Wastewater from biorefineries that convert plants into fuel is full of organic materials that cannot be efficiently treated with conventional wastewater systems, making it costly and energy-intensive to manage.

However, those rich organic materials are an untapped source of chemical energy that can be recovered as valuable products, including biogas, a clean-burning renewable fuel.

A study by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) found that recovering resources from wastewater can substantially improve the economic and environmental sustainability of second-generation biorefineries, supporting the transition to a sustainable, plant-based biofuels and bioproducts industry.

The CABBI team designed a process that simultaneously treats wastewater and recovers biogas energy that could generate revenue for biorefineries—while lowering costs and greenhouse gas emissions compared to conventional treatment systems.

The work, published in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering, united researchers from all three CABBI themes—Feedstock Production, Conversion, and Sustainability—who are developing plant-based alternatives to petroleum for fuels and chemical products.

With a “plants as factories” model, they aim to produce biofuels, biochemicals, and foundation molecules directly in plant leaves and stems; develop unique tools, yeasts, and processing methods to convert them into high-value bioproducts, such as biodiesel, organic acids, lubricants, and alcohols; and assess the economic and ecological sustainability of CABBI feedstocks, biofuels and bioproducts, from the field to the biorefinery to the bioeconomy.

The wastewater study was led by two CABBI Sustainability researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: Jeremy Guest, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE); and Research Scientist Yalin Li of the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE).

CABBI co-authors included Vijay Singh, Conversion researcher, Deputy Director for Science & Technology, and Professor of Agricultural and Biological Engineering (ABE) at Illinois; and Feedstock Production researcher Fredy Altpeter, Professor of Agronomy at the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences at the University of Florida.

Second-generation biorefineries that process miscanthus, corn stover, or other non-food feedstocks have the potential to produce biofuels and bioproducts with much lower environmental impact than those from fossil fuels or first-generation biorefineries, which use corn and other edible crops. But these second-generation biorefineries still face financial hurdles that prevent their successful deployment in the real world.

If not properly managed, biorefineries can require a prohibitive amount of water and generate a large wastewater stream. To produce fuel and valuable biochemicals from plant biomass, biorefineries can use up to 10 liters of water per liter of biofuel produced, based on a previous CABBI study. The resulting wastewater has high concentrations of organic material—sugars, residual fermentation products, process byproducts, or other chemicals—making it difficult to reuse.

But those prior analyses are often based on conventional, low-rate wastewater treatment technologies that are expensive, energy-intensive, and require a huge physical footprint—which, depending on the size of the plant, could be equivalent to 30 football fields or more. Low-rate conventional treatment systems use large aerobic reactors, which consume large amounts of electricity for aeration, and convert the organic materials from the wastewater to carbon dioxide without creating valuable products.

The CABBI team designed a high-rate anaerobic-dominant wastewater process that largely eliminated aeration, saving electricity, and instead incorporated emerging technologies, including internal circulation and anaerobic membrane bioreactors to recover the embedded energy in the organic materials as biogas.

For their design, they used experimental data from wastewater generated by the processing of sugarcane and oilcane cultivated by the Altpeter group for CABBI’s Feedstocks to Fuels project. The process extracts the plant’s oils and then generates ethanol from plant sugars through fermentation by yeasts. The Singh group provided spent fermentation broth, after the ethanol was extracted, and collaborators from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile determined how much methane could be produced from the real samples.

Using their open-source software BioSTEAM, the researchers then simulated the integration of the new wastewater treatment process into seven biorefinery designs, covering a wide range of feedstocks and biofuels/bioproducts. Through techno-economic analysis and life cycle assessment (TEA-LCA) enabled by BioSTEAM, they found that the new process could substantially reduce the capital cost and energy usage of biorefineries, improving their financial viability and reducing their environmental impact.

The process could efficiently convert organic contaminants in biorefinery wastewater to biogas, achieving simultaneous energy recovery and wastewater treatment. It would reduce energy consumption, operating costs, and greenhouse gas emissions compared to conventional treatment systems.

“Through proper management processes, wastewater can be a potential source of revenue for biorefineries while improving the environmental sustainability of biofuels and bioproducts,” Li said.

The wastewater treatment process designed in this study can substantially improve the financial viability of second-generation biorefineries while reducing their environmental impacts, thus contributing to society’s transition to a circular bioeconomy—and CABBI’s mission to support a viable, sustainable domestic biofuels and bioproducts industry using plant biomass.

Gordon Moore, the Intel Corp. co-founder who set the breakneck pace of progress in the digital age with a simple 1965 prediction of how quickly engineers would boost the capacity of computer chips, has died. He was 94.

Moore died Friday at his home in Hawaii, according to Intel and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Moore, who held a Ph.D. in chemistry and physics, made his famous observation—now known as “Moore’s Law”—three years before he helped start Intel in 1968. It appeared among a number of articles about the future written for the now-defunct Electronics magazine by experts in various fields.

The prediction, which Moore said he plotted out on graph paper based on what had been happening with chips at the time, said the capacity and complexity of integrated circuits would double every year.

Strictly speaking, Moore’s observation referred to the doubling of transistors on a semiconductor. But over the years, it has been applied to hard drives, computer monitors and other electronic devices, holding that roughly every 18 months a new generation of products makes their predecessors obsolete.

It became a standard for the tech industry’s progress and innovation.

“It’s the human spirit. It’s what made Silicon Valley,” Carver Mead, a retired California Institute of Technology computer scientist who coined the term “Moore’s Law” in the early 1970s, said in 2005. “It’s the real thing.”

Moore later became known for his philanthropy when he and his wife established the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, which focuses on environmental conservation, science, patient care and projects in the San Francisco Bay area. It has donated more than $5.1 billion to charitable causes since its founding in 2000.

“Those of us who have met and worked with Gordon will forever be inspired by his wisdom, humility and generosity,” foundation president Harvey Fineberg said in a statement.

Intel Chairman Frank Yeary called Moore a brilliant scientist and a leading American entrepreneur.

“It is impossible to imagine the world we live in today, with computing so essential to our lives, without the contributions of Gordon Moore,” he said.

In his book “Moore’s Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley’s Quiet Revolutionary,” author David Brock called him “the most important thinker and doer in the story of silicon electronics.”

Moore was born in San Francisco on Jan. 3, 1929, and grew up in the tiny nearby coastal town of Pescadero. As a boy, he took a liking to chemistry sets. He attended San Jose State University, then transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, where he graduated with a degree in chemistry.

After getting his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1954, he worked briefly as a researcher at Johns Hopkins University.

His entry into microchips began when he went to work for William Shockley, who in 1956 shared the Nobel Prize for physics for his work inventing the transistor. Less than two years later, Moore and seven colleagues left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory after growing tired of its namesake’s management practices.

The defection by the “traitorous eight,” as the group came to be called, planted the seeds for Silicon Valley’s renegade culture, in which engineers who disagreed with their colleagues didn’t hesitate to become competitors.

The Shockley defectors in 1957 created Fairchild Semiconductor, which became one of the first companies to manufacture the integrated circuit, a refinement of the transistor.

Fairchild supplied the chips that went into the first computers that astronauts used aboard spacecraft.

In 1968, Moore and Robert Noyce, one of the eight engineers who left Shockley, again struck out on their own. With $500,000 of their own money and the backing of venture capitalist Arthur Rock, they founded Intel, a name based on joining the words “integrated” and “electronics.”

Moore became Intel’s chief executive in 1975. His tenure as CEO ended in 1987, thought he remained chairman for another 10 years. He was chairman emeritus from 1997 to 2006.

He received the National Medal of Technology from President George H.W. Bush in 1990 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush in 2002.

Despite his wealth and acclaim, Moore remained known for his modesty. In 2005, he referred to Moore’s Law as “a lucky guess that got a lot more publicity than it deserved.”

He is survived by his wife of 50 years, Betty, sons Kenneth and Steven, and four grandchildren.

© 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

The European Union and Germany on Saturday said they had struck a deal after a dispute over the planned phaseout by 2035 of the sale of cars using fossil fuels.

A landmark deal to prohibit new sales of fossil fuel cars from 2035 is key to the bloc’s ambitious plan to become a “climate-neutral” economy by 2050, with net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.

But in an unprecedented move earlier this month, leading car producer Germany blocked the agreement at the last minute after it had already been approved under the traditional EU legislative process.

Berlin demanded that Brussels provide assurances the law would allow the sales of new cars with combustion engines that run on synthetic fuels, the focus of the breakthrough announced on Saturday.

“We have found an agreement with Germany on the future use of efuels in cars,” EU environment commissioner Frans Timmermans said on Twitter.

“We will work now on getting the CO₂-standards for cars regulation adopted as soon as possible.”

German Transport Minister Volker Wissing said on Twitter that vehicles with combustion engines could continue to be registered after 2035 if they only use fuels that are neutral in their CO₂ emissions.

Weeks-long negotiations between the European Commission and Germany to break the impasse centered on Berlin’s desire for a stronger commitment on synthetic fuels than that presented in the initial text.

The synthetic fuels Germany wanted an exemption for are still under development and produced using low-carbon electricity. The technology is unproven, but German manufacturers hope it will lead to the extended use of combustion engines.

Environmental NGOs have disputed the value of synthetic fuels in the automotive sector’s transition towards clean energy sources, saying they are too expensive, polluting and energy-intensive.

Some industry experts have expressed doubt over whether vehicles powered by synthetic fuels can compete in a market against electric cars that are expected to become cheaper over time.

Audi boss Markus Duesmann told the Der Spiegel weekly that synthetic fuels “will not play an important role in the medium-term future of passenger cars”, even if they prove to be helpful in the green transition.

Domestic politics at play

Some observers saw domestic political calculations behind Germany’s initial move to block the deal, which ruffled the feathers of some of Berlin’s EU partners.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats form a coalition government with the Greens and the liberal FDP party, which initiated the move.

The FDP, which has lost five regional elections in a row, is struggling in national polling and hoped to gain the support of voters hostile to a ban on combustion engines.

Scholz was seen as acting to maintain the unity of the coalition by aligning with the FDP position against the Greens.

Fellow major car manufacturer Italy, Poland and Hungary joined Germany in a small alliance against the combustion engine ban.

The EU aims to reduce CO₂ emissions from new vehicles to zero, with the planned combustion engine plan effectively imposing electric vehicles from the middle of the next decade.

The industry has anticipated the new EU rules by massively investing in electric vehicles in recent years.

© 2023 AFP

Apple enjoys a “symbiotic” relationship with China, CEO Tim Cook said on Saturday, as the iPhone giant looks to move production out of the country.

Cook, who is in China to attend the high-profile China Development Forum, said “Apple and China grew together,” during an interview on the role of technology in education.

“This has been a symbiotic kind of relationship that I think we both enjoyed,” he said at the state-run event attended by top government officials and corporate leaders.

Cook’s visit comes as Apple, the world’s biggest company by market value, is trying to move production out of China.

Last year, Apple sales were hit by curtailed production at factories as a result of China’s zero-COVID policy.

US export controls on high-tech components are also threatening the company’s supply chain.

Cook did not address supply chain issues during his discussion.

Instead, he focused on the need to bridge the education gap between urban and rural schools and encouraged young people to learn programming and critical thinking skills.

He also pledged to increase Apple’s spending on its rural education program in China to 100 million yuan ($15 million).

Cook visited an Apple Store in downtown Beijing on Friday, and a photo of him posing for a selfie with singer Huang Ling has gone viral on Chinese social media.

© 2023 AFP

Once hailed as a genius, South Korean entrepreneur Do Kwon—now facing multiple criminal charges over his failed cryptocurrency—was a brash industry figure whose fame disintegrated into global notoriety.

After months on the run, the 31-year-old, whose full name is Kwon Do-hyung, was arrested Thursday in Montenegro after being caught trying to catch a flight using fake Costa Rican travel documents.

He is accused of fraud over the dramatic implosion last year of his company Terraform Labs, which wiped out about $40 billion of investors’ money and shook global crypto markets.

Immediately after his arrest the United States hit him with a slew of charges over what they called a “multi-billion-dollar crypto asset securities fraud” and South Korea, where he faces separate charges, said it wants to extradite him.

The cryptocurrency he created, an “algorithmic stablecoin” called Terra, was in reality a glorified Ponzi scheme, experts say.

Yet as recently as March 2022, Kwon was being described in glowing South Korean media reports as a “genius” as thousands of private investors lined up to pour cash into his company.

“Kwon and his story are a product of our times,” Cho Dong-keun, an economics professor emeritus at Myongji University, told AFP.

“He knew how to win the hearts of those who so desperately wanted to make a fortune in one stroke. He also knew how to exploit their anxiety and turn it into massive profits.”

Elite connections

Born in 1991, Kwon attended South Korea’s elite Daewon Foreign Language High School where, according to a book he wrote about his school days, he founded an English-language student paper and competed in various English debating championships.

He went on to major in computer science at Stanford University in the US, and reportedly interned at Apple and Microsoft before returning to Asia to start his own business.

In 2018, he co-founded Terraform Labs with Daniel Shin—who is linked to South Korea’s elite Samsung family through his uncle—and developed the TerraUSD and Luna currencies.

He quickly rose to fame, partly thanks to Shin’s connections, successfully branding himself as a young industry luminary.

TerraUSD was marketed as a “stablecoin”, a type of cryptocurrency which is typically pegged to stable assets such as the US dollar to prevent drastic price fluctuations.

In 2019, he featured in Forbes’ 30 under 30 Asia list.

Forbes wrote that Kwon’s “price-stable cryptocurrency, or stablecoin, attracted 40 million users to work with the company at launch in January 2018”.

“With the aim of building a blockchain-based payment system, Terra has raised $32 million from crypto-giants such as Binance,” it said.

‘S Korean Elizabeth Holmes’

But experts had long warned Kwon’s model was fundamentally flawed, with some outright calling it a Ponzi scheme.

Unlike other stablecoins backed by real-world assets such as cash or gold, TerraUSD was algorithmic—pegged only to sister currency Luna, using maths and incentive mechanisms to maintain their peg.

“Algorithmic stablecoins like Terra/Luna were doomed from the very beginning,” Christian Catalini, founder of MIT’s Cryptoeconomics Lab, told AFP.

“Things can work for a while, while the ecosystem is growing, but are destined to run into a death spiral at some point.”

A full investigation of Kwon should help clarify what happened when Terra/Luna collapsed, he said, adding this was necessary to improve the crypto industry as a whole.

“We need to make sure that bad actors are not able to use the technology to design scams and perpetuate other forms of fraud or financial crime,” he said.

Kwon’s impressive rise and precipitous fall are now being compared to those of convicted American fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of the medical technology startup Theranos.

Kwon “is just like Holmes, another elite who went to Stanford”, the Korea Economic Daily newspaper wrote.

Cory Klippsten, CEO of crypto trading app Swan.com, made a similar parallel on Twitter last year.

Kwon had “major Elizabeth Holmes vibes”, he wrote ahead of the collapse. “Creepy levels of cockiness on display, 99.99% of the time means fraud.”

Kwon slipped out of South Korea before disaster struck in May last year, and has effectively been in hiding ever since—even as he claimed on Twitter that he was not “on the run”.

South Korea eventually revoked his passport, and asked Interpol to place him on the red notice list.

“A responsible adult and entrepreneur would have stayed and explained,” professor Cho at Myongji University said.

“The fact that he tried to avoid authorities by even using forged passports shows his character.”

© 2023 AFP

Scientists from the National Institute of Education/Nanyang Technological University of Singapore developed a method for converting fruit wastes such as coconut husks, orange peels, and banana peels into a solar absorber made of MXene for efficient water desalination process.

Singapore produces over 20,000 tons of fruit waste annually, the majority of which comes from the fruit juicing sector, which uses 50% of the fruit but discards the rest as trash, such as fruit peel. This gave Dr. Edison Ang inspiration. He sees wealth where others perceive waste since wastes are free resources that may be used to create valuable products, like MXene in this example.

A type of material known as MXene has outstanding light-to-heat conversion capabilities and can be utilized to build solar stills for the treatment of water using clean, renewable solar energy. This solar still can be made portable and set up easily in rural areas with limited access to electricity.

Fruit wastes were used to create MXene materials through a two-step carbonization process, and these materials were employed to create a solar absorber in a solar still for water desalination. This work has been featured in the 2022 Young Chemists theme collection in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A.

The key findings of the paper are:

• MXenes derived from fruit wastes demonstrate excellent light-to-heat conversion efficiency, with a rate of 90%. This is nearly 30% higher than that of the commercial solar absorber, which means that it is more effective at converting solar energy into heat energy.
• The use of fruit waste as a source of raw materials for MXene production can significantly reduce the cost of the material. In this study, the MXene material was less expensive than commercial alternatives because one of the reactant sources was obtained for free from fruit waste.
• The homemade solar still prototype that utilized MXene material showed a significant improvement in the water production rate, with an increase of approximately 50% over the existing solar still.
• The purified water produced by the homemade solar still prototype met the World Health Organization (WHO) drinking water standard. This indicates that the MXene-based solar still can produce clean drinking water that is safe for human consumption.

The main focus of Dr. Edison’s research is to develop innovative and cost-effective methods to turn organic wastes into useful materials for solar stills that purify water. Graphite was successfully made from plastic trash in a prior study by his team, and this work was published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A.

Both investigations showed that organic wastes can be turned into two-dimensional (2D) materials with higher values like graphite and MXene. Additionally, its distinct honeycomb structure enhances the effectiveness of light-to-heat conversion, and the 2D structure’s interlayers offer numerous pathways for fast water production.

Recycling and reusing organic wastes and turning them into materials with value added, such as carbon, can lessen the negative effects of waste pollution while also lowering the cost of MXene or graphite materials and the mining of natural carbon resources. As a result, the economy and the environment will both gain significantly.

Finding suitable materials for eco-friendly and more efficient solar stills is the main challenge. Usually, non-organic impurities are mixed with organic wastes. As a result, there are only a few pure materials that can be produced using current technologies. Sorting out the different waste material types will require additional work, such as using machine learning and artificial intelligence together to enhance the quality of the waste management process.

Commercial Li-ion batteries, which are used in everything from smartphones to electric vehicles, are known to be made with graphite as a key component. MXenes, which are naturally conductive like graphite and have a 2D structure, are useful for storing charges in batteries and may soon be used in the manufacture of batteries. The MXene made from fruit waste therefore has potential uses that go far beyond water purification.

Are the words used in annual reports a key to unlocking the secrets of corporate tax avoidance?

When it comes to spotting corporate tax dodgers, words can be as useful as numbers. Recent research from Texas McCombs finds that careful reading of text can offer new insights into how companies are trying to avoid taxes—activities that may not be apparent from financial numbers alone.

Dean and Accounting Professor Lillian Mills and her co-author, Kelvin Law of Nanyang Technological University, examined 18 years’ worth of U.S. multinational companies’ annual reports, ones that discussed their business activities in foreign countries, including tax havens. The researchers covered a total of 183,061 reports.

The team used natural language processing (NLP) to analyze the text and identify patterns and word choices that might reveal what kind of activities companies were conducting in tax havens. The computer analysis uncovered clues about these activities.

For example, suppose a U.S. pharmaceutical company has developed a successful drug for treating heart disease, generating a high profit margin. The company owns intellectual property (IP) for the specific formula of the drug and indicates it has “established a subsidiary in Panama to handle manufacturing and production,” using the patented formula. By routing profits from the sale of the heart disease drug through the use of IP in a country known for low tax rates, the company is able to pay lower taxes through the subsidiary in the tax haven.

The word “manufacturing” is one of about 80 words the computer looks for to suggest operations that might be avoiding taxes. Others include “purchasing,” “importing,” “warehouses,” and “distributors.”

Although there is no sure way to detect all instances of tax avoidance, Mills says, close attention to word choices in an annual report can reveal several kinds of insights that numbers might not:

New metrics. A new set of measures in the study assesses not only whether a company has a subsidiary in a tax haven country, but whether it’s an active subsidiary. The new measures are three times as effective as existing ones for predicting that a company is avoiding taxes.

Undisclosed operations. Machine learning techniques can identify companies that may have tax haven operations but do not disclose them in annual reports.

Higher tax avoidance. Nondisclosers flagged by machine learning have lower effective tax rates than other companies.

“Using AI to analyze text data could be a powerful tool for both regulators and investors to detect corporate tax avoidance,” Mills says.

“That information could especially help regulators other than the IRS, who don’t have access to companies’ tax returns. It could guide them in looking at publicly available data to find companies that might be using abusive profit-shifting strategies in tax havens.”

Corporate investments in climate-tech start-ups are a growing but overlooked aspect of energy innovation. According to a new report from Morgan Edwards, a professor at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and her lead co-author at University of Maryland, these investments should be more fully considered as methods to advance climate technology. The report was published in Joule.

Start-up companies have the potential to rapidly commercialize innovation, but they don’t always have the resources to make such ventures successful. Corporations, on the other hand, tend to have the resources that start-ups lack, like access to global markets and supply chains, manufacturing facilities and experience across the energy system.

While corporations are often strategic investors motivated by profits, they can also be motivated to expand existing business models, gain innovation insights, and meet environmental, social, and governance (ESG) commitments. When well-resourced corporations invest in start-ups, they can have an outsized influence on which start-ups succeed and grow, therefore shaping climate technology trajectories.

“We will need a whole host of new technologies to transition to a net-zero or net-negative emissions economy. Many innovations are currently in development but not yet mature,” says Edwards, who holds a joint position in the Nelson Institute Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment at UW–Madison. “Finding the right mix of corporate, private, and public investments will be critical to getting these technologies to market quickly and encouraging new innovations.”

In 2021, corporate investments in climate technology totaled over $11 billion, flowing to more than 460 start-ups, representing a quarter of all public and private investment dollars. This number has grown considerably since the Paris Agreement began in 2016 but still leaves a sizeable gap for governments to step in and incentivize investment in climate-tech that aligns with long-term climate and societal goals.

Kavita Surana, lead co-author with Edwards and a senior fellow at the Center for Global Sustainability at the University of Maryland, says this gap needs to be a larger point of emphasis moving forward to make necessary advances in climate technology.

“Corporations and the choices they make investing in climate-tech start-ups are particularly important as they tend to focus on technologies closer to reaching widespread adoption compared to public or other private investors. However, their role in climate change innovation has been overlooked to this point in our efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change,” says Surana, who is also an associate faculty member at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna.

The paper’s team of researchers investigated a dataset of 6,996 climate-tech start-ups from North America, Europe, and Israel that were founded between 2005 and 2021. They also looked at 9,749 investors who participated in 33,698 investment deals.

Among the paper’s findings, the research team observed that corporate investors are most active in later investment stages when technologies are closer to market deployment.

They also found that corporate investment in climate-tech start-ups is highly concentrated, with a few large corporations like Shell, Alphabet, and Samsung playing an outsized role. Between 2016 and 2021, these large companies each invested in over 25 climate-tech start-ups. A handful of companies, including Amazon, Ford, and Alphabet, each invested over $1 billion.

Investments were also concentrated in certain technologies. For example, fuel cell and hydrogen technologies received a much higher percentage of corporate investment than other sectors like marine and hydropower, nuclear, and biomass generations. These sectors also receive little funding from other private sources, suggesting that public investment may be necessary to fill the gap.

The research team’s policy recommendations include:

• Using data-driven insights on corporate climate-tech investments and their outcomes to anticipate technological change and identify policy and regulatory gaps for emerging sectors and industries.
• Incentivizing investments that support long-term climate solutions over short-term workarounds. This could help policymakers target the technologies that reduce emissions most efficiently.
• Identifying and filling in gaps in corporate and private investment in key technologies and infrastructure. Policymakers need a more complete picture on the full investment landscape to keep balanced the portfolio of technologies needed for decarbonization.
• Mobilizing and rewarding additional corporate and private finance to support climate-tech start-ups. Designing new public-private models that mobilize capital from corporations through rewards or accountability nudges can help advance corporate efforts to invest in climate and energy innovation.

Edwards, Surana and their team see this paper as a first step in being able to understand the relationship between corporate investors and climate-tech start-ups and eventually inform policy that can ensure beneficial climate and societal outcomes.

Ford said Friday that its assembly plant under construction in western Tennessee will be able to build up to 500,000 electric pickup trucks a year at full output, part of the automaker’s drive to produce 2 million electric vehicles worldwide annually by late 2026.

The company made the announcement as it provided updates on the so-called BlueOval City project at an event attended by Ford executives, project leaders, politicians and residents who live near the sprawling Tennessee site.

The Dearborn, Michigan, automaker announced the project in September of 2021 that would build the truck plant and a battery factory on 3,600 acres (1,460-hectares) in rural Stanton, located in Haywood County northeast of Memphis. Known as the Memphis Regional Megasite, the land designated by the state for industrial development sat unused for years before Ford moved in.

Ford’s assembly plant, and the battery plant run by South Korean battery maker SK On, will employ about 6,000 people with an investment of roughly $5.6 billion, Ford said.

The joint venture will also construct twin battery plants in Glendale, Kentucky, with an estimated $5.8 billion investment. The projects are expected to create more than 10,800 jobs and shift the automaker’s future manufacturing footprint toward the South while putting an emphasis on green energy.

Construction on the Tennessee site began last year. Ford plans to start production by 2025, and that timetable remains in place, company officials said

Construction is about 50% complete, said Donna Langford, Ford’s project manager. Media members who joined a bus tour of the site in the rain Friday saw steel skeletons of the massive, partially built structures that will house the battery plant and the truck assembly factory. Once finished, the site will also include a Tennessee Valley Authority substation to help power the plants and a Tennessee College of Applied Technology, where workforce training will take place.

The automaker said its second-generation electric truck is “code named Project T3,” and Ford CEO Jim Farley touted the truck’s simplified design and high-quality technology.

Ford did not release images of the new truck during the event, but it did display colorful drawings made by Tennessee schoolchildren with suggestions for its design—including some trucks that would fly.

In a reference to the fast and tough Star Wars ship, Farley said the new truck “is going to be like the Millennium Falcon, with a back porch attached.”

Speaking with reporters, Farley acknowledged that the Tennessee truck factory would be the most environmentally friendly new plant Ford has ever built.

“Not even close,” said Farley, adding later that “this is a new industrial revolution about clean, carbon neutral manufacturing.”

Ford says the plant is designed to be its first carbon-neutral vehicle manufacturing campus. It will have a 30% smaller general assembly footprint than traditional plants by simplifying sub-assemblies and reducing the number of stations on the line, Farley said.

“We shrunk the plant because we have less people, we have less stations,” Farley said.

Ford also said it will use recovered energy from the site to provide carbon-free heat for the assembly plant and save water by reducing evaporation from the site’s cooling towers.

Before landing the Ford project, Tennessee had invested more than $174 million in the unused Memphis megasite. Tennessee lawmakers have committed to spending nearly $900 million on state incentives, infrastructure upgrades and more as part of a sweeping plan with Ford. The agreement included $500 million in capital grant funds.

The lease essentially grants the land to Ford through December 2051. The rent is $1 for the entire lease term.

Some of the rural West Tennessee counties surrounding the plant hope it will help boost their economies.

With an economy based largely on farming, Haywood County saw its population shrink by 4.9% to 17,864 people from 2010 to 2020, one of 14 counties to lose population as Tennessee grew as a whole by 8.9%, according to census data.

The factory is expected to bring both small and large businesses to the area, including hotels, restaurants, health care facilities and suppliers for the plant, among others. Real estate values also could increase.

Ford’s leaders have pledged to help the communities near the plant. The Ford Motor Company Fund announced Friday it has awarded 17 grants of $75,000 to $100,000 each to fire departments, arts and parks conservancy groups, a community center, local governments and other organizations in six counties.

The $1.2 million grant program received 200 applications, said Mary Culler, president of the Ford Motor Company Fund.

“Those are the kinds of grass-roots, capital projects that these towns and municipalities are looking for,” Culler said.

As it seeks to develop its workforce in Tennessee, Ford said it has begun a talent development program that will support STEM instruction in K-12 schools, bring advanced manufacturing education to schools, and expand certification, dual-enrollment and internship opportunities for students.

© 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

Utah’s sweeping social media legislation passed this week is an ambitious attempt to shield children and teens from the ill effects of social media and empower parents to decide whether their kids should be using apps like TikTok or Instagram.

What’s not clear is if—and how—the new rules can be enforced and whether they will create unintended consequences for kids and teens already coping with a mental health crisis. And while parental rights are a central theme of Utah’s new laws, experts point out that the rights of parents and the best interests of children are not always aligned.

For instance, allowing parents to read their kids’ private messages may be harmful to some children, and age verification requirements could give tech companies access to kids’ personal information, including biometric data, if they use tools such as facial recognition to check ages.

“Children may be put at increased risk if these laws are enforced in such a way that they’re not allowed to some privacy, if they are not allowed some ability for freedom of speech or autonomy,” said Kris Perry, executive director of the nonprofit Children and Screens: Institute of Digital Media and Child Development.

The laws, which will go into effect in a year, impose a digital curfew on people under 18, require minors to get parental consent to sign up for social media apps and force companies to verify the ages of all their Utah users. They also require tech companies to give parents access to their kids’ accounts and private messages, which has raised alarms for child advocates who say this could further harm children’s mental health by depriving them of their right to privacy. This is especially true for LGBTQ+ kids whose parents are not accepting of their identity.

The rules could drastically transform how people in this conservative state access social media and the internet, and if successful, serve as a model for other states to enact similar legislation. But even if the laws clear the inevitable lawsuits from tech giants, it’s not clear how Utah will be able to enforce them.

Take age verification, for instance. Various measures exist that can verify a person’s age online. Someone could upload a government ID, consent to the use facial recognition software to prove they are the age they say they are.

“Some of these verification measures are wonderful, but then also require the collection of sensitive data. And those can pose new risks, especially for marginalized youth,” Perry said. “And it also puts a new kind of burden on parents to monitor their children. These things seem simple and straightforward on their face, but in reality, there are new risks that may emerge in terms of that that collection of additional data on children.”

Just as teens have managed to obtain fake IDs to drink, they are also savvy at skirting online age regulations.

“In Southeast Asia they’ve been trying this for years, for decades, and kids always get around it,” said Gaia Bernstein, author of “Unwired,” a book on how to fight technology addiction.

The problem, she said, is that the Utah rules don’t require social networks to prevent kids from going online. Instead, they are making the parents responsible.

“I think that’s going to be the weak link in the whole thing, because kids drive their parents insane,” Bernstein said.

There is no precedent in the United States for such drastic regulation of social media, although several states have similar rules in the works.

On the federal level, companies are already prohibited from collecting data on children under 13 without parental consent under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. For this reason, social media platforms already ban kids under 13 from signing up to their sites—but children can easily skirt the rules, both with and without their parents’ consent.

Perry suggests that instead of age verification, there are steps tech companies could take to make their platforms less harmful, less addictive, across the board. For instance, Instagram and TikTok could slow down all users’ ability to mindlessly scroll on their platforms for hours on end.

The laws are the latest effort from Utah lawmakers focused on children and the information they can access online. Two years ago, Gov. Spencer Cox signed legislation that called on tech companies to automatically block porn on cell phones and tablets sold, citing the dangers it posed to children. Amid concerns about enforcement, lawmakers in the deeply religious state revised the bill to prevent it from taking effect unless five other states passed similar laws—which has not happened.

Still, child development experts are generally hopeful about the growing push to regulate social media and its effects on children.

“Children have specific developmental needs, and we want to protect them at the same time that we’re trying to push back on Big Tech,” Perry said. “It’s a two-part effort. You have to really put your arm around the kids while you’re pushing Big Tech away.”

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