The article investigates the role the oil and gas industry has played in climate change. Two-thirds of global industrial greenhouse gas emissions over the past two centuries can be traced to the ...activities of a handful of companies, most of which belong to this industry. Emissions generated by oil and gas companies’ products and processes have significantly increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. To add to this, some of the oil and gas majors have funded, shaped, and advanced climate denial. Through this behaviour, these companies have besmirched the entire industry and substantially contributed to paralysing global climate policy for decades. In brief, the oil and gas industry has – either directly through emissions or indirectly through denial – played a major role in anthropogenic climate change, the impacts of which are causing serious harm to humanity and the planet. This article carries out a review of the relevant literature in order to explore and justify this claim, as well as to lay the groundwork for analysing the consequent moral and political implications. It opens by overviewing the oil and gas industry, before going on to focus on the contentious and inconsistent process that led oil and gas companies to – grudgingly, and in a limited fashion – acknowledge climate change, a vivid testament to their awkward coexistence. Thereafter, the article turns its attention to the oil and gas companies’ direct contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions; and finally on how their efforts to upend accepted climate science through denial has been a powerful indirect contributing factor to climate change.
Increasing attention has been devoted in recent years to in situ sensing and monitoring of the electron beam melting process, ranging from seminal methods based on infrared imaging to novel methods ...based on backscattered electron detection. However, the range of available in situ monitoring capabilities and solutions is still quite limited compared to the wide number of studies and industrial toolkits in laser-based additive manufacturing processes. Some methods that are already industrially available in laser powder bed fusion systems, such as in situ detection of recoating errors, have not yet been investigated and tested in electron beam melting. Motivated by the attempt to fill this gap, we present a novel in situ monitoring methodology that can be easily implemented in industrial electron beam melting machines. The method is aimed at identifying local inhomogeneity and irregularities in the powder bed by means of layerwise image acquisition and processing, with no external illumination source apart from the light emitted by the hot material underneath the currently recoated layer. The results show that the proposed approach is suitable to detect powder bed anomalies, while also highlighting the link between the severity of in situ detected errors and the severity of resulting defects in the additively manufactured part.
Abstract
The success of stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) in limiting global heating requires the inclusion and maintenance of the political ideals of legitimacy and procedural justice. Without ...them, the prospects are slim that this institution can be developed and operated in the public interest in such a way that it will protect and promote social well-being by minimising climate-related harm. Long-term legitimacy and procedural justice are crucial to several sensitive features of SAI. They relate to openness, inclusivity, and independence in dealing both with external issues of concern to stakeholders representing the general public and with internal issues concerning agents directly involved in SAI. This article begins by outlining notions of legitimacy and procedural justice and the criteria appropriate for SAI. Then it investigates how the indications provided by the related standards and the consequent morally sound governance options advanced might warrant that SAI is not distorted in such ways that it serves the vested interests of private parties. Finally, the article outlines two recommendations for ensuring that legitimacy and procedural justice in SAI are achieved and maintained over time, so that it can work continuously in the public interest.
How Big Oil can transform itself into Big Green through reparation and decarbonization to rectify the harm it has done through fossil fuels. In From Big Oil to Big Green, Marco Grasso examines the ...responsibility of the oil and gas industry for the climate crisis and develops a moral framework that lays out its duties of reparation and decarbonization to allay the harm it has done. By framing climate change as a moral issue and outlining the industry's obligation to tackle it, Grasso shows that Big Oil is a central, yet overlooked, agent of climate ethics and policy. Grasso argues that by indiscriminately flooding the global economy with fossil fuels—while convincing the public that halting climate change is a matter of consumer choice, that fossil fuels are synonymous with energy, and that a decarbonized world would take civilization back to the Stone Age—Big Oil is morally responsible for the climate crisis. He explains that it has managed to avoid being held financially accountable for past harm and that its duty of reparation has never been theoretically developed or justified. With this book, he fills those gaps. After making the moral case for climate reparations and their implementation, Grasso develops Big Oil's duty of decarbonization, which entails its transformation into Big Green by phasing out carbon emissions from its processes and, especially, its products.
A consumption-based inventory can represent a promising accounting method for more effective collective action against carbon emissions. However, the current scientific debate has not yet proposed ...comprehensive analyses of the political features of consumption-based accounting. In particular, the ultimate objective of this article is to investigate the political feasibility of consumption-based accounting. The article argues that political feasibility is fundamental for gaining support and eventually fostering the development of widely acceptable, stable and effective consumption-based accounting systems. Specifically, the article first briefly investigates the potential of consumption-based carbon inventories. It then frames and scrutinizes political feasibility according to the normative and positive perspectives relevant to understanding the actual possibility of shifting from the current production- to consumption-based accounting. Finally the article, in light of the evidence provided by the analysis carried out, takes a prescriptive turn and indicates how politically feasible governance systems for consumption-based accounting may be forged and successfully put into practice.
The paper discusses Baatz’s work (2018) published in a recent issue of this journal. It first considers the proposed framework of justice within which to evaluate instruments for adaptation finance; ...it then develops the framework’s criteria of fairness and feasibility further; finally, it proposes an option for increasing the capacity of Baatz’s framework to ensure that instruments for adaptation finance operate in a just way.
The layerwise production paradigm entailed in laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) offers the opportunity to acquire a wide range of information about the process stability and the part quality while the ...part is being manufactured. Different authors pointed out that high-resolution imaging of each printed layer combined with image segmentation methods can be used to detect powder recoating errors together with surface and geometrical defects. The paper presents the first study aimed at characterizing the accuracy of in-situ contour identification in LPBF layerwise images by means of a measurement system performance characterization. Different active contours segmentation methods are compared, and the sources of variability of the resulting measurements are investigated in terms of repeatability, part-to-part and build-to-build variability. The study also analyses and compares the sensitivity of in-situ measurements to different lighting conditions and laser scan directions. The results show that, by combining appropriate image pre-processing and segmentation algorithms with suitable lighting configurations, a high measurement repeatability can be achieved, i.e., a pure error that is up to one order of magnitude lower than the total measurement variability. This performance enables the detection of major geometric deviations and it paves the way to the design of statistical in-situ quality monitoring tools that rely on layerwise image segmentation.
Prostate cancer is one of the most widespread neoplasms affecting the male gender. The most commonly used procedures in various urological centers are laparoscopic and robotic surgery because they ...are considered minimally invasive techniques. We present our experience in traditional open radical prostatectomy performed under spinal anesthesia.
We reviewed the clinical courses of 88 consecutive patients who underwent open radical prostatectomy performed under spinal anesthesia at our Institution.
Median age: 67.7 years. Median follow up duration: 48 months. Median pre-operative PSA: 15,9 ng/ml, median Prostate weight: 44.5 gr, median surgical time: 96.5 minutes (range 55-138). Perioperative complications were recorded. The most frequent complication was anemia, 9 cases need blood transfusion after surgery. Complications directly related to spinal anesthesia were not observed. Most patients were discharged within 5 days from the procedure. After two weeks we observed a quick recovery of total continence in 90% of patients. After 6 months all patients were perfectly continent. Erectile dysfunction after 6 months was reported by 48 patients.
The reasons why the gold standard of radical prostatectomy surgery has been considered general anesthesia are essentially two: the long duration of the surgical procedure and the associated significant blood loss. Multiple evidences show that radical retropubic prostatectomy can be safely performed under spinal anaesthesia with various advantages. It is therefore no longer justified to consider general anesthesia as the gold standard for radical prostatectomy with an open technique.
A novel technique for ship wake detection has been recently proposed and applied on X-band Synthetic Aperture Radar images provided by COSMO/SkyMed and TerraSAR-X. The approach shows that the vast ...majority of wake features are correctly detected and validated in critical situations. In this paper, the algorithm was applied to 28 wakes imaged by Sentinel-1 mission with different polarizations and incidence angles with the aim of testing the method’s robustness with reference to radar frequency and resolution. The detection process is properly modified. The results show that the features were correctly classified in 78.5% of cases, whereas false confirmations occur mainly on Kelvin cusps. Finally, the results were compared with the algorithm performance on X-band images, showing that no significant difference arises. In fact, the total false confirmations rate was 15.8% on X-band images and 18.5% on C-band images. Moreover, since the main criticality concerns again the false confirmation of Kelvin cusps, the same empirical criterion suggested for the X-band SAR images yielded a negligible 1.5% of false detection rate.
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