Equilibrium/Sustainability — Vulnerability identified in energy, space networks

A team of researchers say they have exposed a major vulnerability in a networking technology widely used by spacecraft, aircraft and energy generation systems. 

The scientists launched an attack, called “PCspooF,” on a network protocol and hardware system called time-triggered Ethernet.

This system reduces costs by enabling mission-critical devices (like flight controls) to coexist with less-important devices (like passenger WiFi) on the same network hardware, the researchers explained.

That coexistence had long been deemed safe due to a design that prevented the two types of traffic from interfering with each other. But PCspooF was able to break that isolation.

The researchers said they used NASA hardware to recreate a planned asteroid redirection test, involving a simulated crewed capsule that was about to dock with a robotic spacecraft.  

With one malicious device, the scientists said they were able to introduce disruptive messages into the system — creating a cascading effect that ultimately sent the capsule off course.  

“We wanted to determine what the impact would be in a real system,” Baris Kasikci, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, said in a statement.  

The attack emulated so-called “network switches” — or what the researchers described as “high-stakes traffic controllers” in time-triggered Ethernet networks.  

The hackers began by sending out fake synchronization messages and conducting electromagnetic interference into the network switch over an Ethernet cable. The resultant noise then created enough of a gap in the spacecraft cyber-defenses to let the malicious message pass through. 

The team disclosed the findings in 2021 to relevant organizations, who were “receptive about adopting mitigations,” according to Andrew Loveless, a University of Michigan doctoral student and subject area expert at the NASA Johnson Space Center.

“To our knowledge, there is not a current threat to anyone’s safety because of this attack,” Loveless said. 

Welcome to Equilibrium, a newsletter that tracks the growing global battle over the future of sustainability. We’re Saul Elbein and Sharon Udasin. Send us tips and feedback. A friend forward this newsletter to you?

Today we’ll start with Biden administration’s decision to allocate $250 million toward energy efficiency upgrades and building retrofits. Then we’ll present five things to know as the world welcomes its 8 billionth baby. Plus: how empowering women could tamper the negative effects of population growth.  

Feds approve $250M for energy efficiency upgrades

The Biden administration announced on Tuesday that it will be allocating $250 million toward energy efficiency upgrades of commercial and residential buildings. 

Audits, upgrades, retrofits: The Department of Energy will be accepting applications for these resources from all 50 states, five U.S. territories and the District of Columbia, through the Energy Efficiency Revolving Loan Fund Capitalization Grant Program. 

• The program is an initiative of the bipartisan infrastructure law passed last year.
  
• Governments will be able to use grants to establish “revolving loan funds” — or pools of capital from which loans can be made for clean energy projects. 
  
• They can then direct these funds toward energy audits, energy efficiency upgrades and retrofits of residential and commercial buildings. 

Toward an equitable energy economy: “Energy efficiency is one of the most cost-effective and easiest to deploy solutions we have to combat climate change and reduce energy costs,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a statement. 

The grant program aims to advance President Biden’s goals of building an equitable and affordable clean energy economy, according to the Energy Department. 

Tackling underinvestment: States can also use up to 25 percent of the resources for grants and technical assistance to low-income homeowners and small businesses, the Energy Department said.

The agency said it would be working with states to prioritize those communities that have faced underinvestment in energy efficiency deployment.

Maximizing impact: Funding will be available in a format that fosters greater impact in areas with higher energy consumption and carbon emissions, according to the Energy Department. 

• Forty percent of the funds will be allocated to all state energy offices per the State Energy Program formula.  
  
• The other 60 percent will go to a subset of priority states. 

To read the full story, please click here.

First Republican enters race to take on Manchin

Republican Rep. Alex Mooney (W.Va.) on Tuesday announced his plan to challenge Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) in 2024, our colleague Alexander Bolton reported. 

Mooney singled out Manchin’s support for President Biden’s climate package as a key avenue of attack in an interview with the West Virginia Metro News.

Poison bill: That climate package is a a key reason there’s a target on the sitting senator’s back, as we have reported. 

• Mooney’s announcement comes less than a week after winning a fifth House term.
  
• He previously defeated Conservative Climate Caucus incumbent and Manchin ally David McKinley in the primaries, as we reported.
  
• Manchin sits on a key perch affecting climate and energy issues serving as chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

Difference of opinion: While Manchin is one of the chamber’s most conservative Democrats, Mooney attacked him as “Biden’s chief enabler” in the Metro News interview for his support of climate stimulus spending.  

• “I think he’s a liberal Democrat and West Virginia doesn’t deserve that anymore and it has to be changed,” Mooney told MetroNews. 
  
• Mooney is likely to face a crowded primary race against Manchin — and his early announcement will help him raise money, Bolton reported. 

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Five things to know amid 8 billionth baby milestone 

The world added its 8 billionth person on Tuesday, according to projections from the United Nations.

The milestone comes just 11 years after the global population hit 7 billion. It’s a development that points both to surging progress in global public health and serious challenges for the future.

Here are five things to know: 

1. Driving growth: Rising life expectancy and continued high birth rates in the low-income world powered the increase, according to the U.N. 

• About 700 million of the roughly 1 billion people added since 2011 are in low- and middle-income countries.
  
• About 900 million of the next billion are projected to come from poorer countries, largely in Africa and Asia.

2. Larger human impact: The burgeoning population poses a serious challenge to biodiversity and other goals, while it also puts a focus on social inequality.

• In the past 50 years, as human populations have doubled, wildlife populations have dropped by 70 percent, according to the Center for Biological Diversity. 
  
• In a world where a handful of billionaires have roughly as much wealth as the bottom 50 percent of people combined, “runaway inequality is a choice,” Secretary-General António Guterres wrote in an essay. 
  
• “Unless we bridge the yawning chasm between the global haves and have-nots, we are setting ourselves up for an 8-billion-strong world filled with tensions and mistrust, crisis and conflict,” Guterres added.

Population growth is a poor marker of a country’s ecological footprint. The countries with the lowest birth rates tend to have the highest greenhouse gas emissions, according to the U.N. 

3. Birth control isn’t a sole solution: Groups like the Center for Biological Diversity urged increased support for birth control. 

But even with aggressive promotion of birth control, there is enough momentum behind population growth to keep populations increasing for decades, according to a recent U.N. policy brief.

• The world is expected to hit 9 billion by 2037 — a lower rate of increase than the previous billion, The Hill reported. 
  
• Populations should level off around 10.4 billion by the 2080s, according to CNN. 

4. Population growth is a mixed blessing: Growing populations in lower-income countries in Africa and Asia are straining societal systems from education to energy. 

But if properly supported, they will also be a key driver of future growth — particularly as populations in (currently) wealthier countries age, Guterres noted. 

• Declining populations are also a challenge for countries like China, which has too few young people to support its enormous, aging cadre of seniors, Reuters reported. 
  
• “Why would you have more babies when the people you have cannot even get jobs?” Stuart Gietel Basten of the University of Science and Technology in Hong Kong told Reuters

5. Urgent fertility crisis: Hidden behind the population records is a quiet, accelerating collapse in male fertility, according to a paper published on Tuesday in the journal Human Reproduction Update.

• “Our findings serve as a canary in a coal mine. We have a serious problem on our hands that, if not mitigated, could threaten humankind’s survival,” lead author Hagai Levine told The Times of Israel.
  
• While sperm counts have been dropping for decades, the decline rate has more than doubled in the last 20 years.

What’s causing male fertility decline? One major factor could be endocrine-disrupting chemicals, coauthor Shanna Swan, of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told The Financial Times. 

• These have particularly dire impacts on reproductive function, Swan noted. 

View past coverage on how chemicals in food packaging and fossil fuels were linked to declines in male fertility.

Empowering women to alleviate population pressure

As the world’s population topped 8 billion on Tuesday, global leaders agreed that investing in women and girls will play a key role in mitigating the negative effects of rising population pressure.

A smart decision: “Investing in women is not just the right thing to do, but it’s the smart thing to do,” Anita Bhatia, assistant secretary-general and deputy executive director of U.N. Women, said during a virtual dialogue on Tuesday.  

• “Resources going towards women, both as a percentage of overall development aid, but also as a percentage of national budgets, is very low,” she added. 
  
• Bhatia was speaking at a forum on the role of women and girls in sustainable development, hosted by Foreign Policy and the nonprofit Population Institute.  

Income, security, health: Acknowledging that some conditions for women have improved, Bhatia stressed that the coronavirus pandemic exacerbated several issues:

• Income, due to huge drops in employment and the capacity to earn money. 
  
• Security and women’s safety. 
  
• Women’s health, as governments pivoted toward dealing with the pandemic.  

“You can’t really tell a woman who needs an abortion, please come back in six months,” Bhatia said.  

Climate change is also a factor: “The issue of climate is having impacts both on women’s ability to contribute and participate in an economy because drought, in many cases, is creating climate refugees,” Bhatia continued. 

Women, she said, are “so badly affected because they are the ones who are the largest part of the refugee population.” 

Optimizing growth: Ratna Sahay, senior advisor on gender for the International Monetary Fund, stressed that with population growth also comes “a huge opportunity to benefit from empowering women.” 

• By empowering women economically, governments will see greater economic growth, lower income inequality and more financial resilience, she explained.  
  
• In some parts of the world, these democratic changes will result in populations risings, while advanced countries may experience population decline, according to Sahay.    

Importance of school: Educating girls from a young age “will have a very huge impact on this population,” added Habiba Mohammed, direct for the Center for Girls Education in Nigeria. 

• Her center found that when a girl is married young, she tends to still be giving birth at age 50.  
  
• “Allowing her to have a free, safe and quality education will enhance the issue of controlling population,” Mohammed said.  

Successes and failures: The fact that the global population has reached 8 billion is also a “major success” story because this means “many more women who survive giving birth,” said Ib Petersen, deputy executive director for the U.N. Population Fund.

“The challenge for the governments is that these successes and the effects of that [are] not equally distributed in the world,” Petersen added. 

Tech Tuesday

Climate tech surges amid tech industry layoffs, the challenges of cutting China out of the U.S. solar supply chain and biodegradable water bottles are coming to Los Angeles.

Climate tech soaking up laid-off software engineers 

• Thousands of software engineers laid off from companies like Meta and Twitter in recent years could find a “soft landing” in the burgeoning field of climate tech, Protocol reported. For some of the recently-released, “this is a blessing in disguise for them to go in and do something with impact that they care about,” climate-tech venture capitalist Raj Kapoor told Protocol. Thousands of jobs are posted here. 

Domestic solar supply chains are no easy task

• The Biden administration’s plans to bolster domestic solar power without depending on China will require the U.S. to create a photovoltaic supply chain “almost from scratch,” The Wall Street Journal reported. “How do we as the West manage to re-shore entire industries?” the chief commercial officer of one solar firm asked the Journal. 

Biodegradable water bottles hitting grocery shelves on Dec. 1 

• California-based startup Cove announced on Tuesday that its biodegradable water bottles will make their grocery store debut on Dec. 1, at Erewhon in Los Angeles. The biopolymer in the bottles, called PHA, is certified as biodegradable by testing firm TÜV Austria, according to Cove. The bottles will retail for $2.99, Bloomberg reported. 

Please visit The Hill’s Sustainability section online for the web version of this newsletter and more stories. We’ll see you tomorrow.