Removal

Following this week’s news that Universal Music Group is pulling its song catalog from TikTok after failing to reach a new licensing deal with the social media platform, Jack Antonoff gave an unvarnished reaction to the sudden removal after winning producer of the year (non-classical) at Sunday’s 2024 Grammys. Antonoff frequently collaborates with UMG artist Taylor Swift, whose songs vanished from the platform on Wednesday. “You got a whole industry being like, ‘You’ve got to do everything; you’ve got…

The silencing of Universal Music Group’s artists on TikTok has become the talk of the music industry ahead of the Grammys, as fans and UMG-signed artists have been vocal about the licensing rift between the major label and the massively popular social media app. Of the artists who have thus far talked publicly about the rift, none have so spoken out in a way to provoke either party; instead, the singers impacted have approached the situation with humor and optimism. Noah Kahan, signed to Universal label…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Governments and businesses are relying on dangerous amounts of future removal of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, instead of more rapidly reducing emissions and phasing out fossil fuels. This problem is partly due to an incomplete picture of the damaging consequences of carbon dioxide removal for people, food security and natural ecosystems, according to new research published in…

Fans of Universal Music Group’s artists, including Taylor Swift, Nicki Minaj, and Olivia Rodrigo, are not pleased that the record label group has ceased to license its music to TikTok. The day after UMG threatened to stop licensing its music to the social media platform amid a breakdown in deal negotiations, songs from UMG‘s unparalleled stable of artists began vanishing from the social media platform. The removals started gradually late Wednesday evening as official versions of UMG-owned recordings, such as …

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Late last year, Apple announced it would stop selling the Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 in the US as the International Trade Commission (ITC) issued a ban on the two devices. The watches were found to infringe pulse oximetry patents from Masimo, hence the ban. The Biden administration chose not to veto the ruling, and the ban seemed inevitable.However, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit saved Apple by accepting an interim stay on the ban as the court reviewed Apple’s request for a full…

The carbon removal industry is just starting to take off, but some experts are warning that it’s already headed in the wrong direction.  Two former staffers of the US agency responsible for advancing the technology argue that the profit-driven industry’s focus on cleaning up corporate emissions will come at the expense of helping to pull the planet back from dangerous levels of warming. They warn that carbon dioxide removal isn’t a product that any person or company “needs,” in the traditional market sense. Rather, it…

“CDR cannot succeed at restorative and reparative goals if it is controlled by the same forces that created the problems it is trying to solve,” write Grubert and Talati, executive director of the Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering. There is evidence that some companies have come to perceive carbon removal in the way that the authors describe.  Earlier this year, Vicki Hollub, the chief executive of the oil and gas company Occidental, which recently acquired a direct-air capture company, told the…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain As delegates gather in Dubai at the COP28 climate conference—with the aim to ratchet up ambition towards meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement—a key component of these efforts are countries' pledges to achieve net-zero emissions around mid-century. Net-zero carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions refers to a balance between…

Imagine all carbon removal technology as one big time machine, winding the clock back on emissions. If the world is emitting just under 40 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in a year, how far back in time could this year’s total carbon removal take us? Right now, the answer is somewhere around 10 seconds.  We eventually need to reach net-zero emissions if we’re going to avoid the worst effects of climate change. And it’s pretty clear that 10 seconds is a pretty far cry from being enough to zero out a year’s worth of…