Going green is often easier said than done, but a new business organization is hoping to change that. While focusing on large-scale energy buyers, the group plans to push for changes that could make renewable power more accessible for all Americans.

Companies from a variety of industries — including Walmart, General Motors, Google and Johnson & Johnson — are forming a trade association to represent firms that purchase renewable energy and remove barriers that make it complicated to shift away from carbon.

The new organization, the Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance, is building on years of work between corporations and climate advocacy nonprofits. Currently, about 200 companies, cities and universities are involved.

Miranda Ballentine, the CEO of the new trade group, says the organization will help push energy markets and public policies to make it easier to actually choose to buy green energy.

It’s harder than you might think for a company to choose renewables, Ballentine says.

“Especially in today’s day and age, when we see many renewable energy technologies that are meeting or beating brown [conventional] power prices, you would think, ‘Hallelujah! The day has come, clean energy is here, we can now just go out and buy it.’ But there are a number of barriers,” she says.

One is the way energy markets are set up. They vary by region — some areas allow more choice than others. But in many locations, buyers can’t select a source for the energy they get from a utility.

“They can’t actually say, ‘I want power from that wind project over there,’ ” Ballentine says. “They literally cannot contract directly for certain sources of power.”

In other cases, there are technological challenges. “Some renewable energy technologies like wind and solar don’t produce 24/7 — they produce when the sun is shining and when the wind is blowing,” Ballentine says. “And we as energy consumers … we need our power 24/7,” she says.

REBA hopes to flex its purchasing power to support technological innovation and push utilities to offer more green options — calling for changes to public policy where necessary.

“The demand side of the equation really has a unique role to play and really has a unique voice and ability to drive the clean-energy market,” Ballentine says.

Many companies have set green energy targets as part of overall sustainability efforts — whether out of a sense of corporate responsibility or in the pursuit of positive PR.

But Steve Chriss, director for energy and strategy analysis at Walmart, says there’s a financial calculation as well.

Walmart has “a great desire to operate as cleanly and sustainably as possible,” he says. “But we also want to operate at the lowest possible cost. With where renewable energy costs have come, we feel that in a number of markets renewable energy is going to be the best cost option.

“It’s not just a specialty play for the interests of a few [companies] who are really into it,” he says. “It’s really about a business play to deliver the lowest-cost resources possible.”

Walmart, operating on a massive scale, organizes multiple sources of renewable power — from rooftop solar to complex arrangements with utilities. Other companies might be interested in green power, but “don’t necessarily have the scale or capabilities of a Walmart” to pursue those options, Chriss says.

REBA will aim to open access to green energy to all its members, not just the most powerful mega corporations.

“As access points increase, more gets done, economies of scale drive lower costs,” Chriss says. “We try to look towards … getting to where renewables can be the lowest-cost resource in every market.”

Priya Barua, a senior manager for utility innovation at the World Resources Institute, says the work of the new trade group could have implications well beyond its members. The institute is one of the four nonprofits that helped establish REBA.

“It’s not just creating options for [corporate and industrial] customers, but using their collective buying power … to create options in the market that would benefit everybody.”

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Boeing says it has a software fix ready for its 737 Max airplanes that will be unveiled to airline officials, pilots and aviation authorities from around the world Wednesday, as the aircraft manufacturer works to rebuild trust among its customers and the flying public following two fatal crashes of the planes in recent months.

Meanwhile, those crashes and the relationship between Boeing and the federal agency charged with regulating it will be discussed at a U.S. Senate aviation subcommittee hearing on Wednesday. Scheduled to testify are the heads of the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board, along with the Transportation Department’s inspector general, who is investigating how the FAA went about certifying the 737 Max as airworthy, and whether regulators relied too heavily on Boeing’s own safety assessments in their review.

Those developments come as transportation authorities in Ethiopia prepare to release preliminary findings on the cause of the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 plane earlier this month that killed all 157 people on board.

A spokesman for Ethiopia’s transport ministry told The Associated Press “a date has not been set but (the preliminary report) will be released later this week.” The spokesman says the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, France’s aviation investigative authority BEA and Ethiopia’s Transport Ministry have been conducting the investigation jointly.

The investigators have said there were striking similarities between the March 10 crash outside of Ethiopia’s capital city Addis Ababa and the crash of a Lion Air Boeing 737 Max 8 into the Java Sea in Indonesia last October. Both planes crashed shortly after takeoff and both followed similar, erratic flight tracks in the air that indicate the pilots may have been struggling to try keep the planes from going into nosedives.

In the Lion Air jet crash Oct. 29, which killed all 189 people on board, Indonesian investigators say an automated flight control system, acting on erroneous data from a faulty sensor, repeatedly forced the nose of the plane down. That system, called MCAS, for Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, is designed to prevent the airplane from stalling. But the Lion Air pilots apparently did not know how to counteract the system or disengage it, and were in a futile struggle to regain control of the plane.

After the Lion Air crash, many pilots complained that had not been made aware of the MCAS system, as it did not exist on previous versions of the 737, nor had they been trained on what to do when the system engages and forces the nose of the plane downward unexpectedly.

It still is not clear if something similar happened on the Ethiopian Airlines jet but the company’s CEO says pilots had been trained on how to handle the new system after the Lion Air crash.

Boeing officials say the company has completed developing software upgrades for MCAS aimed at preventing such occurrences in the future. The system will no longer act repeatedly in forcing the nose of the plane and will act just once if detecting the plane entering an aerodynamic stall. And the MCAS system will rely on data from the two angle of attack sensors on the plane, instead of just one.

In addition, a warning light that alerts the pilot when the angle of attack sensors disagree will become standard instead of being a more expensive option for airlines to purchase, and it will be added to the entire fleet of 737 Max aircraft for free.

A Boeing official says the software upgrades have undergone extensive lab and simulator testing, with pilots in a simulator facing a series of errors and failures, including sensor errors and other erroneous inputs.

The Boeing official says the FAA participated in the evaluation, even demonstrating the software upgrades during a test flight on March 12.

It is unlikely that the FAA will act quickly in certifying the software upgrades and other fixes, especially considering the scrutiny of the certification process coming from Congress and others. And regulators in Canada, Europe, China and other countries say they will no longer rely on FAA data and will conduct their own tests of the MCAS software updates before allowing Boeing’s 737 Max planes in the air again. As a result, some experts say it could be months before the airplanes are allowed back into service.

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A Lithuanian man pleaded guilty last week to bilking Google and Facebook out of more than $100 million in an elaborate scheme involving a fake company, fake emails and fake invoices.

In an indictment unsealed by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York last week, the Department of Justice alleged that Evaldas Rimasauskas and other unnamed co-conspirators impersonated the Taiwan-based hardware manufacturer, Quanta Computer — with which both tech companies do business — by setting up a company in Latvia with the same name. Using myriad forged invoices, contracts, letters, corporate stamps, and general confusion created by the corporate doppelganger, they successfully bamboozled Google and Facebook into paying tens of million of dollars in fraudulent bills from 2013 to 2015.

The payments were wired to bank accounts controlled by Rimasauskas, which he subsequently laundered through several other bank accounts throughout Latvia, Cyprus, Slovakia, Lithuania, Hungary and Hong Kong.

The 50-year-old, who was extradited to New York in 2017, pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud on Wednesday and agreed to forfeit $49.7 million. He could face up to 30 years in prison when he is sentenced on July 24.

“As Evaldas Rimasauskas admitted today, he devised a blatant scheme to fleece U.S. companies out of $100 million, and then siphoned those funds to bank accounts around the globe,” said U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman in a statement. “Rimasauskas thought he could hide behind a computer screen halfway across the world while he conducted his fraudulent scheme, but as he has learned, the arms of American justice are long, and he now faces significant time in a U.S. prison.”

The indictment does not identify Google and Facebook by name, but the two tech giants confirmed to NPR they are Victim-1 and Victim-2, respectively.

Both companies said they recouped all or most of the money, but declined to comment on the exact sum. Bloomberg reported, “The scheme netted about $23 million from Google in 2013 and about $98 million from Facebook in 2015, according to a person familiar with the case.”

The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center issued an advisory in June, warning that this type of fraud, called a Business Email Compromise, is up by 1,300 percent since January 2015. The FBI estimates companies have been defrauded of more than $3 billion dollars in recent years.

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Investigations into the causes of the two Boeing 737 Max crashes, in Indonesia and Ethiopia, have focused on software — and the possibility that it was autonomously pointing the planes’ noses downward, acting without the pilots’ consent.

It’s a nightmare scenario. It’s also a reminder that software is everywhere, sometimes doing things we don’t expect.

This sank in for a lot of people four years ago, during the Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal. It turned out that software inside the cars had been quietly running the engines in such a way as to cheat on emissions tests.

While it’s always possible for manufacturers to use software dishonestly, the more common problem is software that’s used to enable sloppy designs.

“A lot of times, you see systems that would be much easier to control if somebody had been thoughtful about the mechanical design,” says Chris Gerdes, a professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University.

He says sometimes he’s brought in as a consultant on a project and he’ll find that a moving part was poorly conceived — perhaps it generates too much friction. Designers will leave the problem, assuming the control software will make up for it.

Still, he says software has mostly helped improve cars and other complex systems. And it would be impossible to go back to purely mechanical designs, such as pre-digital automobiles.

“If you open these things up, it’s crazy!” he says, describing the intricate hydraulic systems inside automatic transmissions back before cars had computers. Complex systems of tubes and liquid would “calculate” when to shift gears, something no carmaker would attempt today.

“I have deep appreciation for this but also no idea about how one would implement logic in fluids,” Gerdes says.

Software is quicker, lighter, cheaper and much more flexible than mechanical systems.

For Kara Pernice, senior vice president of the user-experience design consulting firm Nielsen Norman Group, software is a very necessary part of modern manufacturing. But she says it’s often added too late in the design process.

“Many times, hardware-software creation is disjointed,” she says, calling it a “huge problem.”

As an example, she recalls driving her parents’ car recently and being flummoxed by the touch screen.

“I could not figure out how to turn down the air conditioning on a touch screen,” she says. “Are you kidding me?”

Touch screens may strike customers as up to date, but they can also be a shortcut for manufacturers. By leaving all the controls to the programmers of the screen, the mechanical designers can skip the more careful — and time-consuming — process of “considering the human that’s going to use that technology in the end,” as Pernice says. Touch screens often preclude consideration of mechanical controls — such as a knob for the air conditioning — in places where it would make more design sense.

Sometimes, the change to software controls can be deadly. Among the most notorious cases is the Therac-25, a radiation therapy machine built in the 1980s. It dispensed with mechanical safety interlocks of earlier models and replaced them with software. The software turned out to have bugs, and patients were over-radiated — a few were even killed. It became a case study for how not to design safety-critical systems.

But even now, software is a potential risk in medical devices — and programming was the most common cause of medical device recalls last year.

In aviation, software is indispensable. And generally speaking, designers say it has made airplanes much safer and more versatile.

It’s not just about autopilot, says Kristi Morgansen, professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the University of Washington. The next time you fly, she says, just look out the window at the wing.

“You sometimes see the control surfaces doing things, and a bunch of that is automatic,” she says. “Like gust load alleviation — ride quality, how it feels when you fly — a lot of that is handled automatically.”

On the 737 Max, Boeing used software to compensate for a compromise in the physical design. New, larger engines were added to an older airframe, changing its center of gravity. The software suspected of causing the crashes was there to correct for that and push the nose down when it rose too high.

That may strike the layperson as a “kluge” — using software to cover up a problem. But aviation designers say compromises and compensations are a necessary part of design.

Morgansen won’t comment on the 737 Max crashes, which are still under investigation, but she says that generally speaking, using new software on top of older systems is safe — and necessary.

“It would be so cost prohibitive to start from scratch,” she says. “It would take so long that the business model wouldn’t work.”

Commercial pilots have generally come to accept autonomous software as part of flying.

“I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong about doing it through software, provided you do it correctly,” says Alex Fisher, a retired pilot of Boeing 767s. He says that long before computers, pilots have depended on mechanical autonomous systems to smooth out the controls.

“There are other features of the airplane that we were unaware of,” Fisher says, “[but] whether they really applied to the control systems is another matter. If you aren’t taught how the controls work, then you really don’t stand much of a chance.”

Columbia Law School professor Eben Moglen, who has long championed transparency in software, says the real lesson to take from the 737 Max is the necessity for autonomous software systems to “explain themselves” to the people using them.

He says software has allowed manufacturers to cut corners and costs on things like camera phones — say, using image-enhancement software to compensate for inferior lenses. “Every smartphone manufacturer I’ve ever dealt with regards the color-enhancement part of its camera software as among its most valuable trade secrets,” Moglen says.

But cheap physical designs are a minor consideration, he says, compared with what the 737 Max situation represents.

“What we’re looking at in the case of some aerodynamic software taking over from pilots without telling them,” he says, “is an example of why, even if you didn’t think any of this had anything to do with politics, it is still true that systems that don’t explain themselves to the human beings that interact with them are dangerous.”

Moglen says authoritarian autonomous software is becoming a hallmark of authoritarian societies, such as China, and it’s up to democratic societies “to build these technologies to support, rather than threaten, human freedom.”

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The stock market tumbled Friday as investors digested an ominous warning sign: Interest rates on long-term government debt fell below the rate on short-term bills. That’s often a signal that a recession is on the horizon.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 460 points Friday, or about 1.8 percent. The broader S&P 500 index fell 1.9 percent.

Ordinarily, the yield on long-term debt is higher, just as 10-year certificates of deposit tend to pay higher interest rates than 3-month CDs.

Bond watchers get nervous when that typical pattern is turned on its head.

“We don’t see that occur that often, but when it does, it’s almost always bad news,” said Campbell Harvey, a professor of finance at Duke University.

That’s why warning lights started flashing Friday morning when the yield on the 10-year Treasury note slipped below that of the three-month bill. The last time that happened was just before the Great Recession.

Harvey’s been keeping a close eye on these rare, “inverted” yield curves for more than 30 years, and treats them as a kind of early warning signal.

“My indicator has successfully predicted four of the last four recessions,” he said, “including a pretty important call before the global financial crisis.”

Harvey won’t actually forecast a recession unless the yield curve stays inverted for at least three months. But even a flat curve — in which long-term yields are just slightly above short-term yields — could be an indicator the economy is losing steam.

“It might be that we dodge a recession, but the economic growth will be lower — much lower,” Harvey said.

On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve stories from NPR Business.

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Unknown to hundreds of millions of Facebook users, their passwords were sitting in plain text inside the company’s data storage, leaving them vulnerable to potential employee misuse and cyberattack for years.

“To be clear, these passwords were never visible to anyone outside of Facebook and we have found no evidence to date that anyone internally abused or improperly accessed them,” Facebook’s Vice President for Engineering, Security and Privacy Pedro Canahuati said in a statement Thursday.

Staff made the discovery in January, during a routine security check, he said.

The company plans to notify hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users, in areas with scant connectivity, as well as tens of millions of other Facebook users and tens of thousands of Instagram users.

The announcement came in the midst of a report by cybersecurity blog Krebs on Security, which cited an anonymous Facebook source. As many as 600 million users may have been affected, according to the source.

“My Facebook insider said access logs showed some 2,000 engineers or developers made approximately nine million internal queries for data elements that contained plain text user passwords,” blogger Brian Krebs stated.

The archives date back to 2012, according to the report.

Thursday’s disclosure is the latest in a slew of controversies. In 2018, the world learned that political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica harvested information on millions of Facebook users. Later that year, Facebook announced a massive security breach affecting nearly 50 million accounts.

“This is a company that goes from crisis to crisis,” Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, tells NPR.

He says it’s part of a pattern. “Although Facebook is not alone, the problem is that the focus has been on turning all this data into revenue to help advertisers and not enough has been done to help data security.”

There have been accusations of discriminatory ad targeting, discoveries that the company was collecting data from third-party apps on people’s personal details such as menstrual cycles, photos which were accidentally made available to app developers, reports that users’ phone numbers – submitted for security — were targeted by advertisers “within a couple of weeks,” and a scathing New York Times article on Facebook’s attempt to discredit critics with a Washington consulting firm.

Last month, British lawmakers likened Facebook to “digital gangsters” who shunned accountability as disinformation spread like wildfire on social media.

Federal prosecutors are currently conducting a criminal investigation into arrangements Facebook made with Amazon, Apple and other tech giants, according to the New York Times. The partnership may have enabled the companies to access troves of user data without consent, at times without consent.

Chester says news of the password storage insecurity could add fuel to a flame burning in Washington among lawmakers pushing for regulations on big tech companies. “This makes the case for Congress passing privacy legislation and toughening up cybersecurity laws as well,” Chester says.

Facebook insists privacy is its top priority.

“There is nothing more important to us,” Canahuati said, “than protecting people’s information, and we will continue making improvements as part of our ongoing security efforts at Facebook.”

Note: Facebook is among NPR’s financial supporters.

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Boeing’s bestselling jetliner, the 737 Max, has crashed twice in six months — the Lion Air disaster in October and the Ethiopian Airlines crash this month. Nearly 350 people have been killed, and the model of plane has been grounded indefinitely as investigations are underway.

Boeing has maintained the planes are safe. But trust — from the public, from airlines, from pilots and regulators — has been shaken.

So far, experts say, Boeing has mishandled this crisis but has the opportunity to win back confidence in the future.

Boeing bet heavily on the Max. The plane was designed to compete with a fuel-efficient jetliner from rival Airbus, and analysts have estimated it is responsible for nearly a third to 40 percent of Boeing’s profits.

Reporting from The Seattle Times suggests Boeing’s urgency to get the plane to market pressured the Federal Aviation Administration, which may have contributed to lax oversight on safety. Boeing disputes this.

But many people are raising questions about how cozy the manufacturer is with the FAA and how committed the company has been to protecting safety.

“I think that Boeing currently is flunking the ‘can-we-trust-you test,’ ” says Sandra Sucher, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School.

Trust includes multiple dimensions, she says: trusting a company to be competent, to be motivated to do the right thing, to use fair methods to achieve its goals, and to hold itself accountable when things go wrong. On every level, by her reckoning, Boeing is falling short.

It’s possible to win back that trust, she says — but only if the company holds itself accountable.

“The worst thing that they could do would be to maintain their insistence that this plane is safe to fly,” she says. “I think they have to start with a clear statement that they take accountability for what happened.”

Boeing has supported the FAA’s decision to ground its planes and is providing assistance to the ongoing investigations. But the company continues to stand behind the safety of its product. In a letter Monday, CEO Dennis Muilenburg described a commitment to making “safe airplanes even safer.”

“Together, we’ll keep working to earn and keep the trust people have placed in Boeing,” he wrote.

Sucher says Boeing needs to start by rebuilding confidence within the company itself — convincing employees they are protected if they highlight problems. Once that trust is rebuilt, the company can start looking outward, where it has multiple audiences to convince of its reliability.

“Boeing is working in a dual lane when it comes to restoring its brand,” says Shashank Nigam, the CEO of aviation consultant firm SimpliFlying.

On one hand, he says, there are “airlines and regulators, who are the key stakeholders” — those who actually purchase and monitor the planes.

But members of the general public are “the ultimate customers,” Nigam says, and Boeing ultimately needs to win their confidence, too.

A history of turbulence — and soaring success

Analysts expect Boeing to weather this storm. The company has certainly survived other rough patches in its century-long history.

It was founded in 1916, just 13 years after the Wright brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk. Bill Boeing started out making wood-and-canvas seaplanes out of a boathouse. He got a big boost from military orders during World War I, explains Russ Banham, a financial journalist and the author of Higher, a history of the company.

“Then the war ended. The government orders came to a standstill and the company actually was forced to make furniture … and wooden boats,” Banham says.

But Boeing hung on until World War II, and another infusion of U.S. military funds — and deeper ties to the U.S. government.

A period of postwar prosperity was followed by a low point in the early 1970s, during a recession that struck the entire aerospace industry. For a year and a half, Banham says, Boeing didn’t get a single order. The company laid off so many people from its facilities in Seattle that locals put up a billboard: “Will the last person leaving Seattle — turn out the lights.”

Still, Boeing was resilient, building wind turbines and even getting into the housing industry, before roaring back to become a profitable, influential industrial powerhouse. Today it’s America’s largest exporter.

More recently, Boeing survived the troubled launch of the 787 Dreamliner. Batteries onboard could catch fire, a problem that prompted the FAA to ground the planes. Christine Negroni, an aviation writer and the author of The Crash Detectives, called it a “fiasco.”

But nobody died in the Dreamliner battery incidents. Negroni says Boeing is in a tougher situation today.

“I don’t think it could be worse for Boeing right now,” she says. “Two new airplanes. Two big problems, two groundings. It doesn’t live up to our expectations of Boeing and it’s certainly shaken the confidence of travelers worldwide.”

“People are going to forget”

Passengers might be alarmed today. But historical precedents suggest that after some time has passed, the public will be willing to get back on the 737 Max.

The world’s very first jetliner — the de Havilland Comet — had a fatal flaw. Three planes disintegrated, killing all onboard, before engineers figured out the problem and fixed it. A redesigned Comet 4 flew for decades.

And in the 1970s, the DC-10 (produced by then-Boeing rival McDonnell Douglas) suffered a series of crashes tied to design flaws. Problems with the plane’s cargo door brought down two planes, killing nearly 350 people in the second accident. Then, in 1979, a combination of maintenance and design flaws caused the then-deadliest aviation accident in U.S. history.

The DC-10 had a horrible reputation. It earned nicknames like “death cruiser,” says aviation reporter Bernie Leighton.

But problems in the plane’s design were fixed. “When they were rectified, the DC-10 went on to have a very illustrious career with multiple airlines,” he says.

Both the Comet and the DC-10 were eventually eclipsed by other planes with better technology, and their manufacturers were acquired by competitors (McDonnell Douglas, in fact, was purchased by Boeing). But the planes themselves spent decades in service, and a version of the DC-10 is still in use by the U.S. Air Force.

So once the investigations into the 737 Max are concluded, and problems are fixed, Leighton has a simple prediction.

“People are going to forget,” he says. “People are just going to see it as another 737. They’re going to take their kids to Disneyland; they’re going to focus on how amazing the vacation was and how much they don’t like the TSA. They’ll forget they ever flew on a 737 Max.”

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With great power, comes great responsibility.

Or the chance to pull a practical joke.

Pranksters included some whimsical credits buried in the fine print of an annual White House economic report, making it seem that Peter Parker and Aunt May had joined the staff of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers.

Spider-Man’s alter ego and his aunt are listed among the interns who contributed to the 705-page report, which is nearly a year in the making. Other high-profile interns listed include John Cleese of Monty Python fame, Star Trek character Kathryn Janeway and the uncaped Batman, Bruce Wayne — suggesting the CEA plays no favorites between the Marvel and DC Comics universes.

Martha Gimbel, research director at Indeed.com, was one of many economists who picked up on the stunt, tweeting, “The quality of interns at CEA is much better than when I was there.”

“Who said economics has to be a dismal science,” the council responded in its own tweet. “Our interns are indeed super heroes,” it added in another tweet.

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