New story in Science and Health from Time: SpaceX Just Put 60 More Broadband Internet Satellites Into Space SpaceX Just Put 60 More Broadband Internet Satellites Into Space

(Bloomberg) — Space Exploration Technologies Corp. launched its second batch of 60 Starlink satellites on Monday, taking another step toward Elon Musk’s vision to create a network for space-based broadband internet service around the world.

One of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets rumbled aloft at 9:56 a.m. local time from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The satellites deployed a little over an hour after the launch.

Liftoff! pic.twitter.com/Rz6Y4EnEnM

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 11, 2019

A space-based internet service will be an important source of funding for the closely held company, according to Musk, who founded SpaceX in 2002 with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets. SpaceX launched its first batch of satellites in May and has tinkered with the design to increase spectrum capacity.

The first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket, which flew in three previous missions, landed back on a drone ship about 8 1/2 minutes after the launch.

Falcon 9 first stage has landed on the Of Course I Still Love You droneship – the fourth launch and landing of this booster pic.twitter.com/qQvH7pwMDO

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 11, 2019

SpaceX called off an attempt to use two vessels to catch the fairing — the nose cone that protects the payload — out of concern about sea conditions. The company still plans to retrieve the fairing, which was used in one mission earlier this year, once its two halves splash down.

Read more: SpaceX Is One of TIME’s 50 Genius Companies of 2018

SpaceX plans to continue launching Starlink satellites in batches and aims to provide service to parts of the northern U.S. and Canada next year, according to Starlink’s website. The company isn’t alone in wanting to start a constellation: Jeff Bezos’s Amazon.com Inc. has a rival effort called Project Kuiper, and SoftBank Group Corp.-backed OneWeb aims to have a network available by 2021.

“We see this as a way for SpaceX to generate revenue that can be used to develop more advanced rockets and spaceships,” Musk told journalists during a conference call in May. “This is a key stepping stone on the way toward establishing a self-sustaining city on Mars and a base on the moon.”

New story in Science and Health from Time: Scientists Have Found the Oldest Example of an Upright Ape Scientists Have Found the Oldest Example of an Upright Ape

BERLIN (AP) — The remains of an ancient ape found in a Bavarian clay pit suggest that humans’ ancestors began standing upright millions of years earlier than previously thought, scientists said Wednesday.

An international team of researchers says the fossilized partial skeleton of a male ape that lived almost 12 million years ago in the humid forests of what is now southern Germany bears a striking resemblance to modern human bones. In a paper published by the journal Nature, they concluded that the previously unknown species — named Danuvius guggenmosi — could walk on two legs but also climb like an ape.

The findings “raise fundamental questions about our previous understanding of the evolution of the great apes and humans,” said Madelaine Boehme of the University of Tuebingen, Germany, who led the research.

The question of when apes evolved bipedal motion has fascinated scientists since Charles Darwin first argued that they were the ancestors of humans. Previous fossil records of apes with an upright gait — found in Crete and Kenya — dated only as far back as 6 million years ago.

Boehme, along with researchers from Bulgaria, Germany, Canada and the United States, examined more than 15,000 bones recovered from a trove of archaeological remains known as the Hammerschmiede, or Hammer Smithy, about 70 kilometers (44 miles) west of the Germany city of Munich.

Among the remains they were able to piece together were primate fossils belonging to four individuals that lived 11.62 million years ago. The most complete, an adult male, likely stood about 1 meter (3 feet, 4 inches) tall, weighed 31 kilograms (68 pounds) and looked similar to modern-day bonobos, a species of chimpanzee.

“It was astonishing for us to realize how similar certain bones are to humans, as opposed to great apes,” Boehme said.

Thanks to several well-preserved vertebra, limb, finger and toe bones, the scientists were able to reconstruct how Danuvius moved, concluding that while it would have been able to hang from branches by his arms, it could also straighten its legs to walk upright.

“This changes our view of early human evolution, which is that it all happened in Africa,” Boehme told The Associated Press in an interview.

Like humans, Danuvius had an S-shaped spine to hold its body upright while standing. Unlike humans, though, it had a powerful, opposable big toe that would have allowed it to grab branches with its foot and safely walk through the treetops.

Fred Spoor, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, called the fossil finds “fantastic” but said they would likely be the subject of much debate, not least because they could challenge many existing ideas about evolution.

“I can see that there will be a lot of agonizing and re-analysis of what these fossils mean,” said Spoor, who wasn’t involved in the study.

New story in Science and Health from Time: How Asthma Inhalers Are Choking the Planet How Asthma Inhalers Are Choking the Planet

If there is any field of science that understands the doctrine of unintended consequences, it’s medicine. We rely on antibiotics to wipe out infections, and in the process breed a class of superbugs resistant to the drugs. We develop powerful medications that can control chronic pain, and in the U.S., have a nationwide addiction crisis to show for that breakthrough.

Now, it appears, we can add asthma control to the list pharmaceutical blowbacks we didn’t see coming. According to a new study published in BMJ Open, the familiar lightweight, pocket-sized aerosolized inhalers that make breathing easier for so many of the 235 million people worldwide who suffer from asthma may be choking the planet on a powerful greenhouse gas they release in the process.

The study, led by Dr. Alexander JK Wilkinson, a respiratory specialist with Britain’s National Health Service, focused on the 4.67 million people diagnosed with asthma in the United Kingdom, but it has implications for treatment worldwide, including in the U.S., where 22.6 million people (6.1 million of them children) are afflicted with the condition. The researcher compared the greenhouse gas emissions of aerosol pumps—known as metered dose inhalers (MDI)—with dry powder inhalers (DPI), which are shaped something like a hockey puck and are activated simply by inhaling. The two weren’t even close.

The problem with MDIs is not carbon dioxide (the most common greenhouse gas), but rather methane, which represents a far smaller share of greenhouse emissions, but a much more powerful one, with up to 84 times the heat-trapping power of CO2. Even the least polluting inhaler was found to emit methane at levels equal to up to 10 kg (22 lbs.) of carbon dioxide into the air over the course of its 200-puff lifetime. The worst emitted the equivalent of more than 36 kg (79 lbs) of CO2.

Dry powder inhalers, by comparison, use no methane propellants at all. To the extent that they have any carbon footprint, it’s mostly from their manufacture and disposal, and the numbers are comparatively small—from 1.5 kg to 6 kg (3.3 lbs to 13 lbs) CO2 equivalent depending on brand.

In the U.K., MDIs represent about 70% of all inhaler prescriptions and the researchers estimate they are responsible for releasing the equivalent of 635,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year. If just 10% of those patients switched to DPIs, the equivalent of 58,000 metric tons of CO2 could be kept out of the atmosphere. That, Britain’s Sky News pointed out, is the same carbon footprint as 180,000 gas-powered cars driving making the round-trip journey between London and Edinburgh—about 1,300 km (or approximately 800 miles) each.

What makes such a switchover especially important, the study argues, is that many of the people who are hurt most by all this MDI outgassing are the very people the inhalers are designed to help. “Climate change is a huge and present threat to health which will disproportionately impact the poorest and most vulnerable people on the planet,” the researchers wrote, “including people with pre-existing lung disease.”

Across the rest of Europe, less than 50% of inhalers prescribed are MDIs and in Scandinavia it’s barely 10%. The difference, in most cases, is less about pharmaceutical efficacy than simply local medical custom and practice.

The authors are not calling for a blanket elimination of MDIs. Dry powder inhalers require patients to have at least enough lung strength to draw in the medication, and many do not. For them, the forced puff of an MDI is the only way to administer the drug.

“We recognize the need to protect the environment,” said Jesica Kirby, head of health advice for the advocacy group Asthma UK, in a statement responding to the study, “but it’s critically important that people with asthma receive the medicines they need to stay well and avoid a life-threatening asthma attack.”

As with so many things medical, the right solution is all about finding the proper balance between cost and benefits. In the case of asthma, the benefit of dialing back the aerosols and turning to alternatives whenever possible can accrue to not just individual patients, but the planet at large.

New story in Science and Health from Time: Trump Now Has an Opening to Pull the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Pact Trump Now Has an Opening to Pull the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Pact

WASHINGTON (AP) — For more than two years President Donald Trump has talked about pulling the United States out of the landmark Paris climate agreement. Starting Monday he finally can do something about it.

Even then, though, the withdrawal process takes a year and wouldn’t become official until at least the day after the 2020 presidential election.

In the Paris agreement, nearly 200 countries set their own national targets for reducing or controlling pollution of heat-trapping gases. It was negotiated in 2015 with lots of prodding by the United States and China and went into effect Nov. 4, 2016.

The terms of the deal say no country can withdraw in the first three years. So Monday is the first time the U.S. could actually start the withdrawal process, which begins with a letter to the United Nations. And it doesn’t become official for a year after that, which leads to the day after the election.

If someone other than Trump wins in 2020, the next president could get back in the deal in just 30 days and plan to cut carbon pollution, said Andrew Light, a former Obama State Department climate negotiator now at the nonprofit World Resources Institute.

Light and other experts say the withdrawal by the United States, the second biggest climate polluter and world’s largest economy, will hurt efforts to fight global warming.

“Global objectives can’t be met unless everybody does their part and the U.S. has to play the game,” said Appalachian State University environmental sciences professor Gregg Marland, who is part of a global effort to track carbon dioxide emissions. “We’re the second biggest player. What happens to the game if we take our ball and go home?”

Someone else, probably the biggest polluter China, will take over leadership in the global fight, said MIT economist Jake Jacoby, who co-founded the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change.

The penalty for the U.S. “is not in economic loss. The penalty is in shame, in discrediting U.S. leadership,” Jacoby said.

Asked what the U.S. plans next, State Department spokesman James Dewey on Friday emailed only this: “The U.S. position with respect to the Paris Agreement has not changed. The United States intends to withdraw from the Paris Agreement.”

The agreement set goals of preventing another 0.9 degrees (0.5 degrees Celsius) to 1.8 degrees (1 degree Celsius) of warming from current levels. Even the pledges made in 2015 weren’t enough to prevent those levels of warming.

The deal calls for nations to come up with more ambitious pollution cuts every five years, starting in November 2020 in at a meeting in Scotland. Because of the expected withdrawal, the U.S. role in 2020 negotiations will be reduced, Light said.

Climate change, caused by the burning of coal, oil and gas, has already warmed the world by 1.8 degrees (1 degree Celsius) since the late 1800s, caused massive melting of ice globally, triggered weather extremes and changed ocean chemistry. And scientists say, depending on how much carbon dioxide is emitted, it will only get worse by the end of the century with temperatures jumping by several degrees and oceans rising by close to three feet (1 meter).

Trump has been promising to pull out of the Paris deal since 2017, often mischaracterizing the terms of the agreement, which are voluntary. In October, he called it a massive wealth transfer from America to other nations and said it was one-sided

That’s not the case, experts said.

For example, the U.S. goal — set by Barack Obama’s administration — had been to reduce carbon dioxide emission in 2025 by 26% to 28% compared to 2005 levels. This translates to about 15% compared to 1990 levels.

The European Union’s goal was to cut carbon pollution in 2030 by 40% compared to 1990 levels, which is greater than America’s pledge, said Stanford University’s Rob Jackson, who chairs the Global Carbon Project, a group of scientists that track carbon emissions worldwide. The United Kingdom has already exceeded that goal, he said.

“The U.S. agreement is not a tax on the American people. There is no massive wealth transfer,” said Climate Advisers CEO Nigel Purvis, who was a lead State Department climate negotiator in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. “In fact, the agreement obligates no country to make any financial payments.”

Formally getting out of the Paris agreement is bad, but at this point after years of rhetoric is more symbolic than anything, said Georgia Tech climate scientist Kim Cobb. She said she is more worried about other Trump carbon pollution actions, such as fighting California’s tougher emissions and mileage standards and rollbacks of coal fired power plant regulations.

The U.S. was not on track to reach its Paris pledge, according to the federal Energy Information Administration’s latest projections.

The EIA projects that in 2025 emissions will be at 4959 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, 17% below 2005 levels, about 500 million tons short of the goal. Emissions in 2018 were nearly 2% higher than in 2016, the agency’s latest energy outlook says. That spike likely was from extreme weather and economic growth, Marland and Jacoby said.

New story in Science and Health from Time: Supply Ship Launches Into Space With Cookie Oven and Sports Car Parts as Experiment for Future Journeys Supply Ship Launches Into Space With Cookie Oven and Sports Car Parts as Experiment for Future Journeys

A supply ship rocketed toward the International Space Station on Saturday with sports car parts, an oven for baking cookies and a vest to protect against radiation.

Northrop Grumman launched its Cygnus capsule for NASA from Wallops Island, Virginia. The 8,200-pound shipment (3,700 kilograms) should reach the orbiting lab Monday.

“Good launch all the way around,” a ground controller observed.

The space station’s astronauts will test the oven by baking chocolate chip cookies from scratch and try out the new safety vest to gauge its comfort. Both experiments are seen as precursors to moon and Mars journeys.

Other newly arriving equipment will be used in a series of NASA spacewalks later this month to fix a key particle physics detector. Parked outside the space station since 2011, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer needs new cooling pumps to continue its search for elusive dark matter and antimatter.

Italy’s Lamborghini is also along for the ride. It’s sending up samples of carbon fiber used in its sports cars for six months of direct space exposure. Researchers are considering the materials for medical implants.

Like space, the insides of a person’s body are an extreme environment, explained Houston Methodist’s Alessandro Grattoni, who is collaborating with Lamborghini on the experiment. As a nanomedicine specialist, he said Friday he’s continuously on the lookout for new materials for devices that are inserted beneath the skin. These minuscule implants release therapeutic drugs to treat cancer, hormone deficiencies and other illnesses.

Northrop Grumman is now controlling two Cygnus capsules in orbit, a first for the Virginia-based company. Named for the swan constellation, the Cygnus launched last spring is flying free of the 250-mile-high (400-kilometer-high) space station, after completing its grocery run. It will be directed to a fiery re-entry sometime in the near future, taking station trash down with it, according to company officials.

The newest Cygnus is officially called the S.S. Alan Bean after the Apollo 12 astronaut who became the fourth man to walk on the moon 50 years ago this month. He later commanded NASA’s first space station, Skylab, and became known for his cosmic-themed paintings. He died last year.

NASA has contracted with Northrop Grumman and SpaceX to keep the space station stocked. This is Northrop Grumman’s 12th successful Cygnus flight since 2013. The company has upgraded both its Cygnus and Antares rocket to haul more cargo from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on the eastern Virginia shore.

The space station is currently home to three Americans, two Russians and one Italian.

New story in Science and Health from Time: These Researchers Are Using AI Drones to More Safely Track Wildlife These Researchers Are Using AI Drones to More Safely Track Wildlife

In the late ’90s, wildlife conservationists Zoe Jewell and Sky Alibhai were grappling with a troubling realization. The pair had been studying black rhino populations in Zimbabwe, and they spent a good deal of their time shooting the animals with tranquilizer darts and affixing radio collars around their necks. But after years of work, the researchers realized there was a major problem: Their technique, commonly used by all manner of wildlife scientists, seemed to be causing female rhinos to have fewer offspring.

The researchers published their findings in 2001, igniting a controversy in the conservation world. The problem, says Duke University professor of conservation ecology Stuart Pimm, is that being “collared” is extremely stressful for animals. “If you were walking through your neighborhood and suddenly a bunch of strange people came charging after you … and you got shot in the ass with a dart and woke up with something around your neck, I think you’d be in pretty bad shape too,” he says.

But Jewell and Alibhai had an idea. While working alongside the Shona tribe in Zimbabwe, they saw how the indigenous trackers were able to deduce an enormous amount of information about wildlife from animals’ footprints, including weight, sex, and species, all without getting anywhere close to the animals themselves. “We would go out with local game scouts, who were often expert trackers, and they would often laugh at us as we were listening to these signals coming from the collars,” Jewell says. “They would say to us, ‘all you need to do is look on the ground.”

Might it be possible, they wondered, to apply those time-tested techniques to conservation efforts?

Yes, it turns out. In 2004, the pair founded WildTrack, a nonprofit organization that developed a footprint identification technique (FIT) and specialized software for researchers to track wildlife populations. WildTrack can identify individual animals with 95% accuracy, it says, all without getting up close or using camera traps. Furthermore, Jewell says WildTrack’s technique can help solve one of the core challenges in any conservation effort: figuring out how many animals are in the wild, and where exactly they are.

While the process was inspired by indigenous trackers, Jewell says WildTrack’s technology is still limited compared to their capabilities. “It’s humbling in a way to look at what these expert [trackers] can do in the field,” she says. “We can only still emulate a tiny bit of that.”

WildTrack’s method is being used in dozens of conservation efforts around the world, from monitoring rhinos in Namibia, to eurasian otters in Portugal, to tigers in Nepal. In China, where panda researchers formerly had little option but to measure the lengths of undigested bamboo pieces in feces to identify and track individuals, the FIT protocol, which is faster and more accurate, has been a breakthrough. “This is extraordinary, exciting work,” says Pimm. “It’s technologically very clever, and it feeds directly into good natural history.”

With hundreds of footprint images now coming in every week from monitoring efforts across the world, the researchers at WildTrack are looking to new advances in computing, especially artificial intelligence (AI), to speed up their work. Jewell and Alibhai have been working with software provider SAS since the late nineties. In 2018, they collaborated to create a machine learning algorithm that can automatically identify footprints or find marker points in footprint images, a task researchers used to carry out by hand. The team soon trained an AI system to recognize different species of big cats just from looking at paw prints. “After a while, you get it to tell the difference between a cougar and a snow leopard, or any of the big cats really,” says Craig Mann, a software developer on the WildTrack project at SAS. Although the AI software doesn’t yet do all the work of human researchers, it has made the time-consuming FIT process about five times faster.

AI advancements aren’t just being used to help conservation efforts in the lab — WildTrack’s researchers are also using AI to improve their footprint-gathering technique. Together with European drone company SenseFly, they’re developing an AI-powered drone to track footprints and collect information about animals from the air. In August, the researchers tested a drone typically used for mining, surveying and agriculture to scan a large area and locate human, dog and horse tracks. Their hope is to develop a drone that can scan footprints in higher resolution, as well as follow animal tracks across grasslands or deep snow.

Some of WildTrack’s work has attracted interest from outside the conservation community. The group has received financial support from the U.S. Army, which often funds projects in which it sees a possible long-term benefit. Some of that interest came from the Army’s own conservation work, which includes helping park rangers prevent poaching and illicit trafficking of elephant tusks and rhino horns, activities that can fund extremist groups. But it’s also interested in using similar techniques to track humans. “We see this as a long-term investment,” says Stephan Lee, a chief scientist at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory. “The techniques developed can be obviously applied to studying if [we can be] identifying individuals specifically.”

For Jewell, it’s a fortunate coincidence that the U.S. Army’s goals align with those of WildTrack. She says stopping trade in body parts like rhino horns from endangered animals is beneficial both for conservation and regional stability. “We feel very encouraged that the U.S. Army Research Office is working with us to support the conservation of endangered species and glad that we have a common mission,” she says over email.

That military research may eventually pay dividends in the defense sphere, but it’s also a potent reminder of the potential for all technologies, even those developed for as agreeable a purpose as wildlife conservation, to be used in different ways than originally intended. But for conservationists faced with a slew of threats — poaching, habitat loss, climate change — there may be little alternative but to use every technological advancement and financial opportunity at their disposal to prevent the extinction of vital species. And if that means monitoring rhinos from military-funded, AI-powered footprint tracking drones gliding high above the savanna, then so be it. “Non-invasive monitoring, I think it’s very much an idea that’s time has come,” says Pimm. “It’s going to be the wave of the future.”

New story in Science and Health from Time: China Is Bankrolling Green Energy Projects Around the World China Is Bankrolling Green Energy Projects Around the World

Perched on the ochre scrub of Argentina’s sunbaked Puna Jujeña plateau, the $400 million Cauchari power station is the world’s highest-altitude solar farm at 13,000 ft (about 4,000 meters) above sea level. In Kenya’s volcano-strewn Rift Valley, a newly green-lit, super-efficient electrical substation will soon funnel clean power from the nearby Olkaria Geothermal Plant about 50 miles (80 km) to downtown Nairobi. Some 14 miles off blustery northeastern Scotland, Moray East is set to become the world’s largest offshore wind farm, helping to heat and light up to a million homes.

Three distinct renewable energy projects utilizing cutting edge technology in far-flung corners of the globe sharing one uniting characteristic: Chinese finance. Over the past five years, Chinese bankrolling of green energy projects overseas has soared as the world’s number two economy and number one polluter rebrands itself as an environmental champion.

Not only is China today the world’s largest producer of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and electric vehicles, but it has also been the top investor in clean energy for nine out of the last ten years, according to the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management. Since 2014, Chinese equity investment has supported a total of 12,622 megawatts (MW) of wind and solar projects in South and Southeast Asia alone, according to new research by Greenpeace. That’s the equivalent of 21 standard coal plants or enough to power New York City. The shift from simply exporting to bankrolling green tech—driven by both a drying up of domestic subsidies in China and new incentives to invest abroad—is a boon since “it means China really cares about the future profitability of each project,” says Greenpeace campaigner Liu Junyan.

Beijing’s refocus from fossil fuels to renewable energy is a net positive for a myriad of reasons: protecting scarce resources, cutting carbon emissions that spur global warming, and boosting energy security by reducing reliance on costly fuel imports. While only a hatful of nations boast significant oil and gas reserves, nearly all have the potential to develop clean energy themselves, whether via solar, wind, tidal, geothermal or hydroelectric plants, mitigating geopolitical tensions by making the world less dependent on restive regions like the Middle East.

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Chinese export of renewable energy technology around the globe is set to boost Beijing’s clout as the influence of major oil exporters like Russia and Saudi Arabia wanes. China has by far the most renewable energy patents with the U.S., Japan and Europe lagging behind. “No country has put itself in a better position to become the world’s renewable energy superpower than China,” says a recent report by the Global Commission on the Geopolitics of Energy Transformation, chaired by former Iceland President Olafur Grimsson.

The U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords under President Donald Trump provided China an opening to seize. America’s abandonment of global leadership on the issue was thrown into sharper focus by Trump’s empty chair during a climate change discussion at August’s G7 meeting in France. “The U.S. administration is not particularly interested in renewables at home let alone overseas,” says Simon Nicholas, an analyst for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. Now, China has firmly established its leading position in renewable energy output, as well as in related technologies such as electric vehicles, transmission lines and battery storage, and Beijing is managing to weaponize green technology in a way that strategic rivals like the U.S. may struggle to counter.

For many Chinese investors, a combination of rising domestic competition and rolling back of subsidies at home has widened their gaze. In solar firm Sungrow’s six-story, steel-and-glass headquarters in China’s eastern province of Anhui, CEO Cao Renxian explains how “struggles with the U.S. trade war” forced him to relocate production to India in order to dodge the 25% tariffs the Trump Administration slapped on imported made-in-China panels last year.

After overcoming the significant cultural, legal and linguistic barriers to secure a foothold abroad, Cao now has designs on growing his foreign portfolio. Sungrow currently has stakes in two solar farms of a combined 90 MW in Vietnam, and is constructing a new 60 MW solar farm to soak up the cerulean skies 100 miles north of Melbourne, Australia. Cao explains his global efforts as something of a rapturous calling “to boost environmental protection for our nation and the whole world,” while adding that his firm now sees annual revenues of 10 billion RMB ($1.4 billion).

The geostrategic corollaries are vast. These green investments chime with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a metaphorical repaving of the ancient Silk Road though a $1 trillion transcontinental trade-and-infrastructure network largely bankrolled by Beijing. It has the potential to be the world’s greatest building project since the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt Europe in the aftermath of World War II. The BRI will extend China’s presence across the globe while reorienting nations away from the U.S.-and-Eurocentricism of the last half century.

Since the BRI was enshrined in the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) constitution in 2017, the nation’s biggest banks are obliged to offer preferential loans towards its projects. There are also tens of billions of dollars set aside in dedicated cash pools like the Silk Road Fund. The Import-Export Bank of China, for one, loaned enough money to fund 85% of the Cauchari solar farm in Argentina at just 3% annual interest over 15 years, according to Reuters. (That compares favorably to the more typical 4.5%-7% interest bank loans for such projects.) The proviso is that three quarters of materials used on the project are sourced from Chinese firms such as Huawei.

Apart from the obvious headache of having allies and partners in hock to Beijing, national security concerns loom large. The Trump Administration has accused Huawei—the world’s biggest supplier of telecoms equipment as well as solar inverters, which turn the energy produced by solar panels into a grid-ready electrical current—of installing illicit “backdoors” in equipment that could be used to spy on or cripple users’ networks, and has threatened to cut off intelligence sharing with nations that embed it. (Huawei vehemently denies this, and hard evidence is scant.)

Suspicions regarding Chinese firms persist, however, with the E.U. in March even branding Beijing a “systemic rival.” Last year, Germany blocked a deal in which China’s state-owned State Grid, the world’s largest utility company, would have purchased a $1.2 billion stake in Germany’s national high-voltage energy network, on apparent “national security” grounds.

However, since State Grid’s cutting-edge high-voltage transmission lines, which are far more efficient than existing technology for long-distance transmission, are seen as vital for linking remote and underutilized renewable energy plants into the national grid, many nations believe the benefits outweigh any risk.

Few have embraced Chinese renewable technology and investment as warmly as Brazil, where State Grid is the largest power generation and distribution company. Another Chinese behemoth, China Three Gorges (CTG), the world’s largest hydropower provider with operations across 47 countries, controlling 14 out of a total of 48 hydro-plants in Brazil, amounting to 8% of the nation’s total hydropower capacity, as well as 11 wind farms. CTG Brazil CEO Li Yinsheng tells TIME that Brazil is attractive for investment because it has the resources, demand and necessary regulatory framework. “And by combining [Chinese and Brazilian] equities we are in a unique position to be more competitive in the market,” he says.

It’s not all blue skies ahead for China. The country still generates 70% of its power from coal, and will continue to consume about half the world’s coal until 2023, according to the International Energy Agency. It also approved 141 million tons of new annual coal mining capacity in the first half of this year; in the whole of 2018, Beijing approved just 25 million tons of new coal mining capacity.

The vast majority of the more than $244 billion that China has spent on energy projects worldwide since 2000 have been on fossil fuels, according to data from the Global Development Policy Center, a policy-oriented research body affiliated with Boston University. Despite Xi telling journalists at April’s second Belt and Road Forum in Beijing that he embraces “open, clean and green development,” China has financed more than 300 foreign coal plants from Egypt to the Philippines.

According to Nicholas, the analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, Beijing’s vociferous championing of renewables is “partly an attempt to position itself globally regarding climate issues, but also to distract from the fact that it’s also heavily pushing coal-fired technology to developing countries.” For as long as the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy relies on the prosperity of the Chinese people, green intentions will always be sacrificed on the altar of economic expediency, both at home and abroad.