But in Canada, it was a Liberal federal government that acted to put a price on carbon pollution and it is the current Conservative Party that is opposed. The latter has started an “axe-the-tax” campaign that has encouraged street protests and buy-in from many of Canada’s provincial premiers.

On April 1, 2024, the federal government raised the price of carbon pollution with an average increase of 3.5 cents per litre of gasoline and diesel, as well as proportionate increases on other fossil fuels by raising the benchmark $15 CDN to $80 per ton. Every ton of CO2 or methane (CH4) emitted is, therefore, accounted for through Canadian purchases of fossil fuels. Some have criticized the government for choosing April Fool’s Day to increase the price, but the truth is the date coincides with the start of the federal government’s fiscal year which begins every April. The $15 annual increase is slated to continue each April until at least 2030 when carbon pricing will reach $170 per ton.

A few years ago I joined Citizens’ Climate Lobby Canada (CCL), a voluntary group focused on lobbying the government to work towards a more livable future.  CCL has been a staunch advocate for carbon pricing as an effective way to deal with climate change. It has taken this stance because it sees carbon pricing as pivotal to reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, driving innovation, and safeguarding economic competitiveness. What is interesting is that CCL is a group of everyday citizens who have taken on the task of becoming more informed about carbon pollution and have been sharing what they have learned with their political representatives. It has proved to be an effective means of moving forward with government environmental policy related to climate change mitigation.

Recently, a note from CCL contained an Open Letter from Economists on Canadian Carbon Pricing signed by approximately 200 Canadian economists. The letter presented evidence and facts to back “economically sensible policies to reduce emissions at a low cost.” It looked at affordability concerns for average Canadians. It addressed the impact of pricing on business competitiveness and the overall Canadian economy.

The open letter contains 5 claims by critics of carbon pricing. I have summarized these below:

Critics’ Claim #1: Carbon pricing won’t reduce GHG emissions.

What the evidence shows: Not only does carbon pricing reduce emissions, but it does so at a lower cost than other approaches.  

Critics’ Claim #2: Carbon pricing drives up the cost of living and is a major cause of inflation.

What the evidence shows: Canadian carbon pricing has a negligible impact on overall inflation.

Critics’ Claim #3: It makes little sense to have both a carbon price and rebates. 

What the evidence shows: The price-and-rebate approach acts as an incentive to reduce carbon emissions as the price rises while maintaining most households’ overall purchasing power.

Critics’ Claim #4: Carbon pricing harms Canadian business competitiveness.

What the evidence shows:  Canada’s carbon-pricing scheme is designed to help businesses reduce emissions at low cost, while competing in the emerging low-carbon global economy.  

Critics’ Claim #5:  Carbon pricing isn’t necessary.

What the evidence shows:  Here the critics are right. Canada could abandon carbon pricing and still hit our climate targets by using regulations and subsidies—but it would be much more costly. 

The CCL note contained the following:

1. Since the inception of federal carbon pricing in 2019, Canada has witnessed a notable decrease of almost 8% in GHG emissions, with projections indicating that carbon pricing will contribute substantially to emissions reductions by 2030.
2. Evidence from the Bank of Canada indicates carbon pricing has had a negligible impact on overall inflation. Factors such as disruptions from climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic and geopolitical tensions have primarily influenced inflation rates.
3. Carbon-pricing revenues are being rebated to households, ensuring that the policy economically unburdens most Canadians. In some families, the rebates total more than what these families outlay when they purchase gasoline or diesel at the pump. Carbon pricing is a disincentive to use fossil fuels for energy needs. The dollars returned through rebates give householders more purchasing power. The Climate Action Network Canada, an umbrella group representing over 200 climate organizations, states that many Canadians have come to depend on quarterly rebates to meet basic needs.
4. Canada’s carbon pricing is designed to promote emission reduction without compromising business competitiveness. Industries are incentivized to adopt low-carbon practices through output-based pricing while remaining economically viable in the global marketplace.
5. While alternatives to carbon pricing exist such as the laws enacted in the United States where it appears resistance to putting a price on pollution comes from mostly conservative voices, these policies and the regulations required to enforce them cost more than the market-based carbon pricing in place in Canada.

Cathy Orlando is the National Director of CCL Canada. She describes Canada’s carbon-pricing policies as “exemplary in achieving all these objectives,” referring to reducing emissions, addressing affordability, maintaining business competitiveness and facilitating a transition to a low-carbon economic future.

Why the federal Conservative Party continues to balk at carbon pricing mystifies me since they have always believed that the market should dictate our future path, and have advocated market-based environmental policy in the past. Instead, the Conservative Party wants industry to invent solutions and the government to impose regulations.

“Every age has its particular folly; some scheme, project, or phantasy into which it plunges, spurred on either by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the mere force of imitation.”

Mackay’s words are relevant today. We are witnessing a dramatic change starting in the last decade with the arrival of smartphones accompanied by social media applications. Whether TikTok, X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or other types of social media platforms, young people have become addicted. Jonathan Haidt in his book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, was a guest on Bill Maher’s Realtime last Friday. Haidt described how childhood changed between 2010 and 2015 pointing to increased levels of self-harm and suicide. He linked this rise to smartphones and high-speed Internet connectivity noting that smartphones were isolating young people rather than encouraging them to play.

All young mammals play. Whether puppies, kittens, cubs, baby whales, you name it, play is an important stage in mammalian development. Smartphones and small screens, however, have physically changed how children play and interact. More today happens with children staring at digital displays where they type, tap and react to what is seen.

Ubiquitous access to the Internet and parenting changes represent a dangerous confluence threatening the well-being of young people is the conclusion of another important publication entitled Social Media and Adolescent Health, edited by Sandro Galea, physician, epidemiologist, and a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, Gillian J. Buckley, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Alexis Wojtowicz, a Bloomberg Fellow and Research Associate at the National Academies of Sciences (NAS).

This NAS publication first defined what was meant by social media, writing:

“Social media refers to interactive technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. Social media can therefore include social networking, gaming, virtual worlds, video sharing sites, and blogs.”

It reviewed published literature on both smartphone technologies and social media looking at the claims being made of a causal link between the two related to young people’s mental health. It noted the transformation of the world over the last 15 years because of the emergence of smartphones and other handheld devices. It described the “breakneck pace” of information, news and entertainment bombarding eyes fixed on small screens.

It also described how social media works noting features designed to keep users engaged for as long as possible. A feature called affordances is common to all social media platforms. Affordances are algorithms that generate content in response to user requests. Affordances determine the ranking of displayed content, targeted advertising, content moderation, and continuous engagement. Capturing a user’s attention and keeping it to monetize the result is the ultimate end goal.

Social media algorithms also can influence health in the way content is presented with more provocative and sensational posts ranked higher based on the viewing history of the user. This creates distortions and gives rise “to recursive feedback loops.” The result is harmful content, misinformation, fringe views, and conspiracy theories shaping user perceptions.

Sharing on social media furthers its persuasive influence. Likes, badges, points and other features manipulate users and draw them back repeatedly to the platforms. This is harmful to young people and adult frequenters of social media. But for adolescents, it can become deadly affecting their emotions, judgment, and interaction with peers. Disengagement becomes harder fed by manipulative algorithms.

Although social media platforms include usage and consent contracts, most users never read the fine print. They don’t realize that every click and like is collected to shape the messaging that social media ends up sending back to the smartphone and tablet screens being viewed. There is little in the way to ensure viewed content is age-appropriate just as there is no way to ensure new users are not underage when downloading social media apps.

The NAS publication, despite the above, takes a nuanced response to the claim that Haidt makes in his book. Has the social media revolution and the arrival of smartphones been harmful or helpful? NAS concludes both by making two very different observations.

The first states, “Some features of social media function can harm … young people’s mental health. These include, but are not limited to, algorithmically driven distortions of reality exacerbating harmful content and disinformation, the distraction away from time that can otherwise be used in more healthy ways, and the creation of opportunities where youth can be abused or exploited.”

The second points to social media as a means to “improve the lives of youth, including the creation of opportunities for community among more marginalized youth, and the opportunity for fun and joy for the vast majority of users.” 

To reconcile the evil and good of smartphones and the proliferation of social media, the NAS publication recommended:

• Development of industry standards to ensure social media is used responsibly by young people.
• Educators and healthcare providers work with social media developers to protect young people from online abuse.
• Further research to better understand the causal links between social media and mental health.

When the Internet and the Worldwide Web emerged in the early 1990s, I was an earnest advocate. I saw it as a way for global knowledge sharing.

When social media arrived in the first decade of the 21st century, I thought this would break down social, political and ideological barriers, and be a positive force for change in the world.

Today, I realize my naïveté in drawing both conclusions. I see the NAS publication as continuing to reflect a similar naïveté. Haidt’s conclusions persuade me. The addictive properties of social media and smartphone use in young people will only worsen outcomes if we as parents, educators, publishers, and software developers don’t address it and find solutions.

How would they respond? what information would they glean from their training datasets and Internet sources in responding? LLM AIs are trained using enormous datasets of text. They use neural network deep learning AI technologies to analyze and predict sequences of words obtained from these datasets. Human programmers influence word relationship sequences when they create AI algorithms. That’s because different programmers, themselves, have biases, or may have different levels of language facility, and may see word relationships differently.

For AIs understanding the multiple meanings of the same word or the same spellings of words that have different meanings in context presents a challenge. In other words, it’s complicated to resolve and parse the ambiguities of human language.

How does the AI understand the intention of the writer’s words versus what the writer wrote? Are there hidden meanings? Are there emotional contexts to consider?

It is far more than just predicting what word follows another, and how AIs do this remains somewhat of a mystery to their creators.

Just how complex are LLM AIs?

When Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 or GPT-3 was launched in the spring of 2020, its LLM featured 175 billion parameters for learning patterns and relationships within language.

When its successor GPT-4 was introduced in March 2023, it featured 1.76 trillion parameters, ten times the size of its predecessor. Such is the pace of AI’s evolution.

Knowing this, I had to see how three of the latest LLM AIs handle a geopolitical question. I chose the current war between Russia and Ukraine. I didn’t give the LLM AIs anything more than the question posed at the beginning of this article.

These are the results from Copilot, Gemini and Monica.

Copilot

This region of the planet is currently dealing with the latest El Niño traversing the mid-Pacific Ocean which weakens prevailing trade winds, moves warmer water to the east and clouds to the west causing changes in precipitation and sea levels. Many in the group are threatened by drought when El Niño events occur. Add atmospheric warming from greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) produced elsewhere and the region’s environmental challenges start to add up. Most members of the forum, Australia and New Zealand being the outliers, are seeking the help of richer countries to finance mitigation and adaptation, in addition to receiving loss and damage compensation promised at the time of the signing of the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015.

Rising sea levels pose a particular challenge to many of the Pacific island nations. The Pacific is rising faster than other oceans. The rate amounts to 4 millimetres (0.157 inches) annually compared to 3.4 being the average globally. That doesn’t sound like a lot but it translates to 92 millimetres (3.62 inches) since the turn of the 21st century.

Here are a few examples:

• Kiribati, is a nation of 33 small island atolls with a little over 2 metres (6.5 feet) of clearance between current altitude and sea levels. Every high tide and Pacific storm erodes more of the nation away.
• The Solomon Islands include 992 distinct islands and atolls. of which 5 have disappeared since 1947 as Pacific Ocean levels climb and six more have seen erosion remove 20% of their land areas.
• The 274 Torres Strait Islands that lie between Australia and New Guinea have watched rising sea levels invade freshwater aquifers and cause coastal erosion.
• The five Carteret Islands that are part of Papua New Guinea lie at or near sea level. The highest point of land stands 1.5 metres (5 feet) above the encroaching waters of the Pacific Ocean. The inhabitants are already migrating as the waters rise.
• The 1,225 Marshall Islands spread over 29 coral atolls with most less than 2.1 metres (7 feet) above sea level are disappearing at an alarming rate.
• And then there is Tuvalu whose atolls and islands on average stand just under 2 metres (6.5 feet) above sea level. The rising Pacific poses an immediate threat to its citizens who have been putting up a fight building up dunes and coral debris that washes ashore to hold back the ocean.

So what will happen as our warming planet and rising oceans devour these nations? The migration of their inhabitants is inevitable. Will they then cease to be citizens of their respective nations?

Tuvalu has been looking at the nature of its continued existence after the Pacific wipes it out. Current international law defines a nation as having a physical presence and a permanent population. But Tuvalu wants that definition to change by creating a digital version of itself. The digital Tuvalu would preserve its cultural heritage and provide continuing services to its citizens regardless of where they end up.

Tuvalu also wants its patch of the Pacific Ocean to remain an exclusive economic zone (EEZ) even when the islands are no longer there. EEZs were established by the United Nations Law of the Sea, agreed to in 1982. The EEZ gives a nation sovereign rights to explore, exploit, conserve, and manage a physical area of the ocean from below its seabed to the waters above. The current definition of EEZ is measured from a nation’s shoreline to a distance of 321 kilometres (200 miles). But what happens when there no longer is a shoreline from which to measure? Tuvalu is claiming that the EEZ should survive its physical disappearance which means an area of the Pacific Ocean amounting to almost 750,000 square kilometres (almost 290,000 square miles) can remain a source of income for the diaspora. The tuna industry has been a mainstay of the island nation’s economy. worth billions of dollars annually, the earnings from it would continue to provide Tuvalu citizens with healthcare, pensions and other government services regardless of where they end up living.

The greatest challenge to representative democracies trying to address chronic or long-term problems is that they need to seek a mandate from their constituents every few years. In Canada’s case, the government is staying in power despite holding a minority of seats in the Parliament. It has an agreement with another party to keep it in office. Because Canada is a federation, the central government also needs to have cooperative agreements with the sub-jurisdictions which are provinces and territories within the nation.

Canada passed a law in 2018 putting a price on pollution. At the time Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stated that pollution always has a cost and it should no longer be free for industry, utilities, and others to pollute anywhere in the country. The initial price per ton of carbon pollution set by the federal government was $20 CDN. Provinces could collect the pollution levy or develop their equivalent programs. Every year through 2022, the levy increased by $10. Some provinces challenged the law but lost when Canada’s Supreme Court sided with the federal government.

Because the government is a minority it can be forced to quit if it loses a confidence vote in Parliament. If it stays in power until 2025 which is the current expiry date for its rule, the government will have to keep its members happy. Right now, Liberal members from the Atlantic provinces have become antsy because their constituents are complaining about the carbon levy on oil with the bulk of furnaces in that part of the country using it to heat homes. Losing those seats in a future election would mean the Liberals would be out of office.

Even though the next election could be two years away, the federal government decided to remove the levy from home heating oil, thus hoping to quell the complaints from voters in the Atlantic provinces. At the same time, the government announced it would help homeowners using oil to convert to heat pumps offering to pay for them. Of course, the people of Atlantic Canada may have trouble acquiring heat pumps and installers to put them into homes.

So here we have a government that has wrapped itself in green, sustainable policies, that is committed to mitigating climate change, backtracking on carbon pricing to pander for votes. In choosing this path, the federal Liberal Party is no different than the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom which recently announced a rollback of progressive climate change policy focused on converting cars and trucks from petrol and diesel to electricity and hydrogen.

In both countries, it is retail politics that has trumped good environmental policy. What does that say about the future commitment to mitigating climate change? For carbon pricing, the Canadian government has driven the first nail into its coffin. Based on the most recent polls in both Canada and the United Kingdom as well, the shelf life of these two governments doesn’t look long in the offing.

Of course, for the ultimate distraction, you can always look to foreign policy initiatives as a way to deflect the public from acts of domestic incompetence.

I grew up at the dawn of nuclear warfare and The Cold War, the latter an ideological conflict between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its satellites. I also was growing up when European colonialism crumbled sometimes peacefully, but often through armed conflict.

The more recent conflicts have included wars on terrorism with the fallout from the 9/11 attacks in the United States leading to the invasions by America and its allies into Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.

In the 20th century, wars killed more than 160 million. The tally for the 21st century is estimated to be another 20 million to date. But both of these numbers are a significant undercount when you consider the collateral deaths that accompany human conflicts.

The wars of the 20th century featured technological innovation and the restructuring of national economies focused on the mass production of weapons. Two of these wars were global lasting many years. The losers of these 20th-century conflicts saw the emergence of social upheaval, civil war and regime change. A list of 38 of the most notable of these conflicts follows:

1. The Boer War in South Africa, 1899–1902
2. World War One, 1914–1918
3. Russian Revolution and Civil War, 1917 – 1922
4. The Irish War of Independence and Civil War, 1919-1923
5. The Turkish War of Independence, 1919 – 1923
6. The Japanese Invasion of Manchuria, 1931
7. Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935 – 1936
8. The Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939
9. The Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936-1939
10. The Japanese-China War, 1937 – 1945
11. World War 2 in Europe, 1939 – 1945
12. World War 2 in the Pacific, 1941 – 1945
13. The Palestine Conflict, 1944 -1948
14. The Cold War, 1945 – 1991
15. The Chinese Civil War, 1945 – 1949
16. The Partition of India War, 1947
17. Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948 – 1949
18. The British-Malay War, 1948 – 1960
19. The Korean War – 1950 – 1953
20. The Kenyan Mau Mau Rebellion, 1952 – 1960
21. The Algerian War of Independence, 1954 – 1962
22. The Vietnam War, 1955 – 1975
23. The Suez Crisis, 1956
24. The Eritrean War of Independence, 1961 – 1991
25. The War of Malay, Brunei and Indonesian Independence, 1962 – 1966
26. The Six-Day War between Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, 1967
27. The Nigerian Civil War, 1967 – 1970
28. The Northern Ireland Troubles, 1969 – 1998
29. The Yom Kippur War, Israel, Egypt and Syria, 1973
30. The Ogaden Ethiopian-Somali War, 1977 – 1978
31. The Argentine-Falkland Islands War, 1982
32. The Kuwait-Iraq Gulf War, 1990 – 1991
33. Sierra Leone Civil War, 1991–2002
34. The Yugoslav Wars – Slovenia, 1991, Croatia, 1991 – 1995, Bosnia and Herzegovina – 1992 – 1995, Kosovo, 1998 – 1999
35. The Somali Civil War, 1992 – ongoing
36. The Rwandan Genocide, 1994
37. The Congo Civil War, 1997 – 1999
38. The Eritrean – Ethiopian War, 1998 – 2000

The legacy of the 20th century has carried on into the 21st. That legacy includes nuclear, planet-killing weapons, ballistic missiles and more. A growing number of militaries have these capabilities in their armaments. And yet there are even more changes to come as technology alters the battlefields in the 21st century.

So what is changing? Cyberwarfare has opened up an entirely new theatre of war taking it to the Internet, making data networks, energy, and civil infrastructure vulnerable to disruptions. Wars for the minds of people, today, include mass dissemination of misinformation using social media and search engines.

Warfare may soon extend to near-Earth space. Anti-satellite weapons have been tested by Russia and China. Others will soon do the same.

Finally, human warfare is likely to be supplemented by machine-to-machine conflicts as remote-guided and autonomous weapon systems, artificial intelligence, and robotics get deployed on 21st-century future battlefields. The age of killer robots is near, something in the past confined to science fiction novels. That’s why, since 2018, the United Nations has been trying to organize an agreement among nations to draft a treaty banning the use of anti-personnel autonomous weapons in conflicts. How effective have UN bans been in deterring war? Unfortunately, not very.

A final note. Have you heard of the Mad Scientist Initiative? Formed by TRADOC, the United States Army Training and Doctrine Command in the last decade, among its many pursuits were surrounding human soldiers with better technology that included enhancing combatant protection and awareness using Iron Man armour and neural-link implants, the latter, to create human-computer interfaces. Welcome to a real 6-million-dollar man.

If this subject interests you, I recommend you read a paper entitled, “Technology, war and the state: past, present and future,” published in the journal, International Affairs.

In his first contribution to this site, he asks if deepfakes, which are fabricated using AI, serve a positive or negative purpose. But before you read Zac’s contribution, I thought it would be useful to understand the term “deepfake.”

I found this definition on The University of Virginia website which states that a deepfake is an artificial image, video or audio recording generated by a particular type of AI called “deep learning.” Deep learning is a type of machine learning. Why is it deep? Because deep learning uses a particular type of AI called a neural network which is a technology that emulates our multi-layered human brain.

But do we need an AI to create fake images? Haven’t we been seeing doctored images and videos on the Internet for years where humans use tools like Photoshop to produce faked results?

But I will leave the conversation on this subject to Zac to explain something he asks: can the good outweigh the bad with deepfake technology?

Deepfakes are fabricated media created using AI. In simpler terms, they’re fake videos or audio recordings that look and sound remarkably real. This technology manipulates existing footage or audio to create a new, convincing narrative.

In today’s digital age, the use of deepfakes is skyrocketing. It’s not just a technology niche curiosity anymore that shows up in mainstream media, political campaigns or on social networks. Deepfakes are invading the digital landscape raising both excitement and concern.

The Good Side of Deepfakes

As one navigates the digital frontier, the focus is often on the pitfalls of new technology like deepfakes. However, it’s time to switch gears and explore the sunny side. From transforming entertainment to empowering content creators, deepfakes offer promising benefits that merit discussion.

Entertainment Revolution

Deepfakes are changing the game in the entertainment industry, particularly in movies and TV shows. They allow filmmakers to bring characters to life in previously impossible or expensive ways. For example, the technology can de-age actors, letting them play younger versions of themselves without using CGI (computer-generated imagery).

Two deepfake examples in film include “Terminator: Dark Fate,” where the technology creates a digitally younger Arnold Schwarzenegger. Another example is the resurrection of late actors for new roles, in this case, Peter Cushing who appeared in “Star Wars: Rogue One” using the technology.

Content Creation

Deepfakes are also democratizing high-quality video creation. Gone are the days when one needed a massive budget and a team of specialists to produce convincing special effects. Now, even independent creators can utilize the technology to elevate content, making it more engaging and professional.

The result is a more vibrant and competitive digital landscape. Independent creators now have the tools to realize their creative visions without the traditional barriers to entry, ushering in a new era of innovation and diversity in content.

Training and Simulation

The technology holds great promise in professional training scenarios and educational settings. Businesses and schools can use it to create realistic simulations or role-playing exercises, offering students and trainees immersive learning experiences. For instance, medical students can interact with a deepfake patient to practice diagnosis and bedside manner providing a safe space to commit mistakes and learn.

In the corporate world, deepfakes can improve employee training modules. Imagine a deepfake CEO announcing a new policy or explaining complex procedures, making the training content more engaging and relatable. It enhances the efficacy of educational materials, making them more interactive and practical.

The Bad Side of Deepfakes

While the potential of deepfakes to enhance creativity and education is captivating, a darker narrative for this technology exists. From spreading misinformation to posing threats to personal privacy, the negative implications of the technology are just as groundbreaking as the above-described benefits.

Misinformation

Deepfakes excel at creating believable false narratives. With the ability to make anyone say or do virtually anything on camera, these manipulated videos can easily distort the truth. One alarming scenario is the potential use of deepfakes to influence public opinion.

In one instance, even a U.S. president can be a victim. The previous link is of a clip of then-Vice President Joe Biden that has been crudely manipulated to show him lolling his tongue and twitching his eyebrows.

Identity Theft

The risks of deepfakes extend beyond the public sphere and into personal security. Anyone can be targeted with just a few photos or short video clips. These types of manipulated images can create compromising or false situations that affect personal relationships.

In the corporate world, this technology when misused can be a significant threat to a company’s security. Imagine a deepfake video depicting a CEO requesting sensitive information or making dubious statements. Such deepfakes can lead to data breaches, financial loss and tarnished reputations.

Ethical Concerns

Deepfakes raise serious ethical issues, particularly regarding consent and personal boundaries. One of the most alarming is deepfake pornography where individual faces can be grafted into adult content without the knowledge or approval of that person. This blatant violation of personal privacy can lead to emotional and reputational damage with legal implications.

Virtual impersonation is another area where deepfakes can overstep ethical boundaries. Imagine someone using deepfake technology to imitate a family member or friend in a video message that requests money or shares false information. This kind of impersonation is deemed to be fraudulent.

The Social Impact and Public Response

Deepfakes are a double-edged sword. On the positive side, they are revolutionizing entertainment, democratizing high-quality content creation, and offering innovative approaches to education and training. They also, however, pose substantial risks, spreading misinformation and can not only influence elections but violate personal privacy and ethical norms.

Various solutions are emerging to mitigate deepfake risks. Technology companies are developing deepfake detection software to flag manipulated content. Governments are also considering legislation to criminalize the malicious use of deepfakes. Moreover, there is a growing public awareness to educate people to spot and report deepfakes found on the Internet.

The fact that the U.S. House of Representatives recently held a hearing about UAPs expressed concern that the unknown phenomena could pose a threat to America or even the rest of us. Hence, the hearing.

Not to be outdone, NASA, the civilian U.S. space agency, has joined in the discussion having recently filed an independent report. Of course, getting NASA involved in something we believe might be coming from outer space would make sense considering the vast panoply of observation satellites, the International Space Station, and other agency earthbound hardware that studies the skies.

In its report, NASA notes that current UAP data is hampered by poor data collection and a lack of sensors with spatial recognition capable of making hazy observed phenomena a lot clearer. After all the Agency has been equipped with an inventory that is “a potent mix of Earth-observing satellites that offer imagery at sub- to several-meter spatial resolution, which is well-matched to the typical spatial scales of known UAP.” In addition, NASA has “state-of-the-art computational and data-analysis techniques” and is “well-positioned to play a leading role.”

Considering what should and should not be a NASA priority, and budgetary challenges, one wonders why the Agency would engage in the UAP exercise. The rationale is that NASA will give legitimacy to the search and reduce the stigma associated with UAP reporting.

The NASA report states, “The threat to U.S. airspace safety posed by UAP is self-evident.” But is it? Has any reported UAP sighting led to an airplane crash or interference with rocket and satellite launches? One would think that if we were dealing with a real out-of-this-world safety threat, sightings would be happening at locations where our space infrastructure exists. But that is not the case. Instead, we have eye-witness reports and images like the one seen at the beginning of this posting. What Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist, calls “fuzzy TicTacs.”

NASA’s UAP study team for its latest report includes 16 experts with backgrounds in science, technology, data, artificial intelligence, space exploration, aerospace safety, media, and commercial innovation. Its initial assessment clearly states that legacy UAP sightings and data have little value. Instead, NASA’s involvement should focus on future sightings with UAP-specific monitoring technology.

At the same time, NASA is encouraging public engagement to report UAPs with the calling for a crowdsourcing system and campaign with open-source smartphone apps to gather images and other citizen-based observations. It appears NASA is unaware of Enigma, an already existing smartphone app designed to record UAP sightings.

The Agency also wants to partner with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to do real-time analysis focused on UAP data gathering to create a future generation of air traffic management systems. I gather that the goal is to guide UAPs to help them on their flight paths.

Neil deGrasse Tyson questions the reliability of sightings noting that “eyewitness testimony is some of the lowest form of evidence you can bring to a scientific conference.” The congressional hearing received testimony from pilots and people deemed to be reliable eyewitnesses. None of these eyewitnesses, however, were using tools and methods of science to reinforce what they had seen, recorded, or experienced. It is this lack of technology specific to UAPs that Tyson questions stating he wants better data. 

He goes on in a recent interview stating, “We have 6 billion smartphones in the world, and at any given moment, there’s a million people airborne with a window looking out into the atmosphere. And everybody has a high-resolution camera, video and stills. And all we have is a fuzzy Tic Tac and some other fuzzy images.”

Some final observations about the pursuit of UAPs:

• If UAPs are a technology designed to spy on the U.S., then the Department of Defense (DoD) is where the effort and money should be spent.
• If UAPs are visitors from remote civilizations, the technology to get them to the vicinity of Earth would so far surpass us that I doubt we would ever figure out what and who they are.
• If UAPs are visits from humans from the future, then we need to understand physics at a level far greater than we know today.

To me, this is not where NASA money should be spent. I propose an alternative, a crowdfunding campaign to raise money in support of this pursuit.

Or as an ultimate absurdity, maybe Congress should hold hearings to verify the claims of Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene who has stated that Jewish space lasers are being used to melt the polar ice and wreck White Christmases for the future. And if Congress isn’t game, maybe NASA could pursue this and file a report.

It was no surprise to me to read the latest U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that questions NASA’s entire approach to the Artemis Program, an ambitious goal to send human crews to the Moon and establish a crewed habitat there before going to Mars. The GAO report questioned the affordability of the Program, NASA’s fundamental ability to manage U.S. taxpayer money, and what the final cost will be.

When I asked the above question in 2019, I wrote that other ways were far cheaper to accomplish the goals of the Artemis Program. These entail:

1. Using the SpaceX Falcon Heavy as a launch vehicle.
2. Developing a modular staging strategy as in the ISS to become the launch platform for Deep Space exploration including the return to the Moon.
3. Modifying the existing crew capsule to allow for docking assembly so that it could be mated to modules placed in orbit.

Since writing these three in 2019, I would revise the first point and replace the Falcon Heavy with the Starship.

NASA has done and can do all three of the items on the above list. But why no one at NASA has put an alternative plan to the SLS in place, would seem to defy logic.

The SLS evolved from several cancelled NASA programs designed to succeed the Space Shuttle. Its direction and design were first formulated in 2011 with the idea to use some of the technology from the Space Shuttle Program, and other technology on the drawing board in development from cancelled programs. This has always been one of the flaws in NASA’s approach which has been exacerbated by the four-year cycle of election politics in the U.S. leading to changes in presidential aspirations regarding space. Throughout regime changes, the return to the Moon has been the only constant. For a while, it was not to land on the Moon but to develop the horsepower to reach and go beyond it. Landing and establishing a crewed lunar base came later to explore the Moon’s environment for potential extractable resources to be used on missions on and beyond it.

SLS has never been a single rocket system. It comes in multiple iterations of which only the first has been built. So there is a lot more design and investment to make to this single-use system for getting to Deep Space. And NASA’s prime contractors have milked the Agency repeatedly for extended funds that go well beyond the original budgeted costs. In recent days, NASA has changed its contractor terms from cost-plus arrangements to firm fixed costs. But that hasn’t changed the boondoggle that is SLS. The GAO report questions the affordability of NASA’s entire approach to Artemis, and to continuing to support the SLS.

Meanwhile, SpaceX, the company that has taken over NASA’s low-Earth orbit taxi business, once the purview of the Space Shuttle and Russia’s Soyuz, has been building the completely reusable alternative to SLS called the Starship with its super heavy booster. Starship is indirectly funded by NASA since the Agency continues to buy services from SpaceX for satellite launches, supply runs and crewed missions to the ISS. The money earned from these projects has allowed SpaceX to plow it into the Starship. NASA has given SpaceX a contract for a version of the Starship to be used in the first and second Artemis lunar landings. Starship is demonstrating flexibility. Starship is reusable. And Starship comes in at a cost considerably lower than the SLS.

Here is a good example of the lack of cost awareness from NASA. The engines being used by SLS currently cost $100 million each. SLS uses several of these per launch. NASA has asked the prime contractor to get the cost down to $70.5 million each. Remember these are throwaways.

A comparable engine built by the American commercial space company, Blue Origin, comes in at $20.4 million per engine and is reusable. These could easily replace the existing SLS engines.

And then there is SpaceX and its Raptor engines which the company uses in clusters to populate the Starship and heavy launch booster. Each of these costs less than $1 million apiece and are reusable.

In the end, each Artemis SLS launch is going to cost NASA several billion dollars. Except for the Orion capsule, everything used in each of these launches gets thrown away.

SpaceX estimates each Starship mission will cost $40 million. All components of the Starship including its heavy booster will be reused repeatedly. If the current use of Falcon 9 first stages is any indicator, reuse should become a fundamental requirement for NASA’s space program including human space flight going forward. So I ask the question once again, “When will NASA abandon the SLS Project?” Or is this a case of “in for a penny,” in for billions with no escape?

The last week at Climeworks’ DAC Summit in Switzerland, a lump of gray rock was on display, a sample of what this technology can produce to remove carbon from the atmosphere. But before too many raise their hands and shout hosannas, for DAC to make an appreciable dent in the CO2 emitted by us annually, we will need thousands of these facilities.

Right now the International Energy Agency (IEA) reports that there are 18 DAC plants in operation. Yet DAC technology has been around for a while. Back in 2015, I wrote about Carbon Engineering, a Calgary, Alberta-based startup with a pilot DAC plant demonstrating the removal of CO2 from ambient air. Since then pilot plants using similar technologies have cropped up in a few countries.

Beyond the 18 operational DAC plants, there are 11 in advanced development. If these come online before 2030, it will mean DAC capacity will grow to 5.5 Megatons. This is 700 times the current carbon capture rate and a mere fraction of what is needed to bend the carbon curve downward. But 18 and even 29 are woefully small numbers if we intend to remove a gigaton of carbon from the atmosphere annually as needed between now and 2030 according to the IEA. The plant in Iceland that was praised at the conference in Switzerland can capture a mere 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide and turn it into stone annually.

What has been holding DAC back?

The technology to direct-air-capture carbon dioxide has been known for some time. The cost per captured ton was seen as a barrier to market entry. Then there was the lack of carbon pollution pricing to offset the cost of implementing DAC. In 2007, the Province of Quebec was the first jurisdiction in Canada to put a price on carbon. In the same year, Alberta priced carbon emissions from fossil fuel and power generation operations. British Columbia followed in 2008 creating carbon pricing, a strategy that became the model for Canada’s future national carbon price which began at $10 CDN (approximately $7.50 US) per emitted ton in 2018. Annual increases have raised the price to $65 CDN (approximately $49 US), and it will continue to rise annually until it reaches $170 (approximately $128 US) by 2030.

Elsewhere, in the United States, California instituted a carbon market in 2012 which in 2022 set the price of carbon credits at $29 US per ton. The European Union’s carbon market currently puts a high price on carbon pollution at €89.9 ($98 US). Earlier this year the price briefly surpassed €100 ($109 US).

DAC facilities’ costs to capture carbon currently range from $125 to $335 USD per ton. So removing carbon from operations remains at best marginal and at worst wildly uneconomic. Right now unless governments are willing to chip in with large subsidies or tax breaks. there is little likelihood that polluters will adopt DAC widely.

Some encouraging news recently has one Texas-based fossil fuel energy provider planning to build and deploy 70 to 135 DAC plants between now and 2035. But where is everybody else?

At the conference in Switzerland last week, the stone from captured carbon had many in attendance giddy. Some described the atmosphere as celebratory. All that remained stated attendees now was to get the cost of deployment and operations down followed by massive deployment to save the planet.

Here too, governments need to change their act by speeding up approval processes for DAC deployment. The Holy Grail for carbon capture technology is to get to $100 per ton. Current industry experts believe a rapid build-out between now and 2030 could drop the cost per ton of captured carbon to that Holy Grail amount. If that were the case, the 2030 Canadian carbon levy at $128 US would make the building of more of these facilities far more attractive.