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Countries around the world have been discussing the need to rein in climate change for three decades, yet global greenhouse gas emissionsand global temperatures with themkeep rising. When it seems like were getting nowhere, its useful to step back and examine the progress that has been made. Lets take a look at the United States, historically the worlds largest greenhouse gas emitter. Over those three decades, the U.S. population soared by 28% and the economy, as measured by gross domestic product adjusted for inflation, more than doubled. Yet U.S. emissions from many of the activities that produce greenhouse gasestransportation, industry, agriculture, heating and cooling of buildingshave remained about the same over the past 30 years. Transportation is a bit up; industry a bit down. And electricity, once the nations largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, has seen its emissions drop significantly. Overall, the U.S. is still among the countries with the highest per capita emissions, so theres room for improvement, and its emissions havent fallen enough to put the country on track to meet its pledges under the 10-year-old Paris climate agreement. But U.S. emissions are down about 15% over the past 10 years. Heres how that happened. U.S. electricity emissions have fallen U.S. electricity use has been rising lately with the shift toward more electrification of cars, and heating and cooling and expansion of data centers, yet greenhouse gas emissions from electricity are down by almost 30% since 1995. One of the main reasons for this big drop is that Americans are using less coal and more natural gas to make electricity. Both coal and natural gas are fossil fuels. Both release carbon dioxide to the atmosphere when they are burned to make electricity, and that carbon dioxide traps heat, raising global temperatures. But power plants can make electricity more efficiently using natural gas compared with coal, so it produces less emissions per unit of power. Why did the U.S. start using more natural gas? Research and technological innovation in fracking and horizontal drilling have allowed companies to extract more oil and gas at a lower cost, making it cheaper to produce electricity from natural gas rather than coal. As a result, utilities have built more natural gas power plantsespecially super-efficient combined cycle gas power plants, which produce power from gas turbines and also capture waste heat from those turbines to generate more power. More coal plants have been shutting down or running less. Because natural gas is a more efficient fuel than coal, it has been a win for the climate in comparison, even though its a fossil fuel. The U.S. has reduced emissions from electricity as a result. Significant improvements in energy efficiency, from appliances to lighting, have also played a role. Even though tech gadgets seem to be recharging everywhere all the time today, household electricity use, per person, plateaued over the first two decades of the 2000s after rising continuously since the 1940s. Costs for renewable electricity, batteries fall U.S. renewable electricity generationincluding wind, solar, and hydro powerhas nearly tripled since 1995, helping to further reduce emissions from electricity generation. Costs for solar and wind power have fallen so much that they are now cheaper than coal and competitive with natural gas. Fourteen states, including most of the Great Plains, now get at least 30% of their power from solar, wind, and battery storage. While wind power has been cost-competitive with fossil fuels for at least 20 years, solar photovoltaic (PV) power has only been competitive with fossil fuels for about 10 years. So expect deployment of solar PV to continue to increase, both in the U.S. and internationally, evn as U.S. federal subsidies disappear. Both wind and solar provide intermittent power: The sun does not always shine, and the wind does not always blow. There are a number of ways utilities are dealing with this. One way is to use demand management, offering lower prices for power during off-peak periods or discounts for companies that can cut their power use during high demand. Virtual power plants aggregate several kinds of distributed energy resourcessolar panels on homes, batteries, and even smart thermostatsto manage power supply and demand. The U.S. had an estimated 37.5 gigawatts of virtual power plants in 2024, equivalent to about 37.5 nuclear power reactors. Another energy management method is battery storage, which is just now beginning to take off. Battery costs have come down enough in the past few years to make utility-scale battery storage cost-effective. What about driving? In the U.S., gasoline consumption has remained roughly constant, but fuel efficiency has generally improved over the decades. Sales of electric vehicles, which could cut emissions more, have been slow, however. Some of this could be due to the success of fracking: U.S. petroleum production has increased, and gasoline and diesel prices have remained relatively low. People in other countries are switching to electric vehicles more rapidly than in the U.S. as the cost of EVs has fallen. Chinese consumers can buy an entry-level EV for under US$10,000 in China with the help of government subsidies, and the country leads the world in EV sales. In 2024, people in the U.S. bought 1.6 million EVs, and global sales reached 17 million, up 25% from the year before. The unknowns ahead: What about data centers? The construction of new data centers, in part to serve the explosive growth of artificial intelligence, is drawing a lot of attention to future energy demand and to the uncertainty ahead. Data centers are increasing electricity demand in some locations, such as northern Virginia, Dallas, Phoenix, Chicago, and Atlanta. The future electricity demand growth from data centers is still unclear, though, meaning the effects of data centers on electric rates and power system emissions are also uncertain. However, AI is not the only reason to watch for increased electricity demand: The U.S. can expect growing electricity demand for industrial processes and electric vehicles, as well as for the overall transition from using oil and gas for heating and appliances to using electricity that continues across the country. Valerie Thomas is a professor of industrial engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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E-Commerce
The Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece titled Why Work-Life Balance Will Keep You Mediocre. Certainly a headline designed to draw ire from many readers, myself included. The author advocates ruthlessly optimizing your time, from missing important events with loved ones to declining social events. The goal? In his case, he built a company worth $20 million and set himself up with financial freedom for the rest of his life. My gut reaction was, Thats no way to live a life. There was a time, in my early twenties, when I poured all of my energy and time into my job. I wore the badge of long hours and unlimited availability, replying to emails long into the evening as I worked on projects. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/04\/workbetter-logo.png","headline":"Work Better","description":"Thoughts on the future of work, career pivots, and why work shouldn't suck, by Anna Burgess Yang. To learn more visit workbetter.media.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.workbetter.media","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}} Then I had kids. I began working remotely. In no way did this keep me mediocre. In fact, Id argue that work-life balance improved my career. Learning to focus my impact If you think you have 100 hours to work each week, youll undoubtedly find ways to fill 100 hours. When I became a parent, my extra time disappeared. I couldnt reliably work outside of business hours. Even my work within business hours changed, since small children are frequently sick or school is closed for various holidays. I became brutally efficient with my time. I learned to think of my work in terms of the results it produced, not the hours I put in. I advocated for better apps and tools at the company that could help the entire team do more with less time. I taught myself how to use automation tools to keep tasks humming in the background. Work smarter, not harder became my mantra. I wasnt willing to sacrifice time with my family or a career Id worked hard to build. I had to figure out how to get more done with less effort so I could enjoy a balance between work and life outside of work. Learning adaptability and empathy Being a parent taught me to be more adaptable. Kids dont wait for your schedule. They dont conform to your ideal workday. You have to pivot quickly to Plan B when Plan A fails. I became a manager early in my career, and Im now embarrassed to say that I was a very rigid thinker. I couldnt understand when life got in the way of work. I assumed that other people were bad at managing their time. Having kids made me more empathetic. I saw how life outside of workeven for reasons unrelated to childrenhappened, and deserved compassion. I wasnt mediocre by being more adaptable and empathetic. I became more human. The entire team benefited from flexibility. As a manager, I let my team know that I trusted them to get work done, without micromanaging oversight. And if something unexpected came up, we would adjust. Leading by example At work, people take cues from other employees, especially those senior to them. If a company claims to be flexible but your manager sends Slack messages while on vacation, its a pretty good indicator that you shouldnt expect any work-life balance. Or how about the job that provides zero coverage when you take time off? You return to a pile of work and spend the next week working extra hours to catch up. Not exactly restful if youre punished for taking time off with more work. The more I embraced work-life balance, the more my team followed suit. If my kids were sick (or I was sick), I took the day off. I took fully unplugged vacations during the year and encouraged others to do the same. We set up internal systems so that anyone taking time off had adequate coverage. Most importantly, my kids have seen how much I prioritize work-life balance. Im there to pick them up from after-school activities. They know that being sick means resting and recovering, not pushing through. When my son was little, someone asked, What do you want to be when you grow up? He responded, I want to work from home. It was a proud moment for me, because I knew that my efforts to model work-life balance were paying off. Do I have a multimillion-dollar business, like the author of Why Work-Life Balance Will Keep You Mediocre? No. But his priorities are just that: his prioritiesnot a universal truth. Pursuing work-life balance is a worthwhile career goal. Dont let anyone tell you otherwise. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/04\/workbetter-logo.png","headline":"Work Better","description":"Thoughts on the future of work, career pivots, and why work shouldn't suck, by Anna Burgess Yang. To learn more visit workbetter.media.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.workbetter.media","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}}
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E-Commerce
When the Trump administration gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement access to a massive database of information about Medicaid recipients in June 2025, privacy and medical justice advocates sounded the alarm. They warned that the move could trigger all kinds of public health and human rights harms. But most people likely shrugged and moved on with their day. Why is that? Its not that people dont care. According to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey, 81% of American adults said they were concerned about how companies use their data, and 71% said they were concerned about how the government uses their data. At the same time, though, 61% expressed skepticism that anything they do makes much difference. This is because people have come to expect that their data will be captured, shared, and misused by state and corporate entities alike. For example, many people are now accustomed to instinctively hitting accept on terms of service agreements, privacy policies, and cookie banners regardless of what the policies actually say. At the same time, data breaches have become a regular occurrence, and private digital conversations exposing everything from infidelity to military attacks have become the stuff of public scrutiny. The cumulative effect is that people are loath to change their behaviors to better protect their datanot because they dont care, but because theyve been conditioned to think that they cant make a difference. As scholars of data, technology, and culture, we find that when people are made to feel as if data collection and abuse are inevitable, they are more likely to accept iteven if it jeopardizes their safety or basic rights. Where regulation falls short Policy reforms could help to change this perception, but they havent yet. In contrast to a growing number of countries that have comprehensive data protection or privacy laws, the United States offers only a patchwork of policies covering the issue. At the federal level, the most comprehensive data privacy laws are nearly 40 years old. The Privacy Act of 1974, passed in the wake of federal wiretapping in the Watergate and the Counterintelligence Program scandals, limited how federal agencies collected and shared data. At the time, government surveillance was unexpected and unpopular. But it also left open a number of exceptionsincluding for law enforcementand did not affect private companies. These gaps mean that data collected by private companies can end up in the hands of the government, and there is no good regulation protecting people from this loophole. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 extended protections against telephone wiretapping to include electronic communications, which included services such as email. But the law did not account for the possibility that most digital data would one day be stored on cloud servers. Since 2018, 19 U.S. states have passed data privacy laws that limit companies data collection activities and enshrine new privacy rights for individuals. However, many of these laws also include exceptions for law enforcement access. These laws predominantly take a consent-based approachthink of the pesky banner beckoning you to accept all cookiesthat encourages you to give up your personal information even when its not necessary. These laws put the onus on individuals to protect their privacy, rather than simply barring companies from collecting certain kinds of information from their customers. The privacy paradox For years, studies have shown that people claim to care about privacy but do not take steps to actively protect it. Researchers call this the privacy paradox. It shows up when people use products that track them in invasive ways, or when they consent to data collection, even when they could opt out. The privacy paradox often elicits appeals to transparency: If only people knew that they had a choice, or how the data would be used, or how the technology works, they would opt out. But this logic downplays the fact that options for limiting data collection are often intentionally designed to be convoluted, confusing, and inconvenient, and they can leave users feeling discouraged about making these choices, as communication scholars Nora Draper and Joseph Turow have shown. This suggests that the discrepancy between users opinions on data privacy and their actions is hardly a contradiction at all. When people are conditioned to feel helpless, nudging them into different decisions isnt likely to be as effective as tackling what makes them feel helpless in the first place. Resisting data disaffection The experience of feeling helpless in the face of data collection is a condition we call data disaffection. Disaffection is not the same as apathy. It is not a lack of feeling but rather an unfeelingan intentional numbness. People manifest this numbness to sustain themselves in the face of seemingly inevitable datafication, the process of turning human behavior into data by monitoring and measuring it. It is similar to how people choose to avoid the news, disengage from politics, or ignore the effects of climate change. They turn away bcause data collection makes them feel overwhelmed and anxiousnot because they dont care. Taking data disaffection into consideration, digital privacy is a cultural issuenot an individual responsibilityand one that cannot be addressed with personal choice and consent. To be clear, comprehensive data privacy law and changing behavior are both important. But storytelling can also play a powerful role in shaping how people think and feel about the world around them. We believe that a change in popular narratives about privacy could go a long way toward changing peoples behavior around their data. Talk of the end of privacy helps create the world the phrase describes. Philosopher of language J.L. Austin called those sorts of expressions performative utterances. This kind of language confirms that data collection, surveillance, and abuse are inevitable so that people feel like they have no choice Cultural institutions have a role to play here, too. Narratives reinforcing the idea of data collection as being inevitable come not only from tech companies PR machines but also mass media and entertainment, including journalists. The regular cadence of stories about the federal government accessing personal data, with no mention of recourse or justice, contributes to the sense of helplessness. Alternatively, its possible to tell stories that highlight the alarming growth of digital surveillance and frame data governance practices as controversial and political rather than innocuous and technocratic. The way stories are told affects peoples capacity to act on the information that the stories convey. It shapes peoples expectations and demands of the world around them. The ICE-Medicaid data-sharing agreement is hardly the last threat to data privacy. But the way people talk and feel about it can make it easieror more difficultto ignore data abuses the next time around. Rohan Grover is an assistant professor of AI and media at American University. Josh Widera is a PhD candidate in communication at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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E-Commerce
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