Month: December 2023

U.S. chipmaker Nvidia’s chief executive said on Monday the company will expand its partnership with Vietnam’s top tech firms and support the

country in training talent for developing artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure.

Nvidia, which has already invested $250 million in Vietnam, has so far partnered with leading tech companies to deploy AI in the cloud, automotive and healthcare industries, a document published by the White House in September showed when Washington upgraded diplomatic relations with Vietnam.

“Vietnam is already our partner as we have millions of clients here,” Jensen Huang, Nvdia’s CEO said at an event in Hanoi in his first visit to the country.

“Vietnam and Nvidia will deepen our relations, with Viettel, FPT, Vingroup, VNG being the partners Nvidia looks to expand partnership with,” Huang said, adding Nvidia would support Vietnam’s artificial training and infrastructure.

Reuters reported last week Nvidia was set to discuss cooperation deals on semiconductors with Vietnamese tech companies and authorities in a meeting on Monday.

Huang’s visit comes at a time when Vietnam is trying to expand into chip designing and possibly chip-making as trade tensions between the United States and China create opportunities for Vietnam in the industry.

At Monday’s event, Vietnam’s investment minister Nguyen Chi Dzung said the country had been preparing mechanisms and incentives to attract investment projects in the semiconductor and artificial intelligence industries.

Dzung also asked Nvidia to consider setting up a research and development facility in the country following Huang’s proposal to set up a base in Vietnam, after his meeting with the Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh on Sunday.

 
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Elon Musk has restored the X account of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, pointing to a poll on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter that came out in favor of the Infowars host who repeatedly called the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting a hoax.

It poses new uncertainty for advertisers, who have fled X over concerns about hate speech appearing alongside their ads, and is the latest divisive public personality to get back their banned account. 

Musk posted a poll on Saturday asking if Jones should be reinstated, with the results showing 70% of those who responded in favor. Early Sunday, Musk tweeted, “The people have spoken and so it shall be.”

A few hours later, Jones’ posts were visible again and he retweeted a post about his video game. He and his Infowars show had been permanently banned in 2018 for abusive behavior.

Musk, who has described himself as a free speech absolutist, said the move was about protecting those rights. In response to a user who posted that “permanent account bans are antithetical to free speech,” Musk wrote, “I find it hard to disagree with this point.”

The billionaire Tesla CEO also tweeted it’s likely that Community Notes — X’s crowd-sourced fact-checking service — “will respond rapidly to any AJ post that needs correction.”

It is a major turnaround for Musk, who previously said he wouldn’t let Jones back on the platform despite repeated calls to do so. Last year, Musk pointed to the death of his first-born child and tweeted, “I have no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame.”

Jones repeatedly has said on his show that the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, that killed 20 children and six educators never happened and was staged in an effort to tighten gun laws.

Relatives of many of the victims sued Jones in Connecticut and Texas, winning nearly $1.5 billion in judgments against him. In October, a judge ruled that Jones could not use bankruptcy protection to avoid paying more than $1.1 billon of that debt.

Relatives of the school shooting victims testified at the trials about being harassed and threatened by Jones’ believers, who sent threats and even confronted the grieving families in person, accusing them of being “crisis actors” whose children never existed.

Jones is appealing the judgments, saying he didn’t get fair trials and his speech was protected by the First Amendment.

Restoring Jones’ account comes as Musk has seen a slew of big brands, including Disney and IBM, stop advertising on X after a report by liberal advocacy group Media Matters said ads were appearing alongside pro-Nazi content and white nationalist posts.

They also were scared away after Musk himself endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory in response to a post on X. The Tesla CEO later apologized and visited Israel, where he toured a kibbutz attacked by Hamas militants and held talks with top Israeli leaders. 

But he also has said advertisers are engaging in “blackmail” and, using a profanity, essentially told them to go away.

“Don’t advertise,” Musk said in an on-stage interview late last month at The New York Times DealBook Summit.

After buying Twitter last year, Musk said he was granting “amnesty” for suspended accounts and has since reinstated former President Donald Trump; Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, following two suspensions over antisemitic posts last year; and far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was kicked off the platform for violating its COVID-19 misinformation policies.

Trump, who was banned for encouraging the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, has his own social media site, Truth Social, and has only tweeted once since being allowed back on X.
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The future of fossil fuels is at the center of the United Nations climate summit in Dubai, where many activists, experts and nations are calling for an agreement to phase out the oil, gas and coal responsible for warming the planet. On the other side: energy companies and oil-rich nations with plans to keep drilling well into the future.

In the background of those discussions are carbon capture and carbon removal, technologies most, if not all, producers are counting on to meet their pledges to get to net-zero emissions. Skeptics worry the technology is being oversold to allow the industry to maintain the status quo.

“The industry needs to commit to genuinely helping the world meet its energy needs and climate goals — which means letting go of the illusion that implausibly large amounts of carbon capture are the solution,” International Energy Agency Executive Director Fatih Birol said before the start of talks.

What is carbon capture?

Many industrial facilities such as coal-fired power plants and ethanol plants produce carbon dioxide. To stop those planet-warming emissions from reaching the atmosphere, businesses can install equipment to separate that gas from all the other gases coming out of the smokestack and transport it to where it can be permanently stored underground. And even for industries trying to reduce emissions, some are likely to always produce some carbon, such as cement manufacturers that use a chemical process that releases CO2.

“We call that a mitigation technology, a way to stop the increased concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere,” said Karl Hausker, an expert on getting to net-zero emissions at World Resources Institute, a climate-focused nonprofit that supports sharp fossil fuel reductions along with a limited role for carbon capture.

The captured carbon is concentrated into a form that can be transported in a vehicle or through a pipeline to a place where it can be injected underground for long-term storage.

What is carbon removal?

Then there’s carbon removal. Instead of capturing carbon from a single, concentrated source, the objective is to remove carbon that’s already in the atmosphere. This already happens when forests are restored, for example, but there’s a push to deploy technology, too. One type directly captures it from the air, using chemicals to pull out carbon dioxide as air passes through.

For some, carbon removal is essential during a global transition to clean energy that will take years. For example, despite notable gains for electric vehicles in some countries, gas-fired cars will be operating well into the future. And some industries, like shipping and aviation, are challenging to fully decarbonize.

“We have to remove some of what’s in the atmosphere in addition to stopping the emissions,” said Jennifer Pett-Ridge, who leads the federally supported Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s carbon initiative in the United States, the world’s second-leading emitter of greenhouse gases.

How is it going?

Many experts say the technology to capture carbon and store it works, but it’s expensive, and it’s still in the early days of deployment.

There are about 40 large-scale carbon capture projects in operation around the world capturing roughly 45 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, according to the International Energy Agency, or IEA. That’s a tiny amount — roughly 0.1% — of the 36.8 billion metric tons emitted globally as tallied by the Global Carbon Project.

The IEA says the history of carbon capture “has largely been one of unmet expectations.” The group analyzed how the world can achieve net zero emissions, and its guide path relies heavily on lowering emissions by slashing fossil fuel use. Carbon capture is just a sliver of the solution — less than 10% — but despite its comparatively small role, its expansion is still behind schedule.

The pace of new projects is picking up, but they face significant obstacles. In the United States, there’s opposition to CO2 pipelines that move carbon to storage sites. Safety is one concern; in 2020, a CO2 pipeline in Mississippi ruptured, releasing carbon dioxide that displaced breathable air near the ground and sent dozens of people to hospitals.

The federal government is working on improving safety standards.

Who supports carbon capture?

The American Petroleum Institute says oil and gas will remain a critical energy source for decades, meaning that for the world to reduce its carbon emissions, rapidly expanding carbon capture technology is “key to cleaner energy use across the economy.” A check of most oil companies’ plans to get to net-zero emissions also finds most of them relying on carbon capture in some way.

The Biden administration wants more investment in carbon capture and removal, too, building off America’s comparatively large spending compared with the rest of the world.

But it’s an industry that needs subsidies to attract private financing. The Inflation Reduction Act makes tax benefits much more generous. Investors can get a $180-per-ton credit for removing carbon from the air and storing it underground, for example. And the Department of Energy has billions to support new projects.

“What we are talking about now is taking a technology that has been proven and has been tested but applying it much more broadly and also applying it in sectors where there is a higher cost to deploy,” said Jessie Stolark, executive director of the Carbon Capture Coalition, an industry advocacy group.

Investment is picking up. The EPA is considering dozens of applications for wells that can store carbon. And in places such as Louisiana and North Dakota, local leaders are fighting to attract projects and investment.

Who is against it?

Some environmentalists argue that fossil fuel companies are holding up carbon capture to distract from the need to quickly phase out oil, gas and coal.

“The fossil fuel industry has proven itself to be dangerous and deceptive,” said Shaye Wolf, climate science director at the Center for Biological Diversity.

There are other problems. Some projects haven’t met their carbon removal targets. A 2021 U.S. government accountability report said that of eight demonstration projects aimed at capturing and storing carbon from coal plants, just one had started operating at the time the report was published despite hundreds of millions of dollars in funding.

Opponents also note that carbon capture can serve to prolong the life of a polluting plant that would otherwise shut down sooner. That can especially hurt poorer, minority communities that have long lived near heavily polluting facilities.
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