanet.com/en/video/how-to-save-our-planet/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ··············<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''2019'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Harriet Tubman, the Movie.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Harriet Tubman, the Movie'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> September 2019<br /> <br /> ''‘Harriet’ makes its worldwide premiere at Toronto International Film Festival''<br /> <br /> ''The first feature film on the story of Harriet Tubman, Harriet, made its premiere Tuesday night at the Toronto International Film Festival. Harriett is directed by Kasi Lemmons, best known for her work directing Eve Bayou, Talk to Me, and Black Nativity, who was on hand for the introduction of the film by festival director Cameron Bailey.''<br /> <br /> <br /> Official Movie Trailer - July 2019<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqoEs4cG6Uw<br /> <br /> <br /> Creative Credits<br /> <br /> ''The extraordinary tale of Harriet Tubman's escape from slavery and transformation into one of America's greatest heroes, whose courage, ingenuity, and tenacity freed hundreds of slaves and changed the course of history.'' <br /> <br /> * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4648786/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Harriet-an American Legend-be free or die.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ································································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''President Trump says no to plans to replace Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on the $20 US bill'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Harriet Tubman on $20 Bill.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ··································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''Bravery Amid Decimation in the Amazon''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Aruanas-1.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> ----<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> ::[[File:One Strange Rock.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/bill-nye-and-the-climate-crisis-68395077769 ''Bill Nye, The Science Guy, Brings It'']<br /> <br /> :: '''The twists of fate that allow life to thrive on Earth'''<br /> <br /> :: • http://natgeotv.com/ca/one-strange-rock/videos<br /> <br /> <br /> ··············<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''2018'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Redford-Real Security.jpg|link=https://vimeo.com/146947405]]<br /> <br /> <br /> A tip of the green hat to [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Redford_Center,_Environmental_Legacy.png Robert Redford] and the [https://redfordcenter.org/films/robert-redford%E2%80%99s-environmental-legacy Redford Center.]<br /> <br /> Much of what we, activists in environmental, political reform, encounter in changing the world can be difficult, almost impossible, and very often we must have resilience and persistence in the face of forces arrayed against visionary work needed to make a difference.<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> ----<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Look Around, 360° Around '''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Climate Change is the defining issue of our time and we are at a defining moment. From shifting weather patterns that threaten food production, to rising sea levels that increase the risk of catastrophic flooding, the impacts of climate change are global in scope and unprecedented in scale. -- United Nations''<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.climaterealityproject.org/blog/6-must-see-movies-about-climate-change &lt;big&gt;'''''Must See Climate Change Movies, via Climate Reality'''''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_environmental_films ''List of environmental films (Wikipedia)'']<br /> : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Environmental_films<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH / AN INCONVENIENT SEQUEL: TRUTH TO POWER''''' - ''https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Inconvenient_Truth''<br /> <br /> Al Gore (controversially) lost the race for U.S. president in 2000. A door closed, a window opened as he chose to become a full-time, full-on environmental activist and educator. <br /> <br /> <br /> &gt;After seeing former US Vice President Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, people worldwide finally understood the reality of the climate crisis devastating our planet. For many, it was the moment they knew they personally had to do something about it. The film’s impact continues to be felt more than a decade after it won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Documentary and took its place among the highest-grossing documentaries ever.<br /> <br /> &gt;Last year’s follow-up, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, took the Climate Crisis story further...<br /> <br /> : https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/A_Day_with_Al_Gore<br /> <br /> <br /> ----------<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD''''' - ''https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beasts_of_the_Southern_Wild''<br /> <br /> : https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/how-benh-zeitlin-made-beasts-of-the-southern-wild-135132724<br /> <br /> &gt;''Living in a Louisiana bayou community called “the Bathtub,” six-year-old Hush Puppy (youngest-ever Best Actress Oscar nominee Quvenzhané Wallis) can’t get the prehistoric aurochs her teacher tells her will be released from melting ice caps off her mind – even as the world in front of her crumbles and cowers, the victim of powerful storms, failing levees, and familial health problems.''<br /> <br /> &gt;''While the film’s setting is technically fictional, it was inspired by several very real fishing villages in Southern Louisiana's Terrebonne Parish. These small, isolated wetland communities are threatened by climate-driven erosion, extreme weather, and rising sea levels. Most notable among them is the rapidly disappearing Isle de Jean Charles, former home of “the first American climate refugees.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> IMDB<br /> <br /> '''Storyline'''<br /> <br /> ''Hushpuppy, an intrepid six-year-old girl, lives with her father, Wink, in the Bathtub, a southern Delta community at the edge of the world. Wink's tough love prepares her for the unraveling of the universe; for a time when he's no longer there to protect her. When Wink contracts a mysterious illness, nature flies out of whack, temperatures rise, and the ice caps melt, unleashing an army of prehistoric creatures called aurochs. With the waters rising, the aurochs coming, and Wink's health fading, Hushpuppy goes in search of her lost mother.'' (Written by Sundance Film Festival)<br /> <br /> '''First Review'''<br /> <br /> Magical, thought-provoking, very, very watchable<br /> <br /> 26 July 2012 | by oldgirl <br /> <br /> ''I can understand how most people view this film within the context of Hurricane Katrina. But even as a former denizen of the Gulf coast who sat out Alicia, Claudette, Allen, Rita, and Ike, I view this film in a much, much larger context. It goes beyond stereotype and into archetype -- the denizens of the Bathtub aren't poor drunks at the mercy of the environment, they are The People of the world they inhabit. Hushpuppy doesn't have a drunk father, she has a Father, with many of the faults and strengths of the immortal epic heroes -- anger, pride, genuine love and concern. Hushpuppy herself isn't just a little girl, she is The Child -- the purveyor of a magic which is real, intimately connected with her world, imaginatively linked with All Things. The outside world is a place of Things and Machines, of paperwork and rules -- and is never actually named, you see, because that would diminish it. Everything in this film exists within the realm of archetype, and if you watch it with that in mind, its multiple messages take on cosmic significance. Beautifully shot, beautifully acted -- it's going to take a few more days for the entire thing to completely sink in. Outstanding!''<br /> <br /> <br /> ----------<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''CHASING CORAL''''' - ''https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/chasing-coral-review-sundance-2017-967131''<br /> <br /> : From GreenPolicy360's friends at the Bioneers and Leo DiCaprio ...<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Chasing_Coral.jpg<br /> <br /> * https://youtu.be/b6fHA9R2cKI<br /> <br /> &gt;''That coral reefs are existentially threatened by the climate crisis is a truth near-universally acknowledged. But filmmaker Jeff Orlowski doesn’t simply telegraph a report on this impending ecological catastrophe.''<br /> <br /> &gt;''Instead, Orlowski infuses his film with such empathy and ardor for our world’s oceans and their vibrant ecosystems – as well as those working hard to save what’s left – that it’s impossible to not walk away pumped up and ready to join the fight.''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Chasing Coral.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ----------<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''INTERSTELLAR''''' - ''https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_(film)'' ''(kudos to Co-producer Lynda Obst)''<br /> <br /> &gt;''Director Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is that rarest of Hollywood anomalies – a wildly complicated, lavishly expensive, wholly original mainstream blockbuster. It doesn’t exist in the Marvel or DC cinematic universes; instead, it occupies a not-so-distant-future version of our very own – and things aren’t exactly going great.'' <br /> <br /> &gt;''While the words “climate change” are never explicitly said in the film, the impacts of the crisis are writ large, driving a plot about an attempt to flee a near-future Earth reeling from drastically changing weather patterns and global food shortages for the safety of a new habitable planet.''<br /> <br /> &gt;''Featuring one of the most stacked casts in recent memory, including Oscar winners Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine, and Ellen Burstyn and nominees Jessica Chastain, Timothée Chalamet, and John Lithgow, Interstellar takes on a very real consequence of climate inaction, though it offers up an untenable solution.''<br /> <br /> &gt;''After all, there’s still no Planet B.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ----------<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''SNOWPIERCER''''' - ''https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowpiercer''<br /> <br /> <br /> &gt;''The film is set in a future where a failed geoengineering experiment to counteract climate change plunges the planet into a new ice age, killing all life except for those lucky enough (a phrase we’re using loosely here) to have boarded the titular train. This train now circles the globe on a constant loop and a tyrannical class system has taken hold onboard.''<br /> <br /> &gt;''It’s an important cautionary tale: While we should investigate any and all scientific developments to stop the climate crisis, dangerous gambles like geoengineering – or for that matter, fleeing our planet for an imagined oasis somewhere deep in the universe – could come with unintended consequences.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ----------<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Eco-films for you'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> • https://www.imdb.com/list/ls052614234/<br /> <br /> • https://medium.com/greenpeace/7-environmental-films-that-you-need-to-watch-right-now-296d4ffd21b8<br /> <br /> • https://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/blogs/top-10-environmental-films-of-all-time<br /> <br /> • https://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/ten-films-to-inspire-your-inner-environmental-superhero<br /> <br /> • https://www.cinemadailies.com/the-best-environmental-movies-and-documentaries-of-all-time/<br /> <br /> • https://tmff.net/environmental-film-festivals-a-list-for-the-planet/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ''[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/tv/one-strange-rock/ One Strange Rock]... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatom Diatoms, microalgae]''<br /> <br /> ''Secret to the Earth's oxygen supply...''<br /> <br /> ''[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/tv/watch/50ce730c31247c2019d5bae5743a10e5/ First Look at One Strange Rock] / [https://www.nationalgeographic.com/tv/watch/42f24374933dbddc310cb5489c3d76c0/ Gasp]''<br /> <br /> ''@GreenPolicy360 / [http://www.thinbluelayer.com www.ThinBlueLayer.com]''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:'Thin Blue Layer' of Earth's Atmosphere m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Pandora to be found Exoplanets in Space.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ----------<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''2017'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Virtual Reality in Space'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''New Perspective of the Home Planet <br /> <br /> :[https://www.spacevr.co/#spacevr '''Space VR''']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Jamie &amp; Robert Redford'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Start Small Robert Redford.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ----------<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.thecoast.net.nz/news/entertainment/cliff-curtis-lands-the-role-of-a-lifetime/ '''''Cliff Curtis: Leader To Be of the Reef People Clan (Avatar)'''''] <br /> <br /> <br /> https://www.bestmovie.it/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Cliff-Curtis-Avatar.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Bill-nye-the-guy 2017.jpg|link=http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/bill-nye-science-guy-review-986806]]<br /> <br /> <br /> http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/bill-nye-science-guy-review-986806<br /> <br /> '''''No more Mr. Nice Science Guy?'''''<br /> <br /> ''With his beloved PBS series having officially wrapped back in 1998 (although still playing in perpetuity on TV and classrooms everywhere), Bill Nye finds himself at a career crossroads.''<br /> <br /> ''While his trademark bow tie is still very much intact, his struggle to be taken seriously as a passionate advocate for the environment, facing off against dismissive climate change deniers and the anti-science movement, is intimately chronicled in the documentary Bill Nye: Science Guy, which had its world premiere at South by Southwest.''<br /> <br /> <br /> http://www.geek.com/tech/bill-nye-the-science-guy-hopeful-for-the-future-1687963/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Bill nye-march for science-earth day.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/apr/24/why-we-joined-the-march-for-science &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;font color=green&gt;''''' Facts Matter today, yesterday &amp; tomorrow '''''&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> :https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_for_Science<br /> ::https://satellites.marchforscience.com/<br /> :::https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:March_for_Science-2.png<br /> ::::https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Bill_nye-march_for_science-earth_day.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::::::[[File:Disaster movies ignore the scientist.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::::::::················································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2017/02/25/entertainment-news/legendary-japanese-animator-miyazaki-comes-retirement-new-film/ &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Miyazaki Is Making a New Film!'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> :[http://the-animatorium.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-best-environmental-epic-case-for.html '''''Remembering Princess Mononoke''''']<br /> <br /> ::[http://www.teachwithmovies.org/guides/princess-mononoke.html '''''Mononoke, a Teachable Moment''''']<br /> <br /> :::[https://muse.jhu.edu/article/614511 '''''Nature, Environment &amp; Industry: a Film for the Ages''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> :::[[File:San and kodama.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :::∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Beautiful Planet imax m.jpg|link=http://abeautifulplanet.imax.com/]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''A Beautiful Planet'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''May - 2016 / IMAX'''<br /> <br /> • http://abeautifulplanet.imax.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://youtu.be/edwZNH-ZKn4 '''Watch the Intro to Beautiful Planet'''] <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ <br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Leonardo takes an Oscar and speaks out...''''' <br /> <br /> ''&quot;Making The Revenant was about man's relationship to the natural world, a world that we collectively felt in 2015 as the hottest year in recorded history. Our production needed to move to the southern tip of this planet just to be able to find snow. Climate change is real. It is happening right now. It's the most urgent threat facing our entire species, and we need to work collectively together and stop procrastinating.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;We need to support leaders around the world who do not speak for the big polluters or the big corporations, but who speak for all of humanity, for the indigenous people of the world, for the billions and billions of underprivileged people who will be most affected by this. For our children's children and for those people out there whose voices have been drowned out by the politics of greed, I thank you all for this amazing award tonight.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;Let us not take this planet for granted. I do not take tonight for granted. Thank you so much.&quot;'' <br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Leo's Oscar Speech 2016.png | link=http://brightcove04.brightcove.com/17/769341148/201602/2953/769341148_4778916325001_4778895776001.mp4?pubId=769341148&amp;videoId=4778895776001]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Film/Media Reviews'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ''In the movie industry the term &quot;look-see&quot; is used to describe a first look...''<br /> <br /> ''a glimpse of a project, a creator's idea, an initial concept, story, package, a pitch of a screenplay...''<br /> <br /> ''Our media reviews are quick look-sees, online intros, scoops and insights of projects worth your time and thought.'' <br /> <br /> ''So pull up to your screen, log on, stream, download, rent it, buy it, go out to a movie, get virtual, take it to the next level... Act out!''<br /> <br /> <br /> -- [http://www.mchannel.org ''www.mchannel.org'']<br /> <br /> <br /> ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Racing Extinction'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [http://www.racingextinction.com/ '''''Racing Extinction'''''] ○ [https://twitter.com/RacingXtinction ''#RacingExtinction @RacingXtinction'']<br /> <br /> ''“I told the crew, 'We’re not making a movie – we’re starting a movement'. This film is one component of a movement that will go on and on...''<br /> <br /> ''and hopefully live in people’s hearts and minds and change behavior. We are the only generation that can save species for millions of years going forward...”''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:RacingExtinction Francois-Languars2 3000Left.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:At st peters endangered species.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Racing Extinction LAopeningSept18,2015.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:RCatUN projection2.gif]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:New Ways of Seeing.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ; &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;''New Ways of Seeing''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Douglas Trumbull: ''I believe we are at the threshold... time to make breakthroughs.'''<br /> <br /> '''''Time for Technology to Revolutionize Cinema'''''<br /> <br /> * http://www.indiewire.com/article/visual-effects-master-douglas-trumbull-gives-us-a-sneak-peek-at-the-techology-that-will-revolutionize-cinema<br /> <br /> <br /> ······················································································································ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Above.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Premiere of BigPicture Media'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''''A Brief Message from SJS - GreenPolicy Siterunner'''''<br /> <br /> ''Here on the Big Picture we throw a eco-Spotlight on important environmentally attuned films/movies/media.''<br /> <br /> ''We visit the work of [http://www.planetcitizen.org #planetcitizen] media makers, creators and visionaries. We look at the [http://www.earthpov.com BIG] and the [http://www.tinybluegreen.com tiny] -- and life in between and all around us.''<br /> <br /> ''At GreenPolicy, we bring a dramatic [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Overview_Effect 360° perspective.]''<br /> <br /> ''And a personal POV as [http://www.planetcitizens.org &quot;Planet Citizens&quot;.]''<br /> <br /> ''Welcome to a Blue Planet adventure.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ~ ''GreenPolicy360 Siterunner from Clearwater, Florida''<br /> <br /> : ''http://www.mchannelonline.com''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Dove of peace s.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Democracy]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Diversity]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-ethics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-nomics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-Spirituality]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Election Law]]<br /> [[Category:Election System Reform]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Protection]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Media]]<br /> [[Category:Mobile]]<br /> [[Category:Movies]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resources]]<br /> [[Category:Nature]]<br /> [[Category:Online Education]]<br /> [[Category:Nuclear Weapons]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Renewable Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability Policies]]<br /> [[Category:Threat Multiplier]]<br /> [[Category:Whole Earth]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=BigPicture_Media&diff=138350 2026-10-05T11:39:33Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> [[File:BigPicture.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Focusing on Stories that Move Us'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> October 2026<br /> <br /> The film ''' 'The Social Reckoning' '''... ''arrives as Meta faces billions of dollars in settlements and verdicts over claims its platforms harmed the mental health of young users, with more cases headed to trial.''<br /> <br /> <br /> Frances Haugen: <br /> <br /> ''&quot;There have been many whistleblowers that have come out of Meta's AI teams talking about the lack of safety...&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;I would pause before rushing into giving Mark the level of power that he's trying to seize when it comes to AI.&quot;''<br /> <br /> * https://www.cbsnews.com/news/aaron-sorkin-on-the-social-reckoning/<br /> <br /> <br /> More: <br /> <br /> &quot;Doom Loops&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-is-creating-doom-loops-all-over-the-economy<br /> <br /> <br /> 👁️‍🗨️<br /> <br /> <br /> '''An AI Supercomputer Is Created for a Mission... Its Name Is HAL'''<br /> <br /> : We listen in as two of its creators explains how HAL came to be...<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Trumbull vfx master.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Trumbull_vfx_master.jpg&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> The HAL 9000 was envisioned by creators and science, as a new type of neural intelligence, a machine brain.<br /> <br /> Hal is heuristic and algorithmic -- and much more as we learn on a mission far from Earth, a mission with deep meaning.<br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence is now here in a fast approaching future and we recall Supercomputer [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000 '''HAL 9000'''] <br /> <br /> A warning of what is on the line for humanity as we ride along in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey '''2001: A Space Odyssey'''] ... <br /> <br /> <br /> HAL's memorable words --<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;I'm sorry, Dave....&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;It can only be attributable to human error....&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.<br /> <br /> HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.<br /> <br /> Dave: What's the problem?<br /> <br /> HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.<br /> <br /> Dave: What are you talking about, HAL?<br /> <br /> HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film)<br /> <br /> * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/characters/nm0706937<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:I'm sorry Dave.jpg]]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:HAL_is_watching_U....png<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> HAL's path to existence is discussed by Douglas Trumbull in a 2020 interview with the Museum of the Moving Image... <br /> <br /> * https://movingimage.org/programs/envisioning-2001-without-hal-douglas-trumbull-and-michael-benson/<br /> <br /> * https://movingimage.org/collection/concept-art-studies-for-deep-space-vehicle-pod-1965/<br /> <br /> <br /> Doug recalls the mid 1960s, the inception and development of '2001, the Movie'. We hear of creatives at work, Graphic Films, NASA, storyboarding and visualizing with an evolving narrative and screenplay. <br /> <br /> Exceptional to hear Doug share an inside look at how HAL came to be in the process of epic meetings bringing together science and artistic process...<br /> <br /> With historical appreciation to Doug's visual effects and Stanley Kubrick's art of cinema, let us also give a special credit to the production influence of AI theoretician Marvin Minsky on HAL's creation. <br /> <br /> <br /> Michael Benson: <br /> <br /> From System/360 Athena concepts to HAL<br /> <br /> 'This computer could work heuristically and algorithmically...' (H &amp; Al, HAL)<br /> <br /> <br /> Wikipedia:<br /> <br /> MIT Professor Marvin Minsky was an adviser to Stanley Kubrick on his movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. <br /> <br /> Arthur C. Clarke's novel of the same name mentions Minsky. <br /> <br /> In it, he achieves a crucial breakthrough in artificial intelligence in the then-future 1980s, paving the way for HAL 9000 in the early 21st century... <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Minsky<br /> <br /> <br /> More References:<br /> <br /> * https://www.mit.edu/~dxh/marvin/web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/minsky.html<br /> <br /> * https://scienceandfilm.org/articles/2643/marvin-minsky-and-hal-9000<br /> <br /> * https://magazine.mindplex.ai/post/hals-legacy-exploring-ai-through-hal-9000<br /> <br /> * https://zsjunai.github.io/history-of-ai/en/biographies/minsky<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Daisy, Daisy...&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/ROA-Times/issues/1992/rt9201/920112/01120086.htm<br /> <br /> * https://youtu.be/E7WQ1tdxSqI<br /> <br /> * https://youtu.be/V0bUd6KrQGg<br /> <br /> <br /> Today, as humanity approaches questions of out-of-control technology created by humanity .... <br /> <br /> We ask, '''[[Planet Citizens]] and [[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]''' ask, 'What's Next?' <br /> <br /> <br /> Read a 'God Test' Substack Conversation between Jack Goldsmith and Robert Wright [https://substack.com/home/post/p-201670588 '''here''']<br /> <br /> Also, read more about Artificial Intelligence, [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Green_AI '''@ Green AI''']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''2025'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Jane Goodall, there still is hope - and action.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Inspiring...&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> She blazed the trail.<br /> <br /> The next steps are up to us.<br /> <br /> <br /> Dr. Jane Goodall’s final message to the world: “I want to make sure that you all understand that each and every one of you has a role to play. You may not know it, you may not find it, but your life matters and you are here for a reason.”<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfLKHY52ERc<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://janegoodall.org/<br /> <br /> * https://janegoodall.org/rememberingjane/<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3b6zSpy7P4<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ST6pqfCTy0<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Goodall on the power of the young.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Poet-Educator Katharine Lee Bates.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''From Sea to Shining Sea'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://vimeo.com/1049155969<br /> <br /> &quot;From Sea to Shining Sea: Katharine Lee Bates and The Story of America the Beautiful&quot; is a film meant for our time. In an era where waves of grievance with American institutions, life, and politics are spreading coast-to-coast, a documentary by writer/director John de Graaf reminds of the beauty, beliefs and the tribulations arising from our land, nation, and experiment we call a 'democratic republic'. John de Graaf's vision of &quot;The Story of America the Beautiful&quot; should be seen from sea to shining sea, especially by young Americans. Hope for a better tomorrow is here all around us. <br /> <br /> -- Steven Schmidt, GreenPolicy360<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''2024'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Stopping the Steal, HBO documentary Sept 2024.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;HBO&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> HBO Documentary Films presents 'Stopping the Steal'<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Stopping the Steal: A Documentary Film'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Recounted in detail by former staff members of the Trump administration, Republican political appointees, and elected state officials, 'Stopping the Steal' tracks the movement to discredit the 2020 presidential election.'' <br /> <br /> ''Unfolding chronologically, the documentary explores and debunks the claims of ballot tampering, illegal immigrants and deceased people voting, and hacking or malfunction of Dominion Voting Systems’ electronic ballot machines.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> (LA Times / September 17, 2024) '''‘Stopping the Steal’ examines Trump’s attempt to subvert 2020 election, and what it means for 2024'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2024-09-17/stopping-the-steal-documentary-hbo-trump<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Getting folks to watch a documentary about the Big Lie is a Big Ask. Who wants to relive that horrible chapter in America’s political history, especially while we’re writing a new, possibly less-horrible chapter?''<br /> <br /> ''Despite its title, HBO’s “Stopping the Steal” is as much about what lies ahead of us as it is about that other election that put Joe Biden in office and then-President Trump on a warpath. The 90-minute film, which premieres at 9 p.m. Tuesday on HBO, explores the depth and veracity of Trump’s scheme to overturn the election results through the first-hand accounts of the people who were there.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> (NPR/All Things Considered / September 14, 2024) ''' 'Stopping the Steal' documents the efforts to help Trump'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.npr.org/2024/09/14/nx-s1-5107592/stopping-the-steal-documents-the-efforts-to-help-trump<br /> <br /> * https://www.npr.org/2022/07/28/1114224368/stop-the-steal-has-moved-beyond-trump-now-its-threatening-future-elections<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The new HBO documentary 'Stopping the Steal' takes viewers behind the scenes into the efforts by former President Trump to challenge the 2020 presidential election results. The film features interviews from former White House staff and appointees, including former Attorney General William Barr, as well as elected Republican officials in Arizona and Georgia.''<br /> <br /> ''Recounted in detail by former staff members of the Trump Administration, Republican political appointees, and elected state officials, “Stopping the Steal” tracks the evolution of the movement to discredit the American election starting as early as July 2020 when the legitimacy of the election process began to be publicly questioned. Unfolding chronologically through to Jan. 6, 2021, when an angry mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, the film explores the debunked claims of a stolen election including accusations of ballot tampering, alleged voting by illegal immigrants and deceased individuals, and hacking or malfunction of Dominion Voting Systems’ electronic ballot machines.''<br /> <br /> ''As President Trump’s supporters pressure officials in Arizona and Georgia responsible for ratifying the count, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger recalls when he was told to find 11,000 additional votes for Trump, and Arizona Speaker of the House of Representatives Rusty Bowers describes getting a call from the White House urging him to further investigate the Maricopa County vote results despite any proof of malfeasance. “Stopping the Steal” is a clear-eyed account of Republican officials who stood firmly by their principles often at great personal cost.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ······························································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Stand Up and Tell the Facts as Best You Know Them'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> The 'End Is Nye', a Fall Season TV series exploring Climate Change -- and its coming impacts.<br /> <br /> Bill Nye, &quot;The Science Guy&quot; as he is called, continues to educate and reach schools across the Internet, on TV, in films, documentaries, lectures and talks in nations around the world. <br /> <br /> This year, 2024, is a good time to watch Bill explain why we need to pay attention to life on Earth, science, our communities and our environment.<br /> <br /> Btw, Bill Nye has said he was inspired to begin his career by the famous educational decades of work on TV by Mr. Wizard! Your GreenPolicy360 siterunner, who worked as an editor of Don Herbert, Mr. Wizard in the 1970s in New York City publishing, has a special affection for science education. GreenPolicy360 tips our green hat to two master teachers of science here ... Don Herbert and Bill Nye. <br /> <br /> Communicators with a spark in their eyes and care for kids and teaching. Their lessons carry on...<br /> <br /> Here's to great teachers who have made a world of difference!!<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Bill_Nye,_the_Science_Guy,_speaks_at_the_March_for_Science-Washington_DC_2017.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Mr_Wizard_-_Don_Herbert.png<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Bill Nye explains.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''2023'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:The Movement and the Madman - PBS - March 2023.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> Watch scenes from the PBS 'American Experience' special event documentary film -- '''The Movement and the ‘Madman’ '''<br /> <br /> — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfhHcq-IUQo<br /> <br /> <br /> Strategic Demands:<br /> <br /> In the “Movement and the Madman” 2023 documentary, PBS reveals the how close the U.S. came to using nuclear weapons to force Vietnam to end the war the U.S. had escalated on the election of President Richard Nixon. <br /> <br /> Daniel Ellsberg, a nuclear war planner, as his Doomsday Machine ‘confessions’ chronicled, recalls the Vietnam Moratorium Peace demonstrations of October-November 1969 in the book and film — and with National Security Council senior staff now, decades later, retells how close we came to nuclear war.<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/the-movement-and-the-madman/<br /> <br /> <br /> Strategic Demands' editor at that time was a student and a coordinator of the Vietnam Moratorium Committee. Steve Schmidt, some 50 years later, became a source of information for the PBS film and, pointing to Daniel Ellsberg and Roger Morris as first-hand source accounts, helped to guide the documentary producers to revealing moments of history here:<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[The Movement and the Madman - PBS - March 2023]]'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/The_Movement_and_the_Madman_-_PBS_-_March_2023<br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Surviving_Victory:_Security_Priorities<br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Vietnam_Moratorium_for_Peace_1969-1970<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''PBS'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Movement and the ‘Madman’'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> PBS PREMIERE MARCH 28 ON AMERICAN EXPERIENCE<br /> <br /> The documentary film tells the little-known story of a dramatic showdown between a protest movement and a president — and the power of protest …<br /> <br /> Citizen action, as is now revealed, prevented the use of nuclear weapons<br /> <br /> * https://www.movementandthemadman.com/home<br /> <br /> * https://www.movementandthemadman.com/history<br /> <br /> * https://www.movementandthemadman.com/preview<br /> <br /> * https://www.movementandthemadman.com/interviewees<br /> <br /> * https://www.movementandthemadman.com/filmmakers<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:A Film About the Power of Protest.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:The Movement and the 'Madman' - 2023.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ·····················<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Canary'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''&quot;I had no idea was I was getting into...&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The official trailer for the Adventure/Climate Documentary about the life story of Lonnie Thompson<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxnQKQQL49M<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''&quot;The fight for our future begins at 18,000 feet&quot;...&quot;'''<br /> <br /> * https://canary.oscilloscope.net/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> About the Directors and the film ...<br /> <br /> * https://twitter.com/alexrivest_phd<br /> <br /> * https://variety.com/2023/film/news/canary-documentary-oscilloscope-1235697694/<br /> <br /> <br /> Read more about Lonnie Thompson and Ellen Moseley Thompson<br /> <br /> * https://alumnimagazine.osu.edu/story/journey-two-courageous-climate-scientists<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Danny O’Malley, directed the film with MIT-trained Neuroscientist Alex Rivest, PhD. It’s set to open in limited release with a special nationwide screening on Sept. 20, 2023.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The subject of the film is Doctor '''Lonnie Thompson''', who is referred to as an explorer “who went where no scientist had gone before and transformed our idea of what is possible.” He’s been globally recognized for his drilling an analysis of ice cores from various regions of the world in the hopes of better understanding the Earth’s climate.'' <br /> <br /> ''“When we say Lonnie is like a real-life superhero, it’s not hyperbole,” the director said. <br /> <br /> “Unlike the glaciers at the poles, the tropical high mountain glaciers Lonnie studies provide water to billions of people, and when they are gone, there’s going to be catastrophic consequences that will affect everyone. Lonnie is doing his work and telling his story because it can save lives. So, it’s not just a great adventure story. It has the potential to make a difference.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360: Here's to Paleoclimatology and the science it teaches us as we navigate into the future ... '''<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonnie_Thompson<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Oppenheimer movie - 2023.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Looking Back: At Trinity, the First Nuclear Bomb Test - 1945]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Trinity monument m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Looking_Back:_At_Trinity,_the_First_Nuclear_Bomb_Test_-_1945<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ························································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Love... the wonder and beauty of the earth - Stewart Udall, the Politics of Beauty.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Stewart Udall: The Politics of Beauty'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Documentary film, Directed by John de Graaf<br /> <br /> :* https://stewartudallfilm.org/<br /> :* https://stewartudallfilm.org/about-the-film/<br /> :* https://stewartudallfilm.org/about-the-team/<br /> <br /> :* https://www.udallcenter.arizona.edu/news/getting-know-stew-stewart-udall-politics-beauty<br /> <br /> <br /> On Utah Public Radio, listen to Film Director John de Graaf talk of Stewart Udall's environmental legacy<br /> <br /> :* https://www.upr.org/show/access-utah/2023-04-06/stewart-udall-the-politics-of-beauty-on-thursdays-access-utah<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Udall called on all Americans to move away from our emphasis on economic growth and consumerism and toward quality of life, and a new politics centered on beauty, frugal living, appreciation of nature and the arts, and a recognition of the Earth’s limits.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;His politics live on..&quot;'<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Watch the Udall, 'Politics of Beauty' '''<br /> <br /> : * https://vimeo.com/797101535<br /> <br /> <br /> Stewart Udall left a profound legacy of conservation and environmental justice as Secretary of the Interior during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. His social and environmental successes stemmed from his ability to bring together people with disparate interests, and inspire them to achieve common goals. <br /> <br /> Udall called on all Americans to move away from our emphasis on economic growth and consumerism and toward quality of life, and a new politics centered on beauty, frugal living, appreciation of nature and the arts, and a recognition of the Earth’s limits. (Related: See GreenPolicy360, &quot;Quality of Life&quot; as a &quot;Key Value&quot; of Greens and as described in a founding platform of the Green Party -- https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Quality_of_Life)<br /> <br /> <br /> Reviews<br /> <br /> * https://stewartudallfilm.org/news/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Director John de Graaf speaks of Stewart Udall and 'the politics of beauty' '''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.prforpeople.com/entertainment/arts-culture/politics-beauty<br /> <br /> <br /> ''In 2017, troubled by the cynicism and the polarizing style of politics that had ushered Donald Trump into the White House, de Graaf sought to offer an alternative. He launched a website – called [https://www.andbeautyforall.org/ '''“And Beauty for All”'''] – and he hoped it might become a movement.''<br /> <br /> ''John de Graaf believes that all Americans, regardless of their politics, ethnicity, religion, or creed, could find common ground in an appreciation of beauty, particularly beautiful landscapes.'' <br /> <br /> ''“I think it’s one of the most universal experiences we have, and I think it’s an evolutionary thing. Evolution has taught us that things we find harmonious and beautiful are things that are life affirming, that are good for the species. It has to do with settings, with water, with things that are green.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''2022'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Jerry Brown documentary film-poster 2022.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Jerry Brown: The Disrupter'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> A new documentary, “Jerry Brown: The Disrupter” <br /> <br /> * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt22782658/<br /> <br /> <br /> Celebrating decades of ideas, service and political vision, the film directed by Emmy Award–winning Marina Zenovich premiered Thursday, November 3, 2022, at the Doc Stories festival.<br /> <br /> Marina Zenovich, film director: “Jerry Brown is a man of ideas, not somebody who wants to sit down and talk about himself...&quot;, so she went for the &quot;emotional side&quot; in her film about Jerry. <br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Like him, love him, don't like him, hate him -- Jerry Brown is a man of his times. His story is a generational story. GreenPolicy360's siterunner is fortunate to have shared, as I have written elsewhere, many adventures in politics from the 1970s on... And those Jesuits, they truly know how to debate... For those who know of our mutual work and a political platform launched in the 90s, a vision doc we called a &quot;Platform in Progress&quot;, the ideas are still making waves #PlanetCitizens #PlanetCitizenAction <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Jerry_w_Steve_%2792_pres_campaign_at_the_Dem_plat_hearing_m.jpg&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> The son of Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, who was California’s governor from 1959 to 1967, San Francisco–born Jerry Brown, aka Edmund G. Brown Jr., grew up surrounded by politics but didn’t initially want a political career. He studied at a Jesuit seminary and then changed paths, attending UC Berkeley and Yale Law School. He found the law books “tedious,” while political discourse stirred him.<br /> <br /> Brown served as California’s secretary of state from 1971 to 1975 and, in 1974 at 36, an age that many, his father included, deemed too young, he ran successfully for governor of California.<br /> <br /> Governor Brown went on to serve four terms. His service and politics, his ideas and travel among political eras and forces, are a story that, in many ways, defines a generation.<br /> <br /> “He was dismissed” at the time for his views on issues now recognized as critical, the film's director says. “But he was spot-on... He was a different drummer.”<br /> <br /> <br /> A born “disrupter,” Brown brought climate change into the spotlight, along with subjects like renewable energy, nuclear proliferation and the possibility of launching a California satellite to monitor the environment. When Mike Royko created the “Governor Moonbeam” moniker (Royko later took back those words), Brown thought it was a compliment for his unconventional thinking.<br /> <br /> “Jerry Brown is a man ahead of his time,” notes a description of the film. “A natural disrupter, Jerry kickstarted the national debate about climate change and spiraling inequality back in the 1970s… For over five decades Brown has proven his willingness to sacrifice everything – even getting elected – for the causes to which he’s devoted. In this candid and emotionally compelling portrait, Brown opens up about his remarkable fifty-year political career, his singular private life and the lessons learned from a life in the public eye.”<br /> <br /> In a director’s statement, Zenovich noted, “I’ve always wanted to make a film about Jerry Brown. I know him both as a political figure and as a layered, complex human. I want people to hear Jerry’s hard-won truths about politics and public life – and about where he thinks America is heading.”<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Visit Deadline's review and exclusive video here:'''<br /> <br /> * https://deadline.com/video/jerry-brown-the-disruptor-exclusive-clip-marina-zenovich-documentary-news/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Jerry Brown - Disrupter - film pre-release.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Douglas Trumbull, visionary filmmaker and visual effects'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:2001 pic3.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Douglas Trumbull's VFX work for [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Kubrick '''Stanley Kubrick'''] in the movie [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film) '''&quot;2001: A Space Odyssey&quot;''']&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''In memory of Douglas Trumbull'''<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Trumbull<br /> <br /> <br /> :: [[File:Trumbull vfx master.jpg]]<br /> <br /> ::&lt;small&gt;Douglas Trumbull&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Steve Schmidt, GreenPolicy360 Siterunner: <br /> <br /> Looking back to July 2015 as we were writing about 'high definition' creative work in Florida. <br /> <br /> We were discussing with Doug interactive visual designs for the [https://www.kennedyspacecenter.com/ '''Kennedy Space Center and Gateway''' - https://www.kennedyspacecenter.com/landing-pages/gateway] <br /> <br /> * https://www.kennedyspacecenter.com/explore-attractions/all-attractions<br /> <br /> <br /> NASA's startling visions of the Home Planet, recall the original Mission Statement from the launch of the US space agency... and beginnings of a new 'whole earth' movement as many of us saw our planet as never seen before...<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Whole_Earth<br /> <br /> <br /> ''I can see back to the beginning of an Earth Observation &quot;Inventory&quot;. I remember meeting, then years of learning, sharing and work alongside a congressman who set in motion and for decades shepherded U.S. earth science research programs. George E. Brown was a special person who brought a physics and engineering background to Congress. George saw what others didn't really understand and when he showed me the original Mission Statement of NASA, I began to understand. Here is the key phrase again'' -- '''''“To understand and protect our home planet...&quot;'''''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''2001, a sci-fi movie invented a pivotal new genre'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Steven Schmidt: ''One of the first and most impactful sci-fi films to tackle ecological crisis still resonates today...''<br /> <br /> ''Back in 1972, while the seeds of the modern environmental movement were starting to take root, a sci-fi movie called [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running '''&quot;Silent Running&quot;'''] arrived. The emotional elements of this intriguing space film had a seismic impact on viewers of a certain age, one that still resonates in today’s time of climate change.''<br /> <br /> ''Directed by Douglas Trumbull, the special effects wizard behind '''2001: A Space Odyssey''', '''Blade Runner''', and '''Close Encounters of the Third Kind''', '''Silent Running''' was a revelatory experience for audiences. Trumbull, who passed away on '''February 7, 2022''', bestowed a quiet grace on the serious subject matter of 'Space Freighters' acting as giant greenhouses to protect the flora and fauna of a post-apocalyptic Earth...''<br /> <br /> * https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/silent-running-50-year-anniversary<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Douglas Trumbull vfx 2001 - Star Child.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> (Wikipedia)<br /> <br /> ''2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 epic science fiction film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick. The screenplay was written by Kubrick and science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, and was inspired by Clarke's 1951 short story &quot;The Sentinel&quot; ...'' <br /> <br /> ''The film is noted for its scientifically accurate depiction of space flight, pioneering special effects, and ambiguous imagery. Kubrick avoided conventional cinematic and narrative techniques; dialogue is used sparingly, and there are long sequences accompanied only by music. The soundtrack incorporates numerous works of classical music, by composers including Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss II, Aram Khachaturian, and György Ligeti.''<br /> <br /> ''The film received diverse critical responses, ranging from those who saw it as darkly apocalyptic to those who saw it as an optimistic reappraisal of the hopes of humanity. Critics noted its exploration of themes such as human evolution, technology, artificial intelligence, and the possibility of extraterrestrial life.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Trumbull high speed 120fps.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;h3 id=&quot;story-heading&quot; class=&quot;story-heading&quot;&gt;'''''Pioneering 'Immersive Reality''''''&lt;/h3&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''A nod of respect to Douglas Trumbull who has aligned with us (M Channel/GreenPolicy360) and the &quot;Overview Institute&quot;''' <br /> <br /> '''continuing his big picture, visionary work looking to change the ways we can see...'''<br /> <br /> <br /> :[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/movies/awardsseason/douglas-trumbull-honored-for-technology-hes-still-creating.html '''&quot;Trumbull and...future of cinema / NY Times&quot;'''] <br /> <br /> :[https://www.berkshireeagle.com/business/made-in-the-berkshires-douglas-trumbull-the-wizard-who-creates-alternative-universes/article_42489399-c536-5ba5-9261-789aa607d8e2.html '''Doug in his Berkshires studio / 2016''']<br /> <br /> :[http://variety.com/2012/digital/news/trumbull-lights-up-hypercinema-1118050369/ '''&quot;Hypercinema&quot;'''] --- [http://www.firstshowing.net/2011/doug-trumbull-wants-to-make-a-120fps-3d-space-adventure-movie/ '''Immersive Cinema beyond 3D'''] <br /> <br /> <br /> : https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/Origin_of_Oculus_Rift_Smithsonian_photo-illus_by_Dan_Saelinger.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> : ''This is not a metaphor or a breathless smile. Trumbull has literally created alternative universes. <br /> <br /> : ''Trumbull's Berkshire-area virtual reality creations... are on a higher level.''<br /> <br /> : ''&quot;What we try to do here is create a whole new viewing experience,&quot; said Trumbull.'' <br /> <br /> :''&quot;An experience where people are not just viewing the movie but being a part of it.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :'''''AR/Immersive/VR'''''<br /> <br /> ::''New Realities — Augmented, Immersive, Virtual''<br /> <br /> ::* http://www.digibod.com/newrealities<br /> <br /> :::* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:2001_pic3.jpeg<br /> <br /> ::::* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Overview_Effect<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Perspective POV.jpg]]<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Whole_Earth Whole Earth Perspective]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;'''&quot;Planetary Awareness&quot;'''&lt;/small&gt; | [http://www.planetaryawareness.org &lt;small&gt;'''www.planetaryawareness.org @GreenPolicy360'''&lt;/small&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Overview Effect'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Overview_Effect<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''Now is time to go beyond old ways of thinking and shape new visions of our communities and our living home -- [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_and_Space,_Politics '''Planet Earth''']''&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Infinite Wonder by Scott Kelly-1.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Six NASA Astronauts Describe the Moment in Space When “Everything Changed”&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> “This is what heaven must look like.”<br /> <br /> * https://www.inverse.com/article/42902-nasa-astronauts-describe-overview-effect-everything-changed<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Six NASA Astronauts.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wfoy_OvNDvw&amp;app=desktop/ &lt;u&gt;'''''Over Planet Earth, Spacewalk'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> [[File:Over Planet Earth.png|link=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wfoy_OvNDvw&amp;app=desktop]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/03/astronauts-space-earth-perspective/ &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''They Saw Earth From Space. Here’s How It Changed Them'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> :[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Overview_Effect '''''#TheOverviewEffect''''']<br /> <br /> :''For most of us, Earth is inescapably larger than life. Even now, after nearly six decades of human spaceflight, precious few people have rocketed into orbit and seen the sun peeking out from behind that curved horizon. Since 1961, a mere 556 people have had this rarefied experience. Fewer, just 24, have watched Earth shrink in the distance, growing smaller and smaller until it was no larger than the face of a wristwatch. And only six have been completely alone behind the far side of the moon, cut off from a view of our planet as they sailed in an endlessly deep, star-studded sea.''<br /> <br /> <br /> Earthrise and Whole Earth images from December 1968 and [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Apollo_8,_Life_Jan10,1969.png '''published famously in January 1969''']<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Beginnings of the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_movement modern environmental movement]'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Apollo 8 launched on Dec. 21, 1968. History was made. Humanity's picture of our place in the universe changed. Life on Earth changed as a result. [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Observations '''Cognitive awareness, planetary awareness changed'''.] Environmental awareness changed forever.<br /> <br /> Apollo 8 was the first human mission into to deep space, deep enough to see the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Whole_Earth '''Whole Earth'''] and share images of what they saw. The images were taken &quot;serendipity&quot;, they were not planned as part of the mission. It was a magic, monumental event -- and the images forever changed humanity's perspective of ourselves and our home planet.<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Apollo.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earthrise, the way Anders saw it.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;&quot;Earthrise&quot;: Historic First-ever Vision of Our Home Planet (1968)&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''2021'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Don't Look Up.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Don't Look Up'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> December 2021<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/index.php?title=Special:Search&amp;search=leonardo%20dicaprio&amp;fulltext=Policy+Search&amp;profile=images&amp;redirs=0 '''Leonardo DiCaprio''']<br /> <br /> '''Interviewed about his new film &quot;Don't Look Up&quot;'''<br /> <br /> &quot;He [https://newrepublic.com/article/164691/adam-mckay-climate-politics-dont-look-up '''(director Adam McKay)'''] is taking a real chance with this film. It’s really a very tough tight rope to manage from a cinematic perspective. '''I've been looking for a project to do about climate change for decades now. But it's nearly impossible to do something with that narrative and he cracked the code by creating this sense of urgency and tension and seeing the hysteria with all of our characters - these scientists, these politicians, the media - trying to react to what do we do to survive.''' And he did it within a six-month time period as opposed to a climate movie, which could only be throughout decades.&quot;<br /> <br /> DiCaprio, speaking of his many years as a climate activist and his work with many scientists on his climate documentaries, says he built on their emotions in portraying Randall Mindy. He mentions Jennifer Lawrence's portrayal of his grad student, Kate Dibiasky, in the film and how she talks 'to the truth' like Greta Thunberg, as '''climate scientists have difficulties explaining the truths and facts of the science: &quot;Scientists get frustrated when they have to try to articulate their life's work and science and urgency about a certain issue on what's going to happen to all of us. [Adam McKay] had these seeds within the script of him having anxiety, taking Xanax constantly, also becoming a Fauciesque figure that tries to work within this insane political system'''.... I try to work with the private sector, the powers that be, and sort of lose my way. Whereas Kate's character is more like Greta Thunberg - who just speaks loudly and openly and consistently and tries to penetrate to the truth.&quot; <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Dr. Volts, David Roberts reviews &quot;Don't Look Up&quot; '''<br /> <br /> * https://www.volts.wtf/p/dont-look-up-the-first-good-movie<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Michael E Mann reviews Don't Look Up - Dec 2021.png|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/Michael_E_Mann_reviews_Don%27t_Look_Up_-_Dec_2021.png]]<br /> <br /> ::&lt;small&gt;Courtesy of @MichaelEMann&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''A Comedy Nails the Media Apocalypse'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''With “Don’t Look Up,” Adam McKay makes a star-studded allegorical satire that shows the news media whistling past the climate-change graveyard''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''New York Times Film Review by Ben Smith'' <br /> <br /> ''December 12, 2021''<br /> <br /> ''@benyt / https://twitter.com/benyt''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''What makes “Don’t Look Up” interesting is that its writer and director, Adam McKay, is putting his money, and his career, where his mouth is.''<br /> <br /> ''“Don’t Look Up” has a raft of stars — the president is played by Meryl Streep — and the familiar arc of big-budget disaster flicks like “Armageddon” or “The Day After Tomorrow.” But while all of Mr. McKay’s films have been attuned to the intertwined roles of media and politics...''<br /> <br /> ''The new opus shows Mr. McKay as “one of America’s most incisive media critics, even if he’s not necessarily recognized that way,” said David Sirota, a co-producer of the film, who is better known as a combative journalist who advised Senator Bernie Sanders during his 2020 presidential campaign and now runs The Daily Poster, an investigative news site.''<br /> <br /> ''Mr. McKay said he tried five different ideas that would allow him to make a movie about the climate crisis, but nothing worked. “How do you tell this story, the biggest story in 66 million years, without exaggeration, since the Chicxulub comet, bigger than the Black Plague, bigger than Krakatoa?” he said in an interview, describing the question that kept him up at night.''<br /> <br /> ''“How can we be looking at the greatest story in human history,” he continued, “but most nights I’m not hearing it talked about — or when it is being talked about, it’s in the fourth block, or the ninth story down?”''<br /> <br /> ''He hit on the solution while talking one night in January 2019 with Mr. Sirota, who was venting about the news media’s passive reaction to climate change, saying it was as though a meteor was headed for earth and no one seemed to get it. Soon, the two were texting plot points back and forth.<br /> <br /> “Don’t Look Up” is populated by politicians and Silicon Valley madmen denying reality for their own reasons, behaving in ways that are recognizably self-interested and deluded. But the real villain is a news media that is forever chasing after a distracted audience and, as a result, simply …'' cannot … focus...<br /> <br /> ''When it comes to the climate story, the media’s failings are undeniable, and there is still a wide gap between the urgency and the attention it commands. However, the journalism on the topic has grown more urgent in tone and more widely seen over the last few years. It’s harder-edged, more numerate and more closely connected to the floods, fires and December tornadoes that have upended millions of people’s lives.<br /> <br /> But great satire amplifies obvious truths, and there’s no doubt that “Don’t Look Up” contains those moments of recognition. David Roberts, the author of the clean energy newsletter Volts, called it “the first good movie about climate change.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Don't Look Up ....jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Reviewing the Making of Climate 'TragiComedy' ''''':&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''&quot;If the world wasn’t such a careening, shifting, shaking, distorted, bizarre place right now, I would happily go back to making comedies...&quot; ''''' ''-- Adam McKay''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Adam McKay Is Tired of Our Climate-Politics Garbage Fire'''''<br /> <br /> * https://newrepublic.com/article/164691/adam-mckay-climate-politics-dont-look-up<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''How Adam McKay’s near-death experience led to ‘Don’t Look Up’ ''''' <br /> <br /> * https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/awards/story/2021-12-14/adam-mckay-the-envelope-podcast<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''''The 11th Hour'''''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://leonardodicaprio.com/the-11th-hour/<br /> <br /> ''Leonardo DiCaprio’s “The 11th Hour” is a feature length documentary concerning the environmental crises caused by human actions and their impact on the planet. The 11th Hour documents the cumulative impact of these actions upon the planet’s life systems and calls for restorative action through a reshaping of human activity.''<br /> <br /> ''DiCaprio: “With the onset of global warming and other catastrophic events, environmentalism has become a broader unifying human issue. We as citizens, leaders, consumers and voters, have the opportunity to help integrate ecology into governmental policy and every day living standards.”''<br /> <br /> ''With the help of over fifty of the world’s most prominent thinkers and activists, including reformer Mikhail Gorbachev, physicist Stephen Hawking, and Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai, “The 11thHour documents the grave problems facing the planet’s life systems. Global warming, deforestation, mass species extinction, and depletion of the oceans’ habitats are all addressed, and their causes rooted in human activity. The combination of these crises call into question the very future not of the planet, but of humanity.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''The most powerful element of “The 11th Hour is... the offering of hope and solutions''''' <br /> <br /> * http://www.11thhourfilm.com/<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IBG2V98IBY<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::·································································································································································· <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Carl Sagan at the Emerging Issues Forum.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Flashback to 1990 and Carl Sagan'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Warning of Science Predicting a Climate Change Emergency'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Carl_Sagan_at_the_Emerging_Issues_Forum.png<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :·································································································································· <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Making of Fantastic Fungi.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;The 15-Year Process Behind the Documentary ‘Fantastic Fungi’&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> With Filmmaker Louis Schwartzberg @ [https://movingart.com/ Moving Art]<br /> <br /> <br /> September 2021<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://youtu.be/5yq0_mqN97s<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxABOiay6oA<br /> <br /> * https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2021/09/fantastic-fungi-making-of/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :································································································ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Today's Visual Trip is an Animation from Red Side'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Comparing the Largest Trees on Earth (with accompanying Cosmonaut &amp; Wolf) <br /> <br /> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyjHtxAOhP4 '''“Trees in Perspective”''' (Watch on YouTube]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Project Drawdown - Spring 2021.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Project Drawdown'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Solutions to Climate Change<br /> <br /> Watch the online video series<br /> <br /> * https://drawdown.org/climate-solutions-101<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Christina Korp Earth Day and Apollo 8.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :::··········································································································· <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Stephen Brown rest in peace - Politico 3-19-2021.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In memory of Stephen Brown'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> “That’s the story, isn’t it?”<br /> <br /> March 2021<br /> <br /> ''The instinct to protect his reporters stemmed from Brown’s firm convictions about the mission of journalism — reasons he would often cite for why he loved getting to work each morning: to hold power to account; to expose wrongdoing; to explain complex issues; to bring injustices into the spotlight. In a profession crowded with cynics, he was an idealist about the power of reporting and its capacity for civic good.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.politico.eu/article/stephen-brown-politico-obituary/<br /> <br /> <br /> :·······················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''2020'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Diversity in Hollywood2.jpg]] <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Diversity in Hollywood: [http://www.npr.org/2016/02/22/467621632/researchers-examine-hollywoods-lack-of-diversity The Time Is Now''''']&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/academy-president-cheryl-boone-isaacs-907544 '''''Academy President on Diversity Push: &quot;We Will Keep the Pedal to the Metal&quot;''''']<br /> <br /> ''The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences spotlighted the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Diversity_in_Hollywood2.jpg diversity of invitations] to join the voting Academy in 2016.'' <br /> <br /> ''&quot;Back in 2012, 30 percent of that year’s invitees were women and 10 percent were non-white. In 2016, 46 percent are women and 41 percent are people of color.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> * ''2020 - [https://socialsciences.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/UCLA-Hollywood-Diversity-Report-2020-Film-2-6-2020.pdf Hollywood Diversity Report, Film, A Tale of Two Hollywoods] --- [https://socialsciences.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/UCLA-Hollywood-Diversity-Report-2020-Television-10-22-2020.pdf Diversity in Hollywood, TV]''<br /> <br /> :''The seventh in a series of annual reports to examine relationships between diversity and the bottom line in the Hollywood entertainment industry.''<br /> <br /> * ''2019 - https://www.npr.org/2019/02/21/696471501/hollywood-diversity-report-finds-progress-but-much-left-to-gain''<br /> <br /> * ''2018 - https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-academy-new-members-list-2018-06252018-story.html''<br /> <br /> * ''2017 - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/motion-picture-academy-invites-largest-class-ever-diversity-push-n777826''<br /> <br /> * ''2016 - http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/02/24/arts/hollywood-diversity-inclusion.html''<br /> <br /> <br /> ············<br /> <br /> <br /> From Wildscreen 2020, a [https://www.wildscreen.org/about/news/david-greta-in-conversation-now-available-on-youtube/ Conversation between David &amp; Greta]<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRFY4ss2W2A<br /> <br /> Celebrating and advancing the art of natural world storytelling.<br /> <br /> * https://www.wildscreen.org/about/<br /> <br /> <br /> Films and photographs are major elements in the battle to protect our imperilled natural world. Wildscreen work with the best photographers and filmmakers to help promote conservation. They are the best at what they do and all their initiatives reflect this. - Sir David Attenborough, Wildscreen Patron<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Special:RecentChanges &lt;font color=gray&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Top of the News @GreenPolicy360'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;]<br /> <br /> :[https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2020/10/08/netflixs-david-attenborough-a-life-on-our-planet-is-the-most-important-documentary-of-the-year/ &lt;font color=amber&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Netflix's ‘David Attenborough: A Life On Our Planet’ Is The Most Important Documentary Of The Year'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> Via Forbes<br /> <br /> ''Attenborough is now 94, and throughout his long life, has watched the natural world wither before his eyes. He seems tired of keeping quiet about it.'' <br /> <br /> ''The scale of the problem is so overwhelming, so gargantuan, that it can be difficult to absorb, and to communicate through a single documentary. But by framing environmental destruction through Attenborough’s eyes and unique career, A Life on Our Planet manages to humanize an issue that can often seem distant, and somewhat abstract.'' <br /> <br /> ''Like the Lorax, who speaks for the trees, Attenborough attests to the fact that a significant amount of wildlife has been forever lost, painting a terrifying picture of a not-so-distant future in which humanity continues down the path of senseless self-destruction.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Watch the Preview''' - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-91umZ7cQE<br /> <br /> '''Watch an Episode''' - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfO-3Oir-qM<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Teaching Resources''' - https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/a-life-on-our-planet-12412175<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Read Reviews:'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11989890/<br /> <br /> * https://www.wwf.org.uk/updates/david-attenborough-life-our-planet<br /> <br /> * https://www.indiewire.com/2020/10/david-attenborough-a-life-on-our-planet-review-netflix-1234590155/<br /> <br /> * https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/02/entertainment/david-attenborough-a-life-on-our-planet-review/index.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/04/movies/david-attenborough-a-life-on-our-planet-review.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/david_attenborough_a_life_on_our_planet<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :···························································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Watch the 13th.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krfcq5pF8u8 &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Watch the 13th, Now on YouTube / Netflix'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Watch_the_13th.jpg Read about Ava DuVernay's powerful documentary film]<br /> <br /> <br /> ·······················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Happening a clean energy revolution.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ····································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://vimeo.com/391958174 &lt;big&gt;'''Gunda'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> ''Russian filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky shows a world that most people never notice or care to understand, one that respects other living creatures and sees, really sees, their distinct behaviors and relationships. To an extent, the movie reflects the issues that John Berger broached in his 1970s essay [https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/04/01/why-look-at-animals-john-berger-about-looking/ “Why Look at Animals?],” which mournfully weighed what has been lost as humans have increasingly severed their ties with animals. “Everywhere animals disappear,” Berger wrote. “In zoos they constitute the living monument to their own disappearance.” ''<br /> <br /> * https://thefilmstage.com/berlin-review-gunda-is-a-spell-binding-take-on-animal-sentience/<br /> <br /> <br /> Great Ideas Why Look At Animals? (Penguin Great Ideas)<br /> <br /> by John Berger <br /> <br /> * https://www.amazon.com/Great-Ideas-Look-Animals-Penguin/dp/0141043970<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ····································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Planet of the Humans'''<br /> <br /> Documentary / April <br /> <br /> Negative reviews extensive -- Sample<br /> <br /> <br /> The new movie Executive Produced and promoted by Michael Moore is unfactual, unscientific, flies in the face of decades of renewable energy science, engineering and research and is counter productive in the age of urgent need for Climate Action.<br /> <br /> Intro:<br /> <br /> Planet of the Humans, directed by Jeff Gibbs and Produced by Michael Moore, promotes a thesis that is patently untrue on many levels.<br /> <br /> 1. The film states that renewable energy such as solar and wind are inefficient, useless and dependent on fossil fuels to work. Quote fro the film “One of the most dangerous things right now is the illusion that alternative technologies, like wind and solar, are somehow different than fossil fuels….You would have been better off just burning the fossil fuels in the first place., instead of playing pretend.”<br /> <br /> This assertion, which is echoed over and over in the film is patently untrue and ridiculous. The notion that solar and wind and other renewable technologies don’t work to produce energy in ways that are cheaper, more efficient and at low or zero carbon emissions over their life span flies in the face of everything engineers, scientists and energy planners have been writing in peer reviewed science for decades.<br /> <br /> <br /> 2. The film trades in debunked fossil fuel industry talking points that are specious and meant to disparage the efficiency, durability and affordability of renewable energy. Quote: “Intermittency is one of the major challenges.” “Solar panels are built to only last 10 years, so it’s not as if you get this magic free energy, right? I don’t know if it’s the solution.” These notions, which are untrue, antiquated and outdated do not pertain to the technology and science of today , in which intermittency and efficiency are no longer issues due to the significant advances that renewable energy science, planning and technology. The fact is that RENEWABLE ENERGY WORKS and is currently cheaper than coal and natural gas, other fossil fuel generated electricity sources.<br /> <br /> <br /> 3. The film totally ignores the last ten years of peer-reviewed renewable energy planning and policy. Absent from this anti-renewable energy screed are important policy and science innovations such as the 100% renewable energy plans for each state, over 150 countries and the world from Stanford University, Physicians Scientists and Engineers for Healthy Energy and the Solutions Project. Also absent is any mention of the Green New Deal, which is the most important policy advance on green energy of all time. Bear in mind that this work on renewable energy, such as the 100% plans for New York and California are all ready well under way and are being enacted now with solar and wind energy growing exponentially- all backed up and predicted by science.<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/NewYorkWWSEnPolicy.pdf Peer reviewed]<br /> <br /> Stanford University plans: https://thesolutionsproject.org/why-clean-energy/<br /> <br /> PSE Research: https://www.psehealthyenergy.org<br /> <br /> <br /> 4. The film attacks important environmental campaigners, scientists, policy leaders and activists in unfair and misleading ways. The climate movement, the anti fracking movement, the movement for renewable energy and against fossil fuels has been an important part of the advancement of thinking and policy towards changing our energy system away from coal oil and gas. The film attacks movement leaders like Bill McKibben, Van Jones and others as well as taking pot shots at important local campaigners like Nathan Sooy of Clean Water Action, accusing them of supporting forms of energy that they do not (like biomass) and taking money from fossil fuel interests (which they do not). See the extensive and detailed rebuttal by Bill McKibben here:<br /> <br /> * https://350.org/response-planet-of-the-humans-documentary/<br /> <br /> <br /> 5. The film ignores that the IPCC and other scientific bodies are saying that we must cut our carbon emissions in half in the next ten years and that the only way to feasibly do that is what a total transformation of our energy systems. These scientists point overwhelmingly towards transformations in our economies towards renewable energy.<br /> <br /> <br /> ······················································<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Explore a Vibrant Forest Garden'''<br /> <br /> An Amazing How-to Story in the UK<br /> <br /> Martin Crawford growing a wondrous forest garden <br /> <br /> <br /> Agroforestry ... Edible Landscapes, The Food Forest Revolution<br /> <br /> * https://www.ulule.com/edible-landscapes-food-forest-documentary/<br /> <br /> * https://www.nationalgeographic.com/video/shorts/1438178883749/<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Agroforestry<br /> <br /> <br /> Industrial agriculture, monoculture, brings unsustainable impacts with loss of forest land and loss of fertile soil. Big corporate petro-chemical growing regimens lead to water pollution, aquifer depletion, environmental and adverse health impacts. The reduction of critical CO2 absorption that forests provide is becoming a profound problem. What can agro-forests provide as an alternative to industrial ag?<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''From the Filmmaker'''''<br /> <br /> ''Increasing food production by expanding conventional agriculture leads directly to large-scale deforestation which in turn is destroying biodiversity, damaging water cycles, and driving devastating climatic change.''<br /> <br /> ''Rethinking forests as our food larder is the only way to simultaneously stop deforestation while providing food through a democratic supply chain.'' <br /> <br /> ''A forest garden or food forest is a plant growing system modeled on the structure of a young natural woodland, utilizing plants that bring direct and indirect benefits to people - mostly edible plants. Humanity has been producing abundant food in forest gardens since the dawn of civilization. The crops which can be produced include fruits, nuts, edible leaves, spices, medicinal plant products, poles, fibres, basketry materials, honey, fuelwood, fodder, mulches, sap products, and on and on...''<br /> <br /> ''The structure and diversity of forest gardens ensure that they are resilient to the impacts of climate change including extreme weather conditions like droughts and heavy rain. The beauty of forest gardens is that they are so perfectly suited to collective engagement, functioning as well in urban spaces as in rural ones.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ······················<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Via Ecodads'''<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Gratitude'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Louie Schwartzberg<br /> <br /> * https://vimeo.com/44131171<br /> <br /> <br /> ··········································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''A Holiday Message'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''David Attenborough speaks of saving the planet (video)'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.ourplanet.com/en/video/how-to-save-our-planet/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ··············<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''2019'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Harriet Tubman, the Movie.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Harriet Tubman, the Movie'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> September 2019<br /> <br /> ''‘Harriet’ makes its worldwide premiere at Toronto International Film Festival''<br /> <br /> ''The first feature film on the story of Harriet Tubman, Harriet, made its premiere Tuesday night at the Toronto International Film Festival. Harriett is directed by Kasi Lemmons, best known for her work directing Eve Bayou, Talk to Me, and Black Nativity, who was on hand for the introduction of the film by festival director Cameron Bailey.''<br /> <br /> <br /> Official Movie Trailer - July 2019<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqoEs4cG6Uw<br /> <br /> <br /> Creative Credits<br /> <br /> ''The extraordinary tale of Harriet Tubman's escape from slavery and transformation into one of America's greatest heroes, whose courage, ingenuity, and tenacity freed hundreds of slaves and changed the course of history.'' <br /> <br /> * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4648786/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Harriet-an American Legend-be free or die.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ································································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''President Trump says no to plans to replace Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on the $20 US bill'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Harriet Tubman on $20 Bill.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ··································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''Bravery Amid Decimation in the Amazon''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Aruanas-1.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> ----<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> ::[[File:One Strange Rock.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/bill-nye-and-the-climate-crisis-68395077769 ''Bill Nye, The Science Guy, Brings It'']<br /> <br /> :: '''The twists of fate that allow life to thrive on Earth'''<br /> <br /> :: • http://natgeotv.com/ca/one-strange-rock/videos<br /> <br /> <br /> ··············<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''2018'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Redford-Real Security.jpg|link=https://vimeo.com/146947405]]<br /> <br /> <br /> A tip of the green hat to [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Redford_Center,_Environmental_Legacy.png Robert Redford] and the [https://redfordcenter.org/films/robert-redford%E2%80%99s-environmental-legacy Redford Center.]<br /> <br /> Much of what we, activists in environmental, political reform, encounter in changing the world can be difficult, almost impossible, and very often we must have resilience and persistence in the face of forces arrayed against visionary work needed to make a difference.<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> ----<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Look Around, 360° Around '''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Climate Change is the defining issue of our time and we are at a defining moment. From shifting weather patterns that threaten food production, to rising sea levels that increase the risk of catastrophic flooding, the impacts of climate change are global in scope and unprecedented in scale. -- United Nations''<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.climaterealityproject.org/blog/6-must-see-movies-about-climate-change &lt;big&gt;'''''Must See Climate Change Movies, via Climate Reality'''''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_environmental_films ''List of environmental films (Wikipedia)'']<br /> : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Environmental_films<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH / AN INCONVENIENT SEQUEL: TRUTH TO POWER''''' - ''https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Inconvenient_Truth''<br /> <br /> Al Gore (controversially) lost the race for U.S. president in 2000. A door closed, a window opened as he chose to become a full-time, full-on environmental activist and educator. <br /> <br /> <br /> &gt;After seeing former US Vice President Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, people worldwide finally understood the reality of the climate crisis devastating our planet. For many, it was the moment they knew they personally had to do something about it. The film’s impact continues to be felt more than a decade after it won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Documentary and took its place among the highest-grossing documentaries ever.<br /> <br /> &gt;Last year’s follow-up, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, took the Climate Crisis story further...<br /> <br /> : https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/A_Day_with_Al_Gore<br /> <br /> <br /> ----------<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD''''' - ''https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beasts_of_the_Southern_Wild''<br /> <br /> : https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/how-benh-zeitlin-made-beasts-of-the-southern-wild-135132724<br /> <br /> &gt;''Living in a Louisiana bayou community called “the Bathtub,” six-year-old Hush Puppy (youngest-ever Best Actress Oscar nominee Quvenzhané Wallis) can’t get the prehistoric aurochs her teacher tells her will be released from melting ice caps off her mind – even as the world in front of her crumbles and cowers, the victim of powerful storms, failing levees, and familial health problems.''<br /> <br /> &gt;''While the film’s setting is technically fictional, it was inspired by several very real fishing villages in Southern Louisiana's Terrebonne Parish. These small, isolated wetland communities are threatened by climate-driven erosion, extreme weather, and rising sea levels. Most notable among them is the rapidly disappearing Isle de Jean Charles, former home of “the first American climate refugees.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> IMDB<br /> <br /> '''Storyline'''<br /> <br /> ''Hushpuppy, an intrepid six-year-old girl, lives with her father, Wink, in the Bathtub, a southern Delta community at the edge of the world. Wink's tough love prepares her for the unraveling of the universe; for a time when he's no longer there to protect her. When Wink contracts a mysterious illness, nature flies out of whack, temperatures rise, and the ice caps melt, unleashing an army of prehistoric creatures called aurochs. With the waters rising, the aurochs coming, and Wink's health fading, Hushpuppy goes in search of her lost mother.'' (Written by Sundance Film Festival)<br /> <br /> '''First Review'''<br /> <br /> Magical, thought-provoking, very, very watchable<br /> <br /> 26 July 2012 | by oldgirl <br /> <br /> ''I can understand how most people view this film within the context of Hurricane Katrina. But even as a former denizen of the Gulf coast who sat out Alicia, Claudette, Allen, Rita, and Ike, I view this film in a much, much larger context. It goes beyond stereotype and into archetype -- the denizens of the Bathtub aren't poor drunks at the mercy of the environment, they are The People of the world they inhabit. Hushpuppy doesn't have a drunk father, she has a Father, with many of the faults and strengths of the immortal epic heroes -- anger, pride, genuine love and concern. Hushpuppy herself isn't just a little girl, she is The Child -- the purveyor of a magic which is real, intimately connected with her world, imaginatively linked with All Things. The outside world is a place of Things and Machines, of paperwork and rules -- and is never actually named, you see, because that would diminish it. Everything in this film exists within the realm of archetype, and if you watch it with that in mind, its multiple messages take on cosmic significance. Beautifully shot, beautifully acted -- it's going to take a few more days for the entire thing to completely sink in. Outstanding!''<br /> <br /> <br /> ----------<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''CHASING CORAL''''' - ''https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/chasing-coral-review-sundance-2017-967131''<br /> <br /> : From GreenPolicy360's friends at the Bioneers and Leo DiCaprio ...<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Chasing_Coral.jpg<br /> <br /> * https://youtu.be/b6fHA9R2cKI<br /> <br /> &gt;''That coral reefs are existentially threatened by the climate crisis is a truth near-universally acknowledged. But filmmaker Jeff Orlowski doesn’t simply telegraph a report on this impending ecological catastrophe.''<br /> <br /> &gt;''Instead, Orlowski infuses his film with such empathy and ardor for our world’s oceans and their vibrant ecosystems – as well as those working hard to save what’s left – that it’s impossible to not walk away pumped up and ready to join the fight.''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Chasing Coral.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ----------<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''INTERSTELLAR''''' - ''https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_(film)'' ''(kudos to Co-producer Lynda Obst)''<br /> <br /> &gt;''Director Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is that rarest of Hollywood anomalies – a wildly complicated, lavishly expensive, wholly original mainstream blockbuster. It doesn’t exist in the Marvel or DC cinematic universes; instead, it occupies a not-so-distant-future version of our very own – and things aren’t exactly going great.'' <br /> <br /> &gt;''While the words “climate change” are never explicitly said in the film, the impacts of the crisis are writ large, driving a plot about an attempt to flee a near-future Earth reeling from drastically changing weather patterns and global food shortages for the safety of a new habitable planet.''<br /> <br /> &gt;''Featuring one of the most stacked casts in recent memory, including Oscar winners Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine, and Ellen Burstyn and nominees Jessica Chastain, Timothée Chalamet, and John Lithgow, Interstellar takes on a very real consequence of climate inaction, though it offers up an untenable solution.''<br /> <br /> &gt;''After all, there’s still no Planet B.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ----------<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''SNOWPIERCER''''' - ''https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowpiercer''<br /> <br /> <br /> &gt;''The film is set in a future where a failed geoengineering experiment to counteract climate change plunges the planet into a new ice age, killing all life except for those lucky enough (a phrase we’re using loosely here) to have boarded the titular train. This train now circles the globe on a constant loop and a tyrannical class system has taken hold onboard.''<br /> <br /> &gt;''It’s an important cautionary tale: While we should investigate any and all scientific developments to stop the climate crisis, dangerous gambles like geoengineering – or for that matter, fleeing our planet for an imagined oasis somewhere deep in the universe – could come with unintended consequences.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ----------<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Eco-films for you'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> • https://www.imdb.com/list/ls052614234/<br /> <br /> • https://medium.com/greenpeace/7-environmental-films-that-you-need-to-watch-right-now-296d4ffd21b8<br /> <br /> • https://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/blogs/top-10-environmental-films-of-all-time<br /> <br /> • https://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/ten-films-to-inspire-your-inner-environmental-superhero<br /> <br /> • https://www.cinemadailies.com/the-best-environmental-movies-and-documentaries-of-all-time/<br /> <br /> • https://tmff.net/environmental-film-festivals-a-list-for-the-planet/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ''[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/tv/one-strange-rock/ One Strange Rock]... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatom Diatoms, microalgae]''<br /> <br /> ''Secret to the Earth's oxygen supply...''<br /> <br /> ''[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/tv/watch/50ce730c31247c2019d5bae5743a10e5/ First Look at One Strange Rock] / [https://www.nationalgeographic.com/tv/watch/42f24374933dbddc310cb5489c3d76c0/ Gasp]''<br /> <br /> ''@GreenPolicy360 / [http://www.thinbluelayer.com www.ThinBlueLayer.com]''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:'Thin Blue Layer' of Earth's Atmosphere m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Pandora to be found Exoplanets in Space.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ----------<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''2017'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Virtual Reality in Space'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''New Perspective of the Home Planet <br /> <br /> :[https://www.spacevr.co/#spacevr '''Space VR''']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Jamie &amp; Robert Redford'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Start Small Robert Redford.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ----------<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.thecoast.net.nz/news/entertainment/cliff-curtis-lands-the-role-of-a-lifetime/ '''''Cliff Curtis: Leader To Be of the Reef People Clan (Avatar)'''''] <br /> <br /> <br /> https://www.bestmovie.it/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Cliff-Curtis-Avatar.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Bill-nye-the-guy 2017.jpg|link=http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/bill-nye-science-guy-review-986806]]<br /> <br /> <br /> http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/bill-nye-science-guy-review-986806<br /> <br /> '''''No more Mr. Nice Science Guy?'''''<br /> <br /> ''With his beloved PBS series having officially wrapped back in 1998 (although still playing in perpetuity on TV and classrooms everywhere), Bill Nye finds himself at a career crossroads.''<br /> <br /> ''While his trademark bow tie is still very much intact, his struggle to be taken seriously as a passionate advocate for the environment, facing off against dismissive climate change deniers and the anti-science movement, is intimately chronicled in the documentary Bill Nye: Science Guy, which had its world premiere at South by Southwest.''<br /> <br /> <br /> http://www.geek.com/tech/bill-nye-the-science-guy-hopeful-for-the-future-1687963/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Bill nye-march for science-earth day.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/apr/24/why-we-joined-the-march-for-science &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;font color=green&gt;''''' Facts Matter today, yesterday &amp; tomorrow '''''&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> :https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_for_Science<br /> ::https://satellites.marchforscience.com/<br /> :::https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:March_for_Science-2.png<br /> ::::https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Bill_nye-march_for_science-earth_day.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::::::[[File:Disaster movies ignore the scientist.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::::::::················································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2017/02/25/entertainment-news/legendary-japanese-animator-miyazaki-comes-retirement-new-film/ &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Miyazaki Is Making a New Film!'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> :[http://the-animatorium.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-best-environmental-epic-case-for.html '''''Remembering Princess Mononoke''''']<br /> <br /> ::[http://www.teachwithmovies.org/guides/princess-mononoke.html '''''Mononoke, a Teachable Moment''''']<br /> <br /> :::[https://muse.jhu.edu/article/614511 '''''Nature, Environment &amp; Industry: a Film for the Ages''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> :::[[File:San and kodama.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :::∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Beautiful Planet imax m.jpg|link=http://abeautifulplanet.imax.com/]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''A Beautiful Planet'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''May - 2016 / IMAX'''<br /> <br /> • http://abeautifulplanet.imax.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://youtu.be/edwZNH-ZKn4 '''Watch the Intro to Beautiful Planet'''] <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ <br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Leonardo takes an Oscar and speaks out...''''' <br /> <br /> ''&quot;Making The Revenant was about man's relationship to the natural world, a world that we collectively felt in 2015 as the hottest year in recorded history. Our production needed to move to the southern tip of this planet just to be able to find snow. Climate change is real. It is happening right now. It's the most urgent threat facing our entire species, and we need to work collectively together and stop procrastinating.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;We need to support leaders around the world who do not speak for the big polluters or the big corporations, but who speak for all of humanity, for the indigenous people of the world, for the billions and billions of underprivileged people who will be most affected by this. For our children's children and for those people out there whose voices have been drowned out by the politics of greed, I thank you all for this amazing award tonight.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;Let us not take this planet for granted. I do not take tonight for granted. Thank you so much.&quot;'' <br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Leo's Oscar Speech 2016.png | link=http://brightcove04.brightcove.com/17/769341148/201602/2953/769341148_4778916325001_4778895776001.mp4?pubId=769341148&amp;videoId=4778895776001]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Film/Media Reviews'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ''In the movie industry the term &quot;look-see&quot; is used to describe a first look...''<br /> <br /> ''a glimpse of a project, a creator's idea, an initial concept, story, package, a pitch of a screenplay...''<br /> <br /> ''Our media reviews are quick look-sees, online intros, scoops and insights of projects worth your time and thought.'' <br /> <br /> ''So pull up to your screen, log on, stream, download, rent it, buy it, go out to a movie, get virtual, take it to the next level... Act out!''<br /> <br /> <br /> -- [http://www.mchannel.org ''www.mchannel.org'']<br /> <br /> <br /> ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Racing Extinction'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [http://www.racingextinction.com/ '''''Racing Extinction'''''] ○ [https://twitter.com/RacingXtinction ''#RacingExtinction @RacingXtinction'']<br /> <br /> ''“I told the crew, 'We’re not making a movie – we’re starting a movement'. This film is one component of a movement that will go on and on...''<br /> <br /> ''and hopefully live in people’s hearts and minds and change behavior. We are the only generation that can save species for millions of years going forward...”''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:RacingExtinction Francois-Languars2 3000Left.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:At st peters endangered species.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Racing Extinction LAopeningSept18,2015.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:RCatUN projection2.gif]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:New Ways of Seeing.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ; &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;''New Ways of Seeing''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Douglas Trumbull: ''I believe we are at the threshold... time to make breakthroughs.'''<br /> <br /> '''''Time for Technology to Revolutionize Cinema'''''<br /> <br /> * http://www.indiewire.com/article/visual-effects-master-douglas-trumbull-gives-us-a-sneak-peek-at-the-techology-that-will-revolutionize-cinema<br /> <br /> <br /> ······················································································································ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Above.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Premiere of BigPicture Media'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''''A Brief Message from SJS - GreenPolicy Siterunner'''''<br /> <br /> ''Here on the Big Picture we throw a eco-Spotlight on important environmentally attuned films/movies/media.''<br /> <br /> ''We visit the work of [http://www.planetcitizen.org #planetcitizen] media makers, creators and visionaries. We look at the [http://www.earthpov.com BIG] and the [http://www.tinybluegreen.com tiny] -- and life in between and all around us.''<br /> <br /> ''At GreenPolicy, we bring a dramatic [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Overview_Effect 360° perspective.]''<br /> <br /> ''And a personal POV as [http://www.planetcitizens.org &quot;Planet Citizens&quot;.]''<br /> <br /> ''Welcome to a Blue Planet adventure.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ~ ''GreenPolicy360 Siterunner from Clearwater, Florida''<br /> <br /> : ''http://www.mchannelonline.com''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Dove of peace s.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Democracy]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Diversity]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-ethics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-nomics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-Spirituality]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Election Law]]<br /> [[Category:Election System Reform]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Protection]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Media]]<br /> [[Category:Mobile]]<br /> [[Category:Movies]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resources]]<br /> [[Category:Nature]]<br /> [[Category:Online Education]]<br /> [[Category:Nuclear Weapons]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Renewable Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability Policies]]<br /> [[Category:Threat Multiplier]]<br /> [[Category:Whole Earth]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=BigPicture_Media&diff=138349 2026-10-05T11:36:02Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> [[File:BigPicture.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Focusing on Stories that Move Us'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> October 2026<br /> <br /> The film ''' 'The Social Reckoning' '''... ''arrives as Meta faces billions of dollars in settlements and verdicts over claims its platforms harmed the mental health of young users, with more cases headed to trial.''<br /> <br /> <br /> Frances Haugen: <br /> <br /> ''&quot;There have been many whistleblowers that have come out of Meta's AI teams talking about the lack of safety...&quot;''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;I would pause before rushing into giving Mark the level of power that he's trying to seize when it comes to AI.&quot;''<br /> <br /> * https://www.cbsnews.com/news/aaron-sorkin-on-the-social-reckoning/<br /> <br /> <br /> 👁️‍🗨️<br /> <br /> <br /> '''An AI Supercomputer Is Created for a Mission... Its Name Is HAL'''<br /> <br /> : We listen in as two of its creators explains how HAL came to be...<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Trumbull vfx master.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Trumbull_vfx_master.jpg&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> The HAL 9000 was envisioned by creators and science, as a new type of neural intelligence, a machine brain.<br /> <br /> Hal is heuristic and algorithmic -- and much more as we learn on a mission far from Earth, a mission with deep meaning.<br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence is now here in a fast approaching future and we recall Supercomputer [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000 '''HAL 9000'''] <br /> <br /> A warning of what is on the line for humanity as we ride along in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey '''2001: A Space Odyssey'''] ... <br /> <br /> <br /> HAL's memorable words --<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;I'm sorry, Dave....&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;It can only be attributable to human error....&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.<br /> <br /> HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.<br /> <br /> Dave: What's the problem?<br /> <br /> HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.<br /> <br /> Dave: What are you talking about, HAL?<br /> <br /> HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film)<br /> <br /> * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/characters/nm0706937<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:I'm sorry Dave.jpg]]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:HAL_is_watching_U....png<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> HAL's path to existence is discussed by Douglas Trumbull in a 2020 interview with the Museum of the Moving Image... <br /> <br /> * https://movingimage.org/programs/envisioning-2001-without-hal-douglas-trumbull-and-michael-benson/<br /> <br /> * https://movingimage.org/collection/concept-art-studies-for-deep-space-vehicle-pod-1965/<br /> <br /> <br /> Doug recalls the mid 1960s, the inception and development of '2001, the Movie'. We hear of creatives at work, Graphic Films, NASA, storyboarding and visualizing with an evolving narrative and screenplay. <br /> <br /> Exceptional to hear Doug share an inside look at how HAL came to be in the process of epic meetings bringing together science and artistic process...<br /> <br /> With historical appreciation to Doug's visual effects and Stanley Kubrick's art of cinema, let us also give a special credit to the production influence of AI theoretician Marvin Minsky on HAL's creation. <br /> <br /> <br /> Michael Benson: <br /> <br /> From System/360 Athena concepts to HAL<br /> <br /> 'This computer could work heuristically and algorithmically...' (H &amp; Al, HAL)<br /> <br /> <br /> Wikipedia:<br /> <br /> MIT Professor Marvin Minsky was an adviser to Stanley Kubrick on his movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. <br /> <br /> Arthur C. Clarke's novel of the same name mentions Minsky. <br /> <br /> In it, he achieves a crucial breakthrough in artificial intelligence in the then-future 1980s, paving the way for HAL 9000 in the early 21st century... <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Minsky<br /> <br /> <br /> More References:<br /> <br /> * https://www.mit.edu/~dxh/marvin/web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/minsky.html<br /> <br /> * https://scienceandfilm.org/articles/2643/marvin-minsky-and-hal-9000<br /> <br /> * https://magazine.mindplex.ai/post/hals-legacy-exploring-ai-through-hal-9000<br /> <br /> * https://zsjunai.github.io/history-of-ai/en/biographies/minsky<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Daisy, Daisy...&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/ROA-Times/issues/1992/rt9201/920112/01120086.htm<br /> <br /> * https://youtu.be/E7WQ1tdxSqI<br /> <br /> * https://youtu.be/V0bUd6KrQGg<br /> <br /> <br /> Today, as humanity approaches questions of out-of-control technology created by humanity .... <br /> <br /> We ask, '''[[Planet Citizens]] and [[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]''' ask, 'What's Next?' <br /> <br /> <br /> Read a 'God Test' Substack Conversation between Jack Goldsmith and Robert Wright [https://substack.com/home/post/p-201670588 '''here''']<br /> <br /> Also, read more about Artificial Intelligence, [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Green_AI '''@ Green AI''']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''2025'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Jane Goodall, there still is hope - and action.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Inspiring...&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> She blazed the trail.<br /> <br /> The next steps are up to us.<br /> <br /> <br /> Dr. Jane Goodall’s final message to the world: “I want to make sure that you all understand that each and every one of you has a role to play. You may not know it, you may not find it, but your life matters and you are here for a reason.”<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfLKHY52ERc<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://janegoodall.org/<br /> <br /> * https://janegoodall.org/rememberingjane/<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3b6zSpy7P4<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ST6pqfCTy0<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Goodall on the power of the young.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Poet-Educator Katharine Lee Bates.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''From Sea to Shining Sea'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://vimeo.com/1049155969<br /> <br /> &quot;From Sea to Shining Sea: Katharine Lee Bates and The Story of America the Beautiful&quot; is a film meant for our time. In an era where waves of grievance with American institutions, life, and politics are spreading coast-to-coast, a documentary by writer/director John de Graaf reminds of the beauty, beliefs and the tribulations arising from our land, nation, and experiment we call a 'democratic republic'. John de Graaf's vision of &quot;The Story of America the Beautiful&quot; should be seen from sea to shining sea, especially by young Americans. Hope for a better tomorrow is here all around us. <br /> <br /> -- Steven Schmidt, GreenPolicy360<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''2024'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Stopping the Steal, HBO documentary Sept 2024.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;HBO&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> HBO Documentary Films presents 'Stopping the Steal'<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Stopping the Steal: A Documentary Film'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Recounted in detail by former staff members of the Trump administration, Republican political appointees, and elected state officials, 'Stopping the Steal' tracks the movement to discredit the 2020 presidential election.'' <br /> <br /> ''Unfolding chronologically, the documentary explores and debunks the claims of ballot tampering, illegal immigrants and deceased people voting, and hacking or malfunction of Dominion Voting Systems’ electronic ballot machines.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> (LA Times / September 17, 2024) '''‘Stopping the Steal’ examines Trump’s attempt to subvert 2020 election, and what it means for 2024'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2024-09-17/stopping-the-steal-documentary-hbo-trump<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Getting folks to watch a documentary about the Big Lie is a Big Ask. Who wants to relive that horrible chapter in America’s political history, especially while we’re writing a new, possibly less-horrible chapter?''<br /> <br /> ''Despite its title, HBO’s “Stopping the Steal” is as much about what lies ahead of us as it is about that other election that put Joe Biden in office and then-President Trump on a warpath. The 90-minute film, which premieres at 9 p.m. Tuesday on HBO, explores the depth and veracity of Trump’s scheme to overturn the election results through the first-hand accounts of the people who were there.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> (NPR/All Things Considered / September 14, 2024) ''' 'Stopping the Steal' documents the efforts to help Trump'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.npr.org/2024/09/14/nx-s1-5107592/stopping-the-steal-documents-the-efforts-to-help-trump<br /> <br /> * https://www.npr.org/2022/07/28/1114224368/stop-the-steal-has-moved-beyond-trump-now-its-threatening-future-elections<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The new HBO documentary 'Stopping the Steal' takes viewers behind the scenes into the efforts by former President Trump to challenge the 2020 presidential election results. The film features interviews from former White House staff and appointees, including former Attorney General William Barr, as well as elected Republican officials in Arizona and Georgia.''<br /> <br /> ''Recounted in detail by former staff members of the Trump Administration, Republican political appointees, and elected state officials, “Stopping the Steal” tracks the evolution of the movement to discredit the American election starting as early as July 2020 when the legitimacy of the election process began to be publicly questioned. Unfolding chronologically through to Jan. 6, 2021, when an angry mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, the film explores the debunked claims of a stolen election including accusations of ballot tampering, alleged voting by illegal immigrants and deceased individuals, and hacking or malfunction of Dominion Voting Systems’ electronic ballot machines.''<br /> <br /> ''As President Trump’s supporters pressure officials in Arizona and Georgia responsible for ratifying the count, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger recalls when he was told to find 11,000 additional votes for Trump, and Arizona Speaker of the House of Representatives Rusty Bowers describes getting a call from the White House urging him to further investigate the Maricopa County vote results despite any proof of malfeasance. “Stopping the Steal” is a clear-eyed account of Republican officials who stood firmly by their principles often at great personal cost.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ······························································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Stand Up and Tell the Facts as Best You Know Them'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> The 'End Is Nye', a Fall Season TV series exploring Climate Change -- and its coming impacts.<br /> <br /> Bill Nye, &quot;The Science Guy&quot; as he is called, continues to educate and reach schools across the Internet, on TV, in films, documentaries, lectures and talks in nations around the world. <br /> <br /> This year, 2024, is a good time to watch Bill explain why we need to pay attention to life on Earth, science, our communities and our environment.<br /> <br /> Btw, Bill Nye has said he was inspired to begin his career by the famous educational decades of work on TV by Mr. Wizard! Your GreenPolicy360 siterunner, who worked as an editor of Don Herbert, Mr. Wizard in the 1970s in New York City publishing, has a special affection for science education. GreenPolicy360 tips our green hat to two master teachers of science here ... Don Herbert and Bill Nye. <br /> <br /> Communicators with a spark in their eyes and care for kids and teaching. Their lessons carry on...<br /> <br /> Here's to great teachers who have made a world of difference!!<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Bill_Nye,_the_Science_Guy,_speaks_at_the_March_for_Science-Washington_DC_2017.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Mr_Wizard_-_Don_Herbert.png<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Bill Nye explains.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''2023'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:The Movement and the Madman - PBS - March 2023.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> Watch scenes from the PBS 'American Experience' special event documentary film -- '''The Movement and the ‘Madman’ '''<br /> <br /> — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfhHcq-IUQo<br /> <br /> <br /> Strategic Demands:<br /> <br /> In the “Movement and the Madman” 2023 documentary, PBS reveals the how close the U.S. came to using nuclear weapons to force Vietnam to end the war the U.S. had escalated on the election of President Richard Nixon. <br /> <br /> Daniel Ellsberg, a nuclear war planner, as his Doomsday Machine ‘confessions’ chronicled, recalls the Vietnam Moratorium Peace demonstrations of October-November 1969 in the book and film — and with National Security Council senior staff now, decades later, retells how close we came to nuclear war.<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/the-movement-and-the-madman/<br /> <br /> <br /> Strategic Demands' editor at that time was a student and a coordinator of the Vietnam Moratorium Committee. Steve Schmidt, some 50 years later, became a source of information for the PBS film and, pointing to Daniel Ellsberg and Roger Morris as first-hand source accounts, helped to guide the documentary producers to revealing moments of history here:<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[The Movement and the Madman - PBS - March 2023]]'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/The_Movement_and_the_Madman_-_PBS_-_March_2023<br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Surviving_Victory:_Security_Priorities<br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Vietnam_Moratorium_for_Peace_1969-1970<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''PBS'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Movement and the ‘Madman’'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> PBS PREMIERE MARCH 28 ON AMERICAN EXPERIENCE<br /> <br /> The documentary film tells the little-known story of a dramatic showdown between a protest movement and a president — and the power of protest …<br /> <br /> Citizen action, as is now revealed, prevented the use of nuclear weapons<br /> <br /> * https://www.movementandthemadman.com/home<br /> <br /> * https://www.movementandthemadman.com/history<br /> <br /> * https://www.movementandthemadman.com/preview<br /> <br /> * https://www.movementandthemadman.com/interviewees<br /> <br /> * https://www.movementandthemadman.com/filmmakers<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:A Film About the Power of Protest.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:The Movement and the 'Madman' - 2023.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ·····················<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Canary'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''&quot;I had no idea was I was getting into...&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The official trailer for the Adventure/Climate Documentary about the life story of Lonnie Thompson<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxnQKQQL49M<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''&quot;The fight for our future begins at 18,000 feet&quot;...&quot;'''<br /> <br /> * https://canary.oscilloscope.net/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> About the Directors and the film ...<br /> <br /> * https://twitter.com/alexrivest_phd<br /> <br /> * https://variety.com/2023/film/news/canary-documentary-oscilloscope-1235697694/<br /> <br /> <br /> Read more about Lonnie Thompson and Ellen Moseley Thompson<br /> <br /> * https://alumnimagazine.osu.edu/story/journey-two-courageous-climate-scientists<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Danny O’Malley, directed the film with MIT-trained Neuroscientist Alex Rivest, PhD. It’s set to open in limited release with a special nationwide screening on Sept. 20, 2023.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The subject of the film is Doctor '''Lonnie Thompson''', who is referred to as an explorer “who went where no scientist had gone before and transformed our idea of what is possible.” He’s been globally recognized for his drilling an analysis of ice cores from various regions of the world in the hopes of better understanding the Earth’s climate.'' <br /> <br /> ''“When we say Lonnie is like a real-life superhero, it’s not hyperbole,” the director said. <br /> <br /> “Unlike the glaciers at the poles, the tropical high mountain glaciers Lonnie studies provide water to billions of people, and when they are gone, there’s going to be catastrophic consequences that will affect everyone. Lonnie is doing his work and telling his story because it can save lives. So, it’s not just a great adventure story. It has the potential to make a difference.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360: Here's to Paleoclimatology and the science it teaches us as we navigate into the future ... '''<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonnie_Thompson<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Oppenheimer movie - 2023.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Looking Back: At Trinity, the First Nuclear Bomb Test - 1945]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Trinity monument m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Looking_Back:_At_Trinity,_the_First_Nuclear_Bomb_Test_-_1945<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ························································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Love... the wonder and beauty of the earth - Stewart Udall, the Politics of Beauty.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Stewart Udall: The Politics of Beauty'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Documentary film, Directed by John de Graaf<br /> <br /> :* https://stewartudallfilm.org/<br /> :* https://stewartudallfilm.org/about-the-film/<br /> :* https://stewartudallfilm.org/about-the-team/<br /> <br /> :* https://www.udallcenter.arizona.edu/news/getting-know-stew-stewart-udall-politics-beauty<br /> <br /> <br /> On Utah Public Radio, listen to Film Director John de Graaf talk of Stewart Udall's environmental legacy<br /> <br /> :* https://www.upr.org/show/access-utah/2023-04-06/stewart-udall-the-politics-of-beauty-on-thursdays-access-utah<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Udall called on all Americans to move away from our emphasis on economic growth and consumerism and toward quality of life, and a new politics centered on beauty, frugal living, appreciation of nature and the arts, and a recognition of the Earth’s limits.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;His politics live on..&quot;'<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Watch the Udall, 'Politics of Beauty' '''<br /> <br /> : * https://vimeo.com/797101535<br /> <br /> <br /> Stewart Udall left a profound legacy of conservation and environmental justice as Secretary of the Interior during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. His social and environmental successes stemmed from his ability to bring together people with disparate interests, and inspire them to achieve common goals. <br /> <br /> Udall called on all Americans to move away from our emphasis on economic growth and consumerism and toward quality of life, and a new politics centered on beauty, frugal living, appreciation of nature and the arts, and a recognition of the Earth’s limits. (Related: See GreenPolicy360, &quot;Quality of Life&quot; as a &quot;Key Value&quot; of Greens and as described in a founding platform of the Green Party -- https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Quality_of_Life)<br /> <br /> <br /> Reviews<br /> <br /> * https://stewartudallfilm.org/news/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Director John de Graaf speaks of Stewart Udall and 'the politics of beauty' '''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.prforpeople.com/entertainment/arts-culture/politics-beauty<br /> <br /> <br /> ''In 2017, troubled by the cynicism and the polarizing style of politics that had ushered Donald Trump into the White House, de Graaf sought to offer an alternative. He launched a website – called [https://www.andbeautyforall.org/ '''“And Beauty for All”'''] – and he hoped it might become a movement.''<br /> <br /> ''John de Graaf believes that all Americans, regardless of their politics, ethnicity, religion, or creed, could find common ground in an appreciation of beauty, particularly beautiful landscapes.'' <br /> <br /> ''“I think it’s one of the most universal experiences we have, and I think it’s an evolutionary thing. Evolution has taught us that things we find harmonious and beautiful are things that are life affirming, that are good for the species. It has to do with settings, with water, with things that are green.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''2022'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Jerry Brown documentary film-poster 2022.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Jerry Brown: The Disrupter'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> A new documentary, “Jerry Brown: The Disrupter” <br /> <br /> * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt22782658/<br /> <br /> <br /> Celebrating decades of ideas, service and political vision, the film directed by Emmy Award–winning Marina Zenovich premiered Thursday, November 3, 2022, at the Doc Stories festival.<br /> <br /> Marina Zenovich, film director: “Jerry Brown is a man of ideas, not somebody who wants to sit down and talk about himself...&quot;, so she went for the &quot;emotional side&quot; in her film about Jerry. <br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Like him, love him, don't like him, hate him -- Jerry Brown is a man of his times. His story is a generational story. GreenPolicy360's siterunner is fortunate to have shared, as I have written elsewhere, many adventures in politics from the 1970s on... And those Jesuits, they truly know how to debate... For those who know of our mutual work and a political platform launched in the 90s, a vision doc we called a &quot;Platform in Progress&quot;, the ideas are still making waves #PlanetCitizens #PlanetCitizenAction <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Jerry_w_Steve_%2792_pres_campaign_at_the_Dem_plat_hearing_m.jpg&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> The son of Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, who was California’s governor from 1959 to 1967, San Francisco–born Jerry Brown, aka Edmund G. Brown Jr., grew up surrounded by politics but didn’t initially want a political career. He studied at a Jesuit seminary and then changed paths, attending UC Berkeley and Yale Law School. He found the law books “tedious,” while political discourse stirred him.<br /> <br /> Brown served as California’s secretary of state from 1971 to 1975 and, in 1974 at 36, an age that many, his father included, deemed too young, he ran successfully for governor of California.<br /> <br /> Governor Brown went on to serve four terms. His service and politics, his ideas and travel among political eras and forces, are a story that, in many ways, defines a generation.<br /> <br /> “He was dismissed” at the time for his views on issues now recognized as critical, the film's director says. “But he was spot-on... He was a different drummer.”<br /> <br /> <br /> A born “disrupter,” Brown brought climate change into the spotlight, along with subjects like renewable energy, nuclear proliferation and the possibility of launching a California satellite to monitor the environment. When Mike Royko created the “Governor Moonbeam” moniker (Royko later took back those words), Brown thought it was a compliment for his unconventional thinking.<br /> <br /> “Jerry Brown is a man ahead of his time,” notes a description of the film. “A natural disrupter, Jerry kickstarted the national debate about climate change and spiraling inequality back in the 1970s… For over five decades Brown has proven his willingness to sacrifice everything – even getting elected – for the causes to which he’s devoted. In this candid and emotionally compelling portrait, Brown opens up about his remarkable fifty-year political career, his singular private life and the lessons learned from a life in the public eye.”<br /> <br /> In a director’s statement, Zenovich noted, “I’ve always wanted to make a film about Jerry Brown. I know him both as a political figure and as a layered, complex human. I want people to hear Jerry’s hard-won truths about politics and public life – and about where he thinks America is heading.”<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Visit Deadline's review and exclusive video here:'''<br /> <br /> * https://deadline.com/video/jerry-brown-the-disruptor-exclusive-clip-marina-zenovich-documentary-news/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Jerry Brown - Disrupter - film pre-release.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Douglas Trumbull, visionary filmmaker and visual effects'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:2001 pic3.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Douglas Trumbull's VFX work for [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Kubrick '''Stanley Kubrick'''] in the movie [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film) '''&quot;2001: A Space Odyssey&quot;''']&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''In memory of Douglas Trumbull'''<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Trumbull<br /> <br /> <br /> :: [[File:Trumbull vfx master.jpg]]<br /> <br /> ::&lt;small&gt;Douglas Trumbull&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Steve Schmidt, GreenPolicy360 Siterunner: <br /> <br /> Looking back to July 2015 as we were writing about 'high definition' creative work in Florida. <br /> <br /> We were discussing with Doug interactive visual designs for the [https://www.kennedyspacecenter.com/ '''Kennedy Space Center and Gateway''' - https://www.kennedyspacecenter.com/landing-pages/gateway] <br /> <br /> * https://www.kennedyspacecenter.com/explore-attractions/all-attractions<br /> <br /> <br /> NASA's startling visions of the Home Planet, recall the original Mission Statement from the launch of the US space agency... and beginnings of a new 'whole earth' movement as many of us saw our planet as never seen before...<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Whole_Earth<br /> <br /> <br /> ''I can see back to the beginning of an Earth Observation &quot;Inventory&quot;. I remember meeting, then years of learning, sharing and work alongside a congressman who set in motion and for decades shepherded U.S. earth science research programs. George E. Brown was a special person who brought a physics and engineering background to Congress. George saw what others didn't really understand and when he showed me the original Mission Statement of NASA, I began to understand. Here is the key phrase again'' -- '''''“To understand and protect our home planet...&quot;'''''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''2001, a sci-fi movie invented a pivotal new genre'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Steven Schmidt: ''One of the first and most impactful sci-fi films to tackle ecological crisis still resonates today...''<br /> <br /> ''Back in 1972, while the seeds of the modern environmental movement were starting to take root, a sci-fi movie called [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running '''&quot;Silent Running&quot;'''] arrived. The emotional elements of this intriguing space film had a seismic impact on viewers of a certain age, one that still resonates in today’s time of climate change.''<br /> <br /> ''Directed by Douglas Trumbull, the special effects wizard behind '''2001: A Space Odyssey''', '''Blade Runner''', and '''Close Encounters of the Third Kind''', '''Silent Running''' was a revelatory experience for audiences. Trumbull, who passed away on '''February 7, 2022''', bestowed a quiet grace on the serious subject matter of 'Space Freighters' acting as giant greenhouses to protect the flora and fauna of a post-apocalyptic Earth...''<br /> <br /> * https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/silent-running-50-year-anniversary<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Douglas Trumbull vfx 2001 - Star Child.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> (Wikipedia)<br /> <br /> ''2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 epic science fiction film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick. The screenplay was written by Kubrick and science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, and was inspired by Clarke's 1951 short story &quot;The Sentinel&quot; ...'' <br /> <br /> ''The film is noted for its scientifically accurate depiction of space flight, pioneering special effects, and ambiguous imagery. Kubrick avoided conventional cinematic and narrative techniques; dialogue is used sparingly, and there are long sequences accompanied only by music. The soundtrack incorporates numerous works of classical music, by composers including Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss II, Aram Khachaturian, and György Ligeti.''<br /> <br /> ''The film received diverse critical responses, ranging from those who saw it as darkly apocalyptic to those who saw it as an optimistic reappraisal of the hopes of humanity. Critics noted its exploration of themes such as human evolution, technology, artificial intelligence, and the possibility of extraterrestrial life.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Trumbull high speed 120fps.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;h3 id=&quot;story-heading&quot; class=&quot;story-heading&quot;&gt;'''''Pioneering 'Immersive Reality''''''&lt;/h3&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''A nod of respect to Douglas Trumbull who has aligned with us (M Channel/GreenPolicy360) and the &quot;Overview Institute&quot;''' <br /> <br /> '''continuing his big picture, visionary work looking to change the ways we can see...'''<br /> <br /> <br /> :[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/movies/awardsseason/douglas-trumbull-honored-for-technology-hes-still-creating.html '''&quot;Trumbull and...future of cinema / NY Times&quot;'''] <br /> <br /> :[https://www.berkshireeagle.com/business/made-in-the-berkshires-douglas-trumbull-the-wizard-who-creates-alternative-universes/article_42489399-c536-5ba5-9261-789aa607d8e2.html '''Doug in his Berkshires studio / 2016''']<br /> <br /> :[http://variety.com/2012/digital/news/trumbull-lights-up-hypercinema-1118050369/ '''&quot;Hypercinema&quot;'''] --- [http://www.firstshowing.net/2011/doug-trumbull-wants-to-make-a-120fps-3d-space-adventure-movie/ '''Immersive Cinema beyond 3D'''] <br /> <br /> <br /> : https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/Origin_of_Oculus_Rift_Smithsonian_photo-illus_by_Dan_Saelinger.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> : ''This is not a metaphor or a breathless smile. Trumbull has literally created alternative universes. <br /> <br /> : ''Trumbull's Berkshire-area virtual reality creations... are on a higher level.''<br /> <br /> : ''&quot;What we try to do here is create a whole new viewing experience,&quot; said Trumbull.'' <br /> <br /> :''&quot;An experience where people are not just viewing the movie but being a part of it.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :'''''AR/Immersive/VR'''''<br /> <br /> ::''New Realities — Augmented, Immersive, Virtual''<br /> <br /> ::* http://www.digibod.com/newrealities<br /> <br /> :::* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:2001_pic3.jpeg<br /> <br /> ::::* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Overview_Effect<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Perspective POV.jpg]]<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Whole_Earth Whole Earth Perspective]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;'''&quot;Planetary Awareness&quot;'''&lt;/small&gt; | [http://www.planetaryawareness.org &lt;small&gt;'''www.planetaryawareness.org @GreenPolicy360'''&lt;/small&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Overview Effect'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Overview_Effect<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''Now is time to go beyond old ways of thinking and shape new visions of our communities and our living home -- [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_and_Space,_Politics '''Planet Earth''']''&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Infinite Wonder by Scott Kelly-1.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Six NASA Astronauts Describe the Moment in Space When “Everything Changed”&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> “This is what heaven must look like.”<br /> <br /> * https://www.inverse.com/article/42902-nasa-astronauts-describe-overview-effect-everything-changed<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Six NASA Astronauts.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wfoy_OvNDvw&amp;app=desktop/ &lt;u&gt;'''''Over Planet Earth, Spacewalk'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> [[File:Over Planet Earth.png|link=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wfoy_OvNDvw&amp;app=desktop]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/03/astronauts-space-earth-perspective/ &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''They Saw Earth From Space. Here’s How It Changed Them'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> :[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Overview_Effect '''''#TheOverviewEffect''''']<br /> <br /> :''For most of us, Earth is inescapably larger than life. Even now, after nearly six decades of human spaceflight, precious few people have rocketed into orbit and seen the sun peeking out from behind that curved horizon. Since 1961, a mere 556 people have had this rarefied experience. Fewer, just 24, have watched Earth shrink in the distance, growing smaller and smaller until it was no larger than the face of a wristwatch. And only six have been completely alone behind the far side of the moon, cut off from a view of our planet as they sailed in an endlessly deep, star-studded sea.''<br /> <br /> <br /> Earthrise and Whole Earth images from December 1968 and [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Apollo_8,_Life_Jan10,1969.png '''published famously in January 1969''']<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Beginnings of the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_movement modern environmental movement]'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Apollo 8 launched on Dec. 21, 1968. History was made. Humanity's picture of our place in the universe changed. Life on Earth changed as a result. [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Observations '''Cognitive awareness, planetary awareness changed'''.] Environmental awareness changed forever.<br /> <br /> Apollo 8 was the first human mission into to deep space, deep enough to see the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Whole_Earth '''Whole Earth'''] and share images of what they saw. The images were taken &quot;serendipity&quot;, they were not planned as part of the mission. It was a magic, monumental event -- and the images forever changed humanity's perspective of ourselves and our home planet.<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Apollo.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earthrise, the way Anders saw it.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;&quot;Earthrise&quot;: Historic First-ever Vision of Our Home Planet (1968)&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''2021'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Don't Look Up.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Don't Look Up'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> December 2021<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/index.php?title=Special:Search&amp;search=leonardo%20dicaprio&amp;fulltext=Policy+Search&amp;profile=images&amp;redirs=0 '''Leonardo DiCaprio''']<br /> <br /> '''Interviewed about his new film &quot;Don't Look Up&quot;'''<br /> <br /> &quot;He [https://newrepublic.com/article/164691/adam-mckay-climate-politics-dont-look-up '''(director Adam McKay)'''] is taking a real chance with this film. It’s really a very tough tight rope to manage from a cinematic perspective. '''I've been looking for a project to do about climate change for decades now. But it's nearly impossible to do something with that narrative and he cracked the code by creating this sense of urgency and tension and seeing the hysteria with all of our characters - these scientists, these politicians, the media - trying to react to what do we do to survive.''' And he did it within a six-month time period as opposed to a climate movie, which could only be throughout decades.&quot;<br /> <br /> DiCaprio, speaking of his many years as a climate activist and his work with many scientists on his climate documentaries, says he built on their emotions in portraying Randall Mindy. He mentions Jennifer Lawrence's portrayal of his grad student, Kate Dibiasky, in the film and how she talks 'to the truth' like Greta Thunberg, as '''climate scientists have difficulties explaining the truths and facts of the science: &quot;Scientists get frustrated when they have to try to articulate their life's work and science and urgency about a certain issue on what's going to happen to all of us. [Adam McKay] had these seeds within the script of him having anxiety, taking Xanax constantly, also becoming a Fauciesque figure that tries to work within this insane political system'''.... I try to work with the private sector, the powers that be, and sort of lose my way. Whereas Kate's character is more like Greta Thunberg - who just speaks loudly and openly and consistently and tries to penetrate to the truth.&quot; <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Dr. Volts, David Roberts reviews &quot;Don't Look Up&quot; '''<br /> <br /> * https://www.volts.wtf/p/dont-look-up-the-first-good-movie<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Michael E Mann reviews Don't Look Up - Dec 2021.png|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/Michael_E_Mann_reviews_Don%27t_Look_Up_-_Dec_2021.png]]<br /> <br /> ::&lt;small&gt;Courtesy of @MichaelEMann&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''A Comedy Nails the Media Apocalypse'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''With “Don’t Look Up,” Adam McKay makes a star-studded allegorical satire that shows the news media whistling past the climate-change graveyard''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''New York Times Film Review by Ben Smith'' <br /> <br /> ''December 12, 2021''<br /> <br /> ''@benyt / https://twitter.com/benyt''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''What makes “Don’t Look Up” interesting is that its writer and director, Adam McKay, is putting his money, and his career, where his mouth is.''<br /> <br /> ''“Don’t Look Up” has a raft of stars — the president is played by Meryl Streep — and the familiar arc of big-budget disaster flicks like “Armageddon” or “The Day After Tomorrow.” But while all of Mr. McKay’s films have been attuned to the intertwined roles of media and politics...''<br /> <br /> ''The new opus shows Mr. McKay as “one of America’s most incisive media critics, even if he’s not necessarily recognized that way,” said David Sirota, a co-producer of the film, who is better known as a combative journalist who advised Senator Bernie Sanders during his 2020 presidential campaign and now runs The Daily Poster, an investigative news site.''<br /> <br /> ''Mr. McKay said he tried five different ideas that would allow him to make a movie about the climate crisis, but nothing worked. “How do you tell this story, the biggest story in 66 million years, without exaggeration, since the Chicxulub comet, bigger than the Black Plague, bigger than Krakatoa?” he said in an interview, describing the question that kept him up at night.''<br /> <br /> ''“How can we be looking at the greatest story in human history,” he continued, “but most nights I’m not hearing it talked about — or when it is being talked about, it’s in the fourth block, or the ninth story down?”''<br /> <br /> ''He hit on the solution while talking one night in January 2019 with Mr. Sirota, who was venting about the news media’s passive reaction to climate change, saying it was as though a meteor was headed for earth and no one seemed to get it. Soon, the two were texting plot points back and forth.<br /> <br /> “Don’t Look Up” is populated by politicians and Silicon Valley madmen denying reality for their own reasons, behaving in ways that are recognizably self-interested and deluded. But the real villain is a news media that is forever chasing after a distracted audience and, as a result, simply …'' cannot … focus...<br /> <br /> ''When it comes to the climate story, the media’s failings are undeniable, and there is still a wide gap between the urgency and the attention it commands. However, the journalism on the topic has grown more urgent in tone and more widely seen over the last few years. It’s harder-edged, more numerate and more closely connected to the floods, fires and December tornadoes that have upended millions of people’s lives.<br /> <br /> But great satire amplifies obvious truths, and there’s no doubt that “Don’t Look Up” contains those moments of recognition. David Roberts, the author of the clean energy newsletter Volts, called it “the first good movie about climate change.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Don't Look Up ....jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Reviewing the Making of Climate 'TragiComedy' ''''':&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''&quot;If the world wasn’t such a careening, shifting, shaking, distorted, bizarre place right now, I would happily go back to making comedies...&quot; ''''' ''-- Adam McKay''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Adam McKay Is Tired of Our Climate-Politics Garbage Fire'''''<br /> <br /> * https://newrepublic.com/article/164691/adam-mckay-climate-politics-dont-look-up<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''How Adam McKay’s near-death experience led to ‘Don’t Look Up’ ''''' <br /> <br /> * https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/awards/story/2021-12-14/adam-mckay-the-envelope-podcast<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''''The 11th Hour'''''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://leonardodicaprio.com/the-11th-hour/<br /> <br /> ''Leonardo DiCaprio’s “The 11th Hour” is a feature length documentary concerning the environmental crises caused by human actions and their impact on the planet. The 11th Hour documents the cumulative impact of these actions upon the planet’s life systems and calls for restorative action through a reshaping of human activity.''<br /> <br /> ''DiCaprio: “With the onset of global warming and other catastrophic events, environmentalism has become a broader unifying human issue. We as citizens, leaders, consumers and voters, have the opportunity to help integrate ecology into governmental policy and every day living standards.”''<br /> <br /> ''With the help of over fifty of the world’s most prominent thinkers and activists, including reformer Mikhail Gorbachev, physicist Stephen Hawking, and Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai, “The 11thHour documents the grave problems facing the planet’s life systems. Global warming, deforestation, mass species extinction, and depletion of the oceans’ habitats are all addressed, and their causes rooted in human activity. The combination of these crises call into question the very future not of the planet, but of humanity.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''The most powerful element of “The 11th Hour is... the offering of hope and solutions''''' <br /> <br /> * http://www.11thhourfilm.com/<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IBG2V98IBY<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::·································································································································································· <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Carl Sagan at the Emerging Issues Forum.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Flashback to 1990 and Carl Sagan'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Warning of Science Predicting a Climate Change Emergency'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Carl_Sagan_at_the_Emerging_Issues_Forum.png<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :·································································································································· <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Making of Fantastic Fungi.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;The 15-Year Process Behind the Documentary ‘Fantastic Fungi’&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> With Filmmaker Louis Schwartzberg @ [https://movingart.com/ Moving Art]<br /> <br /> <br /> September 2021<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://youtu.be/5yq0_mqN97s<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxABOiay6oA<br /> <br /> * https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2021/09/fantastic-fungi-making-of/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :································································································ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Today's Visual Trip is an Animation from Red Side'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Comparing the Largest Trees on Earth (with accompanying Cosmonaut &amp; Wolf) <br /> <br /> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyjHtxAOhP4 '''“Trees in Perspective”''' (Watch on YouTube]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Project Drawdown - Spring 2021.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Project Drawdown'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Solutions to Climate Change<br /> <br /> Watch the online video series<br /> <br /> * https://drawdown.org/climate-solutions-101<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Christina Korp Earth Day and Apollo 8.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :::··········································································································· <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Stephen Brown rest in peace - Politico 3-19-2021.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In memory of Stephen Brown'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> “That’s the story, isn’t it?”<br /> <br /> March 2021<br /> <br /> ''The instinct to protect his reporters stemmed from Brown’s firm convictions about the mission of journalism — reasons he would often cite for why he loved getting to work each morning: to hold power to account; to expose wrongdoing; to explain complex issues; to bring injustices into the spotlight. In a profession crowded with cynics, he was an idealist about the power of reporting and its capacity for civic good.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.politico.eu/article/stephen-brown-politico-obituary/<br /> <br /> <br /> :·······················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''2020'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Diversity in Hollywood2.jpg]] <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Diversity in Hollywood: [http://www.npr.org/2016/02/22/467621632/researchers-examine-hollywoods-lack-of-diversity The Time Is Now''''']&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/academy-president-cheryl-boone-isaacs-907544 '''''Academy President on Diversity Push: &quot;We Will Keep the Pedal to the Metal&quot;''''']<br /> <br /> ''The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences spotlighted the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Diversity_in_Hollywood2.jpg diversity of invitations] to join the voting Academy in 2016.'' <br /> <br /> ''&quot;Back in 2012, 30 percent of that year’s invitees were women and 10 percent were non-white. In 2016, 46 percent are women and 41 percent are people of color.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> * ''2020 - [https://socialsciences.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/UCLA-Hollywood-Diversity-Report-2020-Film-2-6-2020.pdf Hollywood Diversity Report, Film, A Tale of Two Hollywoods] --- [https://socialsciences.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/UCLA-Hollywood-Diversity-Report-2020-Television-10-22-2020.pdf Diversity in Hollywood, TV]''<br /> <br /> :''The seventh in a series of annual reports to examine relationships between diversity and the bottom line in the Hollywood entertainment industry.''<br /> <br /> * ''2019 - https://www.npr.org/2019/02/21/696471501/hollywood-diversity-report-finds-progress-but-much-left-to-gain''<br /> <br /> * ''2018 - https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-academy-new-members-list-2018-06252018-story.html''<br /> <br /> * ''2017 - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/motion-picture-academy-invites-largest-class-ever-diversity-push-n777826''<br /> <br /> * ''2016 - http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/02/24/arts/hollywood-diversity-inclusion.html''<br /> <br /> <br /> ············<br /> <br /> <br /> From Wildscreen 2020, a [https://www.wildscreen.org/about/news/david-greta-in-conversation-now-available-on-youtube/ Conversation between David &amp; Greta]<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRFY4ss2W2A<br /> <br /> Celebrating and advancing the art of natural world storytelling.<br /> <br /> * https://www.wildscreen.org/about/<br /> <br /> <br /> Films and photographs are major elements in the battle to protect our imperilled natural world. Wildscreen work with the best photographers and filmmakers to help promote conservation. They are the best at what they do and all their initiatives reflect this. - Sir David Attenborough, Wildscreen Patron<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Special:RecentChanges &lt;font color=gray&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Top of the News @GreenPolicy360'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;]<br /> <br /> :[https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2020/10/08/netflixs-david-attenborough-a-life-on-our-planet-is-the-most-important-documentary-of-the-year/ &lt;font color=amber&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Netflix's ‘David Attenborough: A Life On Our Planet’ Is The Most Important Documentary Of The Year'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> Via Forbes<br /> <br /> ''Attenborough is now 94, and throughout his long life, has watched the natural world wither before his eyes. He seems tired of keeping quiet about it.'' <br /> <br /> ''The scale of the problem is so overwhelming, so gargantuan, that it can be difficult to absorb, and to communicate through a single documentary. But by framing environmental destruction through Attenborough’s eyes and unique career, A Life on Our Planet manages to humanize an issue that can often seem distant, and somewhat abstract.'' <br /> <br /> ''Like the Lorax, who speaks for the trees, Attenborough attests to the fact that a significant amount of wildlife has been forever lost, painting a terrifying picture of a not-so-distant future in which humanity continues down the path of senseless self-destruction.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Watch the Preview''' - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-91umZ7cQE<br /> <br /> '''Watch an Episode''' - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfO-3Oir-qM<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Teaching Resources''' - https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/a-life-on-our-planet-12412175<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Read Reviews:'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11989890/<br /> <br /> * https://www.wwf.org.uk/updates/david-attenborough-life-our-planet<br /> <br /> * https://www.indiewire.com/2020/10/david-attenborough-a-life-on-our-planet-review-netflix-1234590155/<br /> <br /> * https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/02/entertainment/david-attenborough-a-life-on-our-planet-review/index.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/04/movies/david-attenborough-a-life-on-our-planet-review.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/david_attenborough_a_life_on_our_planet<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :···························································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Watch the 13th.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krfcq5pF8u8 &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Watch the 13th, Now on YouTube / Netflix'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Watch_the_13th.jpg Read about Ava DuVernay's powerful documentary film]<br /> <br /> <br /> ·······················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Happening a clean energy revolution.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ····································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://vimeo.com/391958174 &lt;big&gt;'''Gunda'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> ''Russian filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky shows a world that most people never notice or care to understand, one that respects other living creatures and sees, really sees, their distinct behaviors and relationships. To an extent, the movie reflects the issues that John Berger broached in his 1970s essay [https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/04/01/why-look-at-animals-john-berger-about-looking/ “Why Look at Animals?],” which mournfully weighed what has been lost as humans have increasingly severed their ties with animals. “Everywhere animals disappear,” Berger wrote. “In zoos they constitute the living monument to their own disappearance.” ''<br /> <br /> * https://thefilmstage.com/berlin-review-gunda-is-a-spell-binding-take-on-animal-sentience/<br /> <br /> <br /> Great Ideas Why Look At Animals? (Penguin Great Ideas)<br /> <br /> by John Berger <br /> <br /> * https://www.amazon.com/Great-Ideas-Look-Animals-Penguin/dp/0141043970<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ····································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Planet of the Humans'''<br /> <br /> Documentary / April <br /> <br /> Negative reviews extensive -- Sample<br /> <br /> <br /> The new movie Executive Produced and promoted by Michael Moore is unfactual, unscientific, flies in the face of decades of renewable energy science, engineering and research and is counter productive in the age of urgent need for Climate Action.<br /> <br /> Intro:<br /> <br /> Planet of the Humans, directed by Jeff Gibbs and Produced by Michael Moore, promotes a thesis that is patently untrue on many levels.<br /> <br /> 1. The film states that renewable energy such as solar and wind are inefficient, useless and dependent on fossil fuels to work. Quote fro the film “One of the most dangerous things right now is the illusion that alternative technologies, like wind and solar, are somehow different than fossil fuels….You would have been better off just burning the fossil fuels in the first place., instead of playing pretend.”<br /> <br /> This assertion, which is echoed over and over in the film is patently untrue and ridiculous. The notion that solar and wind and other renewable technologies don’t work to produce energy in ways that are cheaper, more efficient and at low or zero carbon emissions over their life span flies in the face of everything engineers, scientists and energy planners have been writing in peer reviewed science for decades.<br /> <br /> <br /> 2. The film trades in debunked fossil fuel industry talking points that are specious and meant to disparage the efficiency, durability and affordability of renewable energy. Quote: “Intermittency is one of the major challenges.” “Solar panels are built to only last 10 years, so it’s not as if you get this magic free energy, right? I don’t know if it’s the solution.” These notions, which are untrue, antiquated and outdated do not pertain to the technology and science of today , in which intermittency and efficiency are no longer issues due to the significant advances that renewable energy science, planning and technology. The fact is that RENEWABLE ENERGY WORKS and is currently cheaper than coal and natural gas, other fossil fuel generated electricity sources.<br /> <br /> <br /> 3. The film totally ignores the last ten years of peer-reviewed renewable energy planning and policy. Absent from this anti-renewable energy screed are important policy and science innovations such as the 100% renewable energy plans for each state, over 150 countries and the world from Stanford University, Physicians Scientists and Engineers for Healthy Energy and the Solutions Project. Also absent is any mention of the Green New Deal, which is the most important policy advance on green energy of all time. Bear in mind that this work on renewable energy, such as the 100% plans for New York and California are all ready well under way and are being enacted now with solar and wind energy growing exponentially- all backed up and predicted by science.<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/NewYorkWWSEnPolicy.pdf Peer reviewed]<br /> <br /> Stanford University plans: https://thesolutionsproject.org/why-clean-energy/<br /> <br /> PSE Research: https://www.psehealthyenergy.org<br /> <br /> <br /> 4. The film attacks important environmental campaigners, scientists, policy leaders and activists in unfair and misleading ways. The climate movement, the anti fracking movement, the movement for renewable energy and against fossil fuels has been an important part of the advancement of thinking and policy towards changing our energy system away from coal oil and gas. The film attacks movement leaders like Bill McKibben, Van Jones and others as well as taking pot shots at important local campaigners like Nathan Sooy of Clean Water Action, accusing them of supporting forms of energy that they do not (like biomass) and taking money from fossil fuel interests (which they do not). See the extensive and detailed rebuttal by Bill McKibben here:<br /> <br /> * https://350.org/response-planet-of-the-humans-documentary/<br /> <br /> <br /> 5. The film ignores that the IPCC and other scientific bodies are saying that we must cut our carbon emissions in half in the next ten years and that the only way to feasibly do that is what a total transformation of our energy systems. These scientists point overwhelmingly towards transformations in our economies towards renewable energy.<br /> <br /> <br /> ······················································<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Explore a Vibrant Forest Garden'''<br /> <br /> An Amazing How-to Story in the UK<br /> <br /> Martin Crawford growing a wondrous forest garden <br /> <br /> <br /> Agroforestry ... Edible Landscapes, The Food Forest Revolution<br /> <br /> * https://www.ulule.com/edible-landscapes-food-forest-documentary/<br /> <br /> * https://www.nationalgeographic.com/video/shorts/1438178883749/<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Agroforestry<br /> <br /> <br /> Industrial agriculture, monoculture, brings unsustainable impacts with loss of forest land and loss of fertile soil. Big corporate petro-chemical growing regimens lead to water pollution, aquifer depletion, environmental and adverse health impacts. The reduction of critical CO2 absorption that forests provide is becoming a profound problem. What can agro-forests provide as an alternative to industrial ag?<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''From the Filmmaker'''''<br /> <br /> ''Increasing food production by expanding conventional agriculture leads directly to large-scale deforestation which in turn is destroying biodiversity, damaging water cycles, and driving devastating climatic change.''<br /> <br /> ''Rethinking forests as our food larder is the only way to simultaneously stop deforestation while providing food through a democratic supply chain.'' <br /> <br /> ''A forest garden or food forest is a plant growing system modeled on the structure of a young natural woodland, utilizing plants that bring direct and indirect benefits to people - mostly edible plants. Humanity has been producing abundant food in forest gardens since the dawn of civilization. The crops which can be produced include fruits, nuts, edible leaves, spices, medicinal plant products, poles, fibres, basketry materials, honey, fuelwood, fodder, mulches, sap products, and on and on...''<br /> <br /> ''The structure and diversity of forest gardens ensure that they are resilient to the impacts of climate change including extreme weather conditions like droughts and heavy rain. The beauty of forest gardens is that they are so perfectly suited to collective engagement, functioning as well in urban spaces as in rural ones.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ······················<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Via Ecodads'''<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Gratitude'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Louie Schwartzberg<br /> <br /> * https://vimeo.com/44131171<br /> <br /> <br /> ··········································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''A Holiday Message'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''David Attenborough speaks of saving the planet (video)'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.ourplanet.com/en/video/how-to-save-our-planet/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ··············<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''2019'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Harriet Tubman, the Movie.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Harriet Tubman, the Movie'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> September 2019<br /> <br /> ''‘Harriet’ makes its worldwide premiere at Toronto International Film Festival''<br /> <br /> ''The first feature film on the story of Harriet Tubman, Harriet, made its premiere Tuesday night at the Toronto International Film Festival. Harriett is directed by Kasi Lemmons, best known for her work directing Eve Bayou, Talk to Me, and Black Nativity, who was on hand for the introduction of the film by festival director Cameron Bailey.''<br /> <br /> <br /> Official Movie Trailer - July 2019<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqoEs4cG6Uw<br /> <br /> <br /> Creative Credits<br /> <br /> ''The extraordinary tale of Harriet Tubman's escape from slavery and transformation into one of America's greatest heroes, whose courage, ingenuity, and tenacity freed hundreds of slaves and changed the course of history.'' <br /> <br /> * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4648786/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Harriet-an American Legend-be free or die.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ································································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''President Trump says no to plans to replace Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on the $20 US bill'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Harriet Tubman on $20 Bill.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ··································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''Bravery Amid Decimation in the Amazon''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Aruanas-1.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> ----<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> ::[[File:One Strange Rock.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/bill-nye-and-the-climate-crisis-68395077769 ''Bill Nye, The Science Guy, Brings It'']<br /> <br /> :: '''The twists of fate that allow life to thrive on Earth'''<br /> <br /> :: • http://natgeotv.com/ca/one-strange-rock/videos<br /> <br /> <br /> ··············<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''2018'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Redford-Real Security.jpg|link=https://vimeo.com/146947405]]<br /> <br /> <br /> A tip of the green hat to [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Redford_Center,_Environmental_Legacy.png Robert Redford] and the [https://redfordcenter.org/films/robert-redford%E2%80%99s-environmental-legacy Redford Center.]<br /> <br /> Much of what we, activists in environmental, political reform, encounter in changing the world can be difficult, almost impossible, and very often we must have resilience and persistence in the face of forces arrayed against visionary work needed to make a difference.<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> ----<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Look Around, 360° Around '''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Climate Change is the defining issue of our time and we are at a defining moment. From shifting weather patterns that threaten food production, to rising sea levels that increase the risk of catastrophic flooding, the impacts of climate change are global in scope and unprecedented in scale. -- United Nations''<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.climaterealityproject.org/blog/6-must-see-movies-about-climate-change &lt;big&gt;'''''Must See Climate Change Movies, via Climate Reality'''''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_environmental_films ''List of environmental films (Wikipedia)'']<br /> : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Environmental_films<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH / AN INCONVENIENT SEQUEL: TRUTH TO POWER''''' - ''https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Inconvenient_Truth''<br /> <br /> Al Gore (controversially) lost the race for U.S. president in 2000. A door closed, a window opened as he chose to become a full-time, full-on environmental activist and educator. <br /> <br /> <br /> &gt;After seeing former US Vice President Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, people worldwide finally understood the reality of the climate crisis devastating our planet. For many, it was the moment they knew they personally had to do something about it. The film’s impact continues to be felt more than a decade after it won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Documentary and took its place among the highest-grossing documentaries ever.<br /> <br /> &gt;Last year’s follow-up, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, took the Climate Crisis story further...<br /> <br /> : https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/A_Day_with_Al_Gore<br /> <br /> <br /> ----------<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD''''' - ''https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beasts_of_the_Southern_Wild''<br /> <br /> : https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/how-benh-zeitlin-made-beasts-of-the-southern-wild-135132724<br /> <br /> &gt;''Living in a Louisiana bayou community called “the Bathtub,” six-year-old Hush Puppy (youngest-ever Best Actress Oscar nominee Quvenzhané Wallis) can’t get the prehistoric aurochs her teacher tells her will be released from melting ice caps off her mind – even as the world in front of her crumbles and cowers, the victim of powerful storms, failing levees, and familial health problems.''<br /> <br /> &gt;''While the film’s setting is technically fictional, it was inspired by several very real fishing villages in Southern Louisiana's Terrebonne Parish. These small, isolated wetland communities are threatened by climate-driven erosion, extreme weather, and rising sea levels. Most notable among them is the rapidly disappearing Isle de Jean Charles, former home of “the first American climate refugees.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> IMDB<br /> <br /> '''Storyline'''<br /> <br /> ''Hushpuppy, an intrepid six-year-old girl, lives with her father, Wink, in the Bathtub, a southern Delta community at the edge of the world. Wink's tough love prepares her for the unraveling of the universe; for a time when he's no longer there to protect her. When Wink contracts a mysterious illness, nature flies out of whack, temperatures rise, and the ice caps melt, unleashing an army of prehistoric creatures called aurochs. With the waters rising, the aurochs coming, and Wink's health fading, Hushpuppy goes in search of her lost mother.'' (Written by Sundance Film Festival)<br /> <br /> '''First Review'''<br /> <br /> Magical, thought-provoking, very, very watchable<br /> <br /> 26 July 2012 | by oldgirl <br /> <br /> ''I can understand how most people view this film within the context of Hurricane Katrina. But even as a former denizen of the Gulf coast who sat out Alicia, Claudette, Allen, Rita, and Ike, I view this film in a much, much larger context. It goes beyond stereotype and into archetype -- the denizens of the Bathtub aren't poor drunks at the mercy of the environment, they are The People of the world they inhabit. Hushpuppy doesn't have a drunk father, she has a Father, with many of the faults and strengths of the immortal epic heroes -- anger, pride, genuine love and concern. Hushpuppy herself isn't just a little girl, she is The Child -- the purveyor of a magic which is real, intimately connected with her world, imaginatively linked with All Things. The outside world is a place of Things and Machines, of paperwork and rules -- and is never actually named, you see, because that would diminish it. Everything in this film exists within the realm of archetype, and if you watch it with that in mind, its multiple messages take on cosmic significance. Beautifully shot, beautifully acted -- it's going to take a few more days for the entire thing to completely sink in. Outstanding!''<br /> <br /> <br /> ----------<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''CHASING CORAL''''' - ''https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/chasing-coral-review-sundance-2017-967131''<br /> <br /> : From GreenPolicy360's friends at the Bioneers and Leo DiCaprio ...<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Chasing_Coral.jpg<br /> <br /> * https://youtu.be/b6fHA9R2cKI<br /> <br /> &gt;''That coral reefs are existentially threatened by the climate crisis is a truth near-universally acknowledged. But filmmaker Jeff Orlowski doesn’t simply telegraph a report on this impending ecological catastrophe.''<br /> <br /> &gt;''Instead, Orlowski infuses his film with such empathy and ardor for our world’s oceans and their vibrant ecosystems – as well as those working hard to save what’s left – that it’s impossible to not walk away pumped up and ready to join the fight.''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Chasing Coral.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ----------<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''INTERSTELLAR''''' - ''https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_(film)'' ''(kudos to Co-producer Lynda Obst)''<br /> <br /> &gt;''Director Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is that rarest of Hollywood anomalies – a wildly complicated, lavishly expensive, wholly original mainstream blockbuster. It doesn’t exist in the Marvel or DC cinematic universes; instead, it occupies a not-so-distant-future version of our very own – and things aren’t exactly going great.'' <br /> <br /> &gt;''While the words “climate change” are never explicitly said in the film, the impacts of the crisis are writ large, driving a plot about an attempt to flee a near-future Earth reeling from drastically changing weather patterns and global food shortages for the safety of a new habitable planet.''<br /> <br /> &gt;''Featuring one of the most stacked casts in recent memory, including Oscar winners Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine, and Ellen Burstyn and nominees Jessica Chastain, Timothée Chalamet, and John Lithgow, Interstellar takes on a very real consequence of climate inaction, though it offers up an untenable solution.''<br /> <br /> &gt;''After all, there’s still no Planet B.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ----------<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''SNOWPIERCER''''' - ''https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowpiercer''<br /> <br /> <br /> &gt;''The film is set in a future where a failed geoengineering experiment to counteract climate change plunges the planet into a new ice age, killing all life except for those lucky enough (a phrase we’re using loosely here) to have boarded the titular train. This train now circles the globe on a constant loop and a tyrannical class system has taken hold onboard.''<br /> <br /> &gt;''It’s an important cautionary tale: While we should investigate any and all scientific developments to stop the climate crisis, dangerous gambles like geoengineering – or for that matter, fleeing our planet for an imagined oasis somewhere deep in the universe – could come with unintended consequences.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ----------<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Eco-films for you'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> • https://www.imdb.com/list/ls052614234/<br /> <br /> • https://medium.com/greenpeace/7-environmental-films-that-you-need-to-watch-right-now-296d4ffd21b8<br /> <br /> • https://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/blogs/top-10-environmental-films-of-all-time<br /> <br /> • https://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/ten-films-to-inspire-your-inner-environmental-superhero<br /> <br /> • https://www.cinemadailies.com/the-best-environmental-movies-and-documentaries-of-all-time/<br /> <br /> • https://tmff.net/environmental-film-festivals-a-list-for-the-planet/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ''[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/tv/one-strange-rock/ One Strange Rock]... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatom Diatoms, microalgae]''<br /> <br /> ''Secret to the Earth's oxygen supply...''<br /> <br /> ''[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/tv/watch/50ce730c31247c2019d5bae5743a10e5/ First Look at One Strange Rock] / [https://www.nationalgeographic.com/tv/watch/42f24374933dbddc310cb5489c3d76c0/ Gasp]''<br /> <br /> ''@GreenPolicy360 / [http://www.thinbluelayer.com www.ThinBlueLayer.com]''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:'Thin Blue Layer' of Earth's Atmosphere m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Pandora to be found Exoplanets in Space.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ----------<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''2017'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Virtual Reality in Space'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''New Perspective of the Home Planet <br /> <br /> :[https://www.spacevr.co/#spacevr '''Space VR''']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Jamie &amp; Robert Redford'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Start Small Robert Redford.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ----------<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.thecoast.net.nz/news/entertainment/cliff-curtis-lands-the-role-of-a-lifetime/ '''''Cliff Curtis: Leader To Be of the Reef People Clan (Avatar)'''''] <br /> <br /> <br /> https://www.bestmovie.it/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Cliff-Curtis-Avatar.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Bill-nye-the-guy 2017.jpg|link=http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/bill-nye-science-guy-review-986806]]<br /> <br /> <br /> http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/bill-nye-science-guy-review-986806<br /> <br /> '''''No more Mr. Nice Science Guy?'''''<br /> <br /> ''With his beloved PBS series having officially wrapped back in 1998 (although still playing in perpetuity on TV and classrooms everywhere), Bill Nye finds himself at a career crossroads.''<br /> <br /> ''While his trademark bow tie is still very much intact, his struggle to be taken seriously as a passionate advocate for the environment, facing off against dismissive climate change deniers and the anti-science movement, is intimately chronicled in the documentary Bill Nye: Science Guy, which had its world premiere at South by Southwest.''<br /> <br /> <br /> http://www.geek.com/tech/bill-nye-the-science-guy-hopeful-for-the-future-1687963/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Bill nye-march for science-earth day.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/apr/24/why-we-joined-the-march-for-science &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;font color=green&gt;''''' Facts Matter today, yesterday &amp; tomorrow '''''&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> :https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_for_Science<br /> ::https://satellites.marchforscience.com/<br /> :::https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:March_for_Science-2.png<br /> ::::https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Bill_nye-march_for_science-earth_day.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::::::[[File:Disaster movies ignore the scientist.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::::::::················································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2017/02/25/entertainment-news/legendary-japanese-animator-miyazaki-comes-retirement-new-film/ &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Miyazaki Is Making a New Film!'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> :[http://the-animatorium.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-best-environmental-epic-case-for.html '''''Remembering Princess Mononoke''''']<br /> <br /> ::[http://www.teachwithmovies.org/guides/princess-mononoke.html '''''Mononoke, a Teachable Moment''''']<br /> <br /> :::[https://muse.jhu.edu/article/614511 '''''Nature, Environment &amp; Industry: a Film for the Ages''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> :::[[File:San and kodama.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :::∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Beautiful Planet imax m.jpg|link=http://abeautifulplanet.imax.com/]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''A Beautiful Planet'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''May - 2016 / IMAX'''<br /> <br /> • http://abeautifulplanet.imax.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://youtu.be/edwZNH-ZKn4 '''Watch the Intro to Beautiful Planet'''] <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ <br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Leonardo takes an Oscar and speaks out...''''' <br /> <br /> ''&quot;Making The Revenant was about man's relationship to the natural world, a world that we collectively felt in 2015 as the hottest year in recorded history. Our production needed to move to the southern tip of this planet just to be able to find snow. Climate change is real. It is happening right now. It's the most urgent threat facing our entire species, and we need to work collectively together and stop procrastinating.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;We need to support leaders around the world who do not speak for the big polluters or the big corporations, but who speak for all of humanity, for the indigenous people of the world, for the billions and billions of underprivileged people who will be most affected by this. For our children's children and for those people out there whose voices have been drowned out by the politics of greed, I thank you all for this amazing award tonight.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;Let us not take this planet for granted. I do not take tonight for granted. Thank you so much.&quot;'' <br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Leo's Oscar Speech 2016.png | link=http://brightcove04.brightcove.com/17/769341148/201602/2953/769341148_4778916325001_4778895776001.mp4?pubId=769341148&amp;videoId=4778895776001]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Film/Media Reviews'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ''In the movie industry the term &quot;look-see&quot; is used to describe a first look...''<br /> <br /> ''a glimpse of a project, a creator's idea, an initial concept, story, package, a pitch of a screenplay...''<br /> <br /> ''Our media reviews are quick look-sees, online intros, scoops and insights of projects worth your time and thought.'' <br /> <br /> ''So pull up to your screen, log on, stream, download, rent it, buy it, go out to a movie, get virtual, take it to the next level... Act out!''<br /> <br /> <br /> -- [http://www.mchannel.org ''www.mchannel.org'']<br /> <br /> <br /> ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Racing Extinction'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [http://www.racingextinction.com/ '''''Racing Extinction'''''] ○ [https://twitter.com/RacingXtinction ''#RacingExtinction @RacingXtinction'']<br /> <br /> ''“I told the crew, 'We’re not making a movie – we’re starting a movement'. This film is one component of a movement that will go on and on...''<br /> <br /> ''and hopefully live in people’s hearts and minds and change behavior. We are the only generation that can save species for millions of years going forward...”''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:RacingExtinction Francois-Languars2 3000Left.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:At st peters endangered species.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Racing Extinction LAopeningSept18,2015.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:RCatUN projection2.gif]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:New Ways of Seeing.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ; &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;''New Ways of Seeing''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Douglas Trumbull: ''I believe we are at the threshold... time to make breakthroughs.'''<br /> <br /> '''''Time for Technology to Revolutionize Cinema'''''<br /> <br /> * http://www.indiewire.com/article/visual-effects-master-douglas-trumbull-gives-us-a-sneak-peek-at-the-techology-that-will-revolutionize-cinema<br /> <br /> <br /> ······················································································································ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Above.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Premiere of BigPicture Media'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''''A Brief Message from SJS - GreenPolicy Siterunner'''''<br /> <br /> ''Here on the Big Picture we throw a eco-Spotlight on important environmentally attuned films/movies/media.''<br /> <br /> ''We visit the work of [http://www.planetcitizen.org #planetcitizen] media makers, creators and visionaries. We look at the [http://www.earthpov.com BIG] and the [http://www.tinybluegreen.com tiny] -- and life in between and all around us.''<br /> <br /> ''At GreenPolicy, we bring a dramatic [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Overview_Effect 360° perspective.]''<br /> <br /> ''And a personal POV as [http://www.planetcitizens.org &quot;Planet Citizens&quot;.]''<br /> <br /> ''Welcome to a Blue Planet adventure.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ~ ''GreenPolicy360 Siterunner from Clearwater, Florida''<br /> <br /> : ''http://www.mchannelonline.com''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Dove of peace s.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Democracy]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Diversity]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-ethics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-nomics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-Spirituality]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Election Law]]<br /> [[Category:Election System Reform]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Protection]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Media]]<br /> [[Category:Mobile]]<br /> [[Category:Movies]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resources]]<br /> [[Category:Nature]]<br /> [[Category:Online Education]]<br /> [[Category:Nuclear Weapons]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Renewable Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability Policies]]<br /> [[Category:Threat Multiplier]]<br /> [[Category:Whole Earth]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]</div>

Siterunner https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=BigPicture_Media&diff=138348 2026-10-05T11:35:10Z

<p>Siterunner: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <br /> [[File:BigPicture.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Focusing on Stories that Move Us'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> : &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''2026'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> October 2026<br /> <br /> The film ''' 'The Social Reckoning' '''... ''arrives as Meta faces billions of dollars in settlements and verdicts over claims its platforms harmed the mental health of young users, with more cases headed to trial.''<br /> <br /> Frances Haugen: <br /> <br /> &quot;There have been many whistleblowers that have come out of Meta's AI teams talking about the lack of safety...&quot;<br /> <br /> &quot;I would pause before rushing into giving Mark the level of power that he's trying to seize when it comes to AI.&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://www.cbsnews.com/news/aaron-sorkin-on-the-social-reckoning/<br /> <br /> <br /> 👁️‍🗨️<br /> <br /> <br /> '''An AI Supercomputer Is Created for a Mission... Its Name Is HAL'''<br /> <br /> : We listen in as two of its creators explains how HAL came to be...<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Trumbull vfx master.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:Trumbull_vfx_master.jpg&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> The HAL 9000 was envisioned by creators and science, as a new type of neural intelligence, a machine brain.<br /> <br /> Hal is heuristic and algorithmic -- and much more as we learn on a mission far from Earth, a mission with deep meaning.<br /> <br /> Artificial Intelligence is now here in a fast approaching future and we recall Supercomputer [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000 '''HAL 9000'''] <br /> <br /> A warning of what is on the line for humanity as we ride along in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey '''2001: A Space Odyssey'''] ... <br /> <br /> <br /> HAL's memorable words --<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;I'm sorry, Dave....&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;It can only be attributable to human error....&quot;<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.<br /> <br /> HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.<br /> <br /> Dave: What's the problem?<br /> <br /> HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.<br /> <br /> Dave: What are you talking about, HAL?<br /> <br /> HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film)<br /> <br /> * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/characters/nm0706937<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:I'm sorry Dave.jpg]]<br /> <br /> * https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/File:HAL_is_watching_U....png<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> HAL's path to existence is discussed by Douglas Trumbull in a 2020 interview with the Museum of the Moving Image... <br /> <br /> * https://movingimage.org/programs/envisioning-2001-without-hal-douglas-trumbull-and-michael-benson/<br /> <br /> * https://movingimage.org/collection/concept-art-studies-for-deep-space-vehicle-pod-1965/<br /> <br /> <br /> Doug recalls the mid 1960s, the inception and development of '2001, the Movie'. We hear of creatives at work, Graphic Films, NASA, storyboarding and visualizing with an evolving narrative and screenplay. <br /> <br /> Exceptional to hear Doug share an inside look at how HAL came to be in the process of epic meetings bringing together science and artistic process...<br /> <br /> With historical appreciation to Doug's visual effects and Stanley Kubrick's art of cinema, let us also give a special credit to the production influence of AI theoretician Marvin Minsky on HAL's creation. <br /> <br /> <br /> Michael Benson: <br /> <br /> From System/360 Athena concepts to HAL<br /> <br /> 'This computer could work heuristically and algorithmically...' (H &amp; Al, HAL)<br /> <br /> <br /> Wikipedia:<br /> <br /> MIT Professor Marvin Minsky was an adviser to Stanley Kubrick on his movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. <br /> <br /> Arthur C. Clarke's novel of the same name mentions Minsky. <br /> <br /> In it, he achieves a crucial breakthrough in artificial intelligence in the then-future 1980s, paving the way for HAL 9000 in the early 21st century... <br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Minsky<br /> <br /> <br /> More References:<br /> <br /> * https://www.mit.edu/~dxh/marvin/web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/minsky.html<br /> <br /> * https://scienceandfilm.org/articles/2643/marvin-minsky-and-hal-9000<br /> <br /> * https://magazine.mindplex.ai/post/hals-legacy-exploring-ai-through-hal-9000<br /> <br /> * https://zsjunai.github.io/history-of-ai/en/biographies/minsky<br /> <br /> <br /> &quot;Daisy, Daisy...&quot;<br /> <br /> * https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/ROA-Times/issues/1992/rt9201/920112/01120086.htm<br /> <br /> * https://youtu.be/E7WQ1tdxSqI<br /> <br /> * https://youtu.be/V0bUd6KrQGg<br /> <br /> <br /> Today, as humanity approaches questions of out-of-control technology created by humanity .... <br /> <br /> We ask, '''[[Planet Citizens]] and [[Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]''' ask, 'What's Next?' <br /> <br /> <br /> Read a 'God Test' Substack Conversation between Jack Goldsmith and Robert Wright [https://substack.com/home/post/p-201670588 '''here''']<br /> <br /> Also, read more about Artificial Intelligence, [https://greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Green_AI '''@ Green AI''']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''2025'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Jane Goodall, there still is hope - and action.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Inspiring...&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> She blazed the trail.<br /> <br /> The next steps are up to us.<br /> <br /> <br /> Dr. Jane Goodall’s final message to the world: “I want to make sure that you all understand that each and every one of you has a role to play. You may not know it, you may not find it, but your life matters and you are here for a reason.”<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfLKHY52ERc<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://janegoodall.org/<br /> <br /> * https://janegoodall.org/rememberingjane/<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3b6zSpy7P4<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ST6pqfCTy0<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Goodall on the power of the young.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Poet-Educator Katharine Lee Bates.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''From Sea to Shining Sea'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://vimeo.com/1049155969<br /> <br /> &quot;From Sea to Shining Sea: Katharine Lee Bates and The Story of America the Beautiful&quot; is a film meant for our time. In an era where waves of grievance with American institutions, life, and politics are spreading coast-to-coast, a documentary by writer/director John de Graaf reminds of the beauty, beliefs and the tribulations arising from our land, nation, and experiment we call a 'democratic republic'. John de Graaf's vision of &quot;The Story of America the Beautiful&quot; should be seen from sea to shining sea, especially by young Americans. Hope for a better tomorrow is here all around us. <br /> <br /> -- Steven Schmidt, GreenPolicy360<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''2024'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Stopping the Steal, HBO documentary Sept 2024.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;HBO&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> HBO Documentary Films presents 'Stopping the Steal'<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Stopping the Steal: A Documentary Film'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''Recounted in detail by former staff members of the Trump administration, Republican political appointees, and elected state officials, 'Stopping the Steal' tracks the movement to discredit the 2020 presidential election.'' <br /> <br /> ''Unfolding chronologically, the documentary explores and debunks the claims of ballot tampering, illegal immigrants and deceased people voting, and hacking or malfunction of Dominion Voting Systems’ electronic ballot machines.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> (LA Times / September 17, 2024) '''‘Stopping the Steal’ examines Trump’s attempt to subvert 2020 election, and what it means for 2024'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2024-09-17/stopping-the-steal-documentary-hbo-trump<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Getting folks to watch a documentary about the Big Lie is a Big Ask. Who wants to relive that horrible chapter in America’s political history, especially while we’re writing a new, possibly less-horrible chapter?''<br /> <br /> ''Despite its title, HBO’s “Stopping the Steal” is as much about what lies ahead of us as it is about that other election that put Joe Biden in office and then-President Trump on a warpath. The 90-minute film, which premieres at 9 p.m. Tuesday on HBO, explores the depth and veracity of Trump’s scheme to overturn the election results through the first-hand accounts of the people who were there.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> (NPR/All Things Considered / September 14, 2024) ''' 'Stopping the Steal' documents the efforts to help Trump'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.npr.org/2024/09/14/nx-s1-5107592/stopping-the-steal-documents-the-efforts-to-help-trump<br /> <br /> * https://www.npr.org/2022/07/28/1114224368/stop-the-steal-has-moved-beyond-trump-now-its-threatening-future-elections<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The new HBO documentary 'Stopping the Steal' takes viewers behind the scenes into the efforts by former President Trump to challenge the 2020 presidential election results. The film features interviews from former White House staff and appointees, including former Attorney General William Barr, as well as elected Republican officials in Arizona and Georgia.''<br /> <br /> ''Recounted in detail by former staff members of the Trump Administration, Republican political appointees, and elected state officials, “Stopping the Steal” tracks the evolution of the movement to discredit the American election starting as early as July 2020 when the legitimacy of the election process began to be publicly questioned. Unfolding chronologically through to Jan. 6, 2021, when an angry mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, the film explores the debunked claims of a stolen election including accusations of ballot tampering, alleged voting by illegal immigrants and deceased individuals, and hacking or malfunction of Dominion Voting Systems’ electronic ballot machines.''<br /> <br /> ''As President Trump’s supporters pressure officials in Arizona and Georgia responsible for ratifying the count, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger recalls when he was told to find 11,000 additional votes for Trump, and Arizona Speaker of the House of Representatives Rusty Bowers describes getting a call from the White House urging him to further investigate the Maricopa County vote results despite any proof of malfeasance. “Stopping the Steal” is a clear-eyed account of Republican officials who stood firmly by their principles often at great personal cost.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ······························································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Stand Up and Tell the Facts as Best You Know Them'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> The 'End Is Nye', a Fall Season TV series exploring Climate Change -- and its coming impacts.<br /> <br /> Bill Nye, &quot;The Science Guy&quot; as he is called, continues to educate and reach schools across the Internet, on TV, in films, documentaries, lectures and talks in nations around the world. <br /> <br /> This year, 2024, is a good time to watch Bill explain why we need to pay attention to life on Earth, science, our communities and our environment.<br /> <br /> Btw, Bill Nye has said he was inspired to begin his career by the famous educational decades of work on TV by Mr. Wizard! Your GreenPolicy360 siterunner, who worked as an editor of Don Herbert, Mr. Wizard in the 1970s in New York City publishing, has a special affection for science education. GreenPolicy360 tips our green hat to two master teachers of science here ... Don Herbert and Bill Nye. <br /> <br /> Communicators with a spark in their eyes and care for kids and teaching. Their lessons carry on...<br /> <br /> Here's to great teachers who have made a world of difference!!<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Bill_Nye,_the_Science_Guy,_speaks_at_the_March_for_Science-Washington_DC_2017.png<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Mr_Wizard_-_Don_Herbert.png<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Bill Nye explains.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''2023'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:The Movement and the Madman - PBS - March 2023.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> Watch scenes from the PBS 'American Experience' special event documentary film -- '''The Movement and the ‘Madman’ '''<br /> <br /> — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfhHcq-IUQo<br /> <br /> <br /> Strategic Demands:<br /> <br /> In the “Movement and the Madman” 2023 documentary, PBS reveals the how close the U.S. came to using nuclear weapons to force Vietnam to end the war the U.S. had escalated on the election of President Richard Nixon. <br /> <br /> Daniel Ellsberg, a nuclear war planner, as his Doomsday Machine ‘confessions’ chronicled, recalls the Vietnam Moratorium Peace demonstrations of October-November 1969 in the book and film — and with National Security Council senior staff now, decades later, retells how close we came to nuclear war.<br /> <br /> * https://strategicdemands.com/the-movement-and-the-madman/<br /> <br /> <br /> Strategic Demands' editor at that time was a student and a coordinator of the Vietnam Moratorium Committee. Steve Schmidt, some 50 years later, became a source of information for the PBS film and, pointing to Daniel Ellsberg and Roger Morris as first-hand source accounts, helped to guide the documentary producers to revealing moments of history here:<br /> <br /> <br /> '''[[The Movement and the Madman - PBS - March 2023]]'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/The_Movement_and_the_Madman_-_PBS_-_March_2023<br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Surviving_Victory:_Security_Priorities<br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Vietnam_Moratorium_for_Peace_1969-1970<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''PBS'''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''The Movement and the ‘Madman’'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> PBS PREMIERE MARCH 28 ON AMERICAN EXPERIENCE<br /> <br /> The documentary film tells the little-known story of a dramatic showdown between a protest movement and a president — and the power of protest …<br /> <br /> Citizen action, as is now revealed, prevented the use of nuclear weapons<br /> <br /> * https://www.movementandthemadman.com/home<br /> <br /> * https://www.movementandthemadman.com/history<br /> <br /> * https://www.movementandthemadman.com/preview<br /> <br /> * https://www.movementandthemadman.com/interviewees<br /> <br /> * https://www.movementandthemadman.com/filmmakers<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:A Film About the Power of Protest.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:The Movement and the 'Madman' - 2023.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ·····················<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Canary'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''&quot;I had no idea was I was getting into...&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The official trailer for the Adventure/Climate Documentary about the life story of Lonnie Thompson<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxnQKQQL49M<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''&quot;The fight for our future begins at 18,000 feet&quot;...&quot;'''<br /> <br /> * https://canary.oscilloscope.net/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> About the Directors and the film ...<br /> <br /> * https://twitter.com/alexrivest_phd<br /> <br /> * https://variety.com/2023/film/news/canary-documentary-oscilloscope-1235697694/<br /> <br /> <br /> Read more about Lonnie Thompson and Ellen Moseley Thompson<br /> <br /> * https://alumnimagazine.osu.edu/story/journey-two-courageous-climate-scientists<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Danny O’Malley, directed the film with MIT-trained Neuroscientist Alex Rivest, PhD. It’s set to open in limited release with a special nationwide screening on Sept. 20, 2023.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''The subject of the film is Doctor '''Lonnie Thompson''', who is referred to as an explorer “who went where no scientist had gone before and transformed our idea of what is possible.” He’s been globally recognized for his drilling an analysis of ice cores from various regions of the world in the hopes of better understanding the Earth’s climate.'' <br /> <br /> ''“When we say Lonnie is like a real-life superhero, it’s not hyperbole,” the director said. <br /> <br /> “Unlike the glaciers at the poles, the tropical high mountain glaciers Lonnie studies provide water to billions of people, and when they are gone, there’s going to be catastrophic consequences that will affect everyone. Lonnie is doing his work and telling his story because it can save lives. So, it’s not just a great adventure story. It has the potential to make a difference.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''GreenPolicy360: Here's to Paleoclimatology and the science it teaches us as we navigate into the future ... '''<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonnie_Thompson<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Oppenheimer movie - 2023.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[Looking Back: At Trinity, the First Nuclear Bomb Test - 1945]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Trinity monument m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Looking_Back:_At_Trinity,_the_First_Nuclear_Bomb_Test_-_1945<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ························································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Love... the wonder and beauty of the earth - Stewart Udall, the Politics of Beauty.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Stewart Udall: The Politics of Beauty'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> : Documentary film, Directed by John de Graaf<br /> <br /> :* https://stewartudallfilm.org/<br /> :* https://stewartudallfilm.org/about-the-film/<br /> :* https://stewartudallfilm.org/about-the-team/<br /> <br /> :* https://www.udallcenter.arizona.edu/news/getting-know-stew-stewart-udall-politics-beauty<br /> <br /> <br /> On Utah Public Radio, listen to Film Director John de Graaf talk of Stewart Udall's environmental legacy<br /> <br /> :* https://www.upr.org/show/access-utah/2023-04-06/stewart-udall-the-politics-of-beauty-on-thursdays-access-utah<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Udall called on all Americans to move away from our emphasis on economic growth and consumerism and toward quality of life, and a new politics centered on beauty, frugal living, appreciation of nature and the arts, and a recognition of the Earth’s limits.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;His politics live on..&quot;'<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Watch the Udall, 'Politics of Beauty' '''<br /> <br /> : * https://vimeo.com/797101535<br /> <br /> <br /> Stewart Udall left a profound legacy of conservation and environmental justice as Secretary of the Interior during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. His social and environmental successes stemmed from his ability to bring together people with disparate interests, and inspire them to achieve common goals. <br /> <br /> Udall called on all Americans to move away from our emphasis on economic growth and consumerism and toward quality of life, and a new politics centered on beauty, frugal living, appreciation of nature and the arts, and a recognition of the Earth’s limits. (Related: See GreenPolicy360, &quot;Quality of Life&quot; as a &quot;Key Value&quot; of Greens and as described in a founding platform of the Green Party -- https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Quality_of_Life)<br /> <br /> <br /> Reviews<br /> <br /> * https://stewartudallfilm.org/news/<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Director John de Graaf speaks of Stewart Udall and 'the politics of beauty' '''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.prforpeople.com/entertainment/arts-culture/politics-beauty<br /> <br /> <br /> ''In 2017, troubled by the cynicism and the polarizing style of politics that had ushered Donald Trump into the White House, de Graaf sought to offer an alternative. He launched a website – called [https://www.andbeautyforall.org/ '''“And Beauty for All”'''] – and he hoped it might become a movement.''<br /> <br /> ''John de Graaf believes that all Americans, regardless of their politics, ethnicity, religion, or creed, could find common ground in an appreciation of beauty, particularly beautiful landscapes.'' <br /> <br /> ''“I think it’s one of the most universal experiences we have, and I think it’s an evolutionary thing. Evolution has taught us that things we find harmonious and beautiful are things that are life affirming, that are good for the species. It has to do with settings, with water, with things that are green.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''2022'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Jerry Brown documentary film-poster 2022.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Jerry Brown: The Disrupter'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> A new documentary, “Jerry Brown: The Disrupter” <br /> <br /> * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt22782658/<br /> <br /> <br /> Celebrating decades of ideas, service and political vision, the film directed by Emmy Award–winning Marina Zenovich premiered Thursday, November 3, 2022, at the Doc Stories festival.<br /> <br /> Marina Zenovich, film director: “Jerry Brown is a man of ideas, not somebody who wants to sit down and talk about himself...&quot;, so she went for the &quot;emotional side&quot; in her film about Jerry. <br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Like him, love him, don't like him, hate him -- Jerry Brown is a man of his times. His story is a generational story. GreenPolicy360's siterunner is fortunate to have shared, as I have written elsewhere, many adventures in politics from the 1970s on... And those Jesuits, they truly know how to debate... For those who know of our mutual work and a political platform launched in the 90s, a vision doc we called a &quot;Platform in Progress&quot;, the ideas are still making waves #PlanetCitizens #PlanetCitizenAction <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Jerry_w_Steve_%2792_pres_campaign_at_the_Dem_plat_hearing_m.jpg&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> The son of Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, who was California’s governor from 1959 to 1967, San Francisco–born Jerry Brown, aka Edmund G. Brown Jr., grew up surrounded by politics but didn’t initially want a political career. He studied at a Jesuit seminary and then changed paths, attending UC Berkeley and Yale Law School. He found the law books “tedious,” while political discourse stirred him.<br /> <br /> Brown served as California’s secretary of state from 1971 to 1975 and, in 1974 at 36, an age that many, his father included, deemed too young, he ran successfully for governor of California.<br /> <br /> Governor Brown went on to serve four terms. His service and politics, his ideas and travel among political eras and forces, are a story that, in many ways, defines a generation.<br /> <br /> “He was dismissed” at the time for his views on issues now recognized as critical, the film's director says. “But he was spot-on... He was a different drummer.”<br /> <br /> <br /> A born “disrupter,” Brown brought climate change into the spotlight, along with subjects like renewable energy, nuclear proliferation and the possibility of launching a California satellite to monitor the environment. When Mike Royko created the “Governor Moonbeam” moniker (Royko later took back those words), Brown thought it was a compliment for his unconventional thinking.<br /> <br /> “Jerry Brown is a man ahead of his time,” notes a description of the film. “A natural disrupter, Jerry kickstarted the national debate about climate change and spiraling inequality back in the 1970s… For over five decades Brown has proven his willingness to sacrifice everything – even getting elected – for the causes to which he’s devoted. In this candid and emotionally compelling portrait, Brown opens up about his remarkable fifty-year political career, his singular private life and the lessons learned from a life in the public eye.”<br /> <br /> In a director’s statement, Zenovich noted, “I’ve always wanted to make a film about Jerry Brown. I know him both as a political figure and as a layered, complex human. I want people to hear Jerry’s hard-won truths about politics and public life – and about where he thinks America is heading.”<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Visit Deadline's review and exclusive video here:'''<br /> <br /> * https://deadline.com/video/jerry-brown-the-disruptor-exclusive-clip-marina-zenovich-documentary-news/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Jerry Brown - Disrupter - film pre-release.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Douglas Trumbull, visionary filmmaker and visual effects'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:2001 pic3.jpeg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;Douglas Trumbull's VFX work for [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Kubrick '''Stanley Kubrick'''] in the movie [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film) '''&quot;2001: A Space Odyssey&quot;''']&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''In memory of Douglas Trumbull'''<br /> <br /> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Trumbull<br /> <br /> <br /> :: [[File:Trumbull vfx master.jpg]]<br /> <br /> ::&lt;small&gt;Douglas Trumbull&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Steve Schmidt, GreenPolicy360 Siterunner: <br /> <br /> Looking back to July 2015 as we were writing about 'high definition' creative work in Florida. <br /> <br /> We were discussing with Doug interactive visual designs for the [https://www.kennedyspacecenter.com/ '''Kennedy Space Center and Gateway''' - https://www.kennedyspacecenter.com/landing-pages/gateway] <br /> <br /> * https://www.kennedyspacecenter.com/explore-attractions/all-attractions<br /> <br /> <br /> NASA's startling visions of the Home Planet, recall the original Mission Statement from the launch of the US space agency... and beginnings of a new 'whole earth' movement as many of us saw our planet as never seen before...<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Whole_Earth<br /> <br /> <br /> ''I can see back to the beginning of an Earth Observation &quot;Inventory&quot;. I remember meeting, then years of learning, sharing and work alongside a congressman who set in motion and for decades shepherded U.S. earth science research programs. George E. Brown was a special person who brought a physics and engineering background to Congress. George saw what others didn't really understand and when he showed me the original Mission Statement of NASA, I began to understand. Here is the key phrase again'' -- '''''“To understand and protect our home planet...&quot;'''''<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''2001, a sci-fi movie invented a pivotal new genre'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Steven Schmidt: ''One of the first and most impactful sci-fi films to tackle ecological crisis still resonates today...''<br /> <br /> ''Back in 1972, while the seeds of the modern environmental movement were starting to take root, a sci-fi movie called [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running '''&quot;Silent Running&quot;'''] arrived. The emotional elements of this intriguing space film had a seismic impact on viewers of a certain age, one that still resonates in today’s time of climate change.''<br /> <br /> ''Directed by Douglas Trumbull, the special effects wizard behind '''2001: A Space Odyssey''', '''Blade Runner''', and '''Close Encounters of the Third Kind''', '''Silent Running''' was a revelatory experience for audiences. Trumbull, who passed away on '''February 7, 2022''', bestowed a quiet grace on the serious subject matter of 'Space Freighters' acting as giant greenhouses to protect the flora and fauna of a post-apocalyptic Earth...''<br /> <br /> * https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/silent-running-50-year-anniversary<br /> <br /> <br /> ~<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Douglas Trumbull vfx 2001 - Star Child.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> (Wikipedia)<br /> <br /> ''2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 epic science fiction film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick. The screenplay was written by Kubrick and science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, and was inspired by Clarke's 1951 short story &quot;The Sentinel&quot; ...'' <br /> <br /> ''The film is noted for its scientifically accurate depiction of space flight, pioneering special effects, and ambiguous imagery. Kubrick avoided conventional cinematic and narrative techniques; dialogue is used sparingly, and there are long sequences accompanied only by music. The soundtrack incorporates numerous works of classical music, by composers including Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss II, Aram Khachaturian, and György Ligeti.''<br /> <br /> ''The film received diverse critical responses, ranging from those who saw it as darkly apocalyptic to those who saw it as an optimistic reappraisal of the hopes of humanity. Critics noted its exploration of themes such as human evolution, technology, artificial intelligence, and the possibility of extraterrestrial life.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Trumbull high speed 120fps.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :&lt;h3 id=&quot;story-heading&quot; class=&quot;story-heading&quot;&gt;'''''Pioneering 'Immersive Reality''''''&lt;/h3&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''A nod of respect to Douglas Trumbull who has aligned with us (M Channel/GreenPolicy360) and the &quot;Overview Institute&quot;''' <br /> <br /> '''continuing his big picture, visionary work looking to change the ways we can see...'''<br /> <br /> <br /> :[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/movies/awardsseason/douglas-trumbull-honored-for-technology-hes-still-creating.html '''&quot;Trumbull and...future of cinema / NY Times&quot;'''] <br /> <br /> :[https://www.berkshireeagle.com/business/made-in-the-berkshires-douglas-trumbull-the-wizard-who-creates-alternative-universes/article_42489399-c536-5ba5-9261-789aa607d8e2.html '''Doug in his Berkshires studio / 2016''']<br /> <br /> :[http://variety.com/2012/digital/news/trumbull-lights-up-hypercinema-1118050369/ '''&quot;Hypercinema&quot;'''] --- [http://www.firstshowing.net/2011/doug-trumbull-wants-to-make-a-120fps-3d-space-adventure-movie/ '''Immersive Cinema beyond 3D'''] <br /> <br /> <br /> : https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/Origin_of_Oculus_Rift_Smithsonian_photo-illus_by_Dan_Saelinger.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> : ''This is not a metaphor or a breathless smile. Trumbull has literally created alternative universes. <br /> <br /> : ''Trumbull's Berkshire-area virtual reality creations... are on a higher level.''<br /> <br /> : ''&quot;What we try to do here is create a whole new viewing experience,&quot; said Trumbull.'' <br /> <br /> :''&quot;An experience where people are not just viewing the movie but being a part of it.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :'''''AR/Immersive/VR'''''<br /> <br /> ::''New Realities — Augmented, Immersive, Virtual''<br /> <br /> ::* http://www.digibod.com/newrealities<br /> <br /> :::* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:2001_pic3.jpeg<br /> <br /> ::::* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Overview_Effect<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Perspective POV.jpg]]<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Whole_Earth Whole Earth Perspective]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;'''&quot;Planetary Awareness&quot;'''&lt;/small&gt; | [http://www.planetaryawareness.org &lt;small&gt;'''www.planetaryawareness.org @GreenPolicy360'''&lt;/small&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Overview Effect'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Overview_Effect<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;''Now is time to go beyond old ways of thinking and shape new visions of our communities and our living home -- [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Earth_and_Space,_Politics '''Planet Earth''']''&lt;/small&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Infinite Wonder by Scott Kelly-1.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;Six NASA Astronauts Describe the Moment in Space When “Everything Changed”&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> “This is what heaven must look like.”<br /> <br /> * https://www.inverse.com/article/42902-nasa-astronauts-describe-overview-effect-everything-changed<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Six NASA Astronauts.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp;<br /> <br /> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wfoy_OvNDvw&amp;app=desktop/ &lt;u&gt;'''''Over Planet Earth, Spacewalk'''''&lt;/u&gt;]<br /> <br /> [[File:Over Planet Earth.png|link=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wfoy_OvNDvw&amp;app=desktop]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/03/astronauts-space-earth-perspective/ &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''They Saw Earth From Space. Here’s How It Changed Them'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> :[https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Overview_Effect '''''#TheOverviewEffect''''']<br /> <br /> :''For most of us, Earth is inescapably larger than life. Even now, after nearly six decades of human spaceflight, precious few people have rocketed into orbit and seen the sun peeking out from behind that curved horizon. Since 1961, a mere 556 people have had this rarefied experience. Fewer, just 24, have watched Earth shrink in the distance, growing smaller and smaller until it was no larger than the face of a wristwatch. And only six have been completely alone behind the far side of the moon, cut off from a view of our planet as they sailed in an endlessly deep, star-studded sea.''<br /> <br /> <br /> Earthrise and Whole Earth images from December 1968 and [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Apollo_8,_Life_Jan10,1969.png '''published famously in January 1969''']<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Beginnings of the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_movement modern environmental movement]'''&lt;/big&gt; <br /> <br /> <br /> GreenPolicy360: Apollo 8 launched on Dec. 21, 1968. History was made. Humanity's picture of our place in the universe changed. Life on Earth changed as a result. [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Observations '''Cognitive awareness, planetary awareness changed'''.] Environmental awareness changed forever.<br /> <br /> Apollo 8 was the first human mission into to deep space, deep enough to see the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Whole_Earth '''Whole Earth'''] and share images of what they saw. The images were taken &quot;serendipity&quot;, they were not planned as part of the mission. It was a magic, monumental event -- and the images forever changed humanity's perspective of ourselves and our home planet.<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Apollo.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Earthrise, the way Anders saw it.jpg]]<br /> <br /> &lt;small&gt;&quot;Earthrise&quot;: Historic First-ever Vision of Our Home Planet (1968)&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> 🌎<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''2021'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Don't Look Up.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Don't Look Up'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> December 2021<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/index.php?title=Special:Search&amp;search=leonardo%20dicaprio&amp;fulltext=Policy+Search&amp;profile=images&amp;redirs=0 '''Leonardo DiCaprio''']<br /> <br /> '''Interviewed about his new film &quot;Don't Look Up&quot;'''<br /> <br /> &quot;He [https://newrepublic.com/article/164691/adam-mckay-climate-politics-dont-look-up '''(director Adam McKay)'''] is taking a real chance with this film. It’s really a very tough tight rope to manage from a cinematic perspective. '''I've been looking for a project to do about climate change for decades now. But it's nearly impossible to do something with that narrative and he cracked the code by creating this sense of urgency and tension and seeing the hysteria with all of our characters - these scientists, these politicians, the media - trying to react to what do we do to survive.''' And he did it within a six-month time period as opposed to a climate movie, which could only be throughout decades.&quot;<br /> <br /> DiCaprio, speaking of his many years as a climate activist and his work with many scientists on his climate documentaries, says he built on their emotions in portraying Randall Mindy. He mentions Jennifer Lawrence's portrayal of his grad student, Kate Dibiasky, in the film and how she talks 'to the truth' like Greta Thunberg, as '''climate scientists have difficulties explaining the truths and facts of the science: &quot;Scientists get frustrated when they have to try to articulate their life's work and science and urgency about a certain issue on what's going to happen to all of us. [Adam McKay] had these seeds within the script of him having anxiety, taking Xanax constantly, also becoming a Fauciesque figure that tries to work within this insane political system'''.... I try to work with the private sector, the powers that be, and sort of lose my way. Whereas Kate's character is more like Greta Thunberg - who just speaks loudly and openly and consistently and tries to penetrate to the truth.&quot; <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Dr. Volts, David Roberts reviews &quot;Don't Look Up&quot; '''<br /> <br /> * https://www.volts.wtf/p/dont-look-up-the-first-good-movie<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Michael E Mann reviews Don't Look Up - Dec 2021.png|link=https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/Michael_E_Mann_reviews_Don%27t_Look_Up_-_Dec_2021.png]]<br /> <br /> ::&lt;small&gt;Courtesy of @MichaelEMann&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''A Comedy Nails the Media Apocalypse'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> ''With “Don’t Look Up,” Adam McKay makes a star-studded allegorical satire that shows the news media whistling past the climate-change graveyard''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''New York Times Film Review by Ben Smith'' <br /> <br /> ''December 12, 2021''<br /> <br /> ''@benyt / https://twitter.com/benyt''<br /> <br /> <br /> ''What makes “Don’t Look Up” interesting is that its writer and director, Adam McKay, is putting his money, and his career, where his mouth is.''<br /> <br /> ''“Don’t Look Up” has a raft of stars — the president is played by Meryl Streep — and the familiar arc of big-budget disaster flicks like “Armageddon” or “The Day After Tomorrow.” But while all of Mr. McKay’s films have been attuned to the intertwined roles of media and politics...''<br /> <br /> ''The new opus shows Mr. McKay as “one of America’s most incisive media critics, even if he’s not necessarily recognized that way,” said David Sirota, a co-producer of the film, who is better known as a combative journalist who advised Senator Bernie Sanders during his 2020 presidential campaign and now runs The Daily Poster, an investigative news site.''<br /> <br /> ''Mr. McKay said he tried five different ideas that would allow him to make a movie about the climate crisis, but nothing worked. “How do you tell this story, the biggest story in 66 million years, without exaggeration, since the Chicxulub comet, bigger than the Black Plague, bigger than Krakatoa?” he said in an interview, describing the question that kept him up at night.''<br /> <br /> ''“How can we be looking at the greatest story in human history,” he continued, “but most nights I’m not hearing it talked about — or when it is being talked about, it’s in the fourth block, or the ninth story down?”''<br /> <br /> ''He hit on the solution while talking one night in January 2019 with Mr. Sirota, who was venting about the news media’s passive reaction to climate change, saying it was as though a meteor was headed for earth and no one seemed to get it. Soon, the two were texting plot points back and forth.<br /> <br /> “Don’t Look Up” is populated by politicians and Silicon Valley madmen denying reality for their own reasons, behaving in ways that are recognizably self-interested and deluded. But the real villain is a news media that is forever chasing after a distracted audience and, as a result, simply …'' cannot … focus...<br /> <br /> ''When it comes to the climate story, the media’s failings are undeniable, and there is still a wide gap between the urgency and the attention it commands. However, the journalism on the topic has grown more urgent in tone and more widely seen over the last few years. It’s harder-edged, more numerate and more closely connected to the floods, fires and December tornadoes that have upended millions of people’s lives.<br /> <br /> But great satire amplifies obvious truths, and there’s no doubt that “Don’t Look Up” contains those moments of recognition. David Roberts, the author of the clean energy newsletter Volts, called it “the first good movie about climate change.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Don't Look Up ....jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Reviewing the Making of Climate 'TragiComedy' ''''':&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''&quot;If the world wasn’t such a careening, shifting, shaking, distorted, bizarre place right now, I would happily go back to making comedies...&quot; ''''' ''-- Adam McKay''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Adam McKay Is Tired of Our Climate-Politics Garbage Fire'''''<br /> <br /> * https://newrepublic.com/article/164691/adam-mckay-climate-politics-dont-look-up<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''How Adam McKay’s near-death experience led to ‘Don’t Look Up’ ''''' <br /> <br /> * https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/awards/story/2021-12-14/adam-mckay-the-envelope-podcast<br /> <br /> <br /> ○<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''''The 11th Hour'''''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> * https://leonardodicaprio.com/the-11th-hour/<br /> <br /> ''Leonardo DiCaprio’s “The 11th Hour” is a feature length documentary concerning the environmental crises caused by human actions and their impact on the planet. The 11th Hour documents the cumulative impact of these actions upon the planet’s life systems and calls for restorative action through a reshaping of human activity.''<br /> <br /> ''DiCaprio: “With the onset of global warming and other catastrophic events, environmentalism has become a broader unifying human issue. We as citizens, leaders, consumers and voters, have the opportunity to help integrate ecology into governmental policy and every day living standards.”''<br /> <br /> ''With the help of over fifty of the world’s most prominent thinkers and activists, including reformer Mikhail Gorbachev, physicist Stephen Hawking, and Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai, “The 11thHour documents the grave problems facing the planet’s life systems. Global warming, deforestation, mass species extinction, and depletion of the oceans’ habitats are all addressed, and their causes rooted in human activity. The combination of these crises call into question the very future not of the planet, but of humanity.''<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''The most powerful element of “The 11th Hour is... the offering of hope and solutions''''' <br /> <br /> * http://www.11thhourfilm.com/<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IBG2V98IBY<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::·································································································································································· <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Carl Sagan at the Emerging Issues Forum.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Flashback to 1990 and Carl Sagan'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''Warning of Science Predicting a Climate Change Emergency'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Carl_Sagan_at_the_Emerging_Issues_Forum.png<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :·································································································································· <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : [[File:Making of Fantastic Fungi.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;The 15-Year Process Behind the Documentary ‘Fantastic Fungi’&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> With Filmmaker Louis Schwartzberg @ [https://movingart.com/ Moving Art]<br /> <br /> <br /> September 2021<br /> <br /> <br /> * https://youtu.be/5yq0_mqN97s<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxABOiay6oA<br /> <br /> * https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2021/09/fantastic-fungi-making-of/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :································································································ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Today's Visual Trip is an Animation from Red Side'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Comparing the Largest Trees on Earth (with accompanying Cosmonaut &amp; Wolf) <br /> <br /> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyjHtxAOhP4 '''“Trees in Perspective”''' (Watch on YouTube]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Project Drawdown - Spring 2021.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Project Drawdown'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Solutions to Climate Change<br /> <br /> Watch the online video series<br /> <br /> * https://drawdown.org/climate-solutions-101<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Christina Korp Earth Day and Apollo 8.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> :::··········································································································· <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Stephen Brown rest in peace - Politico 3-19-2021.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''In memory of Stephen Brown'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> “That’s the story, isn’t it?”<br /> <br /> March 2021<br /> <br /> ''The instinct to protect his reporters stemmed from Brown’s firm convictions about the mission of journalism — reasons he would often cite for why he loved getting to work each morning: to hold power to account; to expose wrongdoing; to explain complex issues; to bring injustices into the spotlight. In a profession crowded with cynics, he was an idealist about the power of reporting and its capacity for civic good.''<br /> <br /> * https://www.politico.eu/article/stephen-brown-politico-obituary/<br /> <br /> <br /> :·······················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''2020'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Diversity in Hollywood2.jpg]] <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Diversity in Hollywood: [http://www.npr.org/2016/02/22/467621632/researchers-examine-hollywoods-lack-of-diversity The Time Is Now''''']&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/academy-president-cheryl-boone-isaacs-907544 '''''Academy President on Diversity Push: &quot;We Will Keep the Pedal to the Metal&quot;''''']<br /> <br /> ''The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences spotlighted the [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Diversity_in_Hollywood2.jpg diversity of invitations] to join the voting Academy in 2016.'' <br /> <br /> ''&quot;Back in 2012, 30 percent of that year’s invitees were women and 10 percent were non-white. In 2016, 46 percent are women and 41 percent are people of color.&quot;''<br /> <br /> <br /> * ''2020 - [https://socialsciences.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/UCLA-Hollywood-Diversity-Report-2020-Film-2-6-2020.pdf Hollywood Diversity Report, Film, A Tale of Two Hollywoods] --- [https://socialsciences.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/UCLA-Hollywood-Diversity-Report-2020-Television-10-22-2020.pdf Diversity in Hollywood, TV]''<br /> <br /> :''The seventh in a series of annual reports to examine relationships between diversity and the bottom line in the Hollywood entertainment industry.''<br /> <br /> * ''2019 - https://www.npr.org/2019/02/21/696471501/hollywood-diversity-report-finds-progress-but-much-left-to-gain''<br /> <br /> * ''2018 - https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-academy-new-members-list-2018-06252018-story.html''<br /> <br /> * ''2017 - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/motion-picture-academy-invites-largest-class-ever-diversity-push-n777826''<br /> <br /> * ''2016 - http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/02/24/arts/hollywood-diversity-inclusion.html''<br /> <br /> <br /> ············<br /> <br /> <br /> From Wildscreen 2020, a [https://www.wildscreen.org/about/news/david-greta-in-conversation-now-available-on-youtube/ Conversation between David &amp; Greta]<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRFY4ss2W2A<br /> <br /> Celebrating and advancing the art of natural world storytelling.<br /> <br /> * https://www.wildscreen.org/about/<br /> <br /> <br /> Films and photographs are major elements in the battle to protect our imperilled natural world. Wildscreen work with the best photographers and filmmakers to help promote conservation. They are the best at what they do and all their initiatives reflect this. - Sir David Attenborough, Wildscreen Patron<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Special:RecentChanges &lt;font color=gray&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Top of the News @GreenPolicy360'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;]<br /> <br /> :[https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2020/10/08/netflixs-david-attenborough-a-life-on-our-planet-is-the-most-important-documentary-of-the-year/ &lt;font color=amber&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Netflix's ‘David Attenborough: A Life On Our Planet’ Is The Most Important Documentary Of The Year'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/font&gt;]<br /> <br /> <br /> Via Forbes<br /> <br /> ''Attenborough is now 94, and throughout his long life, has watched the natural world wither before his eyes. He seems tired of keeping quiet about it.'' <br /> <br /> ''The scale of the problem is so overwhelming, so gargantuan, that it can be difficult to absorb, and to communicate through a single documentary. But by framing environmental destruction through Attenborough’s eyes and unique career, A Life on Our Planet manages to humanize an issue that can often seem distant, and somewhat abstract.'' <br /> <br /> ''Like the Lorax, who speaks for the trees, Attenborough attests to the fact that a significant amount of wildlife has been forever lost, painting a terrifying picture of a not-so-distant future in which humanity continues down the path of senseless self-destruction.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Watch the Preview''' - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-91umZ7cQE<br /> <br /> '''Watch an Episode''' - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfO-3Oir-qM<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Teaching Resources''' - https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/a-life-on-our-planet-12412175<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Read Reviews:'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11989890/<br /> <br /> * https://www.wwf.org.uk/updates/david-attenborough-life-our-planet<br /> <br /> * https://www.indiewire.com/2020/10/david-attenborough-a-life-on-our-planet-review-netflix-1234590155/<br /> <br /> * https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/02/entertainment/david-attenborough-a-life-on-our-planet-review/index.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/04/movies/david-attenborough-a-life-on-our-planet-review.html<br /> <br /> * https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/david_attenborough_a_life_on_our_planet<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :···························································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Watch the 13th.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krfcq5pF8u8 &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''Watch the 13th, Now on YouTube / Netflix'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Watch_the_13th.jpg Read about Ava DuVernay's powerful documentary film]<br /> <br /> <br /> ·······················································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Happening a clean energy revolution.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ····································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [https://vimeo.com/391958174 &lt;big&gt;'''Gunda'''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> ''Russian filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky shows a world that most people never notice or care to understand, one that respects other living creatures and sees, really sees, their distinct behaviors and relationships. To an extent, the movie reflects the issues that John Berger broached in his 1970s essay [https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/04/01/why-look-at-animals-john-berger-about-looking/ “Why Look at Animals?],” which mournfully weighed what has been lost as humans have increasingly severed their ties with animals. “Everywhere animals disappear,” Berger wrote. “In zoos they constitute the living monument to their own disappearance.” ''<br /> <br /> * https://thefilmstage.com/berlin-review-gunda-is-a-spell-binding-take-on-animal-sentience/<br /> <br /> <br /> Great Ideas Why Look At Animals? (Penguin Great Ideas)<br /> <br /> by John Berger <br /> <br /> * https://www.amazon.com/Great-Ideas-Look-Animals-Penguin/dp/0141043970<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ····································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''Planet of the Humans'''<br /> <br /> Documentary / April <br /> <br /> Negative reviews extensive -- Sample<br /> <br /> <br /> The new movie Executive Produced and promoted by Michael Moore is unfactual, unscientific, flies in the face of decades of renewable energy science, engineering and research and is counter productive in the age of urgent need for Climate Action.<br /> <br /> Intro:<br /> <br /> Planet of the Humans, directed by Jeff Gibbs and Produced by Michael Moore, promotes a thesis that is patently untrue on many levels.<br /> <br /> 1. The film states that renewable energy such as solar and wind are inefficient, useless and dependent on fossil fuels to work. Quote fro the film “One of the most dangerous things right now is the illusion that alternative technologies, like wind and solar, are somehow different than fossil fuels….You would have been better off just burning the fossil fuels in the first place., instead of playing pretend.”<br /> <br /> This assertion, which is echoed over and over in the film is patently untrue and ridiculous. The notion that solar and wind and other renewable technologies don’t work to produce energy in ways that are cheaper, more efficient and at low or zero carbon emissions over their life span flies in the face of everything engineers, scientists and energy planners have been writing in peer reviewed science for decades.<br /> <br /> <br /> 2. The film trades in debunked fossil fuel industry talking points that are specious and meant to disparage the efficiency, durability and affordability of renewable energy. Quote: “Intermittency is one of the major challenges.” “Solar panels are built to only last 10 years, so it’s not as if you get this magic free energy, right? I don’t know if it’s the solution.” These notions, which are untrue, antiquated and outdated do not pertain to the technology and science of today , in which intermittency and efficiency are no longer issues due to the significant advances that renewable energy science, planning and technology. The fact is that RENEWABLE ENERGY WORKS and is currently cheaper than coal and natural gas, other fossil fuel generated electricity sources.<br /> <br /> <br /> 3. The film totally ignores the last ten years of peer-reviewed renewable energy planning and policy. Absent from this anti-renewable energy screed are important policy and science innovations such as the 100% renewable energy plans for each state, over 150 countries and the world from Stanford University, Physicians Scientists and Engineers for Healthy Energy and the Solutions Project. Also absent is any mention of the Green New Deal, which is the most important policy advance on green energy of all time. Bear in mind that this work on renewable energy, such as the 100% plans for New York and California are all ready well under way and are being enacted now with solar and wind energy growing exponentially- all backed up and predicted by science.<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/NewYorkWWSEnPolicy.pdf Peer reviewed]<br /> <br /> Stanford University plans: https://thesolutionsproject.org/why-clean-energy/<br /> <br /> PSE Research: https://www.psehealthyenergy.org<br /> <br /> <br /> 4. The film attacks important environmental campaigners, scientists, policy leaders and activists in unfair and misleading ways. The climate movement, the anti fracking movement, the movement for renewable energy and against fossil fuels has been an important part of the advancement of thinking and policy towards changing our energy system away from coal oil and gas. The film attacks movement leaders like Bill McKibben, Van Jones and others as well as taking pot shots at important local campaigners like Nathan Sooy of Clean Water Action, accusing them of supporting forms of energy that they do not (like biomass) and taking money from fossil fuel interests (which they do not). See the extensive and detailed rebuttal by Bill McKibben here:<br /> <br /> * https://350.org/response-planet-of-the-humans-documentary/<br /> <br /> <br /> 5. The film ignores that the IPCC and other scientific bodies are saying that we must cut our carbon emissions in half in the next ten years and that the only way to feasibly do that is what a total transformation of our energy systems. These scientists point overwhelmingly towards transformations in our economies towards renewable energy.<br /> <br /> <br /> ······················································<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Explore a Vibrant Forest Garden'''<br /> <br /> An Amazing How-to Story in the UK<br /> <br /> Martin Crawford growing a wondrous forest garden <br /> <br /> <br /> Agroforestry ... Edible Landscapes, The Food Forest Revolution<br /> <br /> * https://www.ulule.com/edible-landscapes-food-forest-documentary/<br /> <br /> * https://www.nationalgeographic.com/video/shorts/1438178883749/<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Agroforestry<br /> <br /> <br /> Industrial agriculture, monoculture, brings unsustainable impacts with loss of forest land and loss of fertile soil. Big corporate petro-chemical growing regimens lead to water pollution, aquifer depletion, environmental and adverse health impacts. The reduction of critical CO2 absorption that forests provide is becoming a profound problem. What can agro-forests provide as an alternative to industrial ag?<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''From the Filmmaker'''''<br /> <br /> ''Increasing food production by expanding conventional agriculture leads directly to large-scale deforestation which in turn is destroying biodiversity, damaging water cycles, and driving devastating climatic change.''<br /> <br /> ''Rethinking forests as our food larder is the only way to simultaneously stop deforestation while providing food through a democratic supply chain.'' <br /> <br /> ''A forest garden or food forest is a plant growing system modeled on the structure of a young natural woodland, utilizing plants that bring direct and indirect benefits to people - mostly edible plants. Humanity has been producing abundant food in forest gardens since the dawn of civilization. The crops which can be produced include fruits, nuts, edible leaves, spices, medicinal plant products, poles, fibres, basketry materials, honey, fuelwood, fodder, mulches, sap products, and on and on...''<br /> <br /> ''The structure and diversity of forest gardens ensure that they are resilient to the impacts of climate change including extreme weather conditions like droughts and heavy rain. The beauty of forest gardens is that they are so perfectly suited to collective engagement, functioning as well in urban spaces as in rural ones.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ······················<br /> <br /> <br /> '''Via Ecodads'''<br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Gratitude'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> By Louie Schwartzberg<br /> <br /> * https://vimeo.com/44131171<br /> <br /> <br /> ··········································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''A Holiday Message'''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''David Attenborough speaks of saving the planet (video)'''<br /> <br /> * https://www.ourplanet.com/en/video/how-to-save-our-planet/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ··············<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''2019'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Harriet Tubman, the Movie.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''Harriet Tubman, the Movie'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> September 2019<br /> <br /> ''‘Harriet’ makes its worldwide premiere at Toronto International Film Festival''<br /> <br /> ''The first feature film on the story of Harriet Tubman, Harriet, made its premiere Tuesday night at the Toronto International Film Festival. Harriett is directed by Kasi Lemmons, best known for her work directing Eve Bayou, Talk to Me, and Black Nativity, who was on hand for the introduction of the film by festival director Cameron Bailey.''<br /> <br /> <br /> Official Movie Trailer - July 2019<br /> <br /> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqoEs4cG6Uw<br /> <br /> <br /> Creative Credits<br /> <br /> ''The extraordinary tale of Harriet Tubman's escape from slavery and transformation into one of America's greatest heroes, whose courage, ingenuity, and tenacity freed hundreds of slaves and changed the course of history.'' <br /> <br /> * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4648786/<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Harriet-an American Legend-be free or die.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ································································································································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''President Trump says no to plans to replace Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on the $20 US bill'''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Harriet Tubman on $20 Bill.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ··································································<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;''Bravery Amid Decimation in the Amazon''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Aruanas-1.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> ----<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> ::[[File:One Strange Rock.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/bill-nye-and-the-climate-crisis-68395077769 ''Bill Nye, The Science Guy, Brings It'']<br /> <br /> :: '''The twists of fate that allow life to thrive on Earth'''<br /> <br /> :: • http://natgeotv.com/ca/one-strange-rock/videos<br /> <br /> <br /> ··············<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''2018'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Redford-Real Security.jpg|link=https://vimeo.com/146947405]]<br /> <br /> <br /> A tip of the green hat to [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Redford_Center,_Environmental_Legacy.png Robert Redford] and the [https://redfordcenter.org/films/robert-redford%E2%80%99s-environmental-legacy Redford Center.]<br /> <br /> Much of what we, activists in environmental, political reform, encounter in changing the world can be difficult, almost impossible, and very often we must have resilience and persistence in the face of forces arrayed against visionary work needed to make a difference.<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> ----<br /> <br /> &amp;nbsp; <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Look Around, 360° Around '''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ''Climate Change is the defining issue of our time and we are at a defining moment. From shifting weather patterns that threaten food production, to rising sea levels that increase the risk of catastrophic flooding, the impacts of climate change are global in scope and unprecedented in scale. -- United Nations''<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.climaterealityproject.org/blog/6-must-see-movies-about-climate-change &lt;big&gt;'''''Must See Climate Change Movies, via Climate Reality'''''&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_environmental_films ''List of environmental films (Wikipedia)'']<br /> : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Environmental_films<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH / AN INCONVENIENT SEQUEL: TRUTH TO POWER''''' - ''https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Inconvenient_Truth''<br /> <br /> Al Gore (controversially) lost the race for U.S. president in 2000. A door closed, a window opened as he chose to become a full-time, full-on environmental activist and educator. <br /> <br /> <br /> &gt;After seeing former US Vice President Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, people worldwide finally understood the reality of the climate crisis devastating our planet. For many, it was the moment they knew they personally had to do something about it. The film’s impact continues to be felt more than a decade after it won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Documentary and took its place among the highest-grossing documentaries ever.<br /> <br /> &gt;Last year’s follow-up, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, took the Climate Crisis story further...<br /> <br /> : https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/A_Day_with_Al_Gore<br /> <br /> <br /> ----------<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD''''' - ''https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beasts_of_the_Southern_Wild''<br /> <br /> : https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/how-benh-zeitlin-made-beasts-of-the-southern-wild-135132724<br /> <br /> &gt;''Living in a Louisiana bayou community called “the Bathtub,” six-year-old Hush Puppy (youngest-ever Best Actress Oscar nominee Quvenzhané Wallis) can’t get the prehistoric aurochs her teacher tells her will be released from melting ice caps off her mind – even as the world in front of her crumbles and cowers, the victim of powerful storms, failing levees, and familial health problems.''<br /> <br /> &gt;''While the film’s setting is technically fictional, it was inspired by several very real fishing villages in Southern Louisiana's Terrebonne Parish. These small, isolated wetland communities are threatened by climate-driven erosion, extreme weather, and rising sea levels. Most notable among them is the rapidly disappearing Isle de Jean Charles, former home of “the first American climate refugees.”''<br /> <br /> <br /> IMDB<br /> <br /> '''Storyline'''<br /> <br /> ''Hushpuppy, an intrepid six-year-old girl, lives with her father, Wink, in the Bathtub, a southern Delta community at the edge of the world. Wink's tough love prepares her for the unraveling of the universe; for a time when he's no longer there to protect her. When Wink contracts a mysterious illness, nature flies out of whack, temperatures rise, and the ice caps melt, unleashing an army of prehistoric creatures called aurochs. With the waters rising, the aurochs coming, and Wink's health fading, Hushpuppy goes in search of her lost mother.'' (Written by Sundance Film Festival)<br /> <br /> '''First Review'''<br /> <br /> Magical, thought-provoking, very, very watchable<br /> <br /> 26 July 2012 | by oldgirl <br /> <br /> ''I can understand how most people view this film within the context of Hurricane Katrina. But even as a former denizen of the Gulf coast who sat out Alicia, Claudette, Allen, Rita, and Ike, I view this film in a much, much larger context. It goes beyond stereotype and into archetype -- the denizens of the Bathtub aren't poor drunks at the mercy of the environment, they are The People of the world they inhabit. Hushpuppy doesn't have a drunk father, she has a Father, with many of the faults and strengths of the immortal epic heroes -- anger, pride, genuine love and concern. Hushpuppy herself isn't just a little girl, she is The Child -- the purveyor of a magic which is real, intimately connected with her world, imaginatively linked with All Things. The outside world is a place of Things and Machines, of paperwork and rules -- and is never actually named, you see, because that would diminish it. Everything in this film exists within the realm of archetype, and if you watch it with that in mind, its multiple messages take on cosmic significance. Beautifully shot, beautifully acted -- it's going to take a few more days for the entire thing to completely sink in. Outstanding!''<br /> <br /> <br /> ----------<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''CHASING CORAL''''' - ''https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/chasing-coral-review-sundance-2017-967131''<br /> <br /> : From GreenPolicy360's friends at the Bioneers and Leo DiCaprio ...<br /> <br /> * https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Chasing_Coral.jpg<br /> <br /> * https://youtu.be/b6fHA9R2cKI<br /> <br /> &gt;''That coral reefs are existentially threatened by the climate crisis is a truth near-universally acknowledged. But filmmaker Jeff Orlowski doesn’t simply telegraph a report on this impending ecological catastrophe.''<br /> <br /> &gt;''Instead, Orlowski infuses his film with such empathy and ardor for our world’s oceans and their vibrant ecosystems – as well as those working hard to save what’s left – that it’s impossible to not walk away pumped up and ready to join the fight.''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Chasing Coral.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ----------<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''INTERSTELLAR''''' - ''https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_(film)'' ''(kudos to Co-producer Lynda Obst)''<br /> <br /> &gt;''Director Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is that rarest of Hollywood anomalies – a wildly complicated, lavishly expensive, wholly original mainstream blockbuster. It doesn’t exist in the Marvel or DC cinematic universes; instead, it occupies a not-so-distant-future version of our very own – and things aren’t exactly going great.'' <br /> <br /> &gt;''While the words “climate change” are never explicitly said in the film, the impacts of the crisis are writ large, driving a plot about an attempt to flee a near-future Earth reeling from drastically changing weather patterns and global food shortages for the safety of a new habitable planet.''<br /> <br /> &gt;''Featuring one of the most stacked casts in recent memory, including Oscar winners Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine, and Ellen Burstyn and nominees Jessica Chastain, Timothée Chalamet, and John Lithgow, Interstellar takes on a very real consequence of climate inaction, though it offers up an untenable solution.''<br /> <br /> &gt;''After all, there’s still no Planet B.''<br /> <br /> <br /> ----------<br /> <br /> <br /> '''''SNOWPIERCER''''' - ''https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowpiercer''<br /> <br /> <br /> &gt;''The film is set in a future where a failed geoengineering experiment to counteract climate change plunges the planet into a new ice age, killing all life except for those lucky enough (a phrase we’re using loosely here) to have boarded the titular train. This train now circles the globe on a constant loop and a tyrannical class system has taken hold onboard.''<br /> <br /> &gt;''It’s an important cautionary tale: While we should investigate any and all scientific developments to stop the climate crisis, dangerous gambles like geoengineering – or for that matter, fleeing our planet for an imagined oasis somewhere deep in the universe – could come with unintended consequences.'' <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ----------<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Eco-films for you'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> • https://www.imdb.com/list/ls052614234/<br /> <br /> • https://medium.com/greenpeace/7-environmental-films-that-you-need-to-watch-right-now-296d4ffd21b8<br /> <br /> • https://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/blogs/top-10-environmental-films-of-all-time<br /> <br /> • https://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/ten-films-to-inspire-your-inner-environmental-superhero<br /> <br /> • https://www.cinemadailies.com/the-best-environmental-movies-and-documentaries-of-all-time/<br /> <br /> • https://tmff.net/environmental-film-festivals-a-list-for-the-planet/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ''[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/tv/one-strange-rock/ One Strange Rock]... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatom Diatoms, microalgae]''<br /> <br /> ''Secret to the Earth's oxygen supply...''<br /> <br /> ''[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/tv/watch/50ce730c31247c2019d5bae5743a10e5/ First Look at One Strange Rock] / [https://www.nationalgeographic.com/tv/watch/42f24374933dbddc310cb5489c3d76c0/ Gasp]''<br /> <br /> ''@GreenPolicy360 / [http://www.thinbluelayer.com www.ThinBlueLayer.com]''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:'Thin Blue Layer' of Earth's Atmosphere m.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Pandora to be found Exoplanets in Space.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ----------<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''2017'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Virtual Reality in Space'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''New Perspective of the Home Planet <br /> <br /> :[https://www.spacevr.co/#spacevr '''Space VR''']<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> : ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Jamie &amp; Robert Redford'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Start Small Robert Redford.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ----------<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.thecoast.net.nz/news/entertainment/cliff-curtis-lands-the-role-of-a-lifetime/ '''''Cliff Curtis: Leader To Be of the Reef People Clan (Avatar)'''''] <br /> <br /> <br /> https://www.bestmovie.it/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Cliff-Curtis-Avatar.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Bill-nye-the-guy 2017.jpg|link=http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/bill-nye-science-guy-review-986806]]<br /> <br /> <br /> http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/bill-nye-science-guy-review-986806<br /> <br /> '''''No more Mr. Nice Science Guy?'''''<br /> <br /> ''With his beloved PBS series having officially wrapped back in 1998 (although still playing in perpetuity on TV and classrooms everywhere), Bill Nye finds himself at a career crossroads.''<br /> <br /> ''While his trademark bow tie is still very much intact, his struggle to be taken seriously as a passionate advocate for the environment, facing off against dismissive climate change deniers and the anti-science movement, is intimately chronicled in the documentary Bill Nye: Science Guy, which had its world premiere at South by Southwest.''<br /> <br /> <br /> http://www.geek.com/tech/bill-nye-the-science-guy-hopeful-for-the-future-1687963/<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Bill nye-march for science-earth day.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/apr/24/why-we-joined-the-march-for-science &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;&lt;font color=green&gt;''''' Facts Matter today, yesterday &amp; tomorrow '''''&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> :https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_for_Science<br /> ::https://satellites.marchforscience.com/<br /> :::https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:March_for_Science-2.png<br /> ::::https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Bill_nye-march_for_science-earth_day.jpg<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::::::[[File:Disaster movies ignore the scientist.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::::::::················································<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2017/02/25/entertainment-news/legendary-japanese-animator-miyazaki-comes-retirement-new-film/ &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Miyazaki Is Making a New Film!'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;]<br /> <br /> :[http://the-animatorium.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-best-environmental-epic-case-for.html '''''Remembering Princess Mononoke''''']<br /> <br /> ::[http://www.teachwithmovies.org/guides/princess-mononoke.html '''''Mononoke, a Teachable Moment''''']<br /> <br /> :::[https://muse.jhu.edu/article/614511 '''''Nature, Environment &amp; Industry: a Film for the Ages''''']<br /> <br /> <br /> :::[[File:San and kodama.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> :::∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Beautiful Planet imax m.jpg|link=http://abeautifulplanet.imax.com/]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''A Beautiful Planet'''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''May - 2016 / IMAX'''<br /> <br /> • http://abeautifulplanet.imax.com/<br /> <br /> <br /> [https://youtu.be/edwZNH-ZKn4 '''Watch the Intro to Beautiful Planet'''] <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ <br /> <br /> <br /> '''''Leonardo takes an Oscar and speaks out...''''' <br /> <br /> ''&quot;Making The Revenant was about man's relationship to the natural world, a world that we collectively felt in 2015 as the hottest year in recorded history. Our production needed to move to the southern tip of this planet just to be able to find snow. Climate change is real. It is happening right now. It's the most urgent threat facing our entire species, and we need to work collectively together and stop procrastinating.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;We need to support leaders around the world who do not speak for the big polluters or the big corporations, but who speak for all of humanity, for the indigenous people of the world, for the billions and billions of underprivileged people who will be most affected by this. For our children's children and for those people out there whose voices have been drowned out by the politics of greed, I thank you all for this amazing award tonight.''<br /> <br /> ''&quot;Let us not take this planet for granted. I do not take tonight for granted. Thank you so much.&quot;'' <br /> <br /> <br /> :[[File:Leo's Oscar Speech 2016.png | link=http://brightcove04.brightcove.com/17/769341148/201602/2953/769341148_4778916325001_4778895776001.mp4?pubId=769341148&amp;videoId=4778895776001]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Film/Media Reviews'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> <br /> ''In the movie industry the term &quot;look-see&quot; is used to describe a first look...''<br /> <br /> ''a glimpse of a project, a creator's idea, an initial concept, story, package, a pitch of a screenplay...''<br /> <br /> ''Our media reviews are quick look-sees, online intros, scoops and insights of projects worth your time and thought.'' <br /> <br /> ''So pull up to your screen, log on, stream, download, rent it, buy it, go out to a movie, get virtual, take it to the next level... Act out!''<br /> <br /> <br /> -- [http://www.mchannel.org ''www.mchannel.org'']<br /> <br /> <br /> ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ <br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;'''''Racing Extinction'''''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> [http://www.racingextinction.com/ '''''Racing Extinction'''''] ○ [https://twitter.com/RacingXtinction ''#RacingExtinction @RacingXtinction'']<br /> <br /> ''“I told the crew, 'We’re not making a movie – we’re starting a movement'. This film is one component of a movement that will go on and on...''<br /> <br /> ''and hopefully live in people’s hearts and minds and change behavior. We are the only generation that can save species for millions of years going forward...”''<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:RacingExtinction Francois-Languars2 3000Left.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:At st peters endangered species.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Racing Extinction LAopeningSept18,2015.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:RCatUN projection2.gif]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:New Ways of Seeing.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> ; &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;''New Ways of Seeing''&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> Douglas Trumbull: ''I believe we are at the threshold... time to make breakthroughs.'''<br /> <br /> '''''Time for Technology to Revolutionize Cinema'''''<br /> <br /> * http://www.indiewire.com/article/visual-effects-master-douglas-trumbull-gives-us-a-sneak-peek-at-the-techology-that-will-revolutionize-cinema<br /> <br /> <br /> ······················································································································ <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[File:Above.png]]<br /> <br /> <br /> &lt;big&gt;'''''Premiere of BigPicture Media'''''&lt;/big&gt;<br /> <br /> '''''A Brief Message from SJS - GreenPolicy Siterunner'''''<br /> <br /> ''Here on the Big Picture we throw a eco-Spotlight on important environmentally attuned films/movies/media.''<br /> <br /> ''We visit the work of [http://www.planetcitizen.org #planetcitizen] media makers, creators and visionaries. We look at the [http://www.earthpov.com BIG] and the [http://www.tinybluegreen.com tiny] -- and life in between and all around us.''<br /> <br /> ''At GreenPolicy, we bring a dramatic [http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Overview_Effect 360° perspective.]''<br /> <br /> ''And a personal POV as [http://www.planetcitizens.org &quot;Planet Citizens&quot;.]''<br /> <br /> ''Welcome to a Blue Planet adventure.''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ~ ''GreenPolicy360 Siterunner from Clearwater, Florida''<br /> <br /> : ''http://www.mchannelonline.com''<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ::[[File:Dove of peace s.jpg]]<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [[Category:Biodiversity]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Change]]<br /> [[Category:Climate Policy]]<br /> [[Category:Democracy]]<br /> [[Category:Digital Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Diversity]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-ethics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-nomics]]<br /> [[Category:Eco-Spirituality]]<br /> [[Category:Ecology Studies]]<br /> [[Category:Election Law]]<br /> [[Category:Election System Reform]]<br /> [[Category:Environmental Protection]]<br /> [[Category:Green Politics]]<br /> [[Category:Media]]<br /> [[Category:Mobile]]<br /> [[Category:Movies]]<br /> [[Category:Natural Resources]]<br /> [[Category:Nature]]<br /> [[Category:Online Education]]<br /> [[Category:Nuclear Weapons]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizen]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens]]<br /> [[Category:Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists]]<br /> [[Category:Renewable Energy]]<br /> [[Category:Resilience]]<br /> [[Category:Sustainability Policies]]<br /> [[Category:Threat Multiplier]]<br /> [[Category:Whole Earth]]<br /> [[Category:World Wide Web]]</div>

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