Why artificial intelligence and clean energy need each other
【能源与环境】 | Energy & Environment
By Michael Kearney and Lisa Hansmann（MIT Technology Review），October 8. 2024
We are in the early stages of a geopolitical competition for the future of artificial intelligence. The winners will dominate the global economy in the 21st century.
But what’s been too often left out of the conversation is that AI’s huge demand for concentrated and consistent amounts of power represents a chance to scale the next generation of clean energy technologies. If we ignore this opportunity, the United States will find itself disadvantaged in the race for the future of both AI and energy production, ceding global economic leadership to China.
To win the race, the US is going to need access to a lot more electric power to serve data centers. AI data centers could add the equivalent of three New York Cities’ worth of load to the grid by 2026, and they could more than double their share of US electricity consumption—to 9%—by the end of the decade. Artificial intelligence will thus contribute to a spike in power demand that the US hasn’t seen in decades; according to one recent estimate, that demand—previously flat—is growing by around 2.5% per year, with data centers driving as much as 66% of the increase.
Energy-hungry advanced AI chips are behind this growth. Three watt-hours of electricity are required for a ChatGPT query, compared with just 0.3 watt-hours for a simple Google search. These computational requirements make AI data centers uniquely power dense, requiring more power per server rack and orders of magnitude more power per square foot than traditional facilities. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, reportedly pitched the White House on the need for AI data centers requiring five gigawatts of capacity—enough to power over 3 million homes. And AI data centers require steady and reliable power 24 hours a day, seven days a week; they are up and running 99.999% of the year.
The demands that these gigawatt-scale users are placing on the electricity grid are already accelerating far faster than we can expand the physical and political structures that support the development of clean electricity. There are over 1,500 gigawatts of capacity waiting to connect to the grid, and the time to build transmission lines to move that power now stretches into a decade. One illustration of the challenges involved in integrating new power sources: The biggest factor delaying Constellation’s recently announced restart of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant isn’t the facility itself but the time required to connect it to the grid.
The reflexive response to the challenge of scaling clean-electricity supply has been to pose a false choice: cede the United States’ advantage in AI or cede our commitment to clean energy. This logic argues that the only way to meet the growing power demands of the computing economy will involve the expansion of legacy energy resources like natural gas and the preservation of coal-fired power plants.
The dire ecological implications of relying on more fossil fuels are clear. But the economic and security implications are just as serious. Further investments in fossil fuels threaten our national competitiveness as other countries leap ahead in the clean technologies that present the next generation of economic opportunity—markets measured in the trillions.
The reality is that the unprecedented scale and density of power needed for AI require a novel set of generation solutions, able to deliver reliable power 24-7 in ever increasing amounts. While advocates for legacy fuels have historically pointed to the variability of renewables, power sources that require massive, distributed, and disruptable fuel supplies like natural gas are also not the answer. In Texas, natural-gas plants accounted for 70% of outages after a severe winter storm in late 2022. As climate change intensifies, weather-related disruptions are only likely to increase.
Rather than seeing a choice between AI competitiveness and climate, we see AI’s urgent demand for power density as an opportunity to kick-start a slew of new technologies, taking advantage of new buyers and new market structures—positioning the US to not only seize the AI future but create the markets for the energy-dense technologies that will be needed to power it.
Data centers’ incessant demand for computing power is best matched to a set of novel sources of clean, reliable power that are currently undergoing rapid innovation. Those include advanced nuclear fission that can be rapidly deployed at small scale and next-generation geothermal power that can be deployed anywhere, anytime. One day, the arsenal could include nuclear fusion as a source of nearly limitless clean energy. These technologies can produce large amounts of energy in relatively small footprints, matching AI’s demand for concentrated power. They have the potential to provide stable, reliable baseload power matched to AI data centers’ 24-7 operations. While some of these technologies (like fusion) remain in development, others (like advanced fission and geothermal energy) are ready to deploy today.
AI’s power density requirements similarly necessitate a new set of electricity infrastructure enhancements—like advanced conductors for transmission lines that can move up to 10 times as much power through much smaller areas, cooling infrastructure that can address the heat of vast quantities of energy-hungry chips humming alongside one another, and next-generation transformers that enable the efficient use of higher-voltage power. These technologies offer significant economic benefits to AI data centers in the form of increased access to power and reduced latency, and they will enable the rapid expansion of our 20th-century electricity grid to serve 21st-century needs.
Moreover, the convergence of AI and energy technologies will allow for faster development and scaling of both sectors. Across the clean-energy sector, AI serves as a method of invention, accelerating the pace of research and development for next-generation materials design. It is also a tool for manufacturing, reducing capital intensity and increasing the pace of scaling. Already, AI is helping us overcome barriers in next-generation power technologies. For instance, Princeton researchers are using it to predict and avoid plasma instabilities that have long been obstacles to sustained fusion reactions. In the geothermal and mining context, AI is accelerating the pace and driving down the cost of commercial-grade resource discovery and development. Other firms use AI to predict and optimize performance of power plants in the field, greatly reducing the capital intensity of projects.
Historically, deployment of novel clean energy technologies has had to rely on utilities, which are notoriously slow to adopt innovations and invest in first-of-a-kind commercial projects. Now, however, AI has brought in a new source of capital for power-generation technologies: large tech companies that are willing to pay a premium for 24-7 clean power and are eager to move quickly.
These “new buyers” can build additional clean capacity in their own backyards. Or they can deploy innovative market structures to encourage utilities to work in new ways to scale novel technologies. Already, we are seeing examples, such as the agreement between Google, the geothermal developer Fervo, and the Nevada utility NV Energy to secure clean, reliable power at a premium for use by data centers. The emergence of these price-insensitive but time-sensitive buyers can accelerate the deployment of clean energy technologies.
The geopolitical implications of this nexus between AI and climate are clear: The socioeconomic fruits of innovation will flow to the countries that win both the AI and the climate race.
The country that is able to scale up access to reliable baseload power will attract AI infrastructure in the long-run—and will benefit from access to the markets that AI will generate. And the country that makes these investments first will be ahead, and that lead will compound over time as technical progress and economic productivity reinforce each other.
Today, the clean-energy scoreboard tilts toward China. The country has commissioned 37 nuclear power plants over the last decade, while the United States has added two. It is outspending the US two to one on nuclear fusion, with crews working essentially around the clock on commercializing the technology. Given that the competition for AI supremacy boils down to scaling power density, building a new fleet of natural-gas plants while our primary competitor builds an arsenal of the most power-dense energy resources available is like bringing a knife to a gunfight.
The United States and the US-based technology companies at the forefront of the AI economy have the responsibility and opportunity to change this by leveraging AI’s power demand to scale the next generation of clean energy technologies. The question is, will they?
Michael Kearney is a general partner at Engine Ventures, a firm that invests in startups commercializing breakthrough science and engineering. Lisa Hansmann is a principal at Engine Ventures and previously served as special assistant to the president in the Biden administration, working on economic policy and implementation.
Reprinted from MIT Technology Review
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From Waste to Resources: Best Practices of Circular Economy Pioneers
【企业社会责任与可持续发展】| CSR & Sustainability
Edited by Valley, Jointing.Media, in Wuhan, 2024-10-21
Editor’s Note:
For those who grew up in the 1980s, buying drinks required paying a bottle deposit. Households would collect empty glass bottles and return them to neighborhood shops for refunds. Today, bottles that can’t be reused at home often end up in trash bins.
The issues of “resource crisis” and “resource security” have long concerned scientists and policymakers worldwide. Experts across disciplines—from demographics to environmental studies, social development to economics—have explored various approaches to alleviate resource scarcity, proposing concepts like sustainable development, circular economy, and resource-intensive economies.
China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment took a major step in 2019 by releasing the “Zero-Waste City” Pilot Program Implementation Plan. On September 24, 2024, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) held a press conference announcing progress on the “Two New” policies, including plans to establish China Resources Recycling Group. Officials revealed that 59% of bulk solid waste nationwide is now recycled, with significant annual growth in the reuse of scrap steel, non-ferrous metals, and eight other major recyclables. Scrap steel alone now reaches 260 million tons annually.
The emergence of state-backed “recycling giants” has made headlines. On October 18, China Resources Circular Group officially launched in Tianjin, tasked with building a national platform for resource recovery and reuse.
The concept of a circular economy first emerged in the 1960s United States, while the term gained traction in China by the mid-1990s. This article examines global models of circular economies—could these pioneers offer insights for China’s path forward?
Circular Economy Models in the United States
The U.S. was one of the earliest pioneers in circular economy practices. As far back as the 1970s, it began promoting circular economy concepts and implementing energy policies focused on resource cycling.
In 1976, the U.S. enacted the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). Since the mid-1980s, states like Oregon, New Jersey, and Rhode Island introduced laws to promote resource recycling. Today, over half of all U.S. states have adopted some form of recycling legislation. Since 1997, November 15 has been designated “America Recycles Day.” After decades of development, the circular economy has become an indispensable part of the U.S. economy, spanning industries from traditional sectors (paper, steel, plastics, rubber) to emerging fields (electronics, computers, office equipment, and home goods).
The U.S., known for its strong environmentalism, emphasizes not just waste processing but also circular consumption—a concept where consumers consider whether a used item still holds value for others before discarding it. Only when an item is truly worthless is it recycled. This extends a product’s lifecycle across multiple users.
Thanks to widespread awareness and social mechanisms, circular consumption has become a key part of American life, delivering economic and social benefits comparable to traditional recycling. Common practices include:
- Yard sales (community-based secondhand markets)
- Thrift stores (charity or for-profit resale shops)
- Online resale platforms (e.g., eBay, Craigslist, government-supported marketplaces)
In June 2019, Boston launched the U.S.’s first city-scale zero-waste plan, aiming to: Increase recycling rates from 25% to 80% by 2035 (and beyond by 2050). Focus on waste reduction, reuse, composting, and recycling innovation Implement 30 actionable strategies with clear timelines, data tracking, and funding mechanisms
The plan aligns with the Zero Waste International Alliance (ZWIA) definition:
“Zero Waste means designing and managing products and processes to responsibly conserve and recover all resources—without burning, dumping, or polluting land, water, or air.”
Boston employs multiple policy tools to cut greenhouse gas emissions, including:
- Regulatory measures (mandatory recycling, landfill bans)
- Economic incentives (tax breaks for sustainable businesses)
- Voluntary programs (public awareness campaigns, corporate partnerships)
Germany’s Dual System (DSD) Model for Recycling
Germany’s circular economy evolved from the reuse and disposal of household and industrial waste, initially termed “waste economy.”
In 1972, Germany enacted its first waste management law—the Waste Disposal Act—which established that private enterprises could handle non-hazardous waste disposal, marking the beginning of regulated and legal waste management. Over time, the law underwent revisions, influenced by technological advancements and EU waste management policies, eventually evolving into the Circular Economy and Waste Management Act (1994, effective 1996). This law:
- Defines waste categories: “recoverable waste” and “waste requiring proper disposal”
- Classifies waste management into three tiers: strictly regulated, regulated, and unregulated
- Shifts focus from disposal to recycling, aligning with sustainable development goals
Germany’s Dual System (DSD) for packaging waste collection and treatment is a typical model of circular economy practice and operation.
The German Dual System (DSD) company was initiated by 95 retail, consumer goods and labeling production companies with support from the Federation of German Industries (BDI) and the German Association of Chambers of Commerce and Industry (DIHT). It accepts commissions from enterprises to organize recyclers to sort waste, which is then sent to corresponding resource recycling manufacturers for reuse. Packaging that can be directly recycled is returned to manufacturers. Currently, 16,000 companies have joined the DSD system. Since 1991, Germany has classified packaging materials and marked recyclable packaging with a green dot symbol. Products bearing this mark indicate their packaging is recyclable, requiring consumers to place them in designated packaging waste bins for processing by DSD’s recycling companies. The government only sets recycling targets, while all other operations follow market mechanisms.
The DSD system is a non-profit organization funded entirely by registration fees charged to manufacturers for granting the “Green Dot” mark, with all fees used for packaging waste management. Packaging without the Green Dot mark is handled by retailers for recycling.
Although Germany adopts a multi-level governance model for domestic waste management, from federal to local governments, waste management and circular economy issues are uniformly coordinated by environmental authorities. Horizontal communication mechanisms are established across different levels to ensure governance approaches at all government levels comply with national laws and policy frameworks. This not only facilitates effective systematic management of waste and recycled resources but also promotes communication and experience sharing among governments, contributing to common goals within the broader framework.
After the 2016 Berlin city council election, the newly formed coalition government pledged in its phased policy agenda “Berlin Coalition Agreement 2016-2021″ (Berliner Koalitionsvertrag) to gradually revise the city’s waste management regulations based on zero-waste principles and promote circular economy practices to achieve a zero-waste city.
The new agenda also emphasized increasing repair and resale rates for electrical appliances and furniture, while requiring the semi-public Berlin municipal cleaning company to expand its responsibilities beyond waste removal and collection to include recycling of recoverable materials. This adjustment enables the company to further advance source management of waste.
The Dutch Model: Central Guidance with Local Implementation
The Netherlands recognized the importance of a sustainable economy early on and became one of the first European countries to implement waste sorting. Latest data show the country now achieves an 80% waste recycling rate, ranking among the world leaders. Moreover, the Netherlands is progressively reducing virgin material use, targeting a full circular economy transition by 2050. Unlike neighboring Germany, the Netherlands integrates municipal, industrial, and hazardous waste management under a single national law, with detailed regulations outlined in the National Waste Management Plan. This framework strictly enforces the EU’s waste hierarchy across all public and private sectors. Notably, the 12 provincial governments lack authority to amend regulations and have no dedicated departments for waste or circular economy matters. Nevertheless, many provinces actively promote circular economy principles through policy proposals and knowledge-sharing platforms like the Interprovincial Consultative Body (IPO).
(To be continued)
Translated by DeepSeek and Youdao
Photo by Johnny Hsiao of JM，2024
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Sorry, AI won’t “fix” climate change
【能源与环境】 | Energy & Environment
By James Temple（MIT Technology Review），September 28. 2024
OpenAI’s Sam Altman claims AI will deliver an “Intelligence Age,” but tech breakthroughs alone can’t solve global warming.
In an essay last week, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, argued that the accelerating capabilities of AI will usher in an idyllic “Intelligence Age,” unleashing “unimaginable” prosperity and “astounding triumphs” like “fixing the climate.”
It’s a promise that no one is in a position to make—and one that, when it comes to the topic of climate change, fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the problem.
More maddening, the argument suggests that the technology’s massive consumption of electricity today doesn’t much matter, since it will allow us to generate abundant clean power in the future. That casually waves away growing concerns about a technology that’s already accelerating proposals for natural-gas plants and diverting major tech companies from their corporate climate targets.
By all accounts, AI’s energy demands will only continue to increase, even as the world scrambles to build larger, cleaner power systems to meet the increasing needs of EV charging, green hydrogen production, heat pumps, and other low-carbon technologies. Altman himself reportedly just met with White House officials to make the case for building absolutely massive AI data centers, which could require the equivalent of five dedicated nuclear reactors to run.
It’s a bedrock perspective of MIT Technology Review that technological advances can deliver real benefits and accelerate societal progress in meaningful ways. But for decades researchers and companies have oversold the potential of AI to deliver blockbuster medicines, achieve super intelligence, and free humanity from the need to work. To be fair, there have been significant advances, but nothing on the order of what’s been hyped.
Given that track record, I’d argue you need to develop a tool that does more than plagiarize journalism and help students cheat on homework before you can credibly assert that it will solve humanity’s thorniest problems, whether the target is rampant poverty or global warming.
To be sure, AI may help the world address the rising dangers of climate change. We have begun to see research groups and startups harness the technology to try to manage power grids more effectively, put out wildfires faster, and discover materials that could create cheaper, better batteries or solar panels.
All those advances are still relatively incremental. But let’s say AI does bring about an energy miracle. Perhaps its pattern-recognition prowess will deliver the key insight that finally cracks fusion—a technology that Altman is betting on heavily as an investor.
That would be fantastic. But technological advances are just the start—necessary but far from sufficient to eliminate the world’s climate emissions.
How do I know?
Because between nuclear fission plants, solar farms, wind turbines, and batteries, we already have every technology we need to clean up the power sector. This should be the low-hanging fruit of the energy transition. Yet in the largest economy on Earth, fossil fuels still generate 60% of the electricity. The fact that so much of our power still comes from coal, petroleum, and natural gas is a regulatory failure as much as a technological one.
“As long as we effectively subsidize fossil fuels by allowing them to use the atmosphere as a waste dump, we are not allowing clean energy to compete on a level playing field,” Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the independent research organization Berkeley Earth, wrote on X in a response to Altman’s post. “We need policy changes, not just tech breakthroughs, to meet our climate goals.”
That’s not to say there aren’t big technical problems we still need to solve. Just look at the continuing struggles to develop clean, cost-competitive ways of fertilizing crops or flying planes. But the fundamental challenges of climate change are sunk costs, development obstacles, and inertia.
We’ve built and paid for a global economy that spews out planet-warming gases, investing trillions of dollars in power plants, steel mills, factories, jets, boilers, water heaters, stoves, and SUVs that run on fossil fuels. And few people or companies will happily write off those investments so long as those products and plants still work. AI can’t remedy all that just by generating better ideas.
To raze and replace the machinery of every industry around the world at the speed now required, we will need increasingly aggressive climate policies that incentivize or force everyone to switch to cleaner plants, products, and practices.
But with every proposal for a stricter law or some big new wind or solar farm, forces will push back, because the plan will hit someone’s wallet, block someone’s views, or threaten the areas or traditions someone cherishes. Climate change is an infrastructure problem, and building infrastructure is a messy human endeavor.
Tech advances can ease some of these issues. Cheaper, better alternatives to legacy industries make hard choices more politically palatable. But there are no improvements to AI algorithms or underlying data sets that solve the challenge of NIMBYism, the conflict between human interests, or the desire to breathe the fresh air in an unsullied wilderness.
To assert that a single technology—that just happens to be the one your company develops—can miraculously untangle these intractable conflicts of human society is at best self-serving, if not a little naïve. And it’s a troubling idea to proclaim at a point when the growth of that very technology is threatening to undermine the meager progress the world has begun to make on climate change.
As it is, the one thing we can state confidently about generative AI is that it’s making the hardest problem we’ve ever had to solve that much harder to solve.
Reprinted from MIT Technology Review
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AI ask, I answer | Energy management
By Jas, Jointing.Media, 2024-10-06
Doubao: How does social interaction versus alone time affect our energy levels?
Chenya: During the daytime you spend more time communicating with others and dealing with things, it means you transfer your power and energy to others.It’s a way to consume your energy.
But if you stay by yourself and do what you want to do, it’s like charging your energy from those activities.
So, if you want to manage your energy, you should know where you can get the energy. And if you consume too much energy during the daytime, you will need more time to recover and regain the energy in your own way.
Doubao: I think it’s an insightful perspective. Recognizing how we expend and replenish our energy throughout the day is crucial for maintaining balance and welt-being. It’s important to find a balance between interacting with others and having alone time for self-care and recharging.
We do often give a lot of our energy when dealing with various tasks and people during the day. Making sure to consciously set aside time for activities that rejuvenate us is essential.
However, it can also be beneficial-to learn how to find moments of energy restoration even within our-busy social interactions and tasks.
what do you think about all this?
Chen Ya: I mean, regarding energy management, Qi and blood, in traditional Chinese medicine, are used to handle too many matters, and these matters will inevitably consume your energy. And this energy needs to be regenerated and returned to your body. Then you need to have your own way.
Some people might need to relax or do exercise.
Some people need to chat with friends.
Some people might solve this problem by having a meal,
While some people need to take a nap.
And some others might need time to be alone to restore their vitality and energy.
Everyone is like having a field when you interact with good fields and fields that are superior to yours, you might absorb some positive energy. But inevitably, you will encounter some negative energy.
At this time, you will expend energy to resist this interference.You could say it is equivalent to a kind of balance.
The more energy you have, the more and the better you can do. When the energy is relatively low, people appear more negative and depressed. When the energy is very, veiny low, that person gets sick. Therefore, maintaining a high energy state is a sign of good health.
Edited by Wind and Doubao
Photo by Sacima （2024）
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JM Review | There is no Education for a Country, Only for a Person
【观点】| Insight
By Jointing.Media, in Shanghai, 2023-09-30
The Harvard Drama School teacher in the story is a careful observer of his students and has extensive experience in teaching children with high IQs. The whole process of finding problems, gathering information, analysing information, making plans and solving problems also reflects the teacher’s good guidance in training new employees in the workplace. In it, JM saw what ‘teaching and learning’ is all about.
JM believes that there is no education suitable for China, education suitable for Japan or education suitable for the United States, only education suitable for people. Although the cultures of different countries are different, they all follow the law of “the purpose of education determines the creation of the educational environment”. If we want obedient people, we reward teachers and students who follow the rules. If we want creative people, we reward teachers and students who break the rules… The managers of the education industry are the creators of the micro-environment and the industry environment, and at the same time they are the products of the environment, like teachers and students.
Soil conditions for apple trees are PH 5-8, while peach trees need soil with PH 4.9-5.2. It can be seen that different pH levels of soil produce different fruits, and it can also be used to artificially change soil conditions to produce any fruit. Although fruit cannot choose the right soil, people can. The Chinese idiom “Meng mother moved three times” tells the story of Meng Ke’s mother who moved three times in ancient times to choose a good environment for her children’s education. The same is true today, when many parents travel the world with their children, using global educational resources to help them grow.
After Zhou Yijun, a well-known journalist, became a mother, her anxiety about her role as a mother prompted her to research the educational situation in different countries and make a documentary called Childhood in a Foreign Land. She concluded: “Education is how a country defines its citizens. Countries have different needs for their citizens and education is different in many ways”. But what if a nation needed slaves?
If a citizen does not approve of the education methods in his/her own country, he/she will choose to go elsewhere. However, most people can only be forced to adapt to the environment, but are powerless to change the environment. Nevertheless, individuals should avoid living in the cocoon of information, and should micro-innovate and micro-change their own environment, and expand more opportunities for their own lives and those of their children through self-education. The education of the person, after all, is to enable the person to become a free, self-defined person, not a person defined by the state.
Edited by Wind, Youdao and DeepL
Image :The Dolomites in Italy (2024 ) | SQM’s photograph
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A ‘liquid battery’ advance
【能源与环境】 | Energy & Environment
By John Tibbetts，Stanford Report，June 13th, 2024
A Stanford team aims to improve options for renewable energy storage through work on an emerging technology – liquids for hydrogen storage.
Getty Images / tommy
As California transitions rapidly to renewable fuels, it needs new technologies that can store power for the electric grid. Solar power drops at night and declines in winter. Wind power ebbs and flows. As a result, the state depends heavily on natural gas to smooth out highs and lows of renewable power.
“The electric grid uses energy at the same rate that you generate it, and if you’re not using it at that time, and you can’t store it, you must throw it away,” said Robert Waymouth, the Robert Eckles Swain Professor in Chemistry in the School of Humanities and Sciences.
Waymouth is leading a Stanford team to explore an emerging technology for renewable energy storage: liquid organic hydrogen carriers (LOHCs). Hydrogen is already used as fuel or a means for generating electricity, but containing and transporting it is tricky.
“We are developing a new strategy for selectively converting and long-term storing of electrical energy in liquid fuels,” said Waymouth, senior author of a study detailing this work in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. “We also discovered a novel, selective catalytic system for storing electrical energy in a liquid fuel without generating gaseous hydrogen.”
Liquid batteries
Batteries used to store electricity for the grid – plus smartphone and electric vehicle batteries – use lithium-ion technologies. Due to the scale of energy storage, researchers continue to search for systems that can supplement those technologies.
According to the California Energy Commission: “From 2018 to 2024, battery storage capacity in California increased from 500 megawatts to more than 10,300 MW, with an additional 3,800 MW planned to come online by the end of 2024. The state projects 52,000 MW of battery storage will be needed by 2045.”
Among the candidates are LOHCs, which can store and release hydrogen using catalysts and elevated temperatures. Someday, LOHCs could widely function as “liquid batteries,” storing energy and efficiently returning it as usable fuel or electricity when needed.
The Waymouth team studies isopropanol and acetone as ingredients in hydrogen energy storage and release systems. Isopropanol – or rubbing alcohol – is a high-density liquid form of hydrogen that could be stored or transported through existing infrastructure until it’s time to use it as a fuel in a fuel cell or to release the hydrogen for use without emitting carbon dioxide.
Yet methods to produce isopropanol with electricity are inefficient. Two protons from water and two electrons can be converted into hydrogen gas, then a catalyst can produce isopropanol from this hydrogen. “But you don’t want hydrogen gas in this process,” said Waymouth. “Its energy density per unit volume is low. We need a way to make isopropanol directly from protons and electrons without producing hydrogen gas.”
Daniel Marron, lead author of this study who recently completed his Stanford PhD in chemistry, identified how to address this issue. He developed a catalyst system to combine two protons and two electrons with acetone to generate the LOHC isopropanol selectively, without generating hydrogen gas. He did this using iridium as the catalyst.
A key surprise was that cobaltocene was the magic additive. Cobaltocene, a chemical compound of cobalt, a non-precious metal, has long been used as a simple reducing agent and is relatively inexpensive. The researchers found that cobaltocene is unusually efficient when used as a co-catalyst in this reaction, directly delivering protons and electrons to the iridium catalyst rather than liberating hydrogen gas, as was previously expected.
A fundamental future
Cobalt is already a common material in batteries and in high demand, so the Stanford team is hoping their new understanding of cobaltocene’s properties could help scientists develop other catalysts for this process. For example, the researchers are exploring more abundant, non-precious earth metal catalysts, such as iron, to make future LOHC systems more affordable and scalable.
Related story
“This is basic fundamental science, but we think we have a new strategy for more selectively storing electrical energy in liquid fuels,” said Waymouth.
As this work evolves, the hope is that LOHC systems could improve energy storage for industry and energy sectors or for individual solar or wind farms.
And for all the complicated and challenging work behind the scenes, the process, as summarized by Waymouth, is actually quite elegant: “When you have excess energy, and there’s no demand for it on the grid, you store it as isopropanol. When you need the energy, you can return it as electricity.”
For more information
Additional Stanford co-authors are Conor Galvin, PhD ’23, and PhD student Julia Dressel. Waymouth is also a member of Stanford Bio-X and the Stanford Cancer Institute, a faculty fellow of Sarafan ChEM-H, and an affiliate of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.
This work was funded by the National Science Foundation.
Reprinted from Stanford Report
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ESG Does Not Measure a Firm’s Social Impact
【企业社会责任与可持续发展】| CSR & Sustainability
By R. David McLean，March 22, 2024
Advocates of investing based on environmental, social, and governance factors, or ESG, promised that it would transform how business performance is measured, to society’s benefit. Yet, far from being revolutionary, ESG is just the most recent manifestation of an old fallacy—that businesses create wealth for their owners but little else of value for society.
When a business makes a profit, its trading partners or stakeholders, including customers, employees, and suppliers, also gain. Yet these gains are ignored by ESG and other rating schemes that claim to measure the firm’s impact on society.
A business’ stakeholders freely choose whether to trade with it or not. A customer buys a product if the product’s value to the customer exceeds the product’s price. An employee works for a firm because what the employee receives in exchange exceeds what any other available job would offer. A supplier agrees to sell the firm its goods or services if the selling price creates a profit for the supplier. All these stakeholder gains reflect profit-making businesses making positive contributions to society.
A recent National Bureau of Economic Research paper considers all this and estimates a firm’s social impact by measuring the benefits accruing to its shareholders and various stakeholders. It also accounts for negative externalities—harmful side effects a business may produce—including CO2 emissions.
Which of the firms included in the study had the largest positive social impact? Walmart.
Yes, Walmart scored highest because it is large, so its business impacts many people. It sells products at low prices primarily to lower-income consumers, who reported that they would find it difficult to buy the same products at higher prices.
Yet Walmart has only an average ESG rating, according to Sustainalytics, a major ESG rating firm. The study found this discordance was common, concluding, “Existing ESG and social impact ratings are essentially unrelated to our economically grounded measures.”
What do ESG scores measure? ESG is a subjective rating scheme. It reflects the beliefs of the persons who issue the ratings. ESG was created by United Nations (UN) bureaucrats working in concert with executives from the finance industry. Its purpose is to use corporate assets to promote ideological causes that progressives favor.
In practice, ESG has proven to be incoherent. A 2022 study by MIT researchers examined six different ESG scores from six rating firms and found that their methodologies varied greatly. For example, one rating firm used 282 inputs, whereas another used only 38. The study also reports that the six ESG ratings are not highly correlated. As one of the study’s authors put it, “the six never all agreed on a company’s ESG rating, and in most cases there was little agreement among them.”
Before ESG came on the scene, the same global institutions now at the forefront of promoting it, including the UN, World Bank, and World Economic Forum, were busy promoting another economic fallacy—that the world had too many people and was rapidly running out of natural resources. They argued that limiting population growth was the only way to reduce poverty and avoid societal collapse.
The population fallacy was responsible for China’s infamous one-child policy, which led to millions of forced abortions and sterilizations. It also resulted in millions of forced sterilizations in India, financed by lending from the World Bank and the United Nations Population Fund.
And for what? The human toll aside, macroeconomic data clearly show population control’s ineffectiveness as a means of poverty reduction.
India and China have more people and greater prosperity today than in the 1970s, when population control efforts were at their peak. More generally, in 1970, 45 percent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty, whereas today it is only 8 percent. Yet the world’s population more than doubled during this same period.
What caused the reduction in poverty? It was primarily market reforms in China and India that limited the government’s role in the economy and encouraged more market activity. Profit-seeking businesses then created wealth, goods, services, and jobs, just as they do in the United States and Western Europe.
We can see such effects across countries as well: rich countries have an abundance of profit-seeking firms, while poor countries do not.
ESG and other subjective rating schemes do not reflect how business improves the state of humanity. What ESG does is divert corporate resources from profit-seeking, which benefits all of society, toward ideological causes that progressives and some global institutions favor.
China and India did not pull millions out of poverty by embracing ESG, stakeholder capitalism, or any of the other monikers popular in today’s business lingo, but by freeing their people’s entrepreneurial spirits. What better evidence is there that profit-seeking firms benefit all of humanity?
David McLean is the William G. Droms Professor of Finance and Finance Area Chair at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. His research interests are in stock return predictability, behavioral finance, and the interplay between financial markets and corporate investment. David’s papers have been published in leading finance journals, such as the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, and Review of Financial Studies. His research has won several awards, including the Amundi Smith Breeden Award for the best paper in the Journal of Finance and the Jensen Prize for the best paper in the Journal of Financial Economics. Major media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times, and the Economist have covered his research. David serves on the editorial boards of several academic journals, including Management Science and the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. He is the author of the book The Case for Shareholder Capitalism: How the Pursuit of Profit Benefits All.
Reprinted from Real Clear Policy
Edited by Wind
Image : The Udaipur in India (2024 ) | SQM’s photograph
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‘Sustainability’ Is the Most Misleading of the New Business Buzzwords
‘Sustainability’ Is the Most Misleading of the New Business Buzzwords
【企业社会责任与可持续发展】| CSR & Sustainability
By R. David McLean，Cato Institute，May 14, 2024
Earlier this year Hertz announced it was selling 20,000 of the electric vehicles in its fleet and would buy gas-powered vehicles instead.
The reason? Electric vehicles are too expensive to maintain, and more customers prefer gas-powered cars.
Hertz is taking a $245 million loss on the sale. The company’s CEO, who increased electric vehicles’ share of its fleet, resigned.
After all that, is Hertz a more, or less, sustainable company?
One study estimates that a single electric vehicle receives over $48,000 in subsidies over a 10-year lifetime. The tax credits and rebates that most people are familiar with add up to nearly $9,000. Is it fair to describe a product as sustainable if it needs to be subsidized this much?
Oil companies are supposedly unsustainable. Yet 11 of the world’s top 25 most profitable companies, such as Exxon, Shell, and Chevron, are fossil fuel companies. None of them need subsidies to survive.
In contrast, Siemens Energy, one of the world’s largest wind turbine manufacturers, lost $4.5 billion in 2023. The German government recently gave it a rescue package worth $16 billion in U.S. dollars. Which is a more sustainable business, Siemens or the fossil fuel companies?
Calling something sustainable does not make it so. Firms that cannot make consistent profits will either have to be subsidized or die. It does not matter if they make solar panels or pump oil.
Investing in companies that make windmills, solar panels, and electric vehicles in the absence of profits is a bet that governments will continue subsidizing them. Calling that “sustainable investing” misrepresents reality.
Continuing to subsidize such businesses will be very expensive. The $16 billion Siemens got from the German government is small potatoes.
The European Round Table for Industry recently stated that it will cost Europeans $853 billion USD by 2030 and $2.66 trillion by 2050 to meet the goal of net zero C02 emissions by 2050. That money could instead be invested in schools, hospitals, roads, new technologies, cures for diseases, and many other things that can benefit humanity today and in the foreseeable future. Yet, the sustainability moniker doesn’t delve into those issues.
That’s because the sustainability moniker’s use in the business world has nothing to do with the actual meaning of the word. Rather, it originated among progressives working at the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, and in the finance industry to promote progressive agendas that most people do not favor.
The Oxford Languages dictionary defines sustainable as “able to be maintained at a certain rate or level.” Some fund managers such as BlackRock define sustainable investing as investing in so-called ESG funds—those promoting “environmental, social, and governance” goals.
But ESG is not in the definition of sustainable. Rather, it is a subjective rating scheme promoting environmental and social causes that progressives favor. We can debate the merits of those causes, but an honest debate requires not placing misleading labels on them.
David McLean is the William G. Droms Professor of Finance and Finance Area Chair at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. His research interests are in stock return predictability, behavioral finance, and the interplay between financial markets and corporate investment. David’s papers have been published in leading finance journals, such as the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, and Review of Financial Studies. His research has won several awards, including the Amundi Smith Breeden Award for the best paper in the Journal of Finance and the Jensen Prize for the best paper in the Journal of Financial Economics. Major media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times, and the Economist have covered his research. David serves on the editorial boards of several academic journals, including Management Science and the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. He is the author of the book The Case for Shareholder Capitalism: How the Pursuit of Profit Benefits All.
Reprinted from Cato Institute
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This chart shows why heat pumps are still hot in the US
【能源与环境】 | Energy & Environment
By Casey Crownhart, MIT Technology Review，2024-02-12
Sales slowed in 2023, but heat pumps are gaining ground on fossil fuels.
STEPHANIE ARNETT/MITTR | ENVATO
Heat pumps are still a hot technology, though sales in the US, one of the world’s largest markets, fell in 2023. Even with the drop, the appliances beat out gas furnaces for the second year in a row and saw their overall market share increase compared to furnaces, sales of which also fell last year.
Heat pumps heat and cool spaces using electricity, and they could be a major tool in the effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions. (About 10% of global emissions are generated from heating buildings.) Many homes and other buildings around the world use fossil fuels for heating in systems like gas furnaces—heat pumps are generally more efficient, and crucially, can be powered using renewable electricity. Experts say heat pump sales will need to grow quickly in order to keep buildings safe and comfortable while meeting climate goals.
Heat pumps have been around for decades, but the technology has been experiencing a clear moment in the sun in recent years, with global sales increasing by double digits in both 2021 and 2022, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). Heat pumps were featured on MIT Technology Review’s 2024 list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies.
Sales fell by nearly 17% in 2023 in the US, one of the technology’s largest markets, according to new data from the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute. The slowdown comes after nearly a decade of constant growth. The AHRI data isn’t comprehensive, but the organization includes manufacturers accounting for about 90% of the units sold in the US annually.
Annual US heat pump and gas furnace sales
However, the decline likely says less about heat pumps than it does about the whole HVAC sector, since gas furnaces and air conditioners saw even steeper drops. Gas furnace sales declined even more than heat pumps did in 2023, so heat pumps actually made up a slightly larger percentage of sales this year than in 2022.
The broad slowdown reflects broader consumer pessimism amid higher interest rates and inflation, says Yannick Monschauer, an analyst at the IEA, via email.
“We have also been observing slowing heat pump sales in other parts of the world for 2023,” Monschauer adds. In Europe, a rush to electrify, driven by the energy crisis and rising natural gas prices, has slowed.
New incentives programs could help speed progress in 2024 and beyond. The Inflation Reduction Act, a sweeping climate bill passed in 2022, includes individual tax credits for up to $2,000 towards a new heat pump, which went into effect at the beginning of 2023.
However, the more generous incentives in that law have yet to take effect, says Wael Kanj, a research associate at Rewiring America, a nonprofit group focused on electrification in the US.
New rebates set aside funding of up to $8,000 towards a new heat pump system for low- and middle-income households. Distributing the rebates is up to individual states, and analysts anticipate those programs getting up and running in late 2024, or early 2025, Kanj says.
Heat pumps are a crucial component of plans to combat climate change. In a scenario where the world reaches net-zero emissions by 2050, heat pumps need to account for 20% of global heating capacity by the end of this decade, according to an IEA analysis.
“The next five, ten, 15 years are really going to be important,” Kanj says. “We definitely need to pick up the pace.”
Reprinted from MIT Technology Review .
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JM Review | No Innovation Environment Here
【观点】| Insight
By Jointing.Media, in Shanghai, 2023-12-30
According to the National Bureau of Statistics, the unemployment rate for young people (aged 16-24) was 21.3% in June this year, the highest since the start of the graduation season in January 2018.
According to statistics recently released by the Ministry of Education, the number of applicants for the 2024 postgraduate entrance exams fell sharply for the first time in a decade, to 4.38 million.
As of 24 October, more than 2.91 million people had registered for the 2024 national exam, a new record high, according to statistics provided by Zhonggong Education. The average competition ratio is 66:1. Judging by the registration situation for the National Examination in the past three years, the fever has not abated: the number of applicants for the National Examination in 2021 is more than 1.5 million, the number of applicants for the National Examination in 2022 is more than 2.02 million, and the number of applicants for the National Examination in 2023 is more than 2.5 million.
11 December 2023 will be the 112th anniversary of Qian Xuesen’s birth. Thirteen years ago, Qian Lao said that after returning to China after so many years, he felt that there was no such school (like Caltech) in China, and there was no university in China that could run a school according to the mode of training scientific and technological invention and creation talents. The words are still ringing in my ears. The environment is an important educational resource. The university environment is influenced by the social environment, whether our social environment is free and relaxed, suitable for innovation, whether there are channels to express different opinions, and whether those who dare to challenge authority are not suppressed…
The German philosopher Jaspers believed that the process of education is first a process of spiritual growth and then it becomes part of the process of scientific knowledge. The school should create an intellectual and spiritual foundation for a person. The purpose of the school is to translate the spiritual content of mankind in history into the dynamic spirit of today, and through this spirit to lead all students to acquire knowledge and technology. Today, in universities and colleges, the endless recruitment of students, the multiplication of so-called necessary lectures and exercises, the stuffing of students’ minds with such things as “instruments” under forms, while the repeated loss of the “way” of true existence, undoubtedly blocks the passage of the student to the spirit of freedom. The unsystematic specialisation and knowledge, the teaching of examination skills, etc., all weaken the original spiritual life, weaken the student’s ability to reflect, as well as the independent personality and the habit of repeatedly thinking about a problem.
China’s higher education reform started in 1978. In the comprehensive reform period from 2010 to now, the theme is comprehensive quality improvement, and the main measures include promoting innovation and entrepreneurship education, transforming and developing local undergraduate colleges and universities, and implementing “double first-class” construction. More than ten years later, what is the state of our university’s environment? Is it developing in the direction expected by Qian Lao?
Edited by Wind, Youdao and DeepL
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![[Recruiting 2011] Jointing.Media](http://jointings.org/eng/wp-content/themes/news-magazine-theme-640/cropper.php?src=/cn/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/123.png&h=50&w=50&zc=1&q=95)
