#66 (TECH) “Bitcoin’s climate damage similar to beef and crude oil” — EV charging stations. Robotaxis.Firms to pay $1.8B in fines.
- First up – The U.S. Transportation Department (USDOT) signed off on plans for electric vehicle charging stations across all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.
- Our second story – Lyft and Argo AI have debuted autonomous robotaxi rides for the public in Austin, Texas.
- Our third story – More than a dozen U.S. financial firms agreed to pay $1.8B in fines to settle charges over improper use of personal phones and messaging applications.
- And for Our fourth and final story – A new study finds that Bitcoin’s climate damage is similar to beef and crude oil.
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What is going on everyone? I’m your host Kevin Muñoz. This is the LEO podcast tech episode, where we discuss all things tech.
For today’s tech episode. I have 4 juicy stories for you!
First up – Electric vehicles are definitely here to stay. The U.S. Department of Transportation just signed off on plans for electric vehicle charging stations across all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. This is a clear sign that the government is behind the electric vehicle movement and is committed to helping it grow.
Our second story – Could self-driving taxis be the new wave? Lyft and Argo AI have debuted autonomous robotaxi rides for the public in Austin, Texas. The taxis are picking up and dropping off passengers at designated locations in the city. While this is just a pilot program for now, it’s possible that self-driving taxis could eventually become a common way to get around.
Our third story – More than a dozen U.S. financial firms agreed to pay $1.8B in fines to settle charges over improper use of personal phones and messaging applications. The firms allegedly used the applications to share confidential information with each other, in violation of securities laws.
For our fourth and final story – A study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, found that Bitcoin’s emissions are comparable to those of beef and oil when it comes to their climate impact.
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Article 1: The U.S. Transportation Department (USDOT) signed off on plans for electric vehicle charging stations across all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.
The U.S. Transportation Department recently gave the green light for plans to put electric vehicle charging stations throughout all 50 states, Washington D.C., and Puerto Rico meaning it would be covering roughly seventy-five thousand miles of highways.
You might recall that earlier in the year the Biden administration allocated $5 billion to states to fund EV charges over five years along interstate highways as part of the bipartisan infrastructure package.
Well under that plan states provided their EV infrastructure deployment proposals to the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation and now states are approved to construct a network of EV charging stations along designated alternative fuel corridors on the national highways system and even have access to more than $1.5 billion to help build the charges.
Big money is going into putting out more electric vehicles on the road and replacing gas-powered cars. It is clear that this is a big priority for the Biden administration as The White House has put about $135 Billion towards the development and creation of electric vehicles and is even aiming to build a national network of five hundred thousand EV charging stations by 2030. They’re even sweetening the deal more by providing incentives to consumers like tax credits as seen in the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act.
Even though there’s been a rise in EV sales in recent years, the transportation sector is still the nation’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. The U.S. is even the world’s third largest market for EVs behind China and Europe, but One of the major barriers to EV expansion across the country is the lack of convenient charging stations.
The administration has been trying to expand EV sales by communicating to Americans that EVs are more affordable than gas-powered cars and have set a goal of 50% electric vehicle sales by 2030, which will help its bigger commitment to curb emissions in half by 2030 and reach net-zero emissions by 2050. The administration has also committed to replacing its federal fleet of six hundred thousand cars and trucks to electric power by 2035.
Article 2: Lyft and Argo AI have debuted autonomous robotaxi rides for the public in Austin, Texas.
Sticking to the topic of vehicles for our second story Lyft has started offering autonomous robotaxi rides, with two safety drivers on board and if you’re from Austin Texas you might have already experienced this or have seen these vehicles around the city.
The autonomous drives will be powered by Argo AI’s technology in Ford vehicles.
You can order one of these autonomous rides using the Lyft app and apparently the prices for the rides will also be the same as normal Lyft rides.
Once the car arrives you can use the Lyft app to unlock the doors and start your ride. Although For now, you’ll have to share the rides with two safety operators until they can offer fully autonomous rides in the future.
Interestingly enough Austin is actually the third city that Lyft offers autonomous rides with Vegas and Miami being the first two. Lyft began giving rides in Miami in December 2021 which also used Argo AI technology on Ford vehicles, as part of a partnership between the three companies that was announced in July 2021.
However, this space is pretty competitive with companies like Cruise, GM’s self-driving unit, also announcing plans to begin giving driverless robotaxi rides in Austin and Pheonix before the end of the year.
Waymo is the other company to be on the lookout for when it comes to autonomous cars. Waymo is the self-driving business unit of Google’s parent company Alphabet. It began fully driverless rides to its employees in San Francisco in March 2022, and in August it began fully driverless rides in downtown phoenix to its trusted tester program members.
So hey before we know it maybe we’ll be seeing autonomous taxis all over the major cities.
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Article 3: More than a dozen U.S. financial firms agreed to pay $1.8B in fines to settle charges over improper use of personal phones and messaging applications.
For our third story, the U.S. securities regulators have imposed close to $2 billion in fines on more than a dozen financial firms, including eight major Wall Street banks, for failing to police employees who routinely used messaging apps and other “off-channel” services on their personal phones to communicate with one another.
Federal law requires these firms to monitor how employees communicate on work-related matters or keep records of those messages but after a months-long investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, it was found that they failed to do so.
The large banks that admitted the wrongdoing and decided to settle with the regulator include Bank of America, Barclays, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley. Each will pay $125 million to the S.E.C.
According to the S.E.C, the bank’s failure to stop employees from using text messages on personal phones to communicate could have an impact on investigations and monitoring of bank activities.
The regulators found that from 2018 to 2021, bank employees frequently used WhatsApp and other text messaging services to chat with one another and people outside the bank instead of using their work emails or other official forms of communication.
The S.E.C. said the firms had also agreed to bring on compliance consultants to review policies and procedures “relating to the retention of electronic communications found on personal devices.”
Article 4: A new study finds that Bitcoin’s climate damage is similar to beef and crude oil.
For our fourth and final story of the day, according to a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports, the environmental and social damage Bitcoin inflicts on the world is comparable to notoriously polluting industries like beef production and crude oil burned as gasoline.
Bitcoin is often compared to gold for its economic value and even environmental impact but this new study found that when it comes to climate damages Bitcoin is actually 8.75 times greater than gold.
The Bitcoin network is infamous for eating up as much electricity annually as a small nation with the vast majority of its energy used to verify transactions and mine new coins. The author of the study estimated the network’s overall electricity consumption and the planet-heating carbon dioxide emissions that it generates as a result. Then they applied estimates of the social cost of carbon to translate those CO3 emissions into dollar damages. With the social cost of carbon at $100 a ton, the researchers found that climate damages averaged three thousand and eighty-eight dollars for each coin that was mined. Between 2016 and 2021, the researchers estimate that Bitcoin’s total climate damages globally reached $12 billion.
Now it is important to note that there is a caveat, this being that there’s a lot of debate over how much the per ton social cost of carbon should actually be. Using $100 a ton as their baseline, the researchers took a middle-of-the-road sort of approach. The US government, for instance, places their social cost of carbon at $51 per ton when crafting regulations for pollution but this is a figure that many experts consider to be too low. Research published in the journal Nature earlier in the month put the cost at $185 per ton.
So everyone has their own read on what the cost of carbon should be but regardless, the researchers point out that Bitcoin’s climate damages grew over time, whether using low or high-end estimates for the social cost of carbon. And their findings come on the heels of other efforts to quantify how much harm mining Bitcoin does to the planet.
According to a report from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Energy hungry cryptocurrencies are responsible for about as much planet heating pollution annually as the diesel fuel used on the nation’s railroads. Another September report from environmental groups Earthjustice and Sierra Club came to a similar conclusion that crypto mining pumped out about 27.4 million tons of CO2 in a year, which was three times as much as the pollution from the US’s largest coal plant in 2021.
With pressure building to clean up the crypto industry, Bitcoin is now an outlier when it comes to its environmental impact. Its closest rival, Ethereum, recently completed a major software update to drastically reduce its energy consumption in a highly anticipated event called The Merge which we covered on our last tech episode.
THE END
That’s all for today on the LEO podcast. I’m Kevin Muñoz and as always feel free to send me a message with your thoughts or with any interesting topic that you’d like to see covered.
and for those of you on Patreon, I’ll see you in the bonus episode.
Otherwise, I’ll see you all in next week’s episode!
Sources:
Article 1:
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/27/ev-charging-stations-on-highways-dot-approves-50-states-plans.html
Article 2:
https://www.therobotreport.com/lyft-argo-ai-begin-robotaxi-rides-in-austin/
Article 3:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/27/business/banks-fined-texting-sec.html
Article 4:
https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23378337/bitcoin-climate-change-damages-crypto-mining
