Month: May 2019

Enlarge / Four Blackmore lidar units sit atop a demo vehicle in Washington DC. (credit: Timothy B. Lee)

Fresh from a $530 million fundraising round earlier this year, self-driving startup Aurora made a big bet on lidar last week. The company—founded by veterans of Tesla and of Google's self-driving car projects—scooped up a Montana-based lidar startup called Blackmore.

Lidar sensors have a lot in common with fiber-optic communications gear. Both work by sending out information encoded in light, then recapturing it and interpreting the information it contains.

Blackmore's leaders have deep ties to the optical telecom industry, and the company aims to pack more and more components of its lidar sensors into photonic integrated circuits that have been pioneered in the optical telecom sector. These circuits are expensive to design but affordable to manufacture at scale. Earlier this year, Blackmore's most powerful lidar sensors cost as much as $20,000. But by the time Aurora is ready to start selling its self-driving stack to automakers, Blackmore lidar is slated to cost a fraction of that price.

Enlarge / A view of the decommissioned Duke Energy Crystal River Nuclear Power Plant. (credit: Jeffrey Greenberg/UIG via Getty Images)

A report released today by the International Energy Agency (IEA) warns world leaders that—without support for new nuclear power or lifetime extensions for existing nuclear power plants—the world's climate goals are at risk.

"The lack of further lifetime extensions of existing nuclear plants and new projects could result in an additional four billion tonnes of CO₂ emissions," a press release from the IEA noted.

The report is the IEA's first report on nuclear power in two decades, and it paints a picture of low-carbon power being lost through attrition (due to the retirement of aging plants) or due to economics (extremely cheap natural gas as well as wind and solar undercutting more expensive nuclear power for years in some regions).

Enlarge / House Republicans hold a press conference opposing part of the Waxman-Markey Bill with the help of a chart representing... something. (credit: Talk Radio News Service/flickr)

Lobbying is ostensibly a way to inform politicians about issues affecting their constituents. But it has also become an industry of its own as those with a financial interest in legislation vie to sway decisions in their favor. Windows into the lobbying world are limited in the US, but required public reporting can at least enable a postmortem of the actions associated with major bills.

In the first two years of the Obama administration, healthcare legislation was not the only weighty proposal rattling around in Congress. The Waxman-Markey Bill very nearly led to a national cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gas emissions. It would have established a continually shrinking cap on national emissions, with tradable permits required for significant emitters. It was supposed to have bipartisan appeal, featuring a market-based mechanism rather than a simple tax or mandate. But while it passed the House of Representatives, it never achieved the filibuster-proof support in the Senate necessary to see a vote on the floor.

University of California, Santa Barbara, researcher Kyle Meng and the University of Chicago’s Ashwin Rode set out to investigate the role of lobbying in that failure. What makes this so difficult is the fact that public records of who spent how much on lobbying don’t tell you whether they lobbied for or against the bill.

Enlarge / US President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump pose for a photograph with US military personnel aboard the USS Wasp aircraft carrier at the US naval base in Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan, on Tuesday, May 28, 2019. Trump told troops stationed in Japan he plans to order traditional steam-powered catapults aboard American warships instead of newer electromagnetic systems that he said may not work as well during wartime. (credit: Bloomberg/Getty Images)

During his Memorial Day visit to the USS Wasp (LHD-1) at anchor at Yokosuka, Japan, President Donald Trump made comments indicating that he is ordering changes to the aircraft catapult system of the USS Gerald R. Ford and the remaining ships of its class.

Trump has long derided the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS), an all-electric aircraft catapult designed for the Ford, as too complicated and too expensive. After polling the preference of assembled Marines and sailors, he declared he was ordering the Navy to switch to steam.

PRESIDENT TRUMP: So then, let me ask you a question. Catapult—right? The catapult system. Do you like electric or steam?

AUDIENCE MEMBERS: Steam!

AUDIENCE MEMBERS: Electric!

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Steam. Who said "electric"? There's one guy back there. (Laughter.) OK, I really need this information because, you know, we're building carriers. We're building one. They're using an electric catapult and an electric elevator. Number one, I can't imagine, in the case of battle—it must be very delicate, OK? And, you know, steam has only worked for about 65 years, perfectly. And I won't tell you this because it's before my time by a little bit, but they have a $900 million cost overrun on this crazy electric catapult. I said, "What was wrong with steam?" I would like to know—all of the folks that know exactly what I'm talking about, the catapult system—steam or electric? Ready? Steam. (Applause.) Electric.

AUDIENCE MEMBERS: Yeah! (Laughter.)

PRESIDENT TRUMP: He works for the enemy.

Then Trump declared, "No, we want to go with steam." He complained that "They're always coming up with new ideas... they're making planes so complex you can't fly them. They want to show next, next, next... and we all want innovation, but it's too much. But there's never been anything like the steam catapults."

Trump said that he had visited the Ford, which is still being outfitted—and has had problems during EMALS' initial testing.