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Silicon Valley’s ‘Audacity Crisis’

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Wednesday, July 24, 2024

Two years ago, OpenAI released the public beta of DALL-E 2, an image-generation tool that immediately signified that we’d entered a new technological era. Trained off a huge body of data, DALL-E 2 produced unsettlingly good, delightful, and frequently unexpected outputs; my Twitter feed filled up with images derived from prompts such as close-up photo of brushing teeth with toothbrush covered with nacho cheese. Suddenly, it seemed as though machines could create just about anything in response to simple prompts.You likely know the story from there: A few months later, ChatGPT arrived, millions of people started using it, the student essay was pronounced dead, Web3 entrepreneurs nearly broke their ankles scrambling to pivot their companies to AI, and the technology industry was consumed by hype. The generative-AI revolution began in earnest.Where has it gotten us? Although enthusiasts eagerly use the technology to boost productivity and automate busywork, the drawbacks are also impossible to ignore. Social networks such as Facebook have been flooded with bizarre AI-generated slop images; search engines are floundering, trying to index an internet awash in hastily assembled, chatbot-written articles. Generative AI, we know for sure now, has been trained without permission on copyrighted media, which makes it all the more galling that the technology is competing against creative people for jobs and online attention; a backlash against AI companies scraping the internet for training data is in full swing.Yet these companies, emboldened by the success of their products and war chests of investor capital, have brushed these problems aside and unapologetically embraced a manifest-destiny attitude toward their technologies. Some of these firms are, in no uncertain terms, trying to rewrite the rules of society by doing whatever they can to create a godlike superintelligence (also known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI). Others seem more interested in using generative AI to build tools that repurpose others’ creative work with little to no citation. In recent months, leaders within the AI industry are more brazenly expressing a paternalistic attitude about how the future will look—including who will win (those who embrace their technology) and who will be left behind (those who do not). They’re not asking us; they’re telling us. As the journalist Joss Fong commented recently, “There’s an audacity crisis happening in California.”There are material concerns to contend with here. It is audacious to massively jeopardize your net-zero climate commitment in favor of advancing a technology that has told people to eat rocks, yet Google appears to have done just that, according to its latest environmental report. (In an emailed statement, a Google spokesperson, Corina Standiford, said that the company remains “dedicated to the sustainability goals we’ve set,” including reaching net-zero emissions by 2030. According to the report, its emissions grew 13 percent in 2023, in large part because of the energy demands of generative AI.) And it is certainly audacious for companies such as Perplexity to use third-party tools to harvest information while ignoring long-standing online protocols that prevent websites from being scraped and having their content stolen.But I’ve found the rhetoric from AI leaders to be especially exasperating. This month, I spoke with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Thrive Global CEO Arianna Huffington after they announced their intention to build an AI health coach. The pair explicitly compared their nonexistent product to the New Deal. (They suggested that their product—so theoretical, they could not tell me whether it would be an app or not—could quickly become part of the health-care system’s critical infrastructure.) But this audacity is about more than just grandiose press releases. In an interview at Dartmouth College last month, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, Mira Murati, discussed AI’s effects on labor, saying that, as a result of generative AI, “some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place.” She added later that “strictly repetitive” jobs are also likely on the chopping block. Her candor appears emblematic of OpenAI’s very mission, which straightforwardly seeks to develop an intelligence capable of “turbocharging the global economy.” Jobs that can be replaced, her words suggested, aren’t just unworthy: They should never have existed. In the long arc of technological change, this may be true—human operators of elevators, traffic signals, and telephones eventually gave way to automation—but that doesn’t mean that catastrophic job loss across several industries simultaneously is economically or morally acceptable.[Read: AI has become a technology of faith]Along these lines, Altman has said that generative AI will “create entirely new jobs.” Other tech boosters have said the same. But if you listen closely, their language is cold and unsettling, offering insight into the kinds of labor that these people value—and, by extension, the kinds that they don’t. Altman has spoken of AGI possibly replacing the “the median human” worker’s labor—giving the impression that the least exceptional among us might be sacrificed in the name of progress.Even some inside the industry have expressed alarm at those in charge of this technology’s future. Last month, Leopold Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI employee, wrote a 165-page essay series warning readers about what’s being built in San Francisco. “Few have the faintest glimmer of what is about to hit them,” Aschenbrenner, who was reportedly fired this year for leaking company information, wrote. In Aschenbrenner’s reckoning, he and “perhaps a few hundred people, most of them in San Francisco and the AI labs,” have the “situational awareness” to anticipate the future, which will be marked by the arrival of AGI, geopolitical struggle, and radical cultural and economic change.Aschenbrenner’s manifesto is a useful document in that it articulates how the architects of this technology see themselves: a small group of people bound together by their intellect, skill sets, and fate to help decide the shape of the future. Yet to read his treatise is to feel not FOMO, but alienation. The civilizational struggle he depicts bears little resemblance to the AI that the rest of us can see. “The fate of the world rests on these people,” he writes of the Silicon Valley cohort building AI systems. This is not a call to action or a proposal for input; it’s a statement of who is in charge.Unlike me, Aschenbrenner believes that a superintelligence is coming, and coming soon. His treatise contains quite a bit of grand speculation about the potential for AI models to drastically improve from here. (Skeptics have strongly pushed back on this assessment.) But his primary concern is that too few people wield too much power. “I don’t think it can just be a small clique building this technology,” he told me recently when I asked why he wrote the treatise.“I felt a sense of responsibility, by having ended up a part of this group, to tell people what they’re thinking,” he said, referring to the leaders at AI companies who believe they’re on the cusp of achieving AGI. “And again, they might be right or they might be wrong, but people deserve to hear it.” In our conversation, I found an unexpected overlap between us: Whether you believe that AI executives are delusional or genuinely on the verge of constructing a superintelligence, you should be concerned about how much power they’ve amassed.Having a class of builders with deep ambitions is part of a healthy, progressive society. Great technologists are, by nature, imbued with an audacious spirit to push the bounds of what is possible—and that can be a very good thing for humanity indeed. None of this is to say that the technology is useless: AI undoubtedly has transformative potential (predicting how proteins fold is a genuine revelation, for example). But audacity can quickly turn into a liability when builders become untethered from reality, or when their hubris leads them to believe that it is their right to impose their values on the rest of us, in return for building God.[Read: This is what it looks like when AI eats the world]An industry is what it produces, and in 2024, these executive pronouncements and brazen actions, taken together, are the actual state of the artificial-intelligence industry two years into its latest revolution. The apocalyptic visions, the looming nature of superintelligence, and the struggle for the future of humanity—all of these narratives are not facts but hypotheticals, however exciting, scary, or plausible.When you strip all of that away and focus on what’s really there and what’s really being said, the message is clear: These companies wish to be left alone to “scale in peace,” a phrase that SSI, a new AI company co-founded by Ilya Sutskever, formerly OpenAI’s chief scientist, used with no trace of self-awareness in announcing his company’s mission. (“SSI” stands for “safe superintelligence,” of course.) To do that, they’ll need to commandeer all creative resources—to eminent-domain the entire internet. The stakes demand it. We’re to trust that they will build these tools safely, implement them responsibly, and share the wealth of their creations. We’re to trust their values—about the labor that’s valuable and the creative pursuits that ought to exist—as they remake the world in their image. We’re to trust them because they are smart. We’re to trust them as they achieve global scale with a technology that they say will be among the most disruptive in all of human history. Because they have seen the future, and because history has delivered them to this societal hinge point, marrying ambition and talent with just enough raw computing power to create God. To deny them this right is reckless, but also futile.It’s possible, then, that generative AI’s chief export is not image slop, voice clones, or lorem ipsum chatbot bullshit but instead unearned, entitled audacity. Yet another example of AI producing hallucinations—not in the machines, but in the people who build them.

AI executives are acting like they own the world.

Two years ago, OpenAI released the public beta of DALL-E 2, an image-generation tool that immediately signified that we’d entered a new technological era. Trained off a huge body of data, DALL-E 2 produced unsettlingly good, delightful, and frequently unexpected outputs; my Twitter feed filled up with images derived from prompts such as close-up photo of brushing teeth with toothbrush covered with nacho cheese. Suddenly, it seemed as though machines could create just about anything in response to simple prompts.

You likely know the story from there: A few months later, ChatGPT arrived, millions of people started using it, the student essay was pronounced dead, Web3 entrepreneurs nearly broke their ankles scrambling to pivot their companies to AI, and the technology industry was consumed by hype. The generative-AI revolution began in earnest.

Where has it gotten us? Although enthusiasts eagerly use the technology to boost productivity and automate busywork, the drawbacks are also impossible to ignore. Social networks such as Facebook have been flooded with bizarre AI-generated slop images; search engines are floundering, trying to index an internet awash in hastily assembled, chatbot-written articles. Generative AI, we know for sure now, has been trained without permission on copyrighted media, which makes it all the more galling that the technology is competing against creative people for jobs and online attention; a backlash against AI companies scraping the internet for training data is in full swing.

Yet these companies, emboldened by the success of their products and war chests of investor capital, have brushed these problems aside and unapologetically embraced a manifest-destiny attitude toward their technologies. Some of these firms are, in no uncertain terms, trying to rewrite the rules of society by doing whatever they can to create a godlike superintelligence (also known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI). Others seem more interested in using generative AI to build tools that repurpose others’ creative work with little to no citation. In recent months, leaders within the AI industry are more brazenly expressing a paternalistic attitude about how the future will look—including who will win (those who embrace their technology) and who will be left behind (those who do not). They’re not asking us; they’re telling us. As the journalist Joss Fong commented recently, “There’s an audacity crisis happening in California.”

There are material concerns to contend with here. It is audacious to massively jeopardize your net-zero climate commitment in favor of advancing a technology that has told people to eat rocks, yet Google appears to have done just that, according to its latest environmental report. (In an emailed statement, a Google spokesperson, Corina Standiford, said that the company remains “dedicated to the sustainability goals we’ve set,” including reaching net-zero emissions by 2030. According to the report, its emissions grew 13 percent in 2023, in large part because of the energy demands of generative AI.) And it is certainly audacious for companies such as Perplexity to use third-party tools to harvest information while ignoring long-standing online protocols that prevent websites from being scraped and having their content stolen.

But I’ve found the rhetoric from AI leaders to be especially exasperating. This month, I spoke with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Thrive Global CEO Arianna Huffington after they announced their intention to build an AI health coach. The pair explicitly compared their nonexistent product to the New Deal. (They suggested that their product—so theoretical, they could not tell me whether it would be an app or not—could quickly become part of the health-care system’s critical infrastructure.) But this audacity is about more than just grandiose press releases. In an interview at Dartmouth College last month, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, Mira Murati, discussed AI’s effects on labor, saying that, as a result of generative AI, “some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place.” She added later that “strictly repetitive” jobs are also likely on the chopping block. Her candor appears emblematic of OpenAI’s very mission, which straightforwardly seeks to develop an intelligence capable of “turbocharging the global economy.” Jobs that can be replaced, her words suggested, aren’t just unworthy: They should never have existed. In the long arc of technological change, this may be true—human operators of elevators, traffic signals, and telephones eventually gave way to automation—but that doesn’t mean that catastrophic job loss across several industries simultaneously is economically or morally acceptable.

[Read: AI has become a technology of faith]

Along these lines, Altman has said that generative AI will “create entirely new jobs.” Other tech boosters have said the same. But if you listen closely, their language is cold and unsettling, offering insight into the kinds of labor that these people value—and, by extension, the kinds that they don’t. Altman has spoken of AGI possibly replacing the “the median human” worker’s labor—giving the impression that the least exceptional among us might be sacrificed in the name of progress.

Even some inside the industry have expressed alarm at those in charge of this technology’s future. Last month, Leopold Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI employee, wrote a 165-page essay series warning readers about what’s being built in San Francisco. “Few have the faintest glimmer of what is about to hit them,” Aschenbrenner, who was reportedly fired this year for leaking company information, wrote. In Aschenbrenner’s reckoning, he and “perhaps a few hundred people, most of them in San Francisco and the AI labs,” have the “situational awareness” to anticipate the future, which will be marked by the arrival of AGI, geopolitical struggle, and radical cultural and economic change.

Aschenbrenner’s manifesto is a useful document in that it articulates how the architects of this technology see themselves: a small group of people bound together by their intellect, skill sets, and fate to help decide the shape of the future. Yet to read his treatise is to feel not FOMO, but alienation. The civilizational struggle he depicts bears little resemblance to the AI that the rest of us can see. “The fate of the world rests on these people,” he writes of the Silicon Valley cohort building AI systems. This is not a call to action or a proposal for input; it’s a statement of who is in charge.

Unlike me, Aschenbrenner believes that a superintelligence is coming, and coming soon. His treatise contains quite a bit of grand speculation about the potential for AI models to drastically improve from here. (Skeptics have strongly pushed back on this assessment.) But his primary concern is that too few people wield too much power. “I don’t think it can just be a small clique building this technology,” he told me recently when I asked why he wrote the treatise.

“I felt a sense of responsibility, by having ended up a part of this group, to tell people what they’re thinking,” he said, referring to the leaders at AI companies who believe they’re on the cusp of achieving AGI. “And again, they might be right or they might be wrong, but people deserve to hear it.” In our conversation, I found an unexpected overlap between us: Whether you believe that AI executives are delusional or genuinely on the verge of constructing a superintelligence, you should be concerned about how much power they’ve amassed.

Having a class of builders with deep ambitions is part of a healthy, progressive society. Great technologists are, by nature, imbued with an audacious spirit to push the bounds of what is possible—and that can be a very good thing for humanity indeed. None of this is to say that the technology is useless: AI undoubtedly has transformative potential (predicting how proteins fold is a genuine revelation, for example). But audacity can quickly turn into a liability when builders become untethered from reality, or when their hubris leads them to believe that it is their right to impose their values on the rest of us, in return for building God.

[Read: This is what it looks like when AI eats the world]

An industry is what it produces, and in 2024, these executive pronouncements and brazen actions, taken together, are the actual state of the artificial-intelligence industry two years into its latest revolution. The apocalyptic visions, the looming nature of superintelligence, and the struggle for the future of humanity—all of these narratives are not facts but hypotheticals, however exciting, scary, or plausible.

When you strip all of that away and focus on what’s really there and what’s really being said, the message is clear: These companies wish to be left alone to “scale in peace,” a phrase that SSI, a new AI company co-founded by Ilya Sutskever, formerly OpenAI’s chief scientist, used with no trace of self-awareness in announcing his company’s mission. (“SSI” stands for “safe superintelligence,” of course.) To do that, they’ll need to commandeer all creative resources—to eminent-domain the entire internet. The stakes demand it. We’re to trust that they will build these tools safely, implement them responsibly, and share the wealth of their creations. We’re to trust their values—about the labor that’s valuable and the creative pursuits that ought to exist—as they remake the world in their image. We’re to trust them because they are smart. We’re to trust them as they achieve global scale with a technology that they say will be among the most disruptive in all of human history. Because they have seen the future, and because history has delivered them to this societal hinge point, marrying ambition and talent with just enough raw computing power to create God. To deny them this right is reckless, but also futile.

It’s possible, then, that generative AI’s chief export is not image slop, voice clones, or lorem ipsum chatbot bullshit but instead unearned, entitled audacity. Yet another example of AI producing hallucinations—not in the machines, but in the people who build them.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

Hawaii Spent Millions on Housing for the Homeless. Show Us the Receipts

A Honolulu Civil Beat review found that the state agency in charge of Hawaii’s homeless villages lacks records to show how millions paid to a nonprofit to build hundreds of housing units was actually spent

The state agency in charge of Hawaiʻi’s homeless villages lacks the records to show how millions of dollars paid to a nonprofit to build hundreds of housing units was actually spent, a Civil Beat review of contract documents and invoices found.Since late 2023, the state has issued more than $37.1 million in no-bid contracts to HomeAid Hawaiʻi to build small dwellings as part of Gov. Josh Green’s signature Kauhale Initiative.While HomeAid has provided the Department of Human Services with balance sheets and supporting documents showing how it used state money for some of its projects, the state doesn’t have receipts or other documents detailing the specific use of public money for other projects.DHS told Civil Beat that some of those projects are not finished and will be subject to agency audits once they are.Now, Green wants $50 million more from the Legislature for his program to address homelessness. The Legislature has yet to agree on that funding as lawmakers consider what requirements to attach to the money to build kauhale villages across the state.House and Senate lawmakers have disagreed on the terms of the kauhale bill and must hash out differences during a conference committee, which has not yet been scheduled. A key point of contention is whether to require at least two bids for the construction of the villages.The Kauhale Initiative is meant to solve one of the state’s critical social issues. After running for governor on a campaign to address Hawaiʻi’s housing crisis, Green declared a state emergency on homelessness in 2023. Oʻahu’s annual Point-In-Time count at the time tallied more than 6,223 homeless people, more than half of them living outside. Green’s team quickly built 12 kauhale statewide. With the procurement code suspended under the state of emergency, Hawaiʻi waived competitive bidding and went with a no-bid development contractor, HomeAid Hawaiʻi, to implement the program. The initiative calls for creating “affordable spaces for housing and healing our people, through intentional ‘kauhale’ design and operation.”Critics, including of late Green’s former homelessness coordinator John Mizuno, have raised questions about operating costs of some kauhale. And Civil Beat’s review of construction expenditures highlights potential lapses in the Department of Human Services’ oversight of those projects.The department was unable to provide documents to show spending by HomeAid on two of the priciest kauhale projects to date — Middle Street’s Phase 2 and another one in Kahului on Maui — totaling more than $14 million. Work on those projects has just recently begun, officials said, although the nonprofit has received about $2 million up front.Details on two other contracts were also lacking. For one of those contracts – to deliver 273 homes statewide – HomeAid CEO Kimo Carvalho billed the state for nearly the entire cost of the contract all at once and provided almost no detail on how funds were used.On another contract for the Alana Ola Pono kauhale in Iwilei, the state paid out $2.5 million – half the value of the contract – up front with only a brief description of work that would be performed. Details on what became of the rest of the money weren’t provided in response to a records request from Civil Beat. That project opened in December, but is about two weeks away from completion, Carvalho said.Much of the work to review invoices was done by Jun Yang, who at the time was an employee of the Department of Transportation but also part of a kauhale team formed to aid Mizuno. Yang was so deeply involved that at one point, when there was a hold up in payment from DHS to HomeAid in September, Yang told Carvalho that if HomeAid staff sent payment request forms “we will get them taken care of.”Yang took over the top job from Mizuno in February.DHS Deputy Director Joseph Campos told Civil Beat on Wednesday that he recognizes his agency’s responsibility to the public and to legislators. The department has many processes to review the expenditures, he said, and it is not trying to skirt accountability.“Although we utilize the authority of the emergency order not to do a formal bid process, that does not mean we go willy nilly in choosing whatever we want.”Despite the absence of backup documentation to prove it in some cases, Campos said, “almost on a daily basis, we’re price-engineering or value-engineering a contract to make sure that we’re getting the best possible price out there.” Bill To Require Competitive Bidding In Question The House has sought to address questions of accountability by requiring at least two bids from builders. But the Senate removed the requirement after Yang testified that requiring two bids could delay development of projects. House Housing Committee Chairman Luke Evslin, who had amended the kauhale bill to include the two-bid requirement, said he couldn’t say what position House conferees will take during the negotiations to reconcile the two versions. Evslin has been named one of the co-chairs of the conference committee.An older version of the kauhale bill required “at least two bidders for any kauhale project”, however it was dropped in more recent versions.“For my own personal preference, the two-bid requirement makes a lot of sense to ensure accountability and efficiency,” Evslin said.Evslin acknowledged that no-bid contracts are allowed under Green’s emergency proclamation on homelessness, which suspends the state procurement code. But Evslin said requiring at least two bids makes sense as Green’s initiative matures from an emergency policy into a permanent endeavor.“Our hope is to transition the Kauhale Initiative into something that is sustainable,” he said. Green declined an interview request to discuss the kauhale bill. His spokesperson, Makana McClellan, said the administration would wait until after session to talk about active bills. Mizuno also declined to comment.McClellan said that HomeAId’s kauhale projects are routinely reviewed for compliance by the state Attorney General’s Office. How To Make The Program More Effective The rift over the two-bid requirement reflects a difference of opinion between the former and current coordinators in charge of overseeing Green’s Statewide Office on Homelessness and Housing Solutions. The overall philosophy, which isn’t disputed, is that it’s better for people and less expensive for the state to create tiny home villages with support services than to provide services to people on the street. The dispute involves how to get there.Mizuno, a longtime former lawmaker whom Green appointed to the position in December 2023, testified in February in favor of requiring two bids to build kauhale. Evslin’s housing committee amended the bill to incorporate the request.Diesel fuel and equipment to provide electricity cost $21,032 just for April — which came out to more than $1,000 a month per tiny home — according to invoices from Sunbelt Rentals examined by Civil Beat. In contrast, the average monthly bill for a full-sized residential home on Oahu is $202, according to Hawaiian Electric Co.During a tour of several properties Mizuno showed that monthly cost for another kauhale, located in a converted residential home, was just over $1,300 per bed.Generally a staunch advocate of Green’s initiative, Mizuno said he was “very concerned with off-grid kauhale.” At the time, Green said the off-grid kauhale were merely a bridge to get people off the street and into homes.By month’s end, Mizuno had stepped down from the top post to be Green’s special advisor on homelessness, replaced by Yang, who previously had been homelessness coordinator for the Hawaiʻi Department of Transportation.Less than a month later, on March 12, Yang requested that lawmakers remove the two-bid requirement for kauhale construction contracts during testimony in a joint hearing of the Senate committees on Health and Human Services and Housing.Echoing Department of Human Services testimony, Yang said he was “concerned that the two-bid minimum may delay project development in certain communities if only one bid is received.” Documents Show Irregularities Those records included invoices and supporting documents typical of large construction projects and final reports required by the contracts. The request initially focused on the Middle Street and Iwilei kauhale.The department’s first response to the request two weeks later didn’t include documents detailing expenditures. Instead, the department just provided copies of the contracts themselves.The agency eventually scanned and turned over copies of invoices and supporting documents for most of the kauhale projects on April 11. It provided extensive documentation for the Middle Street project’s first phase.But there were notable irregularities concerning other projects.For example, HomeAid was granted a contract in June to provide 273 tiny home units at a cost of $5.8 million. Payment was supposed to be made in four installments between June and September, with invoices and documents accompanying each installment.Instead, HomeAid sent one invoice in August, covering $174,000 worth of work, and another in October for $5.6 million. The majority of those funds went to the broad category of “Consulting and Non Employee Expense.” There’s no breakdown of what that entailed.“I believe we’re still working through the process,” Campos said of the project. “I believe we’re only halfway through on that one.”Despite the lack of publicly available accounting on some of these contracts, the department was looking at what the payments were for. Carvalho said his team and state officials meet weekly to review expenses on projects.Yang was the subject matter expert on the kauhale initiative, Campos said, which is why he was deeply involved in reviewing invoices.In one instance, Carvalho emailed Yang on Sept. 13 to check on reimbursements for money spent on kauhale in Kahului and Iwilei, as well as other projects in Kāneʻohe and Kalihi.“Would you mind helping me to track these down?” Carvalho wrote.Yang replied a few hours later, telling Carvalho to have staff prepare payment request forms. Yang even checked in with Campos’ secretary, asking her to forward other invoices for payment.He asked Carvalho to send a coversheet and a payment form for HomeAid’s 43-unit kauhale in Iwilei.“We will process the check for $2.5 million,” Yang wrote.HomeAid sent the state an invoice a week later. HomeAid’s Iwilei contract requires it to provide an itemization of expenses, timesheets or receipts. But there are no supporting documents to show how HomeAid spent the money on the Iwilei kauhale.Instead, there is merely a description in the invoice summarizing work performed, including erosion control, installation of a dust fence and barriers, construction and environmental services and site work. None of these costs are itemized, and there’s no accounting for what was paid to various subcontractors.Campos explained that those were upfront costs that wouldn’t necessarily be accounted for at this stage. Once projects like the Iwilei kauhale are completed, Campos said the public would be able to review the audits on those projects’ costs.Carvalho acknowledged that HomeAid is behind on providing invoices for the Iwilei project.“It doesn’t mean that the state’s not aware of what is being billed every month,” he said. “There’s still at least some accountability along the way.”The state also couldn’t provide documents concerning two newer projects. HomeAid was given a $6.7 million contract in November to complete the second phase of a kauhale on Middle Street. It called for up to 30 housing units, in addition to the 20 already at the site.In December, HomeAid was given a $7.9 million contract for a kauhale project in Kahului.Both contracts called for $1 million to be paid to HomeAid up front. HomeAid was required to account for those expenses, according to the contracts. The contracts also say that subsequent payments would be made in monthly installments after submission of invoices and supporting documentation.Asked about the status of those projects and records detailing spending, Carvalho said that work has just recently begun on both of those projects.“There hasn’t been a lot of work to spend on,” he said. ‘Where Is The Accountability?’ Lawmakers have also had a hard time getting details about HomeAid’s work on other housing projects.Rep. Elle Cochran, who represents Lahaina, has asked DHS for documentation concerning construction of Ka La’i Ola, a village of temporary homes for fire survivors in her district. The project cost $185 million, or $411,000 per home, including massive infrastructure improvements for the land, which will later be used by the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands. The project opened in January.Cochran said she asked for documentation called for by DHS’s construction contract with HomeAid, including interim reports and a final accounting for the project. Emails from Campos to Cochran show the agency is still working on her request.Regardless of the emergency proclamation suspending the procurement law, Cochran said it’s fair to ask for an accounting now that Ka La’i Ola has been built.“If this type of money has been expended and given, then where is the breakdown? Where is the proof? Where is the receipt?” she asked. “Where is the accountability?”This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Feb. 2025

Romania promises laws to deal with brown bears as population estimate doubles

Country may be home to as many as 13,000 bears, the highest total by far in Europe outside RussiaRomania may be home to as many as 13,000 brown bears, almost twice as many as previously thought, the country’s forestry research institute has said, as officials promised new laws to allow communities to deal with “crisis bear situations”.The institute’s study of 25 counties in the Carpathian mountains was the first to use DNA samples from material such as faeces and hair. Previous estimates based on prints and sightings put the bear population at less than 8,000. Continue reading...

Romania may be home to as many as 13,000 brown bears, almost twice as many as previously thought, the country’s forestry research institute has said, as officials promised new laws to allow communities to deal with “crisis bear situations”.The institute’s study of 25 counties in the Carpathian mountains was the first to use DNA samples from material such as faeces and hair. Previous estimates based on prints and sightings put the bear population at less than 8,000.According to environment ministry figures, bears have killed 26 people and severely injured 274 others over the past 20 years in Romania, the most recent fatality being a 19-year-old hiker who was mauled to death on a popular Carpathian trail last July.The government last year more than doubled its authorised cull of brown bears, a protected species in the EU, to 481 after recording more than 7,500 emergency calls to signal bear sightings in 2023 – more than twice the previous year’s total.MPs argue “overpopulation” is leading to an increase in attacks, an assertion disputed by environmental groups who say the focus must be shifted towards prevention, by keeping bears away from communities and targeting specific “problem bears”.Germany’s foreign ministry last week updated its Romania travel advice, noting that bears were increasingly venturing into residential areas and along roads, leading to “dangerous encounters with humans”. It urged travellers to heed local warnings.Based on an analysis of about 24,000 samples collected over three years since 2022, the institute’s study, published late last week, concluded there were between 10,419 and 12,770 individuals living in Romania – by far Europe’s largest brown bear population outside Russia.A brown bear in a summer field in Romania’s Carpathian mountains. Photograph: Erika Eros/AlamyWorld Wildlife Fund (WWF) Romania has since questioned its methods, saying genetic studies were usually conducted over a much shorter period, but the institute has said it considers the survey 95% accurate.The Romanian environment minister, Mircea Fechet, said he would lobby the European Commission to lift the bears’ protected status. The EU’s habitats directive allows the animal to be killed only in exceptional circumstances and as a last resort.“We have to intervene,” Fechet told local media. “The specialists say the optimal bear population is around 4,000.”skip past newsletter promotionThe planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essentialPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionHe also promised to introduce a law allowing local officials to bypass the current system of “gradual intervention” – which obliges mayors to first try to scare a bear off, or capture and relocate it – and instead put the animal down directly if necessary.Existing methods “have so far proven ineffective”, Fechet said, adding: “I hope my proposal, which is currently under public consultation, will put an end to these tragedies. Human life comes first.”Slovakia this month also authorised a cull of 350 brown bears – about a quarter of its estimated population of 1,300 – after a 59-year-old man was mauled to death. Two other people died last year after being attacked or chased by bears.Slovaks “cannot live in a country where people are afraid to go into the forest, and where humans become food for bears”, said the country’s populist prime minister, Robert Fico.

Coming to The Revelator: Exclusive Tom Toro Cartoons

The cartoonist will shine a satirical light on some of the biggest environmental problems of the day, including the extinction crisis. The post Coming to <i>The Revelator&lt;/i>: Exclusive Tom Toro Cartoons appeared first on The Revelator.

Tom Toro is among the rare cartoonists whose work has become an internet meme. His most famous cartoon, which you’ve probably seen more than once, shows some raggedy survivors huddled around a post-apocalyptic fire:   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Tom Toro (@tbtoro) Toro has tackled other environmental issues in his cartoons for The New Yorker, Yale Climate Connections, and other publications, his own syndicated comic strip, “Home Free,” as well as his children’s picture books. Some of his cartoons will be collected later this year in his new book And to Think We Started as a Book Club… Now he’s focusing his satiric lens on the extinction crisis — and The Revelator. Exclusive Tom Toro cartoons will soon appear in our newsletter every 2-3 weeks. “I’m enjoying this too much,” Toro says. “I finally have an outlet for my lifelong love of animals and nature.” Don’t miss a single new Tom Toro cartoon — or anything else from The Revelator: Sign up for our weekly newsletter today. Previously in The Revelator: Global Warming Funnies   The post Coming to <i>The Revelator&lt;/i>: Exclusive Tom Toro Cartoons appeared first on The Revelator.

When sadness strikes I remember I’m not alone in loving the wild boundless beauty of the living world | Georgina Woods

Nature will reclaim its place as a terrifying quasi-divine force that cannot be mastered. I find this strangely comfortingExplore the series – Last chance: the extinction crisis being ignored this electionGet Guardian Australia environment editor Adam Morton’s Clear Air column as an emailAt times my work takes me to the big city and the tall buildings where people with power make decisions that affect the rest of us. While I am there, crossing busy roads, wearing tidy clothes and carrying out my duty, I think of faraway places where life is getting on without me.Logrunners are turning leaf litter on the rainforest floor, albatross are cruising the wind beyond sight of the coast. Why does thinking about these creatures, who have no idea that I exist, bring me such comfort?Get Guardian Australia environment editor Adam Morton’s Clear Air column as an email Continue reading...

At times my work takes me to the big city and the tall buildings where people with power make decisions that affect the rest of us. While I am there, crossing busy roads, wearing tidy clothes and carrying out my duty, I think of faraway places where life is getting on without me.Logrunners are turning leaf litter on the rainforest floor, albatross are cruising the wind beyond sight of the coast. Why does thinking about these creatures, who have no idea that I exist, bring me such comfort?Because they are free, because they are beautiful, and because of their utter indifference to me.Last chance: the extinction crisis this election is ignoring (series trailer) – videoI was in a pub in Newcastle a few weeks ago chatting to a stranger with a lot going on. He runs a business selling household appliances, employs dozens of people, is negotiating a divorce and paying a mortgage. He seemed sceptical about what people tell him about climate change. Given how much else he has to think about, that didn’t surprise me. I asked him, if he was free next week to do anything he wanted, what would he do? He said he would bundle his kids into a van and drive to Seal Rocks to go camping.If you’re not familiar with it, Seal Rocks is among the most beautiful places anywhere on the New South Wales coast. I’d love to be there next week myself.People seek and find freedom in wild places. There is toil in the rest of the natural world and there are dependants to care for, as there are in civilisation, but there is also a sense of boundlessness.This feeling catches me up and I get carried away. I want to cruise in the great ocean currents like a tuna. I want to gather grass and spider silk and nest in the shrubs with the wrens. I suspect the tug of freedom is what takes some people out on hunting trips, and some to earn their living as jackaroos or prawners.Then there is the beauty. Survival is necessary but being gorgeous, creative and excessive has played as important a role in evolution as survival skills. This has filled the world with the resplendent detail of iridescent insects, curly liverworts, currawong song and the synchronised courtship flight-dance of terns.And it is not just living creatures making this beauty. Rays of sunlight bend through a running creek and make bright moving patterns of line and form on its bedrock. All beings have the urge to expression, even including non-living beings: rivers have it, waves have it, the wind. The wind heaps sand in rhythmic curls in the desert.The freedom and beauty of nature guide my sense of right and wrong. If I am to be free, I must care for the freedom of other earthlings. Beauty is the signal to me that this is true.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Clear Air AustraliaAdam Morton brings you incisive analysis about the politics and impact of the climate crisisPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionWhen self-consciousness traps me in its hall of mirrors, the outside world brings the relief of being unimportant. A friend and I once sat by a creek in a rainforest. A rose robin flew down to drink beside us, unaware we were there. The marvellous world is turning without me and my own life is as dear, marvellous, fleeting and irrelevant as a rose robin’s. What lightness!People talk about cosmic vertigo but how about the giddiness of knowing that the ancestors of the lyrebird you’re listening to have been living in the forests of this continent for 15m years, since there were still trees in Antarctica?We’re living in a thin film of biosphere that is creating its own atmosphere, recycling its own wastes, cleaning its own water, producing and metabolising in complex self-organising systems that we are too small and silly to understand.When we talk about “protecting nature” it makes sense at a certain scale but it is quaintly hubristic. Nature is not all lovely creatures and majestic landscapes. It is mutating viruses, poleward-creeping cyclones and vengeful orcas. Just who needs looking after from whom?Now that greenhouse pollution and the global environmental cataclysms of the last hundred years have broken long-familiar patterns of living within the biosphere, nature will reclaim its place as a terrifying quasi-divine force that cannot be mastered. This, too, is strangely comforting.I often feel overwhelmed with sadness to be living in a culture that doesn’t seem to value all of this but I know that I am not alone in loving the living world.The Biodiversity Council of Australia takes the trouble to ask people how they feel about nature, why and how it is important to them. The overwhelming majority of people feel as I do: that they are part of nature (69%); that being in nature helps them deal with everyday stress (79%); that it is important to them to know that nature is being looked after (88%). The vast majority want more to be done to protect it (96%). The way Australian politics treats “the environment” – either as a decorative irrelevance or as an insidious threat to our prosperity – doesn’t reflect the way the people feel about it.Love and affinity for nature cuts across political, social and economic divisions. Of course, if you ask someone to choose between their own livelihood and the livelihood of a greater glider or a Maugean skate, they’re likely to choose their own – even more so for the non-specific thing they call “net zero”. But why should anyone be asked to make that kind of awful choice?Nature shows me that we don’t have to choose between beauty and freedom on the one hand, and good living on the other. Australians’ desire to be part of and safeguard the living world is a good start but we’re going to lose so much of it unless we take some responsibility for what we’re doing.

A high-flying visitor – the wondrous far eastern curlew – faces fresh threat in NT wetlands haven

Guardian Australia is highlighting the plight of our endangered native species during an election campaign that is ignoring broken environment laws and rapidly declining ecosystemsExplore the series – Last chance: the extinction crisis being ignored this electionGet Guardian Australia environment editor Adam Morton’s Clear Air column as an emailHundreds of far eastern curlews fly non-stop more than 10,000km every year to Darwin Harbour from Russia and China. But their southern habitat is under threat from a large industrial development backed by more than $1bn in federal government funding.Known for its long curved bill and soft brown feathers, the far eastern curlew is the world’s largest migratory shorebird and one of 22 priority bird species the Albanese government has promised to support. The birds fly south each year to forage, rest and fatten up during summer before returning to the northern hemisphere.Get Guardian Australia environment editor Adam Morton’s Clear Air column as an email Continue reading...

Hundreds of far eastern curlews fly non-stop more than 10,000km every year to Darwin Harbour from Russia and China. But their southern habitat is under threat from a large industrial development backed by more than $1bn in federal government funding.Known for its long curved bill and soft brown feathers, the far eastern curlew is the world’s largest migratory shorebird and one of 22 priority bird species the Albanese government has promised to support. The birds fly south each year to forage, rest and fatten up during summer before returning to the northern hemisphere.Register: it’s quick and easyIt’s still free to read – this is not a paywallWe’re committed to keeping our quality reporting open. By registering and providing us with insight into your preferences, you’re helping us to engage with you more deeply, and that allows us to keep our journalism free for all.Have a subscription? Made a contribution? Already registered?Sign InFar eastern curlews are a marvel in the natural world and affectionately described as the ultimate endurance athletes. Unable to glide, soar or land on the ocean, they flap their wings for the entirety of their journeys until they reach safe and familiar coastal habitat thousands of kilometres away.Will the curlew be able to hang on despite habitat loss? Illustration: Meeri AnneliThe curlew’s global population has fallen by 80% over the past 40 years, largely due to destruction and development-related changes to its intertidal habitat.Government documents show the proposed industrial precinct at Middle Arm, on a peninsula 13km south of Darwin, will need about 1,500 hectares (3,705 acres) of native mangroves and savanna woodland to be cleared, affecting “threatened species, and sensitive and significant vegetation”.The precinct is a proposed Northern Territory government development involving the construction of wharves and jetties to be used by industries including liquified natural gas, carbon capture and storage and critical minerals.The former NT Labor government was criticised for promoting it as a “sustainable” development despite documents revealing officials considered it a “key enabler” for a large gas industry expansion.Much of the public scrutiny of the project has focused on its potential contribution to the climate crisis and whether $1.5bn in federal support backed by Labor and the Coalition is effectively a fossil fuel subsidy.But a preliminary assessment by the NT government shows the project would cause significant damage to local wildlife.It would include the “loss of key high tide roosting habitats” for the far eastern curlew and the endangered bar-tailed godwit – another migratory species – as saltpans and mangroves were cleared and reclaimed. Far eastern curlews rely on these areas for foraging and roosting.Dr Amanda Lilleyman, a shorebird expert and BirdLife Top End volunteer based in Darwin, said the Middle Arm development’s potential impact on the species was concerning and consistent with the loss of its coastal habitat around the world. “This has been the direct cause of the population declines over the last 40 years,” she said.Far eastern curlews have ‘been hammered by habitat destruction up and down the entire flyway for the past 40 years’, one expert says. Photograph: Manoj Kutty Padeettathil ManilalThe far eastern curlew is also likely to be harmed by land clearing under way for a defence housing project at Lee Point, north of Darwin, where the birds feed and rest.The federal environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, last year rejected a proposed apartment and marina development at Toondah Harbour in Queensland’s Moreton Bay because of its impact on an internationally significant wetland used by far eastern curlews and other endangered migratory species.Toondah Harbour was designated worthy of protection under the Ramsar convention, a global treaty covering wetlands. The salt pans and intertidal zones of Darwin Harbour are not subject to the treaty. But Lilleyman said they still needed protection.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Clear Air AustraliaAdam Morton brings you incisive analysis about the politics and impact of the climate crisisPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionShe said the curlew’s survival required all governments of countries within its east Asian-Australasian flyway to act.“The survival of threatened migratory species is dependent on the sum of all of those habitat parts,” she said. “If all of the important habitat is protected then you’re starting to get on track for reversing the decline of the species.”Sean Dooley, a senior adviser at BirdLife Australia, said far eastern curlews had “been hammered by habitat destruction up and down the entire flyway for the past 40 years”.He said Australia’s national environmental law, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, was “failing the species badly” because it did not factor in cumulative impacts of habitat loss in different places.Dooley said damage from numerous developments added up to a “serious blow to the viability of the population”. “The idea that they can always just go somewhere else just doesn’t stack up any more and every remaining suitable habitat becomes even more precious,” he said.The NT minister for logistics and infrastructure, Bill Yan, said an environment assessment was being done but the Country Liberal party government was “committed to rebuilding the economy through the development of the Middle Arm precinct”.He said the assessment was identifying “the potential cumulative impacts of the precinct on environmental values and developing ways to protect them”, and it was inappropriate to draw conclusions before it was complete.Dooley said protecting remaining far eastern curlew habitat would be “an act of hope for the future” that the species can be not just saved but could “return and recover”.“The wonder of the curlew’s migration unites cultures across the flyway, their annual return a potent symbol of hope and renewal,” he said. “To consent to further habitat destruction obliterates that hope of a rich and balanced future.”

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