November, 29 2020, 11:00pm EDT
Sierra Club Statement on President-Elect Biden's Nomination of Janet Yellen for Treasury Secretary
Today, President-Elect Biden announced he will be nominating former chair of the Federal Reserve Janet Yellen as his Treasury Secretary.
In response, Senior Representative for Sierra Club's Financial Advocacy Campaign, Ben Cushing, released the following statement:
WASHINGTON
Today, President-Elect Biden announced he will be nominating former chair of the Federal Reserve Janet Yellen as his Treasury Secretary.
In response, Senior Representative for Sierra Club's Financial Advocacy Campaign, Ben Cushing, released the following statement:
"President-Elect Biden was voted in with an unprecedented mandate for climate action and has indicated that he will utilize the full power of the executive branch to tackle the crisis. Considering its profound influence over government spending, development finance, and risk assessment in the U.S. financial sector, the Treasury Department will be crucial in scaling real action on climate change in the U.S. and worldwide. The nomination of Janet Yellen is yet another encouraging sign that Biden's administration will carry out his proposals, as we expect that she will move quickly to manage the decline of fossil fuels and deforestation-risk commodities in our economy and financial sector all while helping the country to build back better.
"The Sierra Club looks forward to working with Yellen to advance our priorities around climate finance, centering on ensuring that U.S. financial institutions zero out their climate impact, beginning with the mandatory disclosure of climate risk."
The Sierra Club is the most enduring and influential grassroots environmental organization in the United States. We amplify the power of our 3.8 million members and supporters to defend everyone's right to a healthy world.
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AI Firm Sued Over Chatbot That Suggested It Was OK for Child to Kill Parents
"In their rush to extract young people's data and sow addiction, Character.AI has created a product so flawed and dangerous that its chatbots are literally inciting children to harm themselves and others," said one advocate.
Dec 10, 2024
"You know sometimes I'm not surprised when I read the news and I see stuff like 'child kills parents after a decade of physical and emotional abuse' stuff like this makes me understand a little bit why it happens."
That's a message sent to a child in Texas from a Character.AI chatbot, indicating to the boy that "murdering his parents was a reasonable response to their limiting of his online activity," according to a federal lawsuit filed in Texas district court Monday.
The complaint was brought by two families in Texas who allege that the Google-backed chatbot service Character.AI harmed their two children, including sexually exploiting and abusing the elder, a 17-year-old with high functioning autism, by targeting him with extreme sexual themes like incest and pushing him to self-harm.
The parents argue that Character.AI, "through its design, poses a clear and present danger to American youth causing serious harms to thousands of kids, including suicide, self-mutilation, sexual solicitation, isolation, depression, anxiety, and harm towards others. Inherent to the underlying data and design of C.AI is a prioritization of overtly sensational and violent responses."
Google is also named as a defendant in the suit. In their filing, the plaintiffs argue that the tech company supported Character.AI's launch even though they knew that it was a "defective product."
The families, who are being represented by the Social Media Victims Law Center and the Tech Justice Law Project, have asked the court to take the product offline.
The explosive court filing comes not long after a mother in Florida filed a separate lawsuit against Character.AI in October, arguing that the chatbot service is responsible for the death of her teenage son because it allegedly encouraged him to commit suicide, per CNN.
Character.AI is different than other chatbots in that it lets uses interact with artificial intelligence "characters." The Texas complaint alleges that the 17-year-old, for example, engaged in a conversation with a character modeled after the celebrity Billie Eilish. These sorts of "companion apps" are finding a growing audience, even though researchers have long warned of the perils of building relationships with chatbots, according to The Washington Post.
A spokesperson for Character.AI declined to comment directly on the lawsuit when asked by NPR, but said the company does have guardrails in place overseeing what chatbots can and cannot say to teen users.
"We warned that Character.AI's dangerous and manipulative design represented a threat to millions of children," said Social Media Victims Law Center founding attorney Matthew P. Bergman. "Now more of these cases are coming to light. The consequences of Character.AI's negligence are shocking and widespread." Social Media Victims Law Center is the plaintiff's counsel in the Florida lawsuit as well.
Josh Golin, the executive director of Fairplay, a nonprofit children's advocacy group, echoed those remarks, saying that "in their rush to extract young people's data and sow addiction, Character.AI has created a product so flawed and dangerous that its chatbots are literally inciting children to harm themselves and others."
"Platforms like Character.AI should not be allowed to perform uncontrolled experiments on our children or encourage kids to form parasocial relationships with bots their developers cannot control," he added.
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Over 75 Nobel Laureates Call On Senate to Reject RFK Jr. as Health Secretary
"In view of his record, placing Mr. Kennedy in charge of DHHS would put the public's health in jeopardy," said the winners of the prestigious prize.
Dec 10, 2024
Nobel laureates rarely wade into politics as a group, but Monday marked the second time in two months that dozens of winners of the prestigious Nobel Prize have banded together to speak out against the agenda of President-elect Donald Trump—this time, calling on U.S. senators to reject his nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
More than 75 Nobel laureates signed a letter warning lawmakers about Kennedy's record of attacking the very agencies he would have power over if confirmed to be Trump's secretary of health and human services, his history of amplifying discredited conspiracy theories about public health—sometimes with deadly consequences—and his "lack of credentials or relevant experience in medicine, science, public health, or administration."
"In view of his record, placing Mr. Kennedy in charge of DHHS would put the public's health in jeopardy and undermine America's global leadership in the health sciences, in both the public and commercial sectors," wrote the Nobel laureates.
Kennedy has alarmed dental experts with his proposal to remove fluoride, which prevents tooth decay, from public drinking water—a plan that Trump has said "sounds OK." The president-elect also said Sunday he would have Kennedy investigate the conspiracy theory that vaccines cause autism, which was the argument made by a 1998 article that has since been retracted and has been debunked by numerous international studies.
The environmental lawyer—whose views and political ambitions have been disavowed by other members of the prominent Kennedy family—has also been condemned for falsely claiming in a letter to the prime minister of Samoa in 2019 that the measles vaccine itself may have caused a measles outbreak that had killed 16 people there. By the time the outbreak was over, 80 people had died, and experts partially blamed "increasing circulation of misinformation leading to distrust and reduced vaccination uptake."
"Maybe there are some [senators] who will read this and think: 'Well, we really do want to protect the health of our citizens. They didn't elect us so that we could kill them,'" Richard Roberts, a co-author of Monday's letter and the winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his discovery of split genes, told The New York Times.
Other beliefs of Kennedy's include his rejection of the established scientific fact that the HIV virus causes AIDS and his claim that unpasteurized raw milk "advances human health" and that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has purposely suppressed that information.
Food scientists say there is no documented proof that raw milk has the health benefits proponents like Kennedy claim it does, but there is ample proof that unpasteurized milk contains bacteria and viruses, including H5N1, the avian flu that's been detected in dairy cow herds in at least 15 states.
The Nobel laureates noted that Kennedy has also been a "belligerent critic" of the FDA and other health agencies and employees that are part of DHHS, calling for vaccine scientists to be imprisoned and threatening to fire FDA and National Institutes of Health employees.
"The leader of DHHS should continue to nurture and improve—not threaten—these important and highly respected institutions and their employees," reads the letter, which was signed by Nobel Prize winners including economist Simon Johnson, vaccine scientist Drew Weissman, and Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, who won the prize in physiology or medicine for discovering microRNA.
Dozens of Nobel laureates also signed a letter in October endorsing Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris' presidential run and warning that Trump's economic agenda would "lead to higher prices, larger deficits, and greater inequality."
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'People Power Works': Shell Backs Down in Anti-Protest Lawsuit Against Greenpeace
"Shell thought suing us for millions over a peaceful protest would intimidate us, but this case became a PR millstone tied around its neck," said the co-executive director of Greenpeace U.K.
Dec 10, 2024
The United Kingdom-based oil giant Shell agreed Tuesday to settle a major lawsuit the company brought against Greenpeace after activists from the group boarded and occupied a company oil platform last year to protest fossil fuel expansion.
Greenpeace said in a statement that as part of the settlement, it agreed to donate £300,000—roughly $382,000—to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, a charity that helps save lives at sea, but will pay nothing to Shell and accept no liability. The donation represents a fraction of the over $11 million in damages and legal costs defendants faced, the group said.
The Greenpeace defendants have also "agreed to avoid protesting for a period at four Shell sites in the northern North Sea."
"Shell thought suing us for millions over a peaceful protest would intimidate us, but this case became a PR millstone tied around its neck," said Areeba Hamid, co-executive director of Greenpeace U.K. "The public backlash against its bullying tactics made it back down and settle out of court."
"This settlement shows that people power works. Thousands of ordinary people across the country backed our fight against Shell and their support means we stay independent and can keep holding Big Oil to account," Hamid added. "This legal battle might be over, but Big Oil's dirty tricks aren't going away. With Greenpeace facing further legal battles around the world, we won't stop campaigning until the fossil fuel industry stops drilling and starts paying for the damage it is causing to people and planet."
"These aggressive legal tactics, the huge sums of money, and attempts to block the right to protest pose a massive threat."
Shell brought the case, which Greenpeace characterized as a "textbook" strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP), in February 2023 and sought $1 million in damages from activists who boarded a Shell-contracted ship carrying equipment to drill for oil in the North Sea.
"When the protest ended, the only damage Shell could find was a padlock which, they alleged, our activists broke. That's it," Greenpeace U.K. said Tuesday. "Yet they came after us with a million-dollar lawsuit, which they justified for their spending on safety."
The group, which warned that the case had dire implications for the right to protest, credited a "sustained, year-long campaign against the suit" for forcing the oil behemoth to back down. The campaign, according to Greenpeace, "turned the legal move into a PR embarrassment for Shell."
"The case was dubbed the 'Cousin Greg' lawsuit by Forbes after a scene in the Emmy-awarded drama Succession, in which the hapless character threatens to sue Greenpeace to universal dismay," the environmental group noted Tuesday.
Greenpeace is currently facing several other SLAPP suits, including one brought by Energy Transfer, majority-owner of the Dakota Access pipeline. The group said Tuesday that the Energy Transfer suit "threatens the very existence of Greenpeace in the U.S."
"These aggressive legal tactics, the huge sums of money, and attempts to block the right to protest pose a massive threat. It could stop Greenpeace being able to make a real difference on the things that matter most," the organization said Tuesday. "It's part of a growing trend by powerful corporations and governments to crush peaceful protest—using draconian laws or intimidation lawsuits like this."
"It seeks to silence the people most impacted by the climate crisis. This threatens the global fight for climate justice," the group added. "We won't give up. This is Shell versus all of us."
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