This

Found the issue: the videos you posted are using the av1 codec, and I am on iOS

I can browse 9gag no problem

Voyager but it won’t open in my browser either. Just tried VLC it works there so maybe it's a codec issue

I can’t see any of your img-9gag-fun.9cache.com posts

I‘m gonna be that guy and recommend GrapheneOS it is a different Android system and while that sounds like a really hard task to do for a beginner they have a really user friendly web-installer with step by step instructions. Adterwards you can just install and use google play store from their integrated app.

It’s made specifically for Pixel phones and you can’t much more degoogle than that

Damn, congrats bro, your life is going to go up immensely soon

Yoda learns from Qui-Gon in the Clone Wars but how the others learn isn’t clear as far as I know

How about Catbox?

As @Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de pointed out, this is an actual answer on Quora so at least it got that right

This one?

One of the goals of the new GNOME project handbook is to provide effective guidelines for contributors. Most of the guidelines are based on recommendations that GNOME already had, which were then improved and updated. These improvements were based on input from others in the project, as well as by drawing on recommendations from elsewhere.

The best example of this effort was around issue management. Before the handbook, GNOME’s issue management guidelines were seriously out of date, and were incomplete in a number of areas. Now we have shiny new issue management guidelines which are full of good advice and wisdom!

The state of our issue trackers matters. An issue tracker with thousands of open issues is intimidating to a new contributor. Likewise, lots of issues without a clear status or resolution makes it difficult for potential contributors to know what to do. My hope is that, with effective issue management guidelines, GNOME can improve the overall state of its issue trackers.

So what magic sauce does the handbook recommend to turn an out of control and burdensome issue tracker into a source of calm and delight, I hear you ask? The formula is fairly simple:

• Review all incoming issues, and regularly conduct reviews of old issues, in order to weed out reports which are ambiguous, obsolete, duplicates, and so on
• Close issues which haven’t seen activity in over a year
• Apply the “needs design” and “needs info” labels as needed
• Close issues that have been labelled “need info” for 6 weeks
• Issues labelled “needs design” get closed after 1 year of inactivity, like any other
• Recruit contributors to help with issue management

To some readers this is probably controversial advice, and likely conflicts with their existing practice. However, there’s nothing new about these issue management procedures. The current incarnation has been in place since 2009, and some aspects of them are even older. Also, personally speaking, I’m of the view that effective issue management requires taking a strong line (being strong doesn’t mean being impolite, I should add – quite the opposite). From a project perspective, it is more important to keep the issue tracker focused than it is to maintain a database of every single tiny flaw in its software.

The guidelines definitely need some more work. There will undoubtedly be some cases where an issue needs to be kept open despite it being untouched for a year, for example, and we should figure out how to reflect that in the guidelines. I also feel that the existing guidelines could be simplified, to make them easier to read and consume.

I’d be really interested to hear what changes people think are necessary. It is important for the guidelines to be something that maintainers feel that they can realistically implement. The guidelines are not set in stone.

That said, it would also be awesome if more maintainers were to put the current issue management guidelines into practice in their modules. I do think that they represent a good way to get control of an issue tracker, and this could be a really powerful way for us to make GNOME more approachable to new contributors.

The economic damage wrought by climate change is six times worse than previously thought, with global heating set to shrink wealth at a rate consistent with the level of financial losses of a continuing permanent war, research has found.

A 1C increase in global temperature leads to a 12% decline in world gross domestic product (GDP), the researchers found, a far higher estimate than that of previous analyses. The world has already warmed by more than 1C (1.8F) since pre-industrial times and many climate scientists predict a 3C (5.4F) rise will occur by the end of this century due to the ongoing burning of fossil fuels, a scenario that the new working paper, yet to be peer-reviewed, states will come with an enormous economic cost.

A 3C temperature increase will cause “precipitous declines in output, capital and consumption that exceed 50% by 2100” the paper states. This economic loss is so severe that it is “comparable to the economic damage caused by fighting a war domestically and permanently”, it adds.

“There will still be some economic growth happening but by the end of the century people may well be 50% poorer than they would’ve been if it wasn’t for climate change,” said Adrien Bilal, an economist at Harvard who wrote the paper with Diego Känzig, an economist at Northwestern University.

“I think everyone could imagine what they would do with an income that is twice as large as it is now. It would change people’s lives.”

Bilal said that purchasing power, which is how much people are able to buy with their money, would already be 37% higher than it is now without global heating seen over the past 50 years. This lost wealth will spiral if the climate crisis deepens, comparable to the sort of economic drain often seen during wartime.

“Let’s be clear that the comparison to war is only in terms of consumption and GDP – all the suffering and death of war is the important thing and isn’t included in this analysis,” Bilal said. “The comparison may seem shocking, but in terms of pure GDP there is an analogy there. It’s a worrying thought.”

The paper places a much higher estimate on economic losses than previous research, calculating a social cost of carbon, which is the cost in dollars of damage done per each additional ton of carbon emissions, to be $1,056 per ton. This compares to a range set out by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that estimates the cost to be around $190 per ton.

Bilal said the new research takes a more “holistic” look at the economic cost of climate change by analyzing it on a global scale, rather than on an individual country basis. This approach, he said, captured the interconnected nature of the impact of heatwaves, storms, floods and other worsening climate impacts that damage crop yields, reduce worker productivity and reduce capital investment.

“They have taken a step back and linking local impacts with global temperatures,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia University who wasn’t involved in the work and said it was significant. “If the results hold up, and I have no reason to believe they wouldn’t, they will make a massive difference in the overall climate damage estimates.”

The paper found that the economic impact of the climate crisis will be surprisingly uniform around the world, albeit with lower-income countries starting at a lower point in wealth. This should spur wealthy countries such as the US, the paper points out, to take action on reducing planet-heating emissions in its own economic interest.

Even with steep emissions cuts, however, climate change will bear a heavy economic cost, the paper finds. Even if global heating was restrained to little more than 1.5C (2.7F) by the end of the century, a globally agreed-upon goal that now appears to have slipped from reach, the GDP losses are still around 15%.

“That is still substantial,” said Bilal. “The economy may keep growing but less than it would because of climate change. It will be a slow-moving phenomenon, although the impacts will be felt acutely when they hit.”

The paper follows separate research released last month that found average incomes will fall by almost a fifth within the next 26 years compared to what they would’ve been without the climate crisis. Rising temperatures, heavier rainfall and more frequent and intense extreme weather are projected to cause $38tn of destruction each year by mid-century, according to the research.

Both papers make clear that the cost of transitioning away from fossil fuels and curbing the impacts of climate change, while not trivial, pale in comparison to the cost of climate change itself. “Unmitigated climate change is a lot more costly than not doing anything about it, that is clear,” said Wagner.

Stand: 12.05.2024 09:06 Uhr

Rhein, Donau, Elbe: Die großen Flüsse in Deutschland werden regelmäßig überprüft. Über die kleinen Bäche allerdings gibt es bisher nur wenige Daten. Eine neue ARD-Mitmachaktion will das ändern.

Von Janina Schreiber, SWR

Der Mühlbach ist ein kleiner Fluss in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern und für ARD-Moderatorin Jessy Wellmer mit vielen Erinnerungen verbunden: "Das Plätschern dieses Baches ist der Soundtrack meiner Kindheit." Ganze Sommer verbrachte die Journalistin dort, fing im Wasser des Mühlbachs gemeinsam mit anderen Kindern Flusskrebse. Doch wenn Wellmer jetzt den Bach besucht, sind die Flusskrebse nicht mehr zu finden: "Ich bin immer mal wieder da und stelle fest: Das Gesicht dieses Baches hat sich ziemlich verändert."

Viele kleine Bäche in Deutschland - nahezu unerforscht

Die großen Fließgewässer in Deutschland müssen regelmäßig überprüft werden. Damit soll auch die europäische Wasserrahmenrichtlinie aus dem Jahr 2000 umgesetzt werden. Nach der müssen sich bis spätestens 2027 alle Oberflächengewässer in einem guten chemischen und ökologischen Zustand befinden. Doch von diesem Ziel sind die großen Flüsse noch weit entfernt: Laut Umweltbundesamt (UBA) sind 90 Prozent unserer Flüsse in keinem guten ökologischen Zustand.

Doch bei diesem Monitoring werden kleine Bäche mit einem Einzugsgebiet von weniger als zehn Quadratkilometer nicht erfasst. Dabei machen diese kleinen Bäche und Zuflüsse etwa 70 Prozent des gesamten Fließgewässernetzwerks in Deutschland aus - belastbare Daten über ihren Zustand gibt es allerdings nur wenige.

Citizen Science: Wissenschaft durch Freiwillige

Vor diesem Hintergrund hat das Helmholtz-Zentrum für Umweltforschung (UFZ) in Leipzig bereits vor drei Jahren das Citizen-Science-Projekt FLOW ins Leben gerufen. Zusammen mit mehr als 900 Bürgerinnen und Bürgern hat unter anderen auch Biologin Aletta Bonn vom UFZ Informationen gesammelt: Wie ist das Ufer des Flusses, nach was riecht das Wasser, welche Farbe hat es, wie klingt der Bach?

Citizen Science: das FLOW-Projekt

Citizen Science ist Wissenschaft durch Hilfe von Freiwilligen, auch Laien-Forschende. Durch die Teilnahme vieler Menschen sollen zum einen Daten erschlossen werden, deren Erhebung für forschende Institute sonst nur schwer möglich wäre. Zum anderen kann die Wissenschaft durch Freiwillige einen Beitrag zur Umweltbildung leisten. Kritische Stimmen hinterfragen die durch Laien gesammelten Ergebnisse, sie könnten ungenau sein. Im Rahmen des FLOW-Projekts (Fließgewässer erforschen, gemeinsam Wissen schaffen) vom Helmholtz-Zentrum für Umweltforschung (UFZ) und dem Deutschen Zentrum für integrative Biodiversitätsforschung (iDiv) haben Freiwillige nach Angaben der durchführenden Zentren gelernt, den ökologischen Zustand von Bächen zu bewerten und zu dokumentieren. Die gesammelten Daten sollen nach Angaben der Initiatoren die Gewässerforschung unterstützten und Basis sein für gezielte Schutz- und Renaturierungsmaßnahmen. Rund drei Jahre lang, bis Anfang 2024, hat das Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) das FLOW-Projekt gefördert.

ARD-Mitmachaktion soll Datenschatz erweitern

Diese "Wissenschaft durch Hilfe von Freiwilligen", soll nun im Rahmen der ARD-Mitmachaktion #unsereFlüsse weitergeführt werden. Im Fokus steht dabei die Struktur des Baches. Denn daraus kann Biologin Bonn Rückschlüsse auf den ökologischen Zustand ziehen:

"Wenn der Bach schön geschwungen ist, bietet er viele verschiedene Lebensräume für Tiere und Pflanzen. Diese sind Nahrungsquelle für Fische und Vögel." So funktioniere der Bach als gesundes Ökosystem im Gleichgewicht.

Mehr als die Hälfte der Flüsse in keinem guten Zustand

Tatsächlich ist die erste Bilanz der Daten aus dem FLOW-Projekt von mehr als 130 Bächen ernüchternd, so Biologin Aletta Bonn. Mehr als die Hälfte der beprobten Bäche, über 60 Prozent, seien stark beeinträchtigt durch Pflanzenschutzmittel. Das habe Auswirkungen auf Kleinstlebewesen wie Würmer, Schnecken oder Köcherfliegenlarven - es sind diese Arten, die bei zu hoher Pestizidkonzentration langsam verschwinden.

Dabei sind Köcherfliegenlarven ein wichtiger Anzeiger für die Gesundheit der Bäche. Gleichzeitig zeigen die Daten, dass die Ufermorphologie von mehr als 60 Prozent der Bäche in keinem guten ökologischen Zustand ist. Die Gewässer seien verbaut, es gebe keine Ufervegetation, die Ufer seien verarmt. Bewachsene Ufer stellen nicht nur die Filtration des Flusswassers sicher, sie sind gleichzeitig Lebensraum und Unterschlupf für verschiedene Arten wie Flohkrebse und Insekten.

ARD-Mitmachaktion als wichtiger Beitrag für die Umwelt

Forscherin Bonn sieht in Citizen Science für die kleinen Fließgewässer ein großes Potenzial: "Ich glaube, hier brauchen wir die Augen und Ohren von allen, aber auch das Können und Wissen und Engagement von allen." Es sei ein wichtiger Beitrag für die Umwelt.

Auch Moderatorin Wellmer macht mit und will Fotos und Beobachtungen des Mühlbachs bei #unsereFlüsse einreichen: "Flüsse sind unsere Lebensadern. Also ab ins Grüne und den Bach checken."

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Last week, there was a public holiday on Thursday in some parts of the world (Ascension Day). Unsurprisingly, many devs, including myself and Ana, took Friday off to enjoy a longer weekend (and I can tell you: the weather was fantastic). As a result, I have to span two weeks of changes to Tumbleweed here once again. We have published 12 snapshots since my last review (0502…0515, snapshots 0504 and 0513 were not built due to weekends)

The most relevant changes delivered as part of those snapshots were:

• Mozilla Firefox 125.0.3
• LibreOffice 24.2.3.2
• GNOME 46.1
• GIMP 2.10.38
• LLVM 18.1.5
• GCC 14.1
• KDE Frameworks 6.2.0
• PHP 8.3.7
• PostgreSQL 16.3
• Systemd 255.5 & 255.6
• Linux kernel 6.8.9 (with linux-glibc-devel already prepared at 6.9)
• Ruby 3.3.1
• QEmu 8.2.3
• util-linux 2.40.1

Snapshot 0515 contained an openssh update, that mistakenly recommended installation of the subpackage openssh-server-config-rootlogin; this package has existed since the default configuration of openSSH was changed to not permit root login anymore, so admins could easily switch it back on. Due to an error, this had been triggered for automatic installation. This has since been corrected and a version of openssh-server was published to the update channel, which is NOT recommended. Please check your installation and remove the package again, should it be installed and you don’t need it (we can’t auto-remove it without breaking users that explicitly wanted it)

The following things are known to be worked on at the moment and are reaching you in some upcoming snapshot:

• chkstat package being renamed to permctl
• Rust 1.78
• Mesa 24.0.7
• Linux kernel 6.9.1
• Ninja 1.12
• dbus-broker: some networking issue after upgrades left to work out
• GCC 14: phase 2: use gcc14 as the default compiler – lots of help needed: https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/openSUSE:Factory:Staging:Gcc7

Das jüngste Urteil gegen die AfD lässt neue Debatten über ein Verbot der Partei aufflammen. Doch die Hürden dafür sind hoch. Zu hoch – warnt Finanzminister Christian Lindner.

17.05.2024, 11.31 Uhr

Wie soll mit der Alternative für Deutschland(AfD) in Zukunft umgegangen werden? Nicht wenige bringen nach dem Urteil von Münstererneut ein mögliches Verbotsverfahren gegen die rechtspopulistische Partei ins Gespräch. Der FDP-Vorsitzende Christian Lindner lehnt solche Versuche, die AfD vom Bundesverfassungsgericht verbieten zu lassen, ab.

»Die Hürden für das Verbot einer Partei sind sehr hoch. Am Ende des Tages sollte nicht durch eine Abweisung eines Verbotsantrags der AfD ein Persilschein ausgestellt werden«, sagte der Bundesfinanzminister den Zeitungen der Funke Mediengruppe (Freitag). Die Auseinandersetzung mit dieser Partei müsse im demokratischen Wettbewerb erfolgen, damit sich die AfD nicht als Opfer inszenieren könne.

Hintergrund der neu aufgekommenen Debatte über ein AfD-Verbotsverfahren ist ein Urteil des nordrhein-westfälischen Oberverwaltungsgerichts in Münster. Dieses hatte am Montag geurteilt, dass die Einstufung der AfD als rechtsextremistischer Verdachtsfall durch das Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz rechtens ist. Damit darf der Verfassungsschutz auch weiterhin nachrichtendienstliche Mittel zur Beobachtung der Partei einsetzen.

Minister empfiehlt »sachliche Härte«

Lindner betonte, man müsse sich um die erreichbaren Wählerinnen und Wähler der AfD bemühen. »Und zwar nicht nur mit dem moralischen Zeigefinger, sondern auch mit konkreten Lösungen. Ich empfehle nüchterne, sachliche Härte«, fügte der FDP-Chef hinzu. Viele Leute wählten die AfD aus Frust über ungeregelte Migration seit der Ära von Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel (CDU). Inzwischen gebe es aber einen neuen Realismus in der europäischen Flüchtlingspolitik.

Bereits kurz nach dem Urteil in Münster hatte sich Lindners Parteikollege, Bundesjustizminister Marco Buschmann, ähnlich geäußert. Die Entscheidung ebne »nicht automatisch den Weg zu einem Verbotsverfahren der AfD«, sagte der FDP-Politiker. »Ein solches sollte man nur anstrengen, wenn man sich sehr sicher sein kann, dass es auch erfolgreich wäre.«

Buschmann betonte, am wichtigsten und überzeugendsten bleibe es, rechtspopulistische Parteien politisch zu bekämpfen und mit Argumenten zu entlarven. »Das sollte der Anspruch der seriösen Demokraten bleiben«, so der Justizminister.

If you need to add stuff to a PDF document, now you can do that online with Firefox. Open the PDF in Firefox and click the Text or Draw buttons in the upper right corner to make changes to your document. Download the file to save it with your changes.

Fill in forms online without printing and scanning

We’ve all faced this: you need to fill in a form that is a PDF, but it isn’t editable. In the past, your only option was to print it on a dead tree, add things with ink, and then scan it back into your computer.

No more! Now, all you need to do is edit the PDF online with Firefox, save it, and email it from your computer.

Add text

Open the PDF in Firefox. Click the Text button to choose a color and text size before selecting where on the document you wish to add text. It’s that easy!

Add drawings (or your signature)

Open the PDF in Firefox. Click the Draw icon to choose a color, thickness and opacity before then being able to draw on the document. It probably won’t be any messier than your usual signature!

Add image with alt text

Open the PDF in Firefox. Click the image icon, which will then prompt you to upload an image. Adjust size and placement of your image as needed. Click the “+Alt text” button on the image to add a photo description to make your PDF more accessible.

Create a highlight

Open the PDF in Firefox. Select the text you want to highlight, then click the highlight icon that appears below your selection, or right click to find the highlight option in the context menu. Click the icon in the top right to freehand highlight sections of the PDF.

What’s happened?

The Linux kernel project has become its own CVE Numbering Authority (CNA) with two very notable features:

• CVE identifiers will only be assigned after a fix is already available and in a release; and
• the project will err on the side of caution, and assign CVEs to all fixes.

This means each new kernel release will contain a lot of CVE fixes.

So what?

This could contribute to a significant change in behaviour for commercial software vendors.

The kernel project has long advocated updating to the latest stable release in order to benefit from fixes, including security patches. They’re not the only ones: Google has analysed this topic and Codethink talks extensively about creating software with Long Term Maintainability baked in.

But alas, a general shift to this mentality appears to allude us: the prevalent attitude amongst the majority of commercial software products is still very much “ship and forget”.

Consider the typical pattern: SoC vendors base their BSP on an old and stable Linux distribution. Bespoke development occurs on top of this, and some time later, a product is released to market. By this point, the Linux version is out of date, quite likely unsupported and almost certainly vulnerable from a security perspective.

Now, fair enough, upgrading your kernel is non-trivial: it needs to be carefully thought through, requires extensive testing, and often careful planning to ensure collaboration between different parties, especially if you have dependencies on vendor blobs or other proprietary components. Clearly, this kind of thing needs to be thought about from day one of a new project. Sadly, in practice, in a lot of cases, upgrading simply isn’t even planned for.

And now?

With the Linux kernel project becoming a CNA, we’ll now have a situation where every new kernel release highlights the scale of how far behind mainline these products are, and by implication how exposed to security vulnerabilities the software is.

The result should be increased pressure on vendors to upgrade.

With this, plus the recent surge in regulations around keeping software up to date (see the CRA, UNECE R155 and R156), we may start to see a genuine movement towards software being designed to be properly maintained and updated, ie, "ship and remember" or Long Term Maintainability. Let's hope so.

What else?

Well, the Linux kernel is just one project. There are countless other FOSS projects which are depended on by almost all commercial projects, and they may also be interested in becoming their own CNA.

This would further increase the visibility of the problem, and apply a renewed focus on the criticality of releasing software products with plans to upgrade built in from the start.

If you would like to learn more about CNAs or Codethink’s Long Term Maintainability approach, reach out via sales@codethink.co.uk.

Electric utilities from Georgia to Wisconsin to Virginia are predicting a dizzying surge in power demand from new industrial facilities, electric vehicles and, most of all, the data centers that store our digital photos and will enable large-language models for artificial intelligence. For months now, they have been signaling that they won’t be able to keep up.

To keep the lights on, many utility companies are proposing to build dozens of new power plants that burn natural gas. North Carolina-based Duke Energy alone wants to add 8.9 gigawatts of new gas-fired capacity — more than the entire country added in 2023. Using their own projections of soaring energy demands as justification, these companies are also pushing back on the climate targets set by their states and the Biden administration.

If state regulators sign off on these plans, they will be gambling with our country’s future. We need to electrify everything from cars to appliances to slow climate change, but we won’t be able to reach our climate goals if we power all of those machines with dirty energy.

There is a better way. But to get there, legislators will need to overhaul the incentives driving utilities to double down on natural gas, so that they can turn a profit without cooking the planet.

Companies like Duke, Dominion Energy and Georgia Power argue that they need more gas-fired plants to reliably provide power during times of peak demand — for instance, on a hot summer weekday afternoon when home cooling systems and data servers are all humming at maximum output, and the grid strains to keep up. But those peaks tend to materialize only for a few dozen hours per year, and there are ways to deal with them that don’t require a massive amount of new methane-burning infrastructure.

The real reason the utilities want to build these plants is quite simple: The more stuff they build, the more money they make. Regulators let utilities charge their customers enough money to cover what they spend on assets like combustion turbines and wires, plus a generous rate of return (up to 10 percent) for their investors. This longstanding arrangement incentivizes power providers to build expensive things whether society needs them or not, in lieu of lower-cost, cleaner options, and to invoke their duty to keep the lights on as a post hoc rationalization.

This dynamic can push some companies to extreme lengths in pursuit of gas-generated profits. Nearly a decade ago, Dominion and Duke partnered to build a 600-mile-long pipeline across West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina, largely to supply their own new power plants. Back then, the companies cited their own forecasts of rising energy demand and claimed more gas supply was needed to back up intermittent wind- and solar-generated power coming onto the grid. But it soon became clear that there wasn’t any need for those plants, and most were canceled. The pipeline’s core premise had proved to be a mirage. And in 2020, faced with relentless grass-roots opposition, Dominion and Duke finally abandoned it.

It makes sense that Dominion and Duke executives would pursue these potentially lucrative investments; their job is to maximize returns for their shareholders. But utilities aren’t like other shareholder-owned companies. They are granted the right to be monopolies in exchange for providing essential services to society. And regulators’ job is to hold them accountable to the public interest. This century-old model is in dire need of an upgrade, so that utilities can be compensated for achieving goals — such as using clean, affordable energy and building a resilient grid — that are in everyone’s interest.

Although breathless forecasts of artificial intelligence gobbling up all of our power supply may or may not prove correct, there’s no question that after decades of remaining mostly flat, electricity demand is increasing. Fortunately, utilities have plenty of ways to meet this new need.

They include “virtual power plants” — when technologies such as home batteries, rooftop solar systems, smart water heaters and thermostats are linked together and managed via software to provide the same services as a conventional power plant. Utilities in Vermont, Colorado and Massachusetts are already using them, to quickly respond to rising demand at a much lower cost than operating natural gas combustion turbines. According to one estimate, virtual power plants could lower U.S. utilities’ costs by as much as $35 billion over the next decade.

Utilities could also accelerate efforts to replace outdated transmission lines with newer ones that can carry double theelectric current and to bring more battery storage online. They can compensate customers for using less energy during times when demand is high and invest far more in energy efficiency, helping customers to adopt devices that use less electricity.

All of these solutions would save customers money and reduce carbon emissions. They could, according to a Department of Energy analysis, meet the entire projected growth in U.S. peak electricity demand over the next decade.

Sure, they wouldn’t provide utilities nearly as much money as building new gas-fired power plants. But that’s why public utility commissions must step in to require utilities to make investments that benefit the climate and their customers, without scaring off their shareholders. What’s needed is not more regulation, just smarter regulation.

There are promising signs that this shift is already underway. In Connecticut, where customers pay some of the highest electricity rates in the nation, the chairwoman of the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority has created a program to test-drive tweaks to utilities’ incentive structure, as part of a larger initiative to build an “equitable, modern electric grid.”

More than a dozen other state legislatures have directed regulators to impose or study some kind of performance-based regulationto reward utilities based on what they do, instead of on how much they spend. This move has predictably elicited pushback from some companies, which believe that their traditional business models are under threat. But others have embraced the new opportunities: Hawaii’s approach has earned the support of the state’s biggest electric utility.

We need utilities to succeed now more than ever before. But the definition of success needs to evolve. We need them not only to shore up a grid being battered by extreme weather and wildfires fueled by climate change, but also to fully embrace the work of phasing out fossil fuels.

The United States has very little chance of reining in its emissions without investor-owned utilities putting their expertise and deep resources to work. We can’t build a carbon-free energy system without them — or without regulators and lawmakers willing to compel them to accelerate, rather than postpone, the clean energy transition.