Greenwashing Scam

A Chevron drilling site near Midland, Texas. It’s unlikely PR firms will be able to serve the fossil-fuel industry as they have in the past. Photograph: Jessica Lutz/Reuters


This week a peer-reviewed study confirmed what many have suspected for years: major oil companies are not fully backing up their clean energy talk with action. Now the PR and advertising firms that have been creating the industry’s greenwashing strategies for decades face a reckoning over whether they will continue serving big oil.

The study compared the rhetoric and actions on climate and clean energy from 2009 to 2020 from the world’s four largest oil companies – ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP. Writing in the journal Plos One, researchers from Tohoku University and Kyoto University in Japan conclude that the companies are not, in fact, transitioning their business models to clean energy.

“The magnitude of investments and actions does not match discourse,” they write. “Until actions and investment behavior are brought into alignment with discourse, accusations of greenwashing appear well-founded.”

Although this isn’t the first time that oil companies have been accused of overstating their climate bona fides, it has never been set out quite so comprehensively, according to environmental sociologist Dr Robert Brulle at Brown University. “This is the first robust, empirical, peer-reviewed analysis of the activities–of the speech, business plans, and the actual investment patterns of the major oil companies regarding their support or opposition to the transition to a sustainable society,” he says.

Brulle says PR firms and advertising agencies that have created campaigns around the oil firms’ net-zero claims are now on notice. “There’s no plausible deniability that they are unaware of the activities of these companies after this paper has been published,” he says. “This paper clearly shows that these companies aren’t walking the talk.”  READ MORE...

The Mayans

A research team from students at Brown University and Brandeis University surveyed a small area in the Western Maya Lowlands. 

It sits on the border between Mexico and Guatemala where the Maya people were thought to have lived around 350 AD and 900 AD. It was previously believed that the Maya were people who engaged in “unchecked agricultural development”.

Andrew Scherer, an associate professor of anthropology, said that “The narrative goes – the population grew too large, the agriculture scaled up, and then everything fell apart.”

But now, the researchers found using a lidar survey — and, later from on the ground surveying, that there were extensive systems of sophisticated irrigation and terracing in and outside the region’s towns, but no huge population booms to match.

This showed that between 350 AD and 900 AD, some Maya kingdoms were living comfortably, with sustainable agricultural systems and no demonstrated food insecurity.

Mr Scherer said: “It’s exciting to talk about the really large populations that the Maya maintained in some places, to survive for so long with such density was a testament to their technological accomplishments.  READ MORE...

Strange Particles Called ANYONS

Researchers Show New Strategy for Detecting Non-Conformist Particles Called Anyons

By observing how strange particles called anyons dissipate heat, researchers have shown that they can probe the properties of these particles in systems that could be relevant for topological quantum computing.A team of Brown University researchers has shown a new method of probing the properties of anyons, strange quasiparticles that could be useful in future quantum computers.

In research published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the team describes a means of probing anyons by measuring subtle properties of the way in which they conduct heat. Whereas other methods probe these particles using electrical charge, this new method enables researchers to probe anyons even in non-conducting materials. That’s critical, the researchers say, because non-conducting systems have far less stringent temperature requirements, making them a more practical option for quantum computing.

“We have beautiful ways of probing anyons using charge, but the question has been how do you detect them in the insulating systems that would be useful in what’s known as topological quantum computing,” said Dima Feldman, a physics professor at Brown and study co-author. “We show that it can be done using heat conductance. Essentially, this is a universal test for anyons that works in any state of matter.”

Anyons are of interest because they don’t follow the same rules as particles in the everyday, three-dimensional world. In three dimensions, there are only two broad kinds of particles: bosons and fermions. Bosons follow what’s known as Bose-Einstein statistics, while fermions follow Fermi-Dirac statistics. 

Generally speaking, those different sets of statistical rules mean that if one boson orbits around another in a quantum system, the particle’s wave function — the equation that fully describes its quantum state — does not change. On the other hand, if a fermion orbits around another fermion, the phase value of its wave function flips from a positive integer to a negative integer. If it orbits again, the wave function returns to its original state.

Anyons, which emerge only in systems that are confined to two dimensions, don’t follow either rule. When one anyon orbits another, its wave function changes by some fraction of an integer. And another orbit does not necessarily restore the original value of the wave function. Instead, it has a new value — almost as if the particle maintains a “memory” of its interactions with the other particle even though it ended up back where it started.

That memory of past interactions can be used to encode information in a robust way, which is why the particles are interesting tools for quantum computing. Quantum computers promise to perform certain types of calculations that are virtually impossible for today’s computers. A quantum computer using anyons — known as a topological quantum computer — has the potential to operate without elaborate error correction, which is a major stumbling block in the quest for usable quantum computers.  TO READ MORE ABOUT ANYONS, CLICK HERE...