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Willow Project

Top 10 Things to Know

Correcting the Myths and Misinformation

After decades of study, research and planning, Willow is the ideal project for a rational energy policy that supports the energy transition and U.S. energy security by producing reliable, low emissions-intensity oil from a petroleum reserve. Unfortunately, there is a lot of misinformation about the project. Here, we compile a list of key facts about Willow to address myths and correct misinformation.

1. The Willow project is not a “carbon bomb.”

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) estimates that Willow will create only a fraction of 1% of all U.S. emissions.

The vast majority of those – approximately 0.1% of 2019 U.S. annual emissions, or 0.3% of anticipated 2030 U.S. annual emissions – will come from consumer end-use products such as gasoline for cars, diesel for tractors and fuel oil for home heating. These emissions, known as “Scope 3 emissions,” are not from sources owned or controlled by ConocoPhillips. In other words, even if Willow weren’t developed, these emissions would still occur because fuel is still needed in the United States – but in that case the economic benefits of producing the needed energy would accrue elsewhere.

• Willow will use modern technology and practices to minimize operational greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Government data indicates Willow direct (Scope 1 and Scope 2) emissions from the Final SEIS would be lower than 709 other GHG emitters in the U.S.
• The BLM concluded that Willow’s annualized direct and net indirect emissions (4.3 million tonnes per year) are comparable to approximately one theoretical coal-fired power plant.

2. The Willow project will not use “chillers.”

Responsible North Slope development – including Willow infrastructure – uses what are known as passive thermosyphons, which allow ground heat to transfer out of the permafrost. These devices are not “chillers” as some have falsely claimed. They are standard Arctic engineering devices that have been in use since the 1960s, and are commonly used when constructing buildings, railroads, bridges and subsistence ice cellars. They require no external power supply.

• Passive thermosyphons are simple devices, usually vertical sealed pipes that are partially embedded in the permafrost. Pressurized two-phase gas (typically natural refrigerants such as CO 2 or NH 3 ) moves through the sealed closed-loop system, driven by the difference in temperature between the cold winter air and the warmer ground temperature. As the vapor/condensate moves, heat is transferred out of the permafrost. Read more about thermosyphons and how they work here .

3. Alaska Native groups support the Willow project.

The North Slope and Alaska Native communities closest to Willow have voiced strong support for the project. In order to gather comments on the project from the people closest to Willow’s proposed site, ConocoPhillips participated in multiple years of engagement including over 150 in-person meetings with local residents and stakeholders, and the BLM held 25 public hearings in Anchorage, Fairbanks, Nuiqsut, Utqiagvik, Atqasuk and Anaktuvuk Pass. Feedback from these meetings shaped the design of the project.

• Ensuring Willow will have minimal impact on the subsistence lifestyle of Alaska Native residents is a priority. As a result, many subsistence mitigation measures were built into the project design, including road access for local community members, boat launches, subsistence road pullouts and subsistence trails.
• Multi-year baseline studies in the Willow area found subsistence harvests have remained at or above previous levels for the duration of ConocoPhillips existing operations near Nuiqsut. These studies will continue throughout the Willow project’s lifetime.

4. The Willow project is on land that the federal government designated for petroleum development and is subject to strict environmental protection requirements.

Willow is located on the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A) , land which was set aside 100 years ago specifically for petroleum development. Roughly the size of Indiana, the NPR-A covers approximately 23 million acres. The Willow gravel footprint is 385 acres, which is less than 0.002% of the total NPR-A. In the area where development will occur, activities are comprehensively regulated to protect air, water, wildlife and other valuable public resources.

• The BLM NPR-A Integrated Activity Plan outlines hundreds of mandatory mitigation and study requirements. Additionally, the inaugural state of Alaska sustainability report, “The Alaska Standard,” details the strict environmental protections in place, including anti-flaring regulations and spill prevention.

5. Willow was designed to co-exist with wildlife.

ConocoPhillips maintains strict operational requirements for wildlife protection, building on a four-decade track record of continuous engineering improvements to avoid and minimize wildlife impacts in our operating fields on the North Slope. Science-based engineering design features at Willow include seven-foot-high pipelines as well as road and pipeline separation to allow for continued caribou movement and herd distribution. Additionally, to minimize the risk of hazards to birds, there are no power lines at Willow.

All permanent Willow infrastructure is outside of designated polar bear critical habitat. Polar bears are not expected in the Willow area, which is inland from the coast. Willow was also designed to have minimal impacts on fish and to subsistence fishers. Facilities are designed to be greater than 500 feet from fish-bearing water.

• The company works with respected scientific firms on a variety of studies and monitoring programs including air quality, wildlife (caribou, birds, polar bears and fish), archaeology, subsistence, habitat mapping, hydrology and water quality. These studies and data are provided to regulatory agencies in connection with permitting and to document compliance and are reflected in the Willow project plans. Reports from these studies and monitoring efforts are available to the public on the North Slope Science Initiative website .

6. Alaska’s entire bipartisan U.S. Congressional delegation supports the Willow project.

Alaska’s entire U.S. Congressional delegation — Democrats and Republicans — supports Willow because of the benefits it will provide to the state of Alaska and Alaska Native communities, while also enhancing U.S. energy security.

• Hear from the bipartisan Alaskan U.S. Congressional delegation here .
• Hear from the first Alaska Native representative in Congress, Representative Mary Peltola, here .

7. The Alaska legislature unanimously approved the Willow project.

The Alaska state legislature unanimously adopted a resolution supporting Willow, urging President Biden and the Department of Interior to approve the project.

• Read the Alaska State Legislature’s unanimous resolution in support of the Willow project, here .

8. The Willow project will provide critical revenues for Alaska starting on day one.

Willow could generate between $8 billion and $17 billion in new revenue for the North Slope Borough and local communities, as well as the state of Alaska and the federal government, according to U.S. BLM estimates. The project is also projected to create 2,500 construction jobs and 300 long-term jobs.

• Federal legislation requires 50% of federal revenue from the NPR-A be made available through the NPR-A Impact Mitigation Grant Program to local communities , which provides significant social and environmental justice benefits by funding city operations, youth programs and essential community projects which in turn create local jobs.
• Property taxes from the Willow project will help fund essential services such as schools, emergency response capabilities, health clinics, drinking water, wastewater, roads, power and solid waste disposal.

9. The Willow project will reduce American dependence on foreign oil.

The BLM found that if Willow doesn’t proceed, 52% of the replacement energy will be oil imported from foreign sources . Most, if not all, of the foreign sources would have lower environmental and GHG standards — and must be transported to the U.S., an additional emissions impact.

This information is detailed in the BLM market substitution analysis . Simply put, Willow’s projected production will reduce American reliance on foreign supply and support U.S. energy security by producing reliable, low emissions-intensity oil from an existing petroleum reserve.

10. The world will need oil for decades to come.

Credible net-zero projections show significant demand for oil for decades to come. The International Energy Agency’s “Net Zero by 2050” pathway shows global oil demand at 24 million barrels per day in 2050 – considerably less than today but also approximately twice what is currently produced by the U.S. During the transition, energy should come from the best possible projects and sources.

• Given this reality, it’s important to develop projects that adhere to strict environmental standards. The Willow project was studied for years before its eventual permitting and evolved based on input from Alaska Native residents and results from baseline studies.
• ConocoPhillips acquired the first Willow-area leases in 1999 and began the development permitting process in 2018. Since then, the project has undergone multiple years of rigorous regulatory review and environmental analysis.
• If Willow were not developed, other countries would produce that oil to meet demand, which means we would be sending jobs, tax revenue and other economic benefits to other countries.

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The Willow Project

Environmental and climate activists are using the internet to protest against a plan to drill for oil and gas in the US state of Alaska by a company called ConocoPhillips. The leader of their country, President Joe Biden, is trying to decide if he should allow this plan to go ahead. Many people have signed a petition online to say they don’t want the plan to happen , as well as sharing messages on social media with the hashtag #StopWillow to show their support for the cause. In recent weeks, there have been 50 million direct views of #StopWillow videos on TikTok alone.

While the project has supporters and opponents in its home state, it has become a lightning rod on social media. Over the past week, TikTok users have galvanized around halting the project, with a staggering number of people watching and posting on the topic.

What is the Willow Project?

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A road and oil pipeline on Alaska’s North Slope

ConocoPhillips plans to spend $6 billion to dig for oil and gas in the North Slope Borough, Alaska. The place they want to extract oil is called the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, a huge land area that people haven’t touched. It’s on the North Slope of Alaska, the biggest piece of untouched wilderness in the USA.

The proposed location of The Willow Project

Will the Willow Project be approved?

President Joe Biden’s team has said they will allow a smaller version of the project. The people responsible for looking after the land, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), have looked at the plans and decided they like one option the most. This option would have fewer drill sites, a block on Arctic Ocean drilling and less surface development than the original ConocoPhillips plan. The company had wanted to dig in five different places and build many roads, seven bridges and pipes to transport the oil. A judge in Alaska had said that the original decision was not good enough because they didn’t think about the environment properly. A final decision about the project could be made soon, maybe even this month.

Why is the Willow Project important for Alaska?

The Willow project area holds an estimated 600 million barrels of oil, or more than the amount currently held in the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the country’s emergency supply.

The project is important to Alaska’s economy. Oil production has declined in the state, which relies heavily on drilling.

ConocoPhillips said the project would deliver up to $17 billion in revenue for the national (federal) and local (state) governments and Alaska communities.

The Biden administration has also been urging U.S. oil companies to invest in boosting production to help keep the price of oil low for consumers.

Is there support for the Willow Project?

There is widespread political support in Alaska, including from those in power — Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy and state lawmakers.

There also is “majority consensus” in support in the North Slope region, said Nagruk Harcharek. He is president of the group Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat, whose members include leaders from across much of that region.

Willow’s supporters – including a coalition of Alaska Natives on the North Slope – say Willow could be a much-needed new source of revenue for the region and help fund schools, health care and other basic services. Supporters have called the project balanced and say communities would benefit from taxes generated by it. They say these would be used to invest in infrastructure and provide public services.

In recent weeks, several Alaska Native groups have also travelled to Washington for routine meetings that have often become about Willow and the state’s oil industry. Although some in the nearest town to Willow, Nuiqsut, are concerned about the project’s local impacts, many Alaska Natives stand to receive a slice of the revenue, which they say will help reduce poverty and boost generational wealth.

What is the Environmental Impact?

The BLM feel that a slimmed-down version of the project would be better for animals like polar bears and yellow-billed loons. This is because removing the most ecologically sensitive site in the project reduces the number of drilling sites from three to two. ConocoPhillips would need to shrink its development footprint by about 12 per cent to protect a yellow-billed loon nesting site and caribou migration paths.

Environmentalists are still against the project because they think it goes against what President Biden promised to do to help with climate change. They also think it would affect the land and the animals that live there through the construction of hundreds of miles of roads and pipelines carving through often pristine wilderness.

By the government’s estimates, the project would generate enough oil to release 9.2 million metric tons of planet-warming carbon pollution a year – equivalent to adding 2 million gas-powered cars to the roads. Over 30 years, climate groups have estimated it would release around 278 million metric tons of carbon pollution, which is more than 70 coal-fired power plants could produce annually.

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What’s the Willow project? An explainer on the battle over the major Alaska oil proposal

The Biden administration is weighing  approval of a major oil project  on Alaska’s petroleum-rich North Slope that supporters say represents an economic lifeline for Indigenous communities in the region but environmentalists say is counter to President Joe Biden’s climate goals.

A decision on ConocoPhillips Alaska’s Willow project, in a federal oil reserve roughly the size of Indiana, could come by early March.

Q: What is the Willow project?

A: The project could produce up to 180,000 barrels of oil a day, according to the company — about 1.5% of total U.S. oil production. But in Alaska, Willow represents the biggest oil field in decades. Alaska Republican U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan said the development could be “one of the biggest, most important resource development projects in our state’s history.”

On average, about 499,700 barrels of oil a day flow through the trans-Alaska pipeline, well below the late-1980s peak of 2.1 million barrels.

ConocoPhillips Alaska had proposed five drilling sites as part of the project. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management in early February identified up to three drill sites initially as a preferred alternative, which ConocoPhillips Alaska said it considered a viable option. But the U.S. Interior Department, which oversees the bureau, took the unusual step of issuing a separate statement expressing “substantial concerns” with the alternative and the project.

The alternative showed extracting and using the oil from Willow would produce the equivalent of more than 278 million tons (306 million short tons) of greenhouse gases over the project’s 30-year life, roughly equal to the combined emissions from 2 million passenger cars over the same time period. It would have a roughly 2% reduction in emissions compared to ConocoPhillips’ favored approach.

Q: Is there support for Willow?

A: There is  widespread political support  in Alaska, including from the bipartisan congressional delegation, Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy and state lawmakers. There also is “majority consensus” in support in the North Slope region, said Nagruk Harcharek, president of the group Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat, whose members include leaders from across much of that region. Supporters have called the project balanced and say communities would benefit from taxes generated by Willow to invest in infrastructure and provide public services.

City of Nuiqsut Mayor Rosemary Ahtuangaruak, whose community of about 525 people is closest to the proposed development, is a prominent opponent who is worried about impacts on caribou and her residents’ subsistence lifestyles. But opposition there isn’t universal. The local Alaska Native village corporation has expressed support.

U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola, a Democrat who is Yup’ik, said there is “such consensus in the region and across Alaska that this project is a good project.” She hoped to make a case to Biden that the project would create well-paying union jobs.

Ahtuangaruak said she feels voices like hers are being drowned out.

Q. What are the politics of the decision?

Biden faces a dilemma that pits Alaska lawmakers against environmental groups and many Democrats in Congress who say the project is out of step with Biden’s goals to  slash planet-warming carbon emissions in half by 2030  and move to clean energy. Approval of the project would represent a betrayal by Biden, who  promised during the 2020 campaign to end new oil and gas drilling on federal lands,  environmentalists say.

Biden has made fighting climate change a top priority and backed a landmark law to accelerate expansion of clean energy such as wind and solar power, and move the U.S. away from the oil, coal and gas.

He faces attacks from Republican lawmakers who blame Biden for gasoline price spikes that occurred after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Q: Didn’t the Biden administration support Willow?

A: Justice Department attorneys in 2021 defended in court an environmental review conducted during the Trump administration that approved the project. But a federal judge later  found flaws with the analysis,  setting aside the approval and returning the matter to the land management agency for further work. That led to the review released in early February.

Alaska Republican U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski said she was concerned the Biden administration would “try to have it both ways” by issuing an approval but including so many restrictions it would render the project uneconomical.

Earthjustice, an environmental group, has encouraged project opponents to call the White House, urging Willow’s rejection.

Q: What about greenhouse gas emissions?

A: Federal officials under former President Donald Trump claimed increased domestic oil drilling would result in fewer net global emissions because it would decrease petroleum imports. U.S. companies adhere to stricter environmental standards than those in other countries, they argued.

After outside scientists rejected the claim and a federal judge agreed,  the Interior Department changed  how it calculates emissions.

The latest review, under the Biden administration, is getting pushback over its inclusion of a suggestion that 50% of Willow’s net emissions could be offset, including by planting more trees on national forests to capture and store carbon dioxide.  Reforestation work  on federal lands was something the administration already planned and needed to meet its broader climate goals, said Michael Lazarus, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute.

“That doesn’t help you meet a reduction goal. It’s absurd,” said Lazarus, whose work was cited by the judge who overruled the Trump-era environmental review. “It doesn’t address the fact that we’re increasing global emissions by doing this project. … We’re locking in emissions for 30 years into the future when we should be on a reduction schedule.”

Q: What about Biden’s promises to curtail oil drilling?

A: Biden  suspended oil and gas  lease sales after taking office and promised to overhaul the government’s fossil fuels program.

Attorneys general from oil-producing states convinced a federal judge to lift the suspension — a ruling later  overturned  by an appeals court. The administration ultimately dropped its resistance to leasing in a compromise over  last year’s climate law . The measure requires the Interior Department to offer for sale tens of millions of acres of onshore and offshore leases before it can approve any renewable energy leases.

The number of new drilling permits to companies with federal leases spiked in Biden’s first year as companies stockpiled drilling rights and officials said they were working through a backlog of applications from the Trump administration. Approvals dropped sharply in fiscal year 2022.

The Biden administration has offered less acreage for lease than previous administrations. But environmentalists say the administration hasn’t done enough.

U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland in a recent interview declined direct comment on Willow but said that “public lands belong to every single American, not just one industry.”

The Associated Press

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How Biden Got From ‘No More Drilling’ to Backing a Huge Project in Alaska

High gas prices, a looming election and fears of a costly legal battle seem to have shifted the political calculus for the president.

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By Lisa Friedman

WASHINGTON — As a candidate, Joseph R. Biden promised voters worried about the warming planet “No more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period, period.” On Monday, President Biden approved an enormous $8 billion plan to extract 600 million barrels of oil from pristine federal land in Alaska.

The distance between Mr. Biden’s campaign pledge and his blessing on that plan, known as the Willow project, is explained by a global energy crisis, intense pressure from Alaska lawmakers (including the state’s lone Democratic House member), a looming election year and a complicated legal landscape that government lawyers said left few choices for Mr. Biden.

Senator Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican and one of the chief advocates for Willow, which is projected to generate 2,500 jobs and millions in revenue for her state, said the president was inclined to oppose it and “needed to really be brought around.”

Mr. Biden was acutely aware of his campaign pledge, according to multiple administration officials involved in discussions over the past several weeks. Environmental activists had also openly warned that Mr. Biden’s climate record, which includes making landmark investments in clean energy, would be undermined if he approved Willow, and that young voters in particular could turn against him.

Approval of the Willow project marks a turning point in the administration’s approach to fossil fuel development. Until this point, the courts and Congress have forced Mr. Biden to sign off on some limited oil and gas leases. Willow would be one of the few oil projects that Mr. Biden has approved freely, without a court order or a congressional mandate.

And it comes as the International Energy Agency has said that governments must stop approving new oil, gas and coal projects if the planet is to avert the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.

Ultimately, the administration made the internal calculation that it did not want to fight ConocoPhillips, the company behind the Willow project.

ConocoPhillips has held leases to the prospective drilling site for more than two decades, and administration attorneys argued that refusing a permit would trigger a lawsuit that could cost the government as much as $5 billion, according to administration officials who asked not to be identified in order to discuss legal strategy.

“The lease does not give Conoco the right to do whatever they want, but it does convey certain rights,” said John Leshy, who served as the Interior Department’s solicitor under President Bill Clinton. “So the administration has to take that into account. I would not say their hands were tied, but their options were limited by the lease rights.”

The leases are basically a contract and if the Biden administration denied the permits, essentially breached the contract, without what a court considered a valid argument, a judge would likely find in favor of the company, Mr. Leshy said. It would be unusual for a court to simply order the government to issue permits; more likely a judge would award damages, he said.

That figure could include not just compensation for investments ConocoPhillips has already made but also profits that the company could have gotten if it had been allowed to drill, Mr. Leshy said, putting a potential judgment into the billions of dollars.

Ms. Murkowski said she believed the legal argument was the turning point for Mr. Biden. “There was no way around the fact that these were valid existing lease rights,” she said. “The administration was going to have to deal with that reality.”

To try to minimize the fallout, the Biden administration demanded concessions. It slashed the size of the project from five drilling sites to three. ConocoPhillips agreed to return to the government leases covering about 68,000 acres in the drilling area, which lies within the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. And the administration said it would put in place new protections for a nearby coastal wetland known as Teshekpuk Lake. Those measures would effectively form a “firewall” that would prevent the Willow project from expanding, the administration said.

Mr. Biden also intends to designate about 2.8 million acres of the Beaufort Sea in the Arctic Ocean near shore in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska as off limits for future oil and gas leasing. And the Interior Department plans to issue new rules to block oil and gas leases on more than 13 million of the 23 million acres that form the petroleum reserve.

But several of those measures could be revoked by a future administration, and none of them seemed to appease environmental groups, which termed the project a “carbon bomb.”

“The announcement is nothing more than window dressing,” Ben Jealous, president of the Sierra Club, said in an interview. “If President Biden were sitting here I’d tell him don’t spit on us and tell us that it’s raining, Mr. President.”

He called the Willow approval “a major breach of trust” and warned that with it, Mr. Biden has alienated many of his supporters, particularly young voters.

“ President Biden’s decision to move forward with the Willow Project abandons the millions of young people who overwhelmingly came together to demand he stop the project and protect our futures,” said Varshini Prakash, executive director of the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led climate change advocacy group.

Earthjustice, an environmental group, said it would sue to stop the project as soon as Wednesday and expects to be joined by several other organizations. Environmental groups argued that the administration had the legal authority to deny ConocoPhillips a permit and should have done so based on a federal environmental review that found “ substantial concerns ” about the project’s impact on the climate, the danger it poses to freshwater sources and the way it threatens migratory birds, caribou, whales and other animals that inhabit the region.

The Willow project would be constructed on the nation’s largest swath of undeveloped land, about 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

Some analysts said Mr. Biden’s decision could ultimately help him with moderates and independents, given elevated gas prices amid an energy crisis created by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Republican attacks that Democratic climate policies are jeopardizing American energy independence.

“I think the White House feels the president has strong climate credentials now, but that he does need to reach out to working class voters in swing states who care about gasoline prices,” said Paul Bledsoe, a former climate aide in the Clinton administration who now works at the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank.

But Mr. Bledsoe said he also thought the administration needed to make a stronger case publicly that the Willow project will not make a large contribution to the climate crisis.

“The problem with climate is not supply, it’s demand,” he said. “The world is awash in oil and other countries will supply the oil if we don’t. The question is, can we reduce demand through substitute technologies? And that’s where the administration has been very strong.”

The burning of oil produced by the Willow project would cause 280 million metric tons of carbon emissions, according to a federal analysis. On an annual basis, that would translate into 9.2 million metric tons of carbon pollution, equal to adding nearly two million cars to the roads each year. The United States, the second-biggest polluter on the planet after China, emits about 5.6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide annually.

A key factor was the widespread support Willow enjoyed from lawmakers of both parties, including Mary Peltola, a Democrat and the state’s first Alaska Native elected to Congress; labor unions; and most Indigenous groups in Alaska.

In 2021 the Biden administration defended a Trump-era decision to allow the Willow project to go forward. Last year, it issued a new draft environmental statement that signaled support for Willow and in February, a federal analysis telegraphed that the administration would look for ways to approve a limited version of the project.

When advocates met with Deb Haaland, the Interior secretary, in late February in a last-ditch attempt to persuade her to block the permits, she choked up twice and explained that her agency often had to make difficult choices, according to several people who were present. Ms. Haaland had fought the Willow project when she served as a member of Congress before joining the administration.

A few days later, Alaska lawmakers met with Mr. Biden. “I had had enough conversations with people to believe that there was a better-than-even chance it was going to go our way,” Ms. Murkowski said.

On Sunday night, Ms. Haaland’s deputy, Tommy Beaudreau, who grew up in Alaska and is friendly with many of the state’s lawmakers, called Ms. Murkowski and others to walk them through the decision, members of Congress said.

ConocoPhillips praised the approval and said the company expected to immediately begin construction on a gravel road to the drill sites. At its peak, Willow will produce about 180,000 barrels of oil a day, but it will be several years before the crude begins to flow.

Nevertheless, the company, oil industry leaders and the state’s lawmakers cast the approval as a signal that Mr. Biden agreed with their argument that he cannot demand the oil industry ramp up production to keep gas prices low while also imposing restrictions.

“Alaska cannot carry the burden of solving our global warming problems alone,” Ms. Peltola said.

Senator Dan Sullivan, Republican of Alaska, said administration officials have told lawmakers that they will defend the decision in court from environmental groups. Mr. Sullivan said the Alaska delegation and others were already preparing an amicus brief in defense of the decision.

“This is going to be the next hurdle, and it will be a big battle,” Mr. Sullivan said.

Lisa Friedman reports on federal climate and environmental policy from Washington. She has broken multiple stories about the Trump administration’s efforts to repeal climate change regulations and limit the use of science in policymaking. More about Lisa Friedman

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The Willow oil project debate comes down to this key climate change question

The Alaskan oil project is a symbol of a larger argument: What matters more, curbing demand or keeping fossil fuels in the ground?

When President Biden approved an $8 billion Alaskan oil drilling project on Monday, many reacted with outrage. “Wrong on every level,” Sen. Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon, wrote on Twitter. “This decision betrays Biden’s own climate promises,” Jeff Ordower, the North America director of the environmental organization 350.org, said in a statement.

During the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden had promised to prevent new oil and gas drilling on federal lands — a vow that runs contrary to his administration’s approval of ConocoPhillips’s operation, known as Willow, in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. In the weeks before the decision, environmentalists, activists, and young people united to try to block the project: For weeks, #StopWillow was even a trending topic on TikTok.

But the Willow project, which the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management estimates will produce 576 million barrels of oil over the course of 30 years, is a small stand-in for what is actually a much larger debate. In recent years, the Democratic Party — and, by extension, the climate movement — has been divided on a key question. What matters more — cutting fossil fuel demand, by encouraging consumers to shift to things like renewable energy and electric vehicles, or tamping down on supply by preventing oil and gas drilling in the United States?

The Biden administration, with its huge investments in a build-out of clean energy, has largely focused on the former. Activists who paddle their kayaks out to ocean oil rigs or participate in climate marches tend to lean toward the latter. But who is actually right?

The ‘leakage’ argument

On the one hand, there is a kind of intuitive obviousness to the climate benefits of cutting fossil fuel supply: Surely if we don’t dig up oil and gas, no one can burn it and release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But the global oil market throws a wrench into that argument. “There’s plenty of oil and gas in the world,” said Samantha Gross, director of the energy security and climate initiative at the Brookings Institution. “If we don’t produce that oil, and there’s still demand for it, someone else will.”

In economics-speak, this is known as “leakage.” The idea is that if there is a decrease in fossil fuel supply — through a ban on drilling in one country, for example — fossil fuel prices will rise, and then another company will expand drilling elsewhere in the world. Simple supply and demand.

This also creates an accounting problem when assessing the project. Activists and opponents referred to the project as a “carbon bomb” — and indeed, according to a federal analysis released last month , the project would produce around 277 million metric tons of carbon dioxide during its lifetime, or around 9.2 million tons per year.

But that number assumes that, if the ConocoPhillips project didn’t go forward, no other oil companies would pick up the slack. Accounting for leakage, the Biden administration’s estimate for the additional CO2 from the project is closer to 70 million metric tons, or around 2.3 million tons per year — not nothing, but significantly smaller. (2.3 million tons would be around 0.03 percent of U.S. emissions in 2021.) The administration also estimates the project would release an additional 60 million tons of CO2 from increased oil consumption overseas.

Those who say supply doesn’t matter much point to these numbers as evidence that the real place to focus attention is on demand — shifting people over to electric vehicles, for example, or rapidly building up renewable energy. If people stop needing fossil fuels, they argue, there will be no need to extract them. “I ultimately think it’s more efficient and effective to go from the demand side,” Gross said.

The counterargument

But there’s another form of economic “leakage” as well. Brian Prest, an economist at the environmental group Resources for the Future, says that policies like electric vehicle tax credits or investments in clean energy can have unintended effects. If the government offers a $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicles, for example, that will push people away from gas-powered cars and reduce demand for fossil fuels — thus lowering the cost of oil and gas. Paradoxically, that can cause more fossil fuel use.

“If we use less gas in U.S. vehicles, that makes it cheaper for folks in other countries to consume more oil,” said Prest. “It’s conceptually symmetric.”

In a report published last year by Resources for the Future, Prest argued that the best approach is “both/and." If the United States encouraged consumers to shift away from fossil fuels, while at the same time taking careful measures to reduce extraction of oil and gas, fossil fuel prices would stay roughly constant — thus preventing “leakage” and leading to lower emissions overall. (His analysis doesn’t include possible external price shocks that could affect the oil market.)

The Biden administration, however, has not taken drastic steps to cut fossil fuel supply, even as the government spends hundreds of billions of dollars boosting clean energy. Some of this is politics: Mary Peltola, the first Alaskan Democrat elected to the House of Representatives in 50 years, supports the project.

Legal considerations also come into play. Once the federal government issues oil and gas leases, it becomes much harder to claw them back, and top administration officials feared that if they denied the Willow project outright they would face a lawsuit from ConocoPhillips, putting taxpayers potentially on the hook for billions of dollars.

So far the Biden administration’s strategy has framed climate change as many carrots and few sticks — cash incentives for clean energy, without halting oil and gas extraction outright. (The president has banned drilling in some place s, such as the waters that the United States controls in the Arctic Ocean.)

The debate also shows that the way the world counts carbon emissions matters a great deal. In the days after the decision, many outlets reported that the project’s estimated 9.2 millions tons of carbon dioxide per year were equivalent to adding roughly 2 million gas-powered cars onto the road. That’s true — and also not true. Most emissions are counted at the point of consumption — that is, when drivers put the oil in their cars and burn it for fuel. If we count the emissions both at the point of extraction and at the point of consumption, that amounts to double-counting.

But for activists and environmentalists, any amount of economic discussion doesn’t change a few simple facts: The United States has promised to reach net-zero carbon emissions, but is still extracting oil. Eventually — if the world is really going to stop emitting carbon dioxide — all fossil fuel production will have to halt. If not now, they might wonder, then when?

This piece has been updated.

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The Effects of the Willow Project on the World

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Max Schwartz '25 , Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy Follow Sarah Kumar '25 , Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy Follow Megan Vanhoof '25 , Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy Follow

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UN Sustainable Development Goal

UNSDG #13: Climate Action

26-4-2023 11:10 AM

26-4-2023 11:25 AM

On March 13, 2023, the Biden Administration approved the Willow project, despite the many protests against it. The Willow project is a large oil drilling project by ConocoPhillip is located in Northern Alaska, aiming to produce about 180k barrels of oil per day in order for the U.S. to decrease its dependence on foreign energy. It has been found that the negative effects of the Willow project will affect the world long term, affecting our environment detrimentally. As the project continues, about 278 million tonnes of CO2 will be produced in just the next 30 years, adding on to U.S. emissions. Pollution is already a very prevalent problem that we face today, and the Willow project will seemingly make it worse. With this amount of carbon dioxide being released into the air, holes in the Ozone layer will become larger, respiratory diseases will be caught at a faster rate, and plants and animals will struggle to survive. Not only will the environment be impacted by pollution, but so will the economy. Because of pollution, our economy will struggle immensely due to reduced workforce productivity, work absences, early deaths due to diseases, and decreasing crop yields. In our artifact, we display a drawing of the world, on the left side being the world as it is now, and the right side displaying the effects of the Willow project. This art piece represents how much the world will change due to the Willow project, and how difficult it would be to live in a world that has irreversible pollution. Our goal is to spread awareness about how harmful the Willow project will be for us in the future, so we must do something to prevent it from being executed.

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The Willow Project: Details, Impacts, and What You Can Do To Help

Photo by ConocoPhillips on CNN

An Explanation, Details, and Impacts

The Willow Project. The name might be familiar, as news about the Willow Project and its recent approval have been a prominent topic of discussion in the news lately; but what is actually happening and what are some effects that the project’s installation might have on the environment? It all dates back to 2016, when oil was discovered in the Willow prospect area of Alpine, Alaska. This location is home to the National Petroleum Reserve in the Plain of North Slope Alaska and is also home to a variety of Arctic wildlife and Native American communities. The Willow Project was initiated by the multinational corporation ConocoPhillips which proposed a massive oil and gas drilling project that will be the largest oil extraction put forward on federal lands to date. It is estimated that in the next 30 or so years, approximately 250 metric tons of CO 2 will be emitted into the atmosphere due to this plan.

Furthermore, if the Willow Project produces the expected amount of oil over a 30 year time period, it is estimated that the consumption of that oil would release the equivalent of 277 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The project could also produce up to 600 million barrels of oil, which would severely impact the Arctic wildlife and Native American communities in this region. For example, the Teshekpuk Lake caribou herd is an imperative source of food for the Nuiqsut community which resides nearby. Many in the community have expressed concern on how the oil and gas extraction have led to sick fish, malnourished animals used for food (such as caribou), and an unhealthy, borderline toxic air quality.  

These adverse effects produce a strong risk of damage to the complex local tundra ecosystem and shockingly, the release of these greenhouse gasses could amount to the estimated total amount of annual emissions from half a million homes. These drawbacks have not gone unnoticed; on March 14, 2023, the EarthJustice organization filed a lawsuit on behalf of conservation groups to stop the Willow Project. Despite these efforts, the Willow Project has been approved and ConocoPhillips has begun to work their plan into action. 

 So, what is the ConocoPhillips corporation and what is its background? This corporation has a complicated history, including many controversial legal settlements. In May of 2019, ConocoPhillips settled a lawsuit with homeowners in northwestern Oklahoma City who accused the company of polluting their soil and water to such a degree that no vegetation would grow; and, in May of 2017, ConocoPhillips agreed to a $39 million settlement to resolve complaints brought forward by the State of New Jersey over groundwater contamination. Most famously, they were one of the 50 companies named in a 2007 lawsuit filed against manufactures, distributors, and other industrial users of the gasoline additive and proven carcinogen MTBE, found in groundwater at locations throughout New Jersey. 

Photo by CBS News on CBS

What Can We Do?

The Willow Project is undoubtedly controversial, and has drawn both environmental and political debate since news of the project’s potential approval broke earlier this year. Discussions regarding the harmful effects that the Willow Project could potentially have on the environment have proved to be a key argument against its approval. Although the Willow Project has since been approved, there are still several actions that we can take both in our own communities and nationwide in order to stop work on the project from taking place. 

Take legislative action. Writing a letter to your local government representative, state legislation officials, and even the White House is an important step that you can take to demonstrate climate activism and work toward stopping the Willow Project in its entirety. While one letter may not seem to amount to much, if many individuals contribute to this common cause, it would make an immense difference.

Spread awareness. Whether it be through a social media post or sharing knowledge with your peers, spreading awareness is vital in order for every individual to understand what the Willow Project is and the effects that it could have on the environment. The more people know about the Willow Project and the ecological consequences that will follow, the greater the chance that important legislation will be enacted to prevent the project from taking place in Alaska. Together, we can make a difference. 

Volunteer with environmental protection groups. Today, there are several environmental protection organizations working to inform and act on the Willow Project. EarthJustice ( https://earthjustice.org/ ), Protect Our Winters ( https://protectourwinters.org/ ), and Defenders of Wildlife ( https://defenders.org/ ) are just a few of the organizations that are working to collect information about the Willow Project and work to combat its installation. Contacting and volunteering with an environmental advocacy group, such as the three listed above, can help you to get involved with an important cause firsthand. 

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willow_project#:~:text=The%20Willow%20project%20is%20an,total%20of%20250%20oil%20wells .
• https://protectourwinters.org/campaign/willow/?gad=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwlumhBhClARIsABO6p-xbpv92zlGBsaXuYgtM2CSt6HHkCa8VfB8En92ki4cmTZ2qS9c2yfAaAkx8EALw_wcB
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConocoPhillips
• https://carnegieendowment.org/2023/03/16/willow-project-and-race-to-pump-last-barrel-of-oil-pub-89298#:~:text=If%20Willow%20produces%20as%20much,carbon%20dioxide%20into%20the%20atmosphere .
• https://www.theindigenousfoundation.org/articles/the-willow-project-and-its-impacts-on-indigenous-communities
• https://en.as.com/latest_news/what-can-you-do-to-stop-the-controversial-willow-project-n/
• https://www.nrdc.org/stories/why-willow-project-bad-idea  
• https://www.wilderness.org/articles/blog/7-ways-oil-and-gas-drilling-bad-environment

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Jul 10, 2020

The willow project: helping wrongfully convicted women.

Anne Geraghty-Rathert discusses the mission of the WILLOW Project and prevalent issues in women’s wrongful convictions.

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Carl Morrison

Carl H. Morrison, ACP, RP, PP, AACP, is an experienced certified paralegal and paralegal manager and has...

This Episode

Episode notes.

From NALA’s 2020 Conference @ Home, host Carl Morrison welcomes Anne Geraghty-Rathert to follow up on her presentation about wrongful convictions and her work with the WILLOW Project. Anne discusses the unique issues surrounding women’s wrongful convictions and shares ways paralegals can get involved in clemency-based projects.

Anne Geraghty-Rather t is an attorney in private practice and a professor at Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri.

Special thanks to our sponsors,  NALA ,  ServeNow ,  CourtFiling.net  and  Legalinc .

The Paralegal Voice

The WILLOW Project Helping Wrongfully Convicted Women

Carl Morrison: Hello everyone. Welcome to a special episode of The Paralegal Voice here on the Legal Talk Network. I am Carl Morrison, advanced certified paralegal and your host to The Paralegal Voice.

We are here today reporting from NALA’s 45th annual conference, and you are like, “wait, I thought this was a virtual conference?” Well, it is. It’s also known as the 2020 NALA Conference @ Home. Due to the pandemic and due to ensure everyone’s safety and health in attending the conference, NALA’s Conference went virtual which was a huge deal and it’s a first for Paralegal Association and I know we’re really, really excited about the conference.

And so today, my special guest is Anne Geraghty-Rathert, JD and she is presenting at the virtual conference on wrongful convictions and what’s known as “The WILLOW Project,” we’re going to talk about that in a second. So, thank you Anne so much for taking time out of your schedule to really sit down with me and do sort of what I’m calling an epilogue to your presentation and welcome to the show.

Anne Geraghty-Rathert: Well, thank you. Nothing makes me happier than talking about this subject. So, glad to be here.

Carl Morrison: I’m a little bit of a law nerd and so, I kind of geek out on this particular subject. So I have a lot of questions for you and I’m sure the listeners do too and so, let’s just jump off into it, let’s just get into it.

And so, in your presentation, you talk about the fact that incarcerated women are less likely to be exonerated for wrongful convictions than men really due to a lack of DNA among other reasons. And I really want to know and I’m sure some of the attendees that have attended it and those that may be listening to the presentation, the recorded version of it, why is that? What’s the cause for that?

Anne Geraghty-Rathert: Well, the complications are many. First of all, with women, the crimes that women are accused of tend to have DNA less frequently than crimes that men are convicted or charged with, and part of that is due to the nature of the crime. So women are less likely to be charged with rape and murder, and so there’s less likely to be DNA at the scene that will link them immediately to that particular crime. The other part about it is that women tend to be convicted of crimes that have to do with people they know, and so if there is any DNA, part of the problem is that you know if it’s a crime scene in someone’s house that person living there as well tends to have DNA all over the place.

So DNA is very infrequently a factor in women’s convictions generally, and so that means that when we get to the wrongful conviction part of it, that it’s much more difficult to prove someone’s innocence to exonerate them because DNA is not in existence or hasn’t been collected or won’t indicate that this person is or is not the perpetrator. So, that’s the first problem.

The other part of it is of course that there are some stereotypes as we know that still follow women around, and part of that are things like motives that are attributed characteristics to women that may or may not be the case, such as they say the motive could be that the person’s career obsessed and so they don’t want their children around if it’s like a child murder or their revenge obsessed or jealous or all of these sort of sexist stereotypes that they’re bad mothers, that they’re prostitutes those kinds of things.

And so, if you’re in that mindset as a police officer or prosecutor, you’re much more likely to sort of have tunnel vision and focus in on someone who’s close to the crime and then without any forensic science that can negate that women are more likely to be convicted of those crimes and some of the forensic science problems are key to this. So we have seen that arson cases have changed a lot, the forensic science has changed on that, shaken baby syndrome is far less conclusive then one would have believed in the past. So a lot of wrongful convictions have come about because of bad signs and also be of tunnel vision connecting a death or a crime to people who are immediately in the vicinity and that in a home situation tends to put the focus on women.

Carl Morrison: There’s a lot to unpack with that particular answer and I can really like elaborate on a whole theory of different things. So I’m going to kind of reel us back a step. And so, let’s first talk about can you define what The WILLOW Project is for our listeners? What is that? And really, how long has it been in existence?

Anne Geraghty-Rathert: Yeah. So, The WILLOW Project, is a project that myself and a couple former students formed when we started to accumulate wrongful conviction cases that were involving incarcerated women. And so, we have been attempting to get people out of prison who are wrongfully convicted. We have three clients, and the first client we received about nine years ago and have been doing that work ever since, all of our clients have things in common with each other all of them were teenagers when they were convicted of the crimes, all of them were in extremely abusive home situations and or in extremely violent relationships with significant others, and all of them were convicted of crimes that were actually perpetrated by people who are their captors or their abusers.

And so, the themes that run through this — that cases are all very different from each other, but the themes that run through this have to do with violence against women and the fact that these situations are not looked at individually by the justice system.

Carl Morrison: So you and other peers saw a need for this particular project initiative, and how long has it been in existence?

Anne Geraghty-Rathert: About eight or nine years in total. So that was when got received our first clients, but we decided to make it into an organization a non-profit when we started accumulating additional clients. So, that was when we came up with the name The WILLOW Project. And actually, WILLOW, is an acronym it stands for Women Initiate Legal Lifelines to Other Women. And the mission of The WILLOW Project is to offer access to the justice system for people who have been without a voice in it in the past and who have been wrongfully convicted because of the lack of a voice.

Carl Morrison: Since you started this particular project, and I guess that’s the best term to call it project or initiative, have you seen just a giant outpouring of people approaching you and going, “can you help me? I’ve heard about you?” And you just don’t have enough manpower, is that what you’re seeing?

Anne Geraghty-Rathert: That’s exactly it. So we are trying not to take on any more cases until we make significant progress in the cases that we have. Unfortunately, as you suggest, there is such a great need and one of the most shocking things for me has been that to find three cases that we currently have where the people who are incarcerated with life sentences are factually innocent, wrongfully convicted and at first I thought that is really odd how did that happen but what I came to understand was that it’s just the tip of a very large iceberg of wrongful convictions. And there has been a lot of focus through the last couple decades on wrongful convictions generally, but there are very, very few people who identify as women who have been exonerated in other words found innocent in comparison to the very large numbers of people who are identify as male who have been exonerated and found innocent.

And so, this has become sort of my obsession I suppose that I’m trying to figure out ways in which I can get representation for other people, trying not to take on additional clients it’s getting harder and harder because once you start to get into this work, people hear that you’re doing it and since people who are in prison obviously don’t have access to lawyers and they also don’t have the money to pay for them if they hear about someone who’s doing it for free for you know pro bono work, then that makes it that much more important that they get a hold of someone. So a lot of what we hear is like letters from prisons, we get phone calls from relatives seeking our assistance and then, we spend a lot of time just trying to find other representation in the attempt to not take on more than we can handle us, they’re really just three of us who work on it on a regular basis along with student interns from Webster University who are of course awesome and every way too, but we also don’t want to get into a situation where we can’t give diligent representation to the people that we have already taken on as clients.

So it’s complicated and then a way so discouraging I wish that we had more resources, but unfortunately at this point, this is what we can do.

Carl Morrison: And of course, with the advent of some of these docuseries such as on Netflix like making a murderer, the staircase, things like that where individuals, whether they are truly or not going through the same type of issue and I think that’s probably — you tell me, exacerbated the problem or made brought more of the problem to light?

Anne Geraghty-Rathert: I think you are correct. What happened first I think for those of us who are a little older, we remember a time when you sort of just assumed that people who were imprisoned were guilty, right?

Carl Morrison: Right.

Anne Geraghty-Rathert: And that was all that there was to be said about it, and I think then with the beginning of the Innocence Project which does DNA exonerations, people began to realize the more and more DNA exonerations there were, it started to loosen that viewpoint. People came to realize that DNA is such an exact science when done correctly that it pretty much guaranteed that the people who had been accused and found guilty were in fact innocent, and that sort of began to open up to crack that mentality that people in prison are all guilty.

And so, I think TV and media followed that because it’s a fascinating subject horrifying, but fascinating, TV shows started to follow that same line of reasoning and then other media, podcasts and so forth. Because there is a recognition that there is something inherently flawed in the justice system that allows people to fall through these cracks and to end up in a place where they clearly do not deserve to be.

Carl Morrison: Right. And really how is The WILLOW Project you mentioned the Innocence Project, how is The WILLOW Project different from that similar type of program?

Anne Geraghty-Rathert: Yeah. The first big difference of course is the size of the Innocence Project as compared to our little tiny project in St. Louis Missouri. The Innocence Project having gone nationwide and even internationally to some extent. But the other thing that makes it significantly different besides size, is that the Innocence Project has exclusively to this point and they’re beginning to change, but up to this point they focused almost exclusively on DNA exonerations.

Obviously, as I said, none of our cases there was any DNA collected. In fact, the majority of cases that are out there, the estimates are that only — there’s only DNA in about 20% of all criminal cases. So if we’re finding people who are wrongfully convicted and we can prove their innocence by DNA, that means that there’s 80% of the prison population that doesn’t even have DNA, we have to assume that some of them are innocent as well and probably in similar numbers to the ones that just happen to have the DNA available to be tested.

So none of our clients have DNA in their cases. And so, they’re very different and we are very different from the Innocence Project in our approach which it means, that we have to go back and we have to interview all kinds of people, we have to go through the records and in far greater detail we have to try to contact lawyers and judges and those kinds of things to see what happened precisely, to see where the errors occurred and to try to write them in whatever way we can.

Carl Morrison: Right. Well, I’m going to cut us off at this point because we’re going to take a short commercial break. But I know, you and I could sit here and talk all day about this. This is — I absolutely love this subject. So, we’re going to take a short commercial break, so don’t turn your dial, we’ll be right back.

Today’s episode is brought to you by Legalinc. Legalinc is empowering paralegals to embrace their inner legal rock star by automating the everyday tasks that hold them back. Through their free dashboard solution, paralegals can quickly and easily automate services like business formations, corporate filings, registered agent services and more. Visit legalinc.com to create a free account and check out the legalinc.com/podcast for a chance to win legal rock star swag.

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Carl Morrison: Welcome back to The Paralegal Voice. Like I said before commercial break, this topic is a fascinating one and I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to be speaking with you about this truly important topic. I don’t practice in the area of criminal law, I’m in-house corporate paralegal.

But I’m intrigued with the overall topic of wrongful convictions and giving help to those that are wrongfully accused and sentenced, and we talked a lot about sort of the differences in the penal system between women and men and you mention in your presentation that the rate of incarceration for women is really currently increasing at a rate twice that of men which I find absolutely fascinating. And why do you think that cause is for that? Are there a number of reasons or just a couple of reasons why that is happening?

Anne Geraghty-Rathert: I believe there are lot of reasons. But I think, part of it is just that the studies that are out there that tend to drive the changes in policy, are looking at the prison population as a whole as opposed to specific groups. And so, while there are far, far fewer women who are incarcerated in the United States —

I mean, far fewer women. As you suggest, the population of women in state prisons has grown by 834% in the last 40 years, whereas the incarcerated men population has only growing up by 367. Now, we should be horrified at either number, right?

Anne Geraghty-Rathert:   And this is even — get based on the fact that the population in general only grew by 44%. So to have the prison population grow by 367% in the male incarcerated prisons and 834% in the women prisons is shocking in relation to the normal population growth. But I think that what is happening is people are realizing that mass incarceration is a huge problem and that it has been policy and legislatively driven. So some of the reforms that are happening right now are just going to that issue of looking at the policies and then in turn creating new policies that will in some way perhaps stop that or slow that growth of the population in prisons.

But since they’re looking at the population as a whole and not focusing on women, which as I say is a much smaller percentage of that population. It’s almost as if the policies don’t apply. So there are a lot of things that happen in women’s prisons that are very different. First of all, when they measure disciplinary actions within the prisons women get far more disciplinary actions than do men, and why that is? I mean, we could talk about that for a really long time, I believe it also has to do with stereotypes and sexist belief systems because the things they’re punishing are things that if perhaps someone who was not a female did them would get very little attention under the sort of boys will be boys mentality whereas the expectation for females is to behave in a very different way, so the disciplinary actions are significant in prison.

What does that have to do with the prison population? It also applies in education. So juveniles who are in the school system, females are being disciplined at much higher rates, they are then entering the prison — the school to prison pipeline. And then when they get to prison, those disciplinary actions in the prison prevent them from accessing probation other kinds of diversion programs that might be for drug rehabilitation or other things like that. So the criminalization of behaviors that aren’t necessarily criminal in nature are problematic. The other thing is — and something that we’re just really coming to grips with I think as a society is the amount of people, the number of people in the trafficking industry.

Anne Geraghty-Rathert:   Particularly, in the sex trafficking industry. And it’s very difficult I believe for police officers and prosecutors to draw a line between people who are also victims but are somehow forced to be involved in the trafficking industry against their will, but then they are committing crimes not by their own independent judgement, but still crimes and there’s –- it’s hard to figure out who’s a victim. So such that we end up with a lot of people in prison and particularly women who are in situations of domestic violence or trafficking and appear to be committing horrific crimes but are actually not operating of their own independent will.

Carl Morrison: Right. And you mentioned the school to prison pipeline just made me think this morning, I saw on Twitter an article by I believe it was the ABA Journal about that very topic and I’m going to have to go back and read it because it’s a subject that I was like wow that’s an interesting topic, and we talked about that.

I should have you on and do a separate show about all sorts of different things and we could really go on a whole bunch of different topics. But, I really want to talk about from the paralegal’s perspective, how can a paralegal go about in assisting and getting involved with a project such as The WILLOW Project? Are there opportunities for a paralegal like myself to provide pro bono services to an organization like yourself?

Anne Geraghty-Rathert: There absolutely are. In fact, there are so many organizations that are desperate for assistance and to have someone with legal background, to have a paralegal with that knowledge base would be just an incredible gift to a lot of these organizations. So I don’t think you would have trouble finding someone who would say, yes and be eager to have the assistance. The issue I think is finding the organization. So just as I said the Innocence Project is big and invisible, they’re always in need of people. So that would be one place to start, but there are also a lot of other clemency based projects throughout the United States that don’t have the size and don’t have the recognition.

So my project is an example, I know the Skylark Project in Iowa, the Centurion Project in Massachusetts, there are a lot of really great organizations that are doing similar kinds of work and pro bono. So what happens is that the people who are legal professionals are just putting in whatever time they can. So they’re desperate for volunteers to do any number of things on-site or off-site, research projects, going through files all those things that we know paralegals are highly trained to do. And it’s not only limited to the wrongful conviction world either, we just talked about trafficking, there are all these other organizations out there that need people to go through their files and to identify discrepancies and errors and all those sorts of things. So there are many ways in which a paralegal could become involved in pro bono work and if anybody needs any suggestions, I’m more than happy to direct them to a local organization wherever they are or to something that is more widely recognized like the Innocence Project.

Carl Morrison: That’s fantastic I’m sure a lot of our listeners would like that more. Well, at the closing, we’ll get your contact info and one last question I wanted to ask you is, how did you decide you know, you mentioned the three clients that you have, how do you decide to take on the clients? Under what circumstances do you choose to take on additional clients? I know you mentioned that you’re putting maxed out at the moment, but at what point do you have to start eliciting more help?

Anne Geraghty-Rathert: Well, the first case that we received came to us because the former student of mine was doing somewhat similar work and that she was representing exclusively women in prison who had been convicted of killing their batterers. And so, when she heard about the first client we received, Angel her situation was one of violence but she was not being accused of killing her batterer instead she was being accused of being held captive herself and being literally and figuratively along for the ride when her captors killed two elderly women.

And so, she was charged along with them with the mental age of 10, she has some severe impairments and she was unable to say what had happened to her or why she was there or the circumstances. So my former student was very concerned about her, didn’t want to just let her go and ask me if I would look into the case and so that’s how we received our first case. The other ones have come to us either through letters from prison or from people calling us and begging us to take on the cases and as they say, there are many, many more out they’re just keeping up with the mail and trying to find representation for people and responding to people as a full-time job at this point.

Anne Geraghty-Rathert: So, we’re trying not to take on anymore, we would love to take on more someday for ever larger we will, but at this point we’re susceptible to be having our arm twisted but trying to make sure that we do an adequate job for the people that we have.

Carl Morrison: And I have to applaud you for the work that you’re doing because it’s not an easing type of work and what you’re doing to help those that’s are wrongfully convicted to me personally that’s an amazing thing. And so, I thank you for the work and service that you’re doing for those that are wrongfully incarcerated and need to be exonerated.

Anne Geraghty-Rathert: Thanks for saying that. But I just want to say that the legal profession doesn’t ever get the credit that it deserves. There are so many paralegals and lawyers out there every day fighting the good fight in their full-time jobs, in their pro bono work and so I appreciate that thanks, but let me just spread that thanks to all the legal professionals who are awake at night worrying the same as I am and doing amazing things relentlessly pursuing whatever justice they can.

Carl Morrison: Thank you. I mean, we work in a profession that works in the background pretty much and we don’t look for the limelight. So thank you, and thank you to the listeners. So I appreciate that and I know we could go on and on and on about this topic.

Anne Geraghty-Rathert: Yes. I often to do.

Carl Morrison: And I love it and I could sit here and talk to you for the next however long, but at this point by the time you’re listening to this particular episode you’ve probably may have already attended her end session on the WILLOW Project. If not, listen to it most definitely you don’t want to miss it and if any of our listeners wanted to reach out to you, how would they go about getting a hold of you.

Anne Geraghty-Rathert: Yeah. Well, we have our website which is willowprojectstl — for St. Louis willowprojectstl.org. We’re on Facebook at The WILLOW Project STL, but probably the easiest way to get ahold of us at this point is just to email me directly. So I’m Webster University in St. Louis. So if you lose this email address you can find me on the Webster University site, but my email address is a [email protected] . So that’s [email protected] . So, please reach out if you even just want to discuss it, but certainly if you want to be directed somewhere I’ll find a place for you to work I guarantee it.

Carl Morrison: Anne, thank you so, so much, I really appreciate it. And like I said, perhaps you and I should do a full episode on one of these little distinct topics that we talked about today. So, it’s an important subject and the more education that we can get out there the better. So, thank you Anne so much for being a guest on the show today.

Anne Geraghty-Rathert: It’s so nice to meet you Carl and thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about my favorite subject so.

Carl Morrison: Fantastic thanks again Anne. We’re going to take a short commercial break, we’ll be back right after these messages.

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Carl Morrison: Before we end today’s show, we would really like to thank our sponsor NALA. NALA is a professional association for paralegals providing continuing education, voluntary certification and professional development programs. NALA has been a sponsor of The Paralegal Voice since our very first show. In CourtFiling.net, e-file court documents with ease in California, Illinois, Indiana and Texas. To learn more, visit CourtFiling.net to take advantage of a free 30-day trial and ServeNow, a nationwide network of trusted prescreened process servers. Work with the most professional process servers who have experience with high-volume serves, who embrace technology, and understand the litigation process. Visit serve-now.com to learn more.

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Carl Morrison: Everyone today I hope you’ve enjoyed it. I’ve enjoyed today’s show it’s a topic that I find absolutely fascinating and my heart pours out for those that are have been wrongfully accused and incarcerated, and this is a topic that we should all be helping provide support and getting out there and fighting the good fight.

And so, that’s all the time we have today for The Paralegal Voice. If you have questions about today’s show, please email them to me at [email protected] . That’s [email protected] and stay tuned for more information and upcoming podcast for exciting paralegal trends, news and engaging and fun interviews from leading paralegals and other leading legal professionals.

Thank you for listening to The Paralegal Voice produced by the broadcast professionals at Legal Talk Network. If you’d like more information about today’s show please visit legaltalknetwork.com and find Legal Talk Network on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn or download Legal Talk Networks free app in Google Play and iTunes. And reminding you that I’m here to enhance your passion and dedication to the paralegal profession and make your paralegal voice heard.

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Community-Based Social Justice Work: The WILLOW Project

• First Online: 05 August 2018

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Anne Geraghty-Rathert highlights the possibilities for melding the theoretical study of law with its practical application for engaging in social justice work. By combining classroom study with community pro bono outreach, undergraduate students gain useful skills for their future careers while learning important lessons about human rights and equality before the law. At Webster University, student interns work on a clemency project called the WILLOW Project (Women Initiate Legal Lifelines to Other Women). The Project represents three women, all incarcerated due to violence perpetrated by their batterers and not by themselves. The issues of domestic violence and wrongful conviction inherent in the WILLOW Project’s work resonate with students and offer them opportunities to hone vital skills for engaging in social justice and human rights protection.

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Beck, Mary T. 2004. “Teaching: Case Studies from American Universities: Spotlight: Response to Violence Against Women at the University of Missouri-Columbia.” St. Louis University Public Law Review 23: 227.

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International Human Rights Network. n.d. “What Are HR Based Approaches.” http://www.ihrnetwork.org/what-are-hr-based-approaches_189.htm .

Nash, Jay Robert. 2008. I Am Innocent. Cambridge: Da Capo Press.

Prison Performing Arts. n.d. “Homepage.” www.prisonartsstl.org .

Roberts, Stephanie, and Lynne Weathered. 2009. “Assisting the Factually Innocent: The Contradictions and Compatibility of Innocence Projects and the Criminal Cases Review Commission.” The Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 29: 43.

Warden, Rob. 2002. “The Revolutionary Role of Journalism in Identifying and Rectifying Wrongful Convictions.” The University of Missouri Kansas City Law Review 70: 83.

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Geraghty-Rathert, A. (2018). Community-Based Social Justice Work: The WILLOW Project. In: Kingston, L. (eds) Human Rights in Higher Education. Palgrave Studies in Global Citizenship Education and Democracy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91421-3_12

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Burlington Police, high school officials apologize for upsetting students during role-play

BURLINGTON, Vt. (WCAX) - Burlington Police and high school officials are apologizing over a role-playing presentation that upset some local high school students taking part in a year-end school program.

Burlington High School officials say about 20 students were taking part in the Forensics section of the school’s Year End Studies, or YES program, and that Wednesday’s presentation included three members of the department simulating an armed robbery. They say while the gun that was used was fake, the enactment involved screaming and fake gunshot sounds that left some students feeling scared and confused.

School officials said in a statement that the demonstration was meant to show that witness statements can be unreliable, but that “it was clear that students and staff were negatively impacted,” they said. “We didn’t realize the demonstration would happen without warning or a chance to properly prepare students to understand what would be taking place.”

But police officials pushed back with their own statement, saying they notified the school in late May, asking “Do you think that sort of incident would be ok for your group of students?” They say school officials told them in response, “I think these students will be fine with this simulation. We will give a heads-up to parents and students.”

“I want to extend an apology, a sincere apology to the students impacted by this and the parents and the teachers,” Burlington Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak said Thursday. She said the incident was the result of a communication breakdown and that she plans to meet with police officials to discuss the incident next week. “I will be specifically asking where are you reflective of what you could have done differently. Do you understand that harm has been made. How do we repair that harm and then how do we create better policies and procedures and policies and frankly have better instincts about flagging things before something has happened and then has caused harm for people.”

Both police and school officials did not respond Thursday to requests for an interview. Burlington Police say they will be meeting with students and staff Friday to discuss the impact of the presentation and say they hope it will be a reflective growth opportunity for all parties involved.

Copyright 2024 WCAX. All rights reserved.

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The Unique Burial of a Child of Early Scythian Time at the Cemetery of Saryg-Bulun (Tuva)

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Pages:  379-406

In 1988, the Tuvan Archaeological Expedition (led by M. E. Kilunovskaya and V. A. Semenov) discovered a unique burial of the early Iron Age at Saryg-Bulun in Central Tuva. There are two burial mounds of the Aldy-Bel culture dated by 7th century BC. Within the barrows, which adjoined one another, forming a figure-of-eight, there were discovered 7 burials, from which a representative collection of artifacts was recovered. Burial 5 was the most unique, it was found in a coffin made of a larch trunk, with a tightly closed lid. Due to the preservative properties of larch and lack of air access, the coffin contained a well-preserved mummy of a child with an accompanying set of grave goods. The interred individual retained the skin on his face and had a leather headdress painted with red pigment and a coat, sewn from jerboa fur. The coat was belted with a leather belt with bronze ornaments and buckles. Besides that, a leather quiver with arrows with the shafts decorated with painted ornaments, fully preserved battle pick and a bow were buried in the coffin. Unexpectedly, the full-genomic analysis, showed that the individual was female. This fact opens a new aspect in the study of the social history of the Scythian society and perhaps brings us back to the myth of the Amazons, discussed by Herodotus. Of course, this discovery is unique in its preservation for the Scythian culture of Tuva and requires careful study and conservation.

Keywords: Tuva, Early Iron Age, early Scythian period, Aldy-Bel culture, barrow, burial in the coffin, mummy, full genome sequencing, aDNA

Information about authors: Marina Kilunovskaya (Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation). Candidate of Historical Sciences. Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Dvortsovaya Emb., 18, Saint Petersburg, 191186, Russian Federation E-mail: [email protected] Vladimir Semenov (Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation). Candidate of Historical Sciences. Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Dvortsovaya Emb., 18, Saint Petersburg, 191186, Russian Federation E-mail: [email protected] Varvara Busova  (Moscow, Russian Federation).  (Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation). Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences.  Dvortsovaya Emb., 18, Saint Petersburg, 191186, Russian Federation E-mail:  [email protected] Kharis Mustafin  (Moscow, Russian Federation). Candidate of Technical Sciences. Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.  Institutsky Lane, 9, Dolgoprudny, 141701, Moscow Oblast, Russian Federation E-mail:  [email protected] Irina Alborova  (Moscow, Russian Federation). Candidate of Biological Sciences. Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.  Institutsky Lane, 9, Dolgoprudny, 141701, Moscow Oblast, Russian Federation E-mail:  [email protected] Alina Matzvai  (Moscow, Russian Federation). Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.  Institutsky Lane, 9, Dolgoprudny, 141701, Moscow Oblast, Russian Federation E-mail:  [email protected]

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Savvino-storozhevsky monastery and museum.

Zvenigorod's most famous sight is the Savvino-Storozhevsky Monastery, which was founded in 1398 by the monk Savva from the Troitse-Sergieva Lavra, at the invitation and with the support of Prince Yury Dmitrievich of Zvenigorod. Savva was later canonised as St Sabbas (Savva) of Storozhev. The monastery late flourished under the reign of Tsar Alexis, who chose the monastery as his family church and often went on pilgrimage there and made lots of donations to it. Most of the monastery’s buildings date from this time. The monastery is heavily fortified with thick walls and six towers, the most impressive of which is the Krasny Tower which also serves as the eastern entrance. The monastery was closed in 1918 and only reopened in 1995. In 1998 Patriarch Alexius II took part in a service to return the relics of St Sabbas to the monastery. Today the monastery has the status of a stauropegic monastery, which is second in status to a lavra. In addition to being a working monastery, it also holds the Zvenigorod Historical, Architectural and Art Museum.

Belfry and Neighbouring Churches

Located near the main entrance is the monastery's belfry which is perhaps the calling card of the monastery due to its uniqueness. It was built in the 1650s and the St Sergius of Radonezh’s Church was opened on the middle tier in the mid-17th century, although it was originally dedicated to the Trinity. The belfry's 35-tonne Great Bladgovestny Bell fell in 1941 and was only restored and returned in 2003. Attached to the belfry is a large refectory and the Transfiguration Church, both of which were built on the orders of Tsar Alexis in the 1650s.  

To the left of the belfry is another, smaller, refectory which is attached to the Trinity Gate-Church, which was also constructed in the 1650s on the orders of Tsar Alexis who made it his own family church. The church is elaborately decorated with colourful trims and underneath the archway is a beautiful 19th century fresco.

Nativity of Virgin Mary Cathedral

The Nativity of Virgin Mary Cathedral is the oldest building in the monastery and among the oldest buildings in the Moscow Region. It was built between 1404 and 1405 during the lifetime of St Sabbas and using the funds of Prince Yury of Zvenigorod. The white-stone cathedral is a standard four-pillar design with a single golden dome. After the death of St Sabbas he was interred in the cathedral and a new altar dedicated to him was added.

Under the reign of Tsar Alexis the cathedral was decorated with frescoes by Stepan Ryazanets, some of which remain today. Tsar Alexis also presented the cathedral with a five-tier iconostasis, the top row of icons have been preserved.

Tsaritsa's Chambers

The Nativity of Virgin Mary Cathedral is located between the Tsaritsa's Chambers of the left and the Palace of Tsar Alexis on the right. The Tsaritsa's Chambers were built in the mid-17th century for the wife of Tsar Alexey - Tsaritsa Maria Ilinichna Miloskavskaya. The design of the building is influenced by the ancient Russian architectural style. Is prettier than the Tsar's chambers opposite, being red in colour with elaborately decorated window frames and entrance.

At present the Tsaritsa's Chambers houses the Zvenigorod Historical, Architectural and Art Museum. Among its displays is an accurate recreation of the interior of a noble lady's chambers including furniture, decorations and a decorated tiled oven, and an exhibition on the history of Zvenigorod and the monastery.

Palace of Tsar Alexis

The Palace of Tsar Alexis was built in the 1650s and is now one of the best surviving examples of non-religious architecture of that era. It was built especially for Tsar Alexis who often visited the monastery on religious pilgrimages. Its most striking feature is its pretty row of nine chimney spouts which resemble towers.

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Nvidia brings ai assistants to life with geforce rtx ai pcs.

TAIPEI, Taiwan, June 02, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- COMPUTEX -- NVIDIA today announced new NVIDIA RTX ™ technology to power AI assistants and digital humans running on new GeForce RTX ™ AI laptops.

NVIDIA unveiled Project G-Assist — an RTX-powered AI assistant technology demo that provides context-aware help for PC games and apps. The Project G-Assist tech demo debuted with ARK: Survival Ascended from Studio Wildcard. NVIDIA also introduced the first PC-based NVIDIA NIM™ inference microservices for the NVIDIA ACE digital human platform.

These technologies are enabled by the NVIDIA RTX AI Toolkit , a new suite of tools and software development kits that aid developers in optimizing and deploying large generative AI models on Windows PCs. They join NVIDIA’s full-stack RTX AI innovations accelerating over 500 PC applications and games and 200 laptop designs from manufacturers.

In addition, newly announced RTX AI PC laptops from ASUS and MSI feature up to GeForce RTX 4070 GPUs and power-efficient systems-on-a-chip with Windows 11 AI PC capabilities. These Windows 11 AI PCs will receive a free update to Copilot+ PC experiences when available.

“NVIDIA launched the era of AI PCs in 2018 with the release of RTX Tensor Core GPUs and NVIDIA DLSS,” said Jason Paul, vice president of consumer AI at NVIDIA. “Now, with Project G-Assist and NVIDIA ACE, we’re unlocking the next generation of AI-powered experiences for over 100 million RTX AI PC users.”

Project G-Assist, a GeForce AI Assistant AI assistants are set to transform gaming and in-app experiences — from offering gaming strategies and analyzing multiplayer replays to assisting with complex creative workflows. Project G-Assist is a glimpse into this future.

PC games offer vast universes to explore and intricate mechanics to master, which are challenging and time-consuming feats even for the most dedicated gamers. Project G-Assist aims to put game knowledge at players’ fingertips using generative AI.

Project G-Assist takes voice or text inputs from the player, along with contextual information from the game screen, and runs the data through AI vision models. These models enhance the contextual awareness and app-specific understanding of a large language model (LLM) linked to a game knowledge database, and then generate a tailored response delivered as text or speech.

NVIDIA partnered with Studio Wildcard to demo the technology with ARK: Survival Ascended . Project G-Assist can help answer questions about creatures, items, lore, objectives, difficult bosses and more. Because Project G-Assist is context-aware, it personalizes its responses to the player’s game session.

In addition, Project G-Assist can configure the player’s gaming system for optimal performance and efficiency. It can provide insights into performance metrics, optimize graphics settings depending on the user’s hardware, apply a safe overclock and even intelligently reduce power consumption while maintaining a performance target.

First ACE PC NIM Debuts NVIDIA ACE technology for powering digital humans is now coming to RTX AI PCs and workstations with NVIDIA NIM — inference microservices that enable developers to reduce deployment times from weeks to minutes. ACE NIM microservices deliver high-quality inference running locally on devices for natural language understanding, speech synthesis, facial animation and more.

At COMPUTEX, the gaming debut of NVIDIA ACE NIM on the PC will be featured in the Covert Protocol tech demo , developed in collaboration with Inworld AI. It now showcases NVIDIA Audio2Face ™ and NVIDIA Riva automatic speech recognition running locally on devices.

Windows Copilot Runtime to Add GPU Acceleration for Local PC SLMs Microsoft and NVIDIA are collaborating to help developers bring new generative AI capabilities to their Windows native and web apps. This collaboration will provide application developers with easy application programming interface (API) access to GPU-accelerated small language models (SLMs) that enable retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) capabilities that run on-device as part of Windows Copilot Runtime.

SLMs provide tremendous possibilities for Windows developers, including content summarization, content generation and task automation. RAG capabilities augment SLMs by giving the AI models access to domain-specific information not well represented in ‌base models. RAG APIs enable developers to harness application-specific data sources and tune SLM behavior and capabilities to application needs.

These AI capabilities will be accelerated by NVIDIA RTX GPUs, as well as AI accelerators from other hardware vendors, providing end users with fast, responsive AI experiences across the breadth of the Windows ecosystem.

The API will be released in developer preview later this year.

4x Faster, 3x Smaller Models With the RTX AI Toolkit The AI ecosystem has built hundreds of thousands of open-source models for app developers to leverage, but most models are pretrained for general purposes and built to run in a data center.

To help developers build application-specific AI models that run on PCs, NVIDIA is introducing RTX AI Toolkit — a suite of tools and SDKs for model customization, optimization and deployment on RTX AI PCs. RTX AI Toolkit will be available later this month for broader developer access.

Developers can customize a pretrained model with open-source QLoRa tools. Then, they can use the NVIDIA TensorRT ™ model optimizer to quantize models to consume up to 3x less RAM. NVIDIA TensorRT Cloud then optimizes the model for peak performance across the RTX GPU lineups. The result is up to 4x faster performance compared with the pretrained model.

The new  NVIDIA AI Inference Manager  SDK, now available in early access, simplifies the deployment of ACE to PCs. It preconfigures the PC with the necessary AI models, engines and dependencies while orchestrating AI inference seamlessly across PCs and the cloud.

Software partners such as Adobe, Blackmagic Design and Topaz are integrating components of the RTX AI Toolkit within their popular creative apps to accelerate AI performance on RTX PCs.

“Adobe and NVIDIA continue to collaborate to deliver breakthrough customer experiences across all creative workflows, from video to imaging, design, 3D and beyond,” said Deepa Subramaniam, vice president of product marketing, Creative Cloud at Adobe. “TensorRT 10.0 on RTX PCs delivers unprecedented performance and AI-powered capabilities for creators, designers and developers, unlocking new creative possibilities for content creation in industry-leading creative tools like Photoshop.”

Components of the RTX AI Toolkit, such as TensorRT-LLM, are integrated in popular developer frameworks and applications for generative AI, including Automatic1111, ComfyUI, Jan.AI, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Oobabooga and Sanctum.AI.

AI for Content Creation NVIDIA is also integrating RTX AI acceleration into apps for creators, modders and video enthusiasts.

Last year, NVIDIA introduced RTX acceleration using TensorRT for one of the most popular Stable Diffusion user interfaces, Automatic1111. Starting this week, RTX will also accelerate the highly popular ComfyUI, delivering up to a 60% improvement in performance over the currently shipping version, and 7x faster performance compared with the MacBook Pro M3 Max.

NVIDIA RTX Remix is a modding platform for remastering classic DirectX 8 and DirectX 9 games with full ray tracing, NVIDIA DLSS 3.5 and physically accurate materials. RTX Remix includes a runtime renderer and the RTX Remix Toolkit app, which facilitates the modding of game assets and materials.

Last year, NVIDIA made RTX Remix Runtime open source, allowing modders to expand game compatibility and advance rendering capabilities.

Since RTX Remix Toolkit launched earlier this year, 20,000 modders have used it to mod classic games , resulting in over 100 RTX remasters in development on the RTX Remix Showcase Discord .

This month, NVIDIA will make the RTX Remix Toolkit open source, allowing modders to streamline how assets are replaced and scenes are relit, increase supported file formats for RTX Remix’s asset ingestor and bolster RTX Remix’s AI Texture Tools with new models.

In addition, NVIDIA is making the capabilities of RTX Remix Toolkit accessible via a REST API, allowing modders to livelink RTX Remix to digital content creation tools such as Blender, modding tools such as Hammer and generative AI apps such as ComfyUI. NVIDIA is also providing an SDK for RTX Remix Runtime to allow modders to deploy RTX Remix’s renderer into other applications and games beyond DirectX 8 and 9 classics.

With more of the RTX Remix platform being made open source, modders across the globe can build even more stunning RTX remasters.

NVIDIA RTX Video , the popular AI-powered super-resolution feature supported in the Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox browsers, is now available as an SDK to all developers, helping them natively integrate AI for upscaling, sharpening, compression artifact reduction and high-dynamic range (HDR) conversion.

Coming soon to video editing software Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve and Wondershare Filmora, RTX Video will enable video editors to upscale lower-quality video files to 4K resolution, as well as convert standard dynamic range source files into HDR. In addition, the free media player VLC media will soon add RTX Video HDR to its existing super-resolution capability.

Learn more about RTX AI PCs and technology by joining NVIDIA at COMPUTEX .

About NVIDIA NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) is the world leader in accelerated computing.

For further information, contact: Jordan Dodge NVIDIA Corporation +1-408-566-6792 [email protected]

Certain statements in this press release including, but not limited to, statements as to: the benefits, impact, performance, and availability of our products, services, and technologies, including NVIDIA RTX technology, GeForce RTX AI laptops, Project G-Assist, NVIDIA NIM inference microservices, NVIDIA ACE digital human platform, NVIDIA RTX AI Toolkit, GeForce RTX 4070 GPUs, RTX Tensor Core GPUs, DLSS, NVIDIA Audio2Face, NVIDIA Riva, NVIDIA TensorRT, NVIDIA AI Inference Manager, NVIDIA RTX Remix, NVIDIA DLSS 3.5, RTX Remix Runtime, and NVIDIA RTX Video; the benefits and impact of NVIDIA’s collaboration with third parties, and the features and availability of their services and offerings; third parties using or adopting NVIDIA’s products or technologies and the benefits thereof; RAG APIs enabling developers to harness application-specific data sources and tune SLM behavior and capabilities to application needs; and NVIDIA unlocking the next generation of AI-powered experiences for over 100 million RTX AI PC users, are forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause results to be materially different than expectations. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include: global economic conditions; our reliance on third parties to manufacture, assemble, package and test our products; the impact of technological development and competition; development of new products and technologies or enhancements to our existing product and technologies; market acceptance of our products or our partners' products; design, manufacturing or software defects; changes in consumer preferences or demands; changes in industry standards and interfaces; unexpected loss of performance of our products or technologies when integrated into systems; as well as other factors detailed from time to time in the most recent reports NVIDIA files with the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, including, but not limited to, its annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. Copies of reports filed with the SEC are posted on the company's website and are available from NVIDIA without charge. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and speak only as of the date hereof, and, except as required by law, NVIDIA disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances.

Many of the products and features described herein remain in various stages and will be offered on a when-and-if-available basis. The statements above are not intended to be, and should not be interpreted as a commitment, promise, or legal obligation, and the development, release, and timing of any features or functionalities described for our products is subject to change and remains at the sole discretion of NVIDIA. NVIDIA will have no liability for failure to deliver or delay in the delivery of any of the products, features, or functions set forth herein.

© 2024 NVIDIA Corporation. All rights reserved. NVIDIA, the NVIDIA logo, Audio2Face, GeForce RTX, NVIDIA NIM, NVIDIA RTX and TensorRT are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. Features, pricing, availability and specifications are subject to change without notice.

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at: https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/25d171ac-da6c-4ebb-880e-71d26b0f5f1e

NVIDIA RTX AI PC

NVIDIA's Project G-Assist is an RTX-powered AI assistant technology demo that provides context-aware help for PC games and apps.

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