AI in-depth, luck, fear and climate response, Octopus's Garden, throwback EV, peak oil, Mark Cuban on meetings, population correction
August 28, 2023 - The Nett Report
Every other week The Nett Report provides readers with thoughtful perspectives useful to navigating life in a changing world. Past issues can be found here (recent) and here (past three years).
Climate Change
Olympian Motors EV – throwback design and simplistic driving experience
I know it feels like a promotion, but we couldn’t pass up sharing the image of the new Olympian Motors electric vehicle. In addition to a dramatic throwback design, Olympian promises a simplistic in-vehicle driving experience without distracting display screens and excessive buttons. Olympian also prioritizes steel and wood over plastics and nature over toxic chemicals. The firm uses a Modular Vehicle/Drivetrain System (MVDS), which it claims will reinvent car manufacturing in the United States, and a Lego-like production model.
New York to allow four-wheeled electric cargo bikes, e-bikes are not a craze
In an August 14, 2023, post, Electrek writes that “a proposed rule update in New York will pave the way for four-wheeled electric cargo bikes, which look like small delivery vans with bicycle pedals, to share the bike lanes and roads.” Another Electrek story, this one on August 22, 2023, says electric bikes are the future of transportation. “They can basically be used as 20 mph (32 km/h) mopeds. At that speed, they’re fast enough for people to cruise through a city easily, yet don’t come with the same power and speed concerns that have traditionally turned most commuters away from motorcycles. Add in the free parking, low entry cost, nearly zero maintenance cost, as well as turning commutes and errands from slogs into joy rides, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for a new transportation paradigm.”
How to make climate policy equitable and fair
According to an August 21, 2023, article in Anthropocene, money and carbon are intimately connected:
Billionaires are responsible for a million times the emissions of the average person.
The average North American emits over 10 times the carbon that the average African does.
Almost all of the growth of fossil energy consumption over the past generation has come from low- and middle-income countries
Most of the spending on energy transformation is happening in the developed economies.
The article explores the options for making climate policy equitable in the midst of these disparities. Three options include:
Let the poor emit more. Reducing poverty is not feasible without access to cheap and reliable energy.
Rich countries could pay climate reparations. Rich nations would need to pay reparations of $192 trillion, an average of $940 to every person in the Global South.
Create luxury carbon taxes. A carbon tax that prioritized luxury goods and services—like air travel—over essentials like domestic heating.
The article also explores options such as fair carbon taxes, creating a global climate fund, and smarter financing.
Why peak oil demand may still be far away
Goldman Sachs energy analyst Arfun Murti says peak oil demand may be far away in an August 24, 2023, Axios article. He believes oil will play a significant role in helping developing countries come out of poverty. Some statistics to make his point:
13 barrels average per capita use - the 1 billion who live in the U.S., Canada, Western Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand.
3 barrels average per capita use - the rest of the globe's roughly 7 billion people.
Even as attempts are made to reduce rich-country oil demand, the upside potential in the developing world is magnitudes greater.
The idea that crude oil will not play a role [in growth] and would globally decline is pure fantasy. Looking at the numbers, it's not a close call.
“Demand increases are inevitable for at least the next decade, and frankly, I think it is going to be much longer than that." Murti likes renewables and electric vehicles but describes himself as a realist. He says, “The timing of when oil demand peaks – and, crucially, the slope of the decline - has big repercussions for global carbon dioxide emissions.”
POLICY WONK SPECIAL: How to get people to believe in science again
This 36-minute podcast produced on August 16, 2023, by In Reality, explores “why some voters align themselves with claims that don’t bear up under scrutiny … and why trust in science has stumbled along with media and government.” The webinar is a moderated discussion between Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences, and Vicar Helgesen, executive director of the Nobel Foundation.
The Political Divide
Perception of time clouds our ability to act
“Time is funny like that. It can take tens of thousands of years to cycle through a geological epoch, just a couple of hundred for industrialization to make a mess of the planet, and only a decade or two to delude people into making decisions based on flawed time frames — whether it’s a 30-year mortgage or a political term that resets every four years. And in this moment when inconvenient realities like climate change have become so politicized, shortsighted individualism has further clouded our ability to plan ahead. We seem to have both no time and too much time to act, and so we spiral into paralyzing battles over the why, who, when, and how.” – Los Angeles Times, Excerpted from “California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline” by Rosanna Xia.
Is simply communicating fear the key to amping up our climate response?
Climate change has been an important topic affected by the political divide. “Three scientists asked 2,000 Norwegian adults their feelings about the climate crisis. They got an earful about anger, sadness, fear, guilt, and hope, according to an August 24, 2023, article in the Climate Coach newsletter. Their paper, “The strength and content of climate anger,” takes a deep look at how people’s emotions drive their reaction to the climate crisis. They studied activism, policy support, and individual action and found the following:
Anger drove activism, such as joining a climate demonstration, but not much else.
Guilt predicted policy support.
Hope drove both individual behaviors and policy support.
Only fear consistently made people engage in all three.
Respondents who were primarily angry at “external actors,” such as politicians or industries, reported no increase in activism, policy support, or individual action.
People who directed their anger at society’s apathy, inaction, or denial of global warming, as well as damage to ecosystems and people, reported engaging in more climate action.
Future of Work / The Economy
Skills becoming more important than college degrees in job search
“75% of recruiting professionals {are} predicting skills-first hire will be a priority for their company in the next 18 months,” according to an August 15, 2023, story in Fortune. New LinkedIn research has determined “the share of job ads in the U.K. that didn’t list the qualification as a requirement surged by 90% on the platform between 2021 and 2022. Meanwhile, recruiters globally are now five times more likely to search for new hires by skills over higher education.” The advertising for new jobs might not tell the whole story, however. “I don’t think we’re seeing job ads not requiring degrees increase because companies don’t want people with degrees,” says the CEO of recruitment agency Bentley Lewis. “It’s marketing. A job ad is to attract people to apply, then hiring managers screen candidates based on whatever criteria they’ve decided ... a degree is very useful.”
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN-DEPTH
With the explosion of media about artificial intelligence (AI). We thought it might be useful to share some information about the new wave of AI companies and their potential impact.
AI is creating tremendous demand for processing power and chips
A February 18, 2023, story in Wired projected that “integrating large language models into search engines could mean a fivefold increase in computing power and huge carbon emissions.” Chipmaker Nvidia reported that AI has fueled demand for its chips, according to an August 23, 2023, story in Reuters. Fortune reported on the same day that shares of Nvidia have “soared another 8%.” The New York Times, on August 16, 2023, wrote that companies are “scrounging for what has become the hottest commodity in tech: computer chips” and that “Nvidia has a virtual lock on the market.” There are long wait lists, but the largest tech firms can “hands on GPUs (graphics processing units) more easily because of their size, deep pockets, and market positions. That has left start-ups and researchers, which typically do not have the relationships or spending power, scrambling.”
Five tips on how to use AI to grow social media presence
Entrepreneur Ole Lehmann has made $175,000 since January creating content and teaching a course on how to use generative AI. As published in an August 26, 2023, story on Insider, here are his five tips to grow your social media presence:
Focus on learning no more than two AI tools at once. I've seen people try out 10 tools at a time and end up using none of them.
Be specific about what you want and don't want in your content: When crafting your prompt, make sure to include specifics like the format, context, target audience, tone of voice you want to see — as well as constraints on what you don't want to see —in your content.
Train ChatGPT on past content that performed well: Feed the chatbot a piece of content, like an X thread, then ask it to learn from that example and restructure the idea you're giving it based on the example's format and tone.
Talk to ChatGPT as if it were your employee or intern: Before writing your prompt, ask yourself, "How would I explain what I need to my content writers" and talk to ChatGPT in that same way.
Create with AI, but edit manually: Even though you use ChatGPT to help optimize content, the magic comes when you flex your writing skills and tweak the generated response to give it personality.
Some articles helpful to understanding AI and its role in our future world.
A.I. is helping ‘small town America’ embrace the green transition. With all the hype about generative A.I., you might have forgotten about “classical A.I.,” which uses big data and “machine learning” algorithms to optimize business processes or create new ones. CEO Daily, August 22, 2023.
People who use AI will replace workers who don’t: IBM. The report says that 40 percent of workers will need to polish their skills due to the implementation of AI. Interesting Engineering, August 21, 2023.
Foundations Seek to Advance A.I. for Good — and Also Protect the World From Its Threats. While technology experts sound the alarm on the pace of artificial intelligence development, philanthropists — including long-established foundations and tech billionaires — have been responding with an uptick in grants. Philanthropy, July 24, 2023.
The World Isn’t Ready for the Next Decade of AI. Mustafa Suleyman, cofounder of DeepMind and Inflection AI, talks about how AI and other technologies will take over everything—and possibly threaten the very structure of the nation-state. Wired, August 16, 2023.
My A.I. Writing Robot. A new wave of artificial intelligence startups is trying to “scale language” by automating the work of writing. The writer asked one such company to try to replace him. The New Yorker, July 11, 2023.
A.I. is changing business and society faster than anyone expected. These 13 A.I. innovators are deciding how the tech will change your life. Fortune, June 13, 2023.
Health
Covid hospitalizations climb, late summer wave predicted
According to an August 24, 2023, story on CBS News, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is forecasting an acceleration in Covid-19 hospitalizations in coming weeks, “replacing a previous projection that admissions ‘would remain stable or have an uncertain trend.’” In addition, a new variant called BA.2.86, nicknamed Pirola, has begun to emerge around the world. “Existing COVID-19 tests and medications ‘appear to be effective with this variant,’" the CDC says. Updated vaccines scheduled to be rolled out in September are expected to “be effective at reducing severe disease and hospitalization from BA.2.86.” An August 17, 2023, story in Axios published a map showing how hospitalization rates are increasing by state.
Summer’s almost gone, but sunscreen is forever
An August 15, 2023, Climate Coach newsletter addresses the two different types of sunscreens and suggests “we don’t get enough time outdoors in the sun. We just need to enjoy the sun safely.” Chemical sunscreens filter out ultraviolet light but can be damaging to coral reefs. Mineral sunscreens, typically containing titanium dioxide and zinc oxide, physically block and scatter the sun’s rays. The newsletter recommends an in-depth guide from the Environmental Working Group. That includes top-rated sunscreens, the best sunscreens for babies and kids, and the top-rated daily-use sunscreens.
Mark Cuban on minimalism as a healthcare disruptor
"People over-meet and over-call. You kill so much time. I try to only do meetings if I have to come to a conclusion or there's no other way. Same with phone calls. Every meeting is, 'Who got the donuts? What do you got going on? How are the kids?' If it were up to me, if I had to have a meeting — and I tried this early on in my career and wasn't established enough to get away with it — I'd take away all the chairs from the meeting room. It's amazing how quickly meetings get over with if no one has a chair or someplace to sit." - Mark Cuban, Becker’s Hospital Review, August 16, 2023
The Nett Light-Side
“We would be so happy, You and me. No one there to tell us what to do. I'd like to be under the sea in an octopus's garden with you.” – Octopus’ Garden, Abbey Road, The Beatles
The Octopus’s Garden is real, thousands nest off Central California
The image above shows an aggregation of female pearl octopus in the deep seafloor off the Central California Coast. According to an August 23, 2023, article in PHYS.ORG, the discovery of an Octopus Garden in 2018 by NOAA's Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary “captured the curiosity of millions of people around the world.”
Winners of the 2023 Black and White Photo Awards
My Modern Met on August 24, 2023, released the winning images from the 2023 Black and White Photo Awards. As usual, they are stunning. The images were selected from nearly 3,000 photos from 92 countries.
Animated video shows how human population reached 8 billion
In a fascinating four-minute video, the American Museum of Natural History visualizes how human population reached 8 billion in 300,000 years. The video is explained in an August 24, 2023, article in Open Culture. “The animation compresses … all human migrations, its growing and declining empires, its major trade routes, its technological developments, its plagues, and its wars” into one video.
Population correction predicted before century’s end
A University of British Columbia population ecologist argues that “we're using up Earth's resources at an unsustainable rate, and that our natural tendencies as humans make it difficult for us to correct this ‘advanced ecological overshoot.’" In an August 18, 2023, story in Science Alert, William Rees says the result could be “some kind of civilizational collapse that 'corrects' the world's population – one that could happen before the end of the century in a worst-case scenario.” Even the richest societies would be vulnerable.
Three things lucky people do differently
A recent article in Inc. says lucky people do three things differently to spot and seize opportunities. Believing you're lucky is also causal. Unlucky people wait to be discovered. Lucky people discover themselves -- and ask for what they want. “People who saw themselves as lucky spotted a chance opportunity much more quickly -- in some cases, people who saw themselves as unlucky never spotted it. Here are the three things lucky people do differently:
1. Start meeting more people. Meeting the right person at the right time can make a huge difference. It's a numbers game: You can't luck into meeting the right person unless you meet a lot of people -- and if you assume that every person you meet is worth meeting.
2. Start trying more things. While sometimes success is a straight line, most successful people have tried and failed at a number of things. That's why they're successful. Try things - Because you never know where one of those things might lead.
3. Start asking. Luck sometimes results from the right person saying yes: to your idea, to your startup, to your pitch, to your proposal, to your request for a favor. But no one can say yes unless you ask. Most people never ask, and that's what separates, sometimes, the people who do things from the people who just dream about them. Most people never pick up the phone and call.
About Carl Nettleton
Carl Nettleton is an award-winning writer, speaker, thought partner, facilitator, and subject-matter expert regarding water, climate, sustainability, the ocean, and binational U.S.-Mexico border affairs. Nettleton Strategies, the consultancy he founded in 2007, is a trusted source of analysis and advice on issues at the forefront of public policy, business, and the environment. He helps people to think strategically about their options for change. He is also the founder of OpenOceans Global, a nonprofit addressing ocean plastic in a new way.
Nettleton Strategies
www.nettstrategies.com