Thanks

Much of my climate news comes from The Daily Climate, whose wonderful subscription service clues me in to what's going on each day. Another great source of stories (and commentaries) comes from my friend Jim Poyser, at Apocadocs. They stopped collecting news at the election of U.S. Unindicted Co-conspirator Forty-Five, which was a frickin' party pooper of a day, I'll tell ya. Their recovery scenario is perhaps more progressive than the Green New Deal.

Quotes

• James Baldwin:
  • "People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction…." — Notes of a Native Son
  • "It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have." — No Name in the Street
  • "Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced." — As Much Truth As One Can Bear
• "If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven't even pulled the knife out much less heal the wound. They won't even admit the knife is there." — Malcolm X, TV interview, Mar. 1964
• "… all you can talk about is money, and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!" — Greta Thunberg (address to the UN, 2019)
• "The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea; they are given into your hands." — Genesis 9:2
• "[Y]ou cannot postpone a rendezvous with reality forever." Nick Cohen, Observer columnist
• “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” — Voltaire
• "Any course in US history is inauthentic — worse, is a lie — if it doesn't teach the experiences of people like Fannie Lou Hamer." [ael: me, late to the game…:(]
• "I want to be a great ancestor…." Overheard on an ACLU zoom call….
• "A question ain't really a question if you know the answer too." John Prine (Far from me)

And Now for the News:

March 1-16, 2021

3/16/2021 — David Schindler Day

• David Schindler, the Scientific Giant Who Defended Fresh Water: Among the world’s greatest ecologists, his boreal research has touched all of our lives.
  • David Schindler was among ‘the most important and effective ecologists and environmental scientists in history, not just in Canada. I’d like to think Canadians will understand and recognize that,’ says his colleague Bill Donahue. Photo by Ellen Brodylo/Mike Morrow.
• ‘Shroom FitBit: Processors In Tech Wearables Could Be Replaced With Fungi Mycelium, New Study Finds
• A Secret War. Decades of Suffering. Will the U.S. Ever Make Good in Laos? America has never taken responsibility for spraying Agent Orange over the neutral country during the Vietnam War. But generations of ethnic minorities have endured the consequences.
  • The use of the herbicide in the neutral nation of Laos by the United States — secretly, illegally and in large amounts — remains one of the last untold stories of the American war in Southeast Asia. Decades later, even in official military records, the spraying of Laos is mentioned only in passing. When the Air Force in 1982 finally released its partially redacted official history of the defoliation campaign, Operation Ranch Hand, the three pages on Laos attracted almost no attention, other than a statement from Gen. William Westmoreland, a former commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, that he knew nothing about it — although it was he who ordered it in the first place. Laos remained a forgotten footnote to a lost war. To those who followed the conflict’s aftermath intimately, this was hardly surprising. Only in the last two decades has the United States finally acknowledged and taken responsibility for the legacy of Agent Orange in Vietnam, committing hundreds of millions of dollars to aiding the victims and cleaning up the worst-contaminated hot spots there.
  • In her push to have the U.S. government take responsibility for its actions in Laos, Hammond has been well aware that it took many years for the plight of America’s own veterans and their offspring to be acknowledged, and much longer still before the same compassion was extended to the Vietnamese victims of dioxin. The Agent Orange Act of 1991 was passed only after a bitter 14-year fight by veterans campaigning for recognition that the chronic illnesses that tens of thousands of them were developing might be directly connected to dioxin exposure. Once the legislation passed, it was determined that if you set foot in Vietnam between 1962 and 1975 and suffered from one of the conditions on the growing V.A. list, you were eligible for compensation. This resolution was a matter of political pragmatism rather than hard science. Although there was growing evidence of the toxicity of the herbicides, studies of their health impacts were inconclusive and fiercely contested. But the veterans formed an angry and influential constituency, and politicians had to assuage a good measure of guilt, both their own and that of the general public, over the trauma of those who had fought in a lost war that most Americans preferred to forget.
  • Accepting responsibility for the horrors visited on the Vietnamese took much longer. Even after diplomatic relations were restored in 1995, Agent Orange was a political third rail. Vietnamese complaints about the effects of the herbicides on human health — raising issues of reparations, corporate liability and possible war crimes — were dismissed as propaganda. American diplomats were forbidden even to utter the words. It was not until around 2000 that the United States was finally forced to acknowledge its obligations, after Hatfield Consultants completed its study of the impact of dioxin and showed U.S. officials incontrovertible evidence of how TCDD moved up the food chain, entered the human body and was transmitted to infants through breast milk.
• Rutgers to drop fossil fuel investments in battle against climate change: New Jersey’s largest university is leveraging its $1.6 billion endowment as a tool to fight climate change.
  • Rutgers University leaders on Tuesday adopted a new policy to divest the university from existing investments in the fossil fuel industry, and to prohibit any new investments in that industry in the future.
• Exclusive: U.S. Congress launches probe into multibillion-dollar 'clean coal' tax credit: The U.S. Congress is investigating a multibillion-dollar subsidy for chemically treated coal that is meant to reduce smokestack pollution, after evidence emerged that power plants using the fuel produced more smog not less.
  • Three U.S. Democratic senators called for the investigation after a Reuters Special Report series in December 2018 revealed that many power plants burning the fuel, which supporters call “clean coal”, pumped out more pollution than previously…. In 2019, Senators Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Sherrod Brown of Ohio made a formal request for the GAO to investigate the program.
  • The Internal Revenue Service, which oversees the tax credit program, allows the companies to qualify by testing relatively small amounts of refined coal in a laboratory once a year, in lieu of real-world emissions measurements at power plants, the Reuters Special Report found. [ael: I'm sure that suffices…:(]
• CDC purges Trump era junk guidance in quest to restore reputation: Rachel Maddow looks back at the Donald Trump administration's practice of forcing the CDC to release politically motivated, unscientific Covid-19 guidance, and reports on the new leadership under the Biden administration ordering a review of past coronavirus guidance officially getting rid of the junk.

3/15/2021 — Last Day of the Juma

• The last living man of the Juma people in Brazil has died from Covid-19.
  • Aruká Juma saw his Amazon tribe dwindle to just a handful of individuals during his lifetime. Numbering an estimated 15,000 in the 18th century, his people were ravaged by disease and successive massacres by rubber tappers, loggers and miners. An estimated 100 remained in 1943; a massacre in 1964 left only six, including him.
  • In 1999, with the death of his brother-in-law, Mr. Juma, who like many Indigenous Brazilians used his tribe’s name as his surname, became the last remaining Juma male. The tribe’s extinction was assured. Mr. Juma died on Feb. 17 in a hospital in Pôrto Velho, the capital of the Brazilian state of Rondônia. He was believed to have been between 86 and 90 years old. The cause was Covid-19, his grandson Puré Juma Uru Eu Wau Wau said.
  • As the last fluent speaker of the tribe’s language, Mr. Juma’s death means that many of the tribe’s traditions and rituals will be forever lost.
• Energy companies have left Colorado with billions of dollars in oil and gas cleanup: As the state tries to reform its relationship to drilling, an expensive task awaits.
  • But plugging a well is no simple task: Cement must be pumped down into it to block the opening, and the tubes connecting it to tanks or pipelines must be removed, along with all the other onsite equipment. Then the top of the well has to be chopped off near the surface and plugged again, and the area around the rig must be cleaned up.
  • There are nearly 60,000 unplugged wells in Colorado in need of this treatment — each costing $140,000 on average, according to the Carbon Tracker, a climate think tank, in a new report that analyzes oil and gas permitting data. Plugging this many wells will cost a lot —more than $8 billion, the report found.
  • Companies that drill wells in Colorado are legally required to pay for plugging them. They do so in the form of bonds, which the state can call on to pay for the plugging. But as it stands today, Colorado has only about $185 million from industry — just 2% of the estimated cleanup bill, according to the new study. The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC) assumes an average cost of $82,500 per well — lower than the Carbon Tracker’s figure, which factors in issues like well depth. But even using the state’s more conservative number, the overall cleanup would cost nearly $5 billion, of which the money currently available from energy companies would cover less than 5%.

3/14/2021 — Allan McDonald Day

• Ralph Peterson Jr., Drummer Who Re-Enlivened Hard Bop, Dead At 58
  • "It's music that revolves around richly ambiguous harmonies and shifty, mercurial melodies," wrote Jon Pareles in 1990, reviewing a performance for the New York Times. "Difficult as it is to play, Mr. Peterson and his group rekindled the style's sense of risk and triumph." Risk and triumph, each inextricable from the other, aptly describes nearly all of the music associated with Peterson — as a locomotive engine on the first several albums by trumpeter Terence Blanchard and saxophonist Donald Harrison; as a leader of bands like Triangular, a venturesome piano trio, and the Fo'tet, with a frontline of saxophone and vibraphone; and as the anointed heir of Art Blakey, a hard-bop progenitor and drummer-bandleader of the Jazz Messengers, whose ranks produced several generations of major jazz talent.
  • Because of his own role in that band, Blakey didn't often work with other drummers. Peterson was a notable exception, initially as the second drummer in a Jazz Messengers Big Band. He became Blakey's protégé — and after the master's death in 1990, his torchbearer and successor. Peterson devoted his 1994 Blue Note album Art to Blakey's music and memory, and later formed the Messenger Legacy, a wrecking crew of other prominent Jazz Messengers alumni.
  • In his 20s, with a career on the rise, Peterson struggled with drug addiction. Years later, after finding sobriety, he often pointed to that experience as a cautionary tale for his students at the Berklee College of Music, some of whom became collaborators on the bandstand. Peterson formed the GenNext Big Band as a crucible for Berklee talent, patterned after the Blakey big band; its first album, in 2018, was a Blakey tribute titled I Remember Bu.
  • Peterson's next album, due out this spring, will also feature the Curtis brothers, along with vocalist Jazzmeia Horn and percussionist Eguie Castrillo. He titled it Raise Up Off Me, referring in part to the experience of Black Americans with law enforcement.
    • [ael: Related: Ralph Peterson & Aggregate Prime - Live at Dizzy's Club]
    • Ralph Peterson - Celebration of Life
  • A lifelong embodiment of the warrior philosopher, Peterson also ran a Taekwondo studio in Boston; he received his ranking as a fifth dan black belt in 2019, as he was fighting cancer. Speaking with Bill Milkowski for a DownBeat profile the previous year, Peterson was open about what he had endured. "I guess it's the Klingon in me," he said with a laugh, alluding to the bellicose Star Trek species. "I've had enough chances to be dead, but I'm grateful to be alive. And the focus and intensity and pace at which I'm now working and living is directly related to the spiritual wake-up call that tomorrow isn't promised."
• Remembering Allan McDonald: He Refused To Approve Challenger Launch, Exposed Cover-Up
  • His job was to sign and submit an official form. Sign the form, he believed, and he'd risk the lives of the seven astronauts set to board the spacecraft the next morning. Refuse to sign, and he'd risk his job, his career and the good life he'd built for his wife and four children. "And I made the smartest decision I ever made in my lifetime," McDonald told me. "I refused to sign it. I just thought we were taking risks we shouldn't be taking." … He also told NASA officials, "If anything happens to this launch, I wouldn't want to be the person that has to stand in front of a board of inquiry to explain why we launched."
  • Twelve days after Challenger exploded, McDonald stood up in a closed hearing of a presidential commission investigating the tragedy. He was "in the cheap seats in the back" when he raised his hand and spoke. He had just heard a NASA official completely gloss over a fundamental fact. McDonald and his team of Thiokol engineers had strenuously opposed the launch, arguing that freezing overnight temperatures, as low as 18 degrees F, meant that the O-rings at the booster rocket joints would likely stiffen and fail to contain the explosive fuel burning inside the rockets. They presented data showing that O-rings had lost elasticity at a much warmer temperature, 53 degrees F, during an earlier launch. The NASA official simply said that Thiokol had some concerns but approved the launch. He neglected to say that the approval came only after Thiokol executives, under intense pressure from NASA officials, overruled the engineers.
  • "I was sitting there thinking that's about as deceiving as anything I ever heard," McDonald recalled. "So … I said I think this presidential commission should know that Morton Thiokol was so concerned, we recommended not launching below 53 degrees Fahrenheit. And we put that in writing and sent that to NASA." Former Secretary of State William Rogers chaired the commission and stared into the auditorium, squinting in the direction of the voice. "I'll never forget Chairman Rogers said, 'Would you please come down here on the floor and repeat what I think I heard?' " McDonald said.
  • The focus of the commission's investigation shifted to the booster rocket O-rings, the efforts of McDonald and his colleagues to stop the launch and the failure of NASA officials to listen. Morton Thiokol executives were not happy that McDonald spoke up, and they demoted him. That alarmed members of the presidential commission and members of Congress. Rep. Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, introduced a joint resolution in the House that threatened to forbid Thiokol from getting future NASA contracts given the company's punishment of McDonald and any other Thiokol engineers who spoke freely. [ael: well done, Ed Markey!]
  • "What we should remember about Al McDonald [is] he would often stress his laws of the seven R's," Maier says. "It was always, always do the right thing for the right reason at the right time with the right people. [And] you will have no regrets for the rest of your life." [I only count six Rs, but I like 'em!]
• Opinion: As a former Alabama attorney general, I do not say this lightly: An innocent man is on our death row
  • I have long believed that some crimes are so horrendous as to demand the penalty of death. As the attorney general of Alabama in the 1970s, I led the effort to bring back Alabama’s death penalty after the U.S. Supreme Court ended capital punishment nationwide in 1972. As a lifelong defender of the death penalty, I do not lightly say what follows: An innocent man is trapped on Alabama’s death row. His name is Toforest Johnson, and Alabama must not execute him. Johnson’s murder trial was so deeply flawed, the evidence presented against him so thin, that no Alabamian should tolerate his incarceration, let alone his execution. This is why I have joined eight former Alabama prosecutors and two former chief justices of Alabama in calling for Johnson’s conviction to be set aside.
• Maggots, Rape and Yet Five Stars: How U.S. Ratings of Nursing Homes Mislead the Public: Nursing homes have manipulated the influential star system in ways that have masked deep problems — and left them unprepared for Covid-19.
  • [ael: Anna says she could have written the report.]
  • More than 130,000 nursing-home residents have died of Covid-19, and The Times’s analysis found that people at five-star facilities were roughly as likely to die of the disease as those at one-star homes.
  • In one sign of the problems with the self-reported data, nursing homes that earn five stars for their quality of care are nearly as likely to flunk in-person inspections as to ace them. But the government rarely audits the nursing homes’ data.
  • Data suggest that at least some nursing homes know in advance about what are supposed to be surprise inspections. Health inspectors still routinely found problems with abuse and neglect at five-star facilities, yet they rarely deemed the infractions serious enough to merit lower ratings.
  • But within months of the star system’s launch, members of a Medicare advisory board cautioned federal officials that nursing homes were incentivized to fudge their numbers, according to board members and former regulators. Board members, including Ms. Harrington, a professor emeritus at the nursing school of University of California, San Francisco, called for more auditing of the self-reported data.
  • Researchers have determined that the better staffed a facility was, the fewer residents they lost to Covid-19. More employees meant that patients received better care and were more closely monitored. When the pandemic hit, staffing came under additional strain as nurses and workers fell ill.

3/13/2021 — Lou Ottens Day

• Lou Ottens, Father of Countless Mixtapes, Is Dead at 94: He led the team at Philips that changed the audio world in 1963 by introducing a small, portable way to play and record: the cassette.
  • “As the story goes, Lou was home one night trying to listen to a reel-to-reel recording when the loose tape began to unravel from its reel,” Zack Taylor, who directed the 2017 film “Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape,” said by email…. “The next morning,” Mr. Taylor continued, “a frustrated Lou Ottens gathered the engineers and designers from the Philips audio division and insisted that they create something foolproof: The tape had to be enclosed, and the player had to fit in his jacket pocket.”
  • In the 1970s, after spearheading the development of the cassette, he contributed to the development of the compact disc, a product Philips and Sony jointly unveiled in 1982. The new format soon pushed the cassette aside. “The best thing about the compact cassette story,” the newspaper Nederlands Dagblad wrote in 2011, “is that its inventor also caused its downfall.”

3/12/2021

• Opinion: Abandoning masks now is a terrible idea. The 1918 pandemic shows why.
  • Abandoning masks and social distancing now would be the worst possible move for Americans and their political leaders. The 1918 pandemic teaches us why.
  • That pandemic came in waves that were much more distinct than what we have experienced. The first wave was extraordinarily mild. The French Army suffered 40,000 hospitalizations but only about 100 deaths. The British Grand Fleet had 10,313 sailors fall ill — but only four deaths. Troops called it “three-day fever.” It was equally mild among civilians and was not nearly as transmissible as influenza normally is.
  • In that second wave, the 1918 virus had an overall case mortality in the West of 2.0 to 2.5 percent, but that average is meaningless because it primarily killed select age groups: children under 10 and adults 20 to 50. Metropolitan Life found that, of those aged 25 to 45, it killed 3.26 percent of all factory workers and 6.21 percent of all miners; and yet it barely touched the elderly.

3/10/2021

• Is this the end of forests as we've known them? Trees lost to drought and wildfires are not returning. Climate change is taking a toll on the world’s forests - and radically changing the environment before our eyes
  • Camille Stevens-Rumann never used to worry about seeing dead trees. As a wildland firefighter in the American west, she encountered untold numbers killed in blazes she helped to extinguish. She knew fires are integral to forests in this part of the world; they prune out smaller trees, giving room to the rest and even help the seeds of some species to germinate. “We have largely operated under the assumption that forests are going to come back after fires,” Stevens-Rumann said. But starting in about 2013, she noticed something unsettling. In certain places, the trees were not returning. For an analysis she performed of sites across the Rocky Mountains, she found that almost one-third of places that had burned since 2000 had no trees regrowing whatsoever. Instead of tree seedlings, there were shrubs and flowers.
  • In western North America, huge swaths of forested areas may become unsuitable for trees owing to climate change, say researchers. In the Rocky Mountains, estimates hold that by 2050, about 15% of the forests would not grow back if felled by fire because the climate would no longer suit them. In Alberta, Canada, about half of existing forests could vanish by 2100. In the south-western US, which is experiencing a “megadrought”, as much as 30% of forests are at risk of converting to shrubland or another kind of ecosystem.
  • The change isn’t unique to the US. In the Amazon, some experts warn that a forest mortality tipping point is looming. The boreal forests of Canada and Siberia are under attack from higher temperatures. Temperate European forests thought to be less vulnerable to climate change are showing worrying symptoms.
  • The possibility of worldwide mass forest mortality linked to climate change was flagged in the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessments in 1990. But today, many researchers are expressing particular concern about the tree mortality crisis building in California and other parts of the west.
  • Researchers acknowledge that there is considerable ambiguity in their predictions about tree mortality. For one thing, it is unclear how many of the trees now dying essentially weren’t meant to be there in the first place. Western forests are denser than they were historically because of human influence: the practice of tamping out wildfires, beginning in the early 20th century, has interfered with a natural process in which blazes weed out younger trees and undergrowth.
  • Not far away, ecologist Craig Allen just marked his 40th year studying forests and landscapes in the Jemez mountains. When he arrived from the cooler climes of north-east Wisconsin, moist weather patterns made the region “a great place to be a tree in the south-west US”. That natural variability has now, thanks to climate change, flipped to megadrought conditions. By mid-century, Allen suspects, trees will barely cling to existence in the mountains of the south-west. “I have to be a little careful about not sounding like some Cassandra saying the sky is falling and forests are going to die and burn – but I have seen what that looks like,” said Allen, who founded the US Geological Survey’s New Mexico Landscapes Field Station.
  • Cooler regions are not immune. Boreal forests ringing the northerly parts of the globe are in fact projected to experience the greatest warming of all. In central Siberia, conifers are already dying at greater rates and are expected to retreat upslope and to the north. One boreal forest researcher told Yale Environment 360 that “the boreal forest is breaking apart.” He added: “The question is what will replace it?”
  • It is true that forests could find new footholds in places that were formerly too cold or otherwise unsuited to them. But trees can take centuries to reach maturity, and in terms of global heating, older, large trees store much more carbon than younger, smaller ones. Instead of focusing on new trees, researchers say, the best answer to the mortality crisis is to preserve the forests we already have – by cutting carbon emissions.
  • For Camille Stevens-Rumann, the fire ecologist studying tree mortality in the Rockies, watching these changes in places she has known for years – and where she has backpacked and rafted – has required an adjustment. “As a person who loves trees and has spent my career so far looking predominantly at trees, it is a bit of a stark difference and a shift of mindset to think about these landscapes as not ‘treed’ for a longer period of time – or indefinitely,” she said. Even so, she is able to find beauty in them, and in what humbler plant life is able to make a comeback even if the pine and fir trees cannot. She is a realist. Life marches on. “This is the beginning of a new ecological state.”
• Hunting for a Leftover Vaccine? This Site Will Match You With a Clinic. More than half a million people have signed up for Dr. B, a service that promises to match them with clinics struggling to equitably dole out extra doses before they expire.
  • Extra shots — which must be used within hours once taken out of cold storage — have been doled out to drugstore customers buying midnight snacks, people who are friends with nurses and those who show up at closing time at certain grocery stores and pharmacies. At some larger vaccination sites, the race to use every dose sets off a flurry of end-of-the-day phone calls.
• Sidney Morgenbesser, 82, Kibitzing Philosopher, Dies
  • An example: in the 1950's, the British philosopher J.L. Austin came to Columbia to present a paper about the close analysis of language. He pointed out that although two negatives make a positive, nowhere is it the case that two positives make a negative. ''Yeah, yeah,'' Dr. Morgenbesser said.
  • [ael: what a beautiful story. Almost as good as Bertrand's response to the person who shouted, during one of his lectures, "1=2: prove that you're the Pope."….]
  • Dr. Morgenbesser, whose only immediate survivor is Ms. Haimson, never lost his Talmud-inspired gifts for reasoning. A few weeks before his death, he asked another Columbia philosopher, David Albert, about God. ''Why is God making me suffer so much?'' he asked. ''Just because I don't believe in him?''

3/8/2021 — Walter Gretzky Day

• Hockey Legend Wayne Gretzky Shared His Father With a Nation: Walter Gretzky coached a young Wayne, who ended up setting N.H.L. scoring records that will never be matched, and became a role model for hockey parents.
  • Wayne Gretzky, with the Conn Smythe Trophy after being named the most valuable player for the 1985 N.H.L. playoffs, gave his father, Walter, credit for all of his success.
    
    Credit…Pat Price/Reuters
  • Walter Gretzky — widely known as “Canada’s Hockey Dad” — died Thursday night in Brantford, Ontario, after a nine-year struggle with Parkinson’s disease. He was 82.
  • It was Walter who told Wayne to “skate to where the puck’s going and not to where it’s been.” As a 10-year-old, Wayne Gretzky scored 378 goals for the Brantford Nadrofsky Steelers, and he became known nationally before reaching his teens. He retired from the N.H.L. as its scoring leader, with 894 goals and 1,963 assists in 1,487 games; all told, he held 61 scoring records.
  • [ael: beautiful story; this father gave it his all!]
• Why Does the Pandemic Seem to Be Hitting Some Countries Harder Than Others?:

3/6/2021

• Blackjewel’s Bankruptcy Filing Is a Harbinger of Trouble Ahead for the Plummeting Coal Industry: The company wants to walk away from almost 200 mining permits in four states, potentially leaving thousands of acres of environmentally damaged land.
  • A federal bankruptcy judge in West Virginia could soon decide whether to allow the Blackjewel coal mining company, once the nation’s sixth-largest coal producer, to shed responsibility for thousands of strip-mined acres, setting up a potential crisis over clean-up and reclamation of the land. Bankruptcy Court Judge Benjamin Kahn will hold a hearing Wednesday in Charleston on the West Virginia-based company’s liquidation plan, which calls for the abandonment of nearly 200 mining permits in Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia and Tennessee. Most of them are in eastern Kentucky, where the future of nearly 8,000 acres of strip-mined mountains hangs in the balance, as shown in court filings and testimony in the massive bankruptcy case that began in 2019.
  • Both the state of Kentucky and the companies that issued bonds guaranteeing clean-up and reclamation of the dynamite-blasted landscape warned in court proceedings that there might not be enough money to do all the required work. [ael: imagine that. All these folks touting the benefits of fossil fuel companies forget how they routinely go belly-up, declare bankruptcy, and leave taxpayers to pick up the tabs for the barren, toxic wastelands they leave behind. Evil bastards!]
  • Coal mining companies are required to post bonds to cover the costs of reclamation should they go bankrupt. They are also supposed to reclaim idled mine sites contemporaneously, as they are mining new areas. As the industry rapidly loses market share and continues its lurch toward the financial abyss, part of its legacy could involve scarred, strip-mined landscapes left behind by serial bankruptcies and government programs that may not be able to step in and finance clean-up and reclamation, environmental and citizens groups fear.
  • But it’s not clear how many of those ownership transfers will be allowed by environmental regulators and whether those buyers will ever be able to resume mining or fully reclaim the sites, said Mary Cromer, an attorney and deputy director of the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center Inc., in Whitesburg, Kentucky, which represents citizens groups in the case. The whole industry is in distress, and it’s increasingly uncertain what it will leave behind, Cromer said. [ael: I'd say it's damned sure what they'll leave behind — a God-forsaken mess.] “There will be some level of coal industry remaining, but this has been a death spiral,” Cromer said, adding that unreclaimed mines are threatening to become even more serious health and safety problems in the years ahead, she said.

3/5/2021

• Alberta’s Carbon Revolution: Could our big liability become our main asset?
  • 
  • “How can we take bitumen and make a continuous fibre at half of today’s cost?” asks Walk, VP of sales for Zoltek, a large Missouri-based carbon fibre manufacturer. Zoltek’s light composite material is five times stronger than steel, but it’s also expensive. Using bitumen as the feedstock could finally make carbon fibre competitive with more traditional materials like steel. “The big market will be the automotive industry, but there are others. It’s a very exciting opportunity.”
  • A second opportunity might rival bitumen and carbon fibre—the production of hydrogen. This carbonless fuel is all the rage these days because it promises to decarbonize hard-to-electrify sectors such as long-haul freight trucking, aviation and marine shipping. Countries are competing to be an early mover in the emerging sector. Hydrogen was a big part of the Alberta government’s natural gas “vision and strategy,” released in October 2020. “Blue hydrogen” is made with natural gas; then the carbon dioxide is sequestered in old oil-and-gas reservoirs. Alberta, as it turns out, is very good at capturing and storing CO2 at a reasonable cost.
• Butterflies are vanishing out West. Scientists say climate change is to blame. The rate of decline is “calamitous," one scientist said, and has implications for crops and the environment
  • In a swath of 11 states, from California to Montana, and from New Mexico to Washington, the populations of a majority of 450 butterfly species are dropping, according to observations by professionals and amateurs stretching back to the 1970s. The loss of butterflies across Western forests and prairies, like the similar drop in bumblebees nationwide due to rising temperatures, is troubling because both insects play a key role in pollinating crops and wildflowers. And the findings may add to fears among researchers of a broader die-off of insects that could be underway everywhere from Germany to Puerto Rico and beyond — a potential and debated bugpocalypse that threatens to upend ecosystems across the world.
  • “They got a really strong climate signal,” Moran said of the study published Thursday. The Western United States, he said, is “one of the more rapidly changing places in the continent. … If you look at it more continentwide, you will see more balancing-out.”

3/4/2021

• Biden accuses Republican governors of 'Neanderthal thinking' over plans to reopen: President said US ‘on the cusp’ of being able to change nature of Covid crisis but ‘the last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking’
  • Public health officials have also expressed disapproval of US states that are lifting mask mandates and reopening businesses. They urged that safety measures were still essential despite Biden’s announcement earlier this week that his administration was ahead of schedule on vaccinating all US adults against the coronavirus. Government experts have spoken out loudly this week to sound the alarm that the US is at risk of yet another Covid-19 surge as states such as Texas rushed to dispense with public health orders designed to slow the spread of the disease.

3/3/2021

• In the Atlantic Ocean, Subtle Shifts Hint at Dramatic Dangers: The warming atmosphere is causing an arm of the powerful Gulf Stream to weaken, some scientists fear.
  • Now, a spate of studies, including one published last week, suggests this northern portion of the Gulf Stream and the deep ocean currents it’s connected to may be slowing. Pushing the bounds of oceanography, scientists have slung necklace-like sensor arrays across the Atlantic to better understand the complex network of currents that the Gulf Stream belongs to, not only at the surface, but hundreds of feet deep.
  • “We’re all wishing it’s not true,” Peter de Menocal, a paleoceanographer and president and director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said of the changing ocean currents. “Because if that happens, it’s just a monstrous change.” [ael: if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.]
  • [ael: the absolutely nutty Covid mandate changes (e.g. no more masks) are going to drive another resurgence of the virus; yet these absolutely insane Governators are going to push to re-open. Careless, thoughtless disregard of science. And the same is happening to our climate.]
  • The northern arm of the Gulf Stream is but one tentacle of a larger, ocean-spanning tangle of currents called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC. Scientists have strong evidence from ice and sediment cores that the AMOC has weakened and shut down before in the past 13,000 years. As a result, mean temperatures in parts of Europe may have rapidly dropped to about 15 degrees Celsius below today’s averages, ushering in arctic like conditions. Parts of northern Africa and northern South America became much drier. Rainfall may even have declined as far away as what is now China. And some of these changes may have occurred in a matter of decades, maybe less.
  • The science remains relatively new, and not everyone agrees the AMOC is actually slowing. But in both scientific modeling of climate change and in the prehistoric record, a North Atlantic cooling presages a shutdown of the current. “One of the hallmarks of a shutdown is this cold blob,” says Dr. de Menocal. “The cold blob is a big deal.”
  • Colleagues studying ice cores from the Greenland ice sheet were seeing evidence of strange climatic “flickers” in the past. As Earth warmed from the deep freeze of the last ice age, which peaked around 22,000 years ago, temperatures would rise, then abruptly fall, then rise again just as swiftly. Dr. Broecker theorized this was caused by stops and starts in what he called the ocean’s “great conveyor belt”— the AMOC. The clearest example began about 12,800 years ago. Glaciers that had once covered much of North America and Europe had retreated considerably, and the world was almost out of the deep freeze. But then, in just a few decades, Greenland and Western Europe plunged back into cold. Temperatures fell by around 10 degrees Celsius, or 18 degrees Fahrenheit, in parts of Greenland. Arctic-like conditions returned to parts of Europe. The cold snap lasted perhaps 1,300 years—before reversing even more abruptly than it began. Scientists have observed the sudden changes in the pollen deposited at the bottom of European lakes and in changes in ocean sediments near Bermuda.
  • This forced a paradigm shift in how scientists thought about climate change. Earlier, they had tended to imagine creeping shifts occurring over many millennia. But by the late 1990s, they accepted that abrupt transitions, tipping points, could occur. This didn’t bode well for humanity’s warming of the atmosphere. Dr. Broecker, who died in 2019, famously warned: “The climate system is an angry beast and we are poking it with sticks.”
  • In 2015, Dr. Rahmstorf and his colleagues published a seminal paper arguing that the AMOC had weakened by 15 percent in recent decades, a slowdown they said was unprecedented in the past 1,000 years. He and his colleagues recently published another paper that used additional reconstructions of sea temperature around the North Atlantic, some going back 1,600 years, to determine that the recent slowdown began with the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, then accelerated after 1950…. For Dr. Rahmstorf, these lines of evidence bolster the argument that the AMOC is slowing. In his view, the change is occurring right on schedule. “The long-term trend is exactly what was predicted by the models,” he said.
  • “We still don’t know how far away this threshold is where it could break down altogether,” he said. If we limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial times —a goal of the Paris agreement among nations to fight climate change — a shutdown is unlikely, he thinks. “But for unmitigated warming,” which is the world’s current trajectory, “I think there’s increasing risk where we make AMOC so weak it goes over the edge and collapses.” “There will be a lot of surprises if we disturb climate that much,” he said. “It’s not at all predictable how bad things will be.”
  • Then there are those consequences that fall in the category of “global weirding.” Scientists at the U.K.’s National Oceanography Centre have somewhat counterintuitively linked the cold blob in the North Atlantic with summer heat waves in Europe. In 2015 and 2018, the jet stream, a river of wind that moves from west to east over temperate latitudes in the northern hemisphere, made an unusual detour to the south around the cold blob. The wrinkle in atmospheric flow brought hotter-than-usual air into Europe, they contend, breaking temperature records. “That was not predicted,” said Joel Hirschi, principal scientist at the centre and senior author of the research. It highlights how current seasonal forecasting models are unable to predict these warm summers. And it underscores the paradox that, far from ushering in a frigid future for, say, Paris, a cooler North Atlantic might actually make France’s summers more like Morocco’s.
  • Dr. Broecker’s old schematics of the AMOC posit a neat warm current flowing north along the western edge of the Atlantic and an equally neat cold current flowing back south below it. In fact, says Dr. Lozier, that deeper current is not confined to the western edge of the Atlantic, but rather flows southward via a number of “rivers” that are filled with eddies. The network of deep ocean currents is much more complicated than once envisioned, in other words, and figuring out how buoyant meltwater from Greenland might affect the formation of cold deepwater has become more complicated as well.
• NYTimes: A judge in Mississippi ordered the state to pay Curtis Flowers $500,000, the maximum the law allows, for wrongfully imprisoning him for more than 20 years.
  • Will Doug Evans face accountability? Prosecutors across the country rarely face consequences for misconduct.
  • Prosecutors have enormous discretion to pursue criminal cases as they see fit. Their actions in any individual proceeding can be reviewed on appeal, but their overall conduct is rarely subject to oversight. In the Flowers case, courts have repeatedly found that Evans flouted the Constitution. Four of Flowers’ convictions were reversed on appeal, all because of Evans’ misconduct. Yet he was allowed to retry Flowers again and again.
  • During oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in March 2019, the justices took issue with Evans’ pattern of striking Black prospective jurors in Flowers’ trials. Several commented on the distressing history of the case. Justice Samuel Alito — one of the high court’s more conservative members and a former prosecutor — twice asked the state of Mississippi’s lawyer how Evans was allowed to keep pursuing Flowers and why the Attorney General’s Office hadn’t stepped in. “Well, could we say in — in this case, because of the unusual and really disturbing history, this case just could not have been tried this sixth time by the same prosecutor?” Alito said.
  • The Mississippi Supreme Court had also twice found Evans guilty of a different type of misconduct during Flowers’ trials, leading to the reversal of Flowers’ first two convictions. Even the local judge in Evans’ district, Joey Loper, chastised Evans for his “dilatory conduct” after he was a no-show at Flowers’ December 2019 bail hearing. Loper suggested that Evans would “reap the whirlwind” if he didn’t change his behavior. Soon after, Evans agreed to recuse himself from the case, clearing the way for the Attorney General’s Office to take over and eventually drop the charges against Flowers for lack of evidence.
  • There are also the findings published by In the Dark that implicate Evans in other forms of wrongdoing. Evans put Odell Hallmon, now a convicted triple murderer, on the stand at four of Flowers’ trials to say that Flowers had confessed to him in prison. Hallmon later told In the Dark that his testimony was “a bunch of lies” and that he concocted it in exchange for favorable treatment from Evans in his own criminal cases, favors that Evans never disclosed to Flowers’ defense, as he was obligated to do. “I helped them. They helped me,” Hallmon said. “That’s what it all boiled down to.”
• India Targets Climate Activists With the Help of Big Tech: Tech giants like Google and Facebook appear to be aiding and abetting a vicious government campaign against Indian climate activists.
  • The bank of cameras that camped outside Delhi’s sprawling Tihar jail was the sort of media frenzy you would expect to await a prime minister caught in an embezzlement scandal, or perhaps a Bollywood star caught in the wrong bed. Instead, the cameras were waiting for Disha Ravi, a nature-loving 22-year-old vegan climate activist who against all odds has found herself ensnared in an Orwellian legal saga that includes accusations of sedition, incitement, and involvement in an international conspiracy whose elements include (but are not limited to): Indian farmers in revolt, the global pop star Rihanna, supposed plots against yoga and chai, Sikh separatism, and Greta Thunberg.
  • Climate activist Disha Ravi is granted bail during a hearing at Patiala House Court in New Delhi on Feb. 23, 2021.
    
    Photo: Sanjeev Verma/Hindustan Times via Getty Images
  • This point was made forcefully by the judge who ruled on Ravi’s bail: “Citizens are conscience keepers of government in any democratic Nation. They cannot be put behind the bars simply because they choose to disagree with the state policies,” he wrote. As for sharing the toolkit with Thunberg, “the freedom of speech and expression includes the right to seek a global audience.”
  • As for the charge that disseminating critical information about India’s treatment of farmers and human rights defenders to prominent activists like Thunberg constitutes “sedition,” the judge was particularly harsh. “The offence of sedition cannot be invoked to minister to the wounded vanity of the governments.”
• Dying Oil Companies’ Parting Gift: Millions in Clean Up Costs: One Texas oil and gas company left the state responsible for almost $10 million after its 2019 bankruptcy.
  • When Weatherly Oil and Gas filed for bankruptcy in February 2019, the company was walking away from several hundred Texas wells. Many hadn’t produced a drop of oil in years. Companies are legally required to “plug” wells that they’re no longer using to extract oil and gas by pouring concrete into all their openings and cracks; this prevents them from leaking fossil fuels or harmful pollutants into the air and water sources nearby. But many companies that abandon wells say they no longer have the financial means to do so, leaving government regulators on the hook for the cost. The problem is massive: There are approximately 2.1 million unplugged abandoned wells across the country.
  • [ael: yeah, tip of the iceberg, when icebergs were still a thing.]
  • Unfortunately, the $3.5 million that the RRC was able to squeeze out of Weatherly doesn’t even cover a third of the $13.3 million estimated cleanup cost. Effectively, the state is now responsible for coming up with almost all of the $10 million shortfall. Though Weatherly insisted it couldn’t find the money to fulfill its plugging obligations, the company’s top executives were paid a combined $8.6 million in the year preceding bankruptcy. Weatherly’s former CEO later became a paid bankruptcy expert for FTI Consulting, a public-relations firm with a record of launching duplicitous front groups for oil companies. (The company’s former executives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)
  • To try to prevent this, the RRC collects financial assurances called bonds from oil companies before they begin to operate in the state. The bond value depends on how many wells the company has. Companies like Weatherly that operate 100 or more wells are required to submit a $250,000 bond — approximately $2,500 per well. But, since a typical abandoned well costs between $20,000 and $40,000 to plug and clean up, these bonds often cover only a fraction of a given company’s plugging costs if it ends up abandoning a large number of wells.
  • Environmental advocates say that cleanup costs are poised to surge even more as newer fracking wells, which are drilled deeper and often involve long horizontal bores, are abandoned. The average well depth in the Permian is approximately 15,000 feet. An analysis of Texas data by Kelly Mitchell, a senior analyst with the corporate watchdog group Documented, found that the average well plugged by the RRC between 2015 and 2020 was only 2,231 feet deep. A separate report published last year by Carbon Tracker, a climate-focused financial think tank, estimated that it could cost as much as $300,000 to plug a 10,000-foot modern shale well.
• A Different Kind of Land Management: Let the Cows Stomp: Regenerative grazing can store more carbon in soils in the form of roots and other plant tissues. But how much can it really help the fight against climate change?
  • “These cows are my land management tool,” Mr. Isaacs said. “It’s a lot easier to work with nature than against it.”
  • Regenerative grazing means closely managing where and for how long animals forage, unlike a more conventional approach in which animals are left to graze the same pasture more or less continuously. Ranchers also rely more on their animals’ manure to help keep their pastures healthy.
  • While there is broad agreement that regenerative techniques can improve soil health and bring other benefits, some analyses have found that the potential carbon-sequestration numbers are vastly overstated. Among the criticisms, researchers point out that short-term studies may show strong increases in soil carbon, but that these gains decline over time.
  • “As I do better for the soil, it just becomes progressively better and better and you grow more grass,” Mr. Isaacs said. “And as you grow more grass, you get better soils.” “It’s never ending.”

3/2/2021 — Vernon Jordan Day

• Vernon Jordan, Civil Rights Leader and D.C. Power Broker, Dies at 85: Mr. Jordan, who was selected to head the National Urban League while still in his 30s, counseled presidents and business leaders.
  • Mr. Jordan, who was raised in segregation-era Atlanta, got his first inkling of the world of power and influence that had largely been denied Black Americans like him while waiting tables at one of the city’s private clubs, where his mother catered dinners, and as a driver for a wealthy white banker, who was startled to discover that the tall Black youth at the wheel could read.
  • Mr. Jordan in 1967 working on voter registration at the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta. He was a key figure in the desegregation of the University of Georgia. Credit…Warren K Leffler/PhotoQuest, via Getty Images
  • In his summers during college, he worked as a driver for Robert F. Maddox, a former Atlanta mayor and president of both the First National Bank of Atlanta and the American Bankers Association. Mr. Jordan wrote that he had been an inexplicable creature to a wealthy Southern white man like Robert Maddox. After discovering the young Mr. Jordan taking his break in the Maddox home’s sumptuous library, Mr. Maddox was stunned to discover that his driver could read — a revelation that he would repeatedly relate to friends and relatives, telling them, “Vernon can read.” Mr. Jordan used the phrase as the title of his memoir, which he wrote with the historian Annette Gordon-Reed and published in 2001.
  • After graduating from law school in 1960, he became a law clerk to Donald Lee Hollowell, a prominent Black lawyer who had a busy one-man civil rights practice in Atlanta. Mr. Jordan worked closely on the case that desegregated the University of Georgia and grew close to Charlayne Hunter (later the journalist and author Charlayne Hunter-Gault), one of two young Black plaintiffs who gained admission after winning in court. On her first day of classes, Mr. Jordan was photographed escorting her onto the campus surrounded by a hostile crowd.

3/1/2021

• Fossil fuel cars make 'hundreds of times' more waste than electric cars: Analysis by transport group says battery electric vehicles are superior to their petrol and diesel counterparts
  • Only about 30kg of raw material will be lost over the lifecycle of a lithium ion battery used in electric cars once recycling is taken into account, compared with 17,000 litres of oil, according to analysis by Transport & Environment (T&E) seen by the Guardian. A calculation of the resources used to make cars relative to their weight shows it is at least 300 times greater for oil-fuelled cars.
  • T&E calculations suggest that battery electric cars will use 58% less energy than a petrol car over its lifetime and emit 64% less carbon dioxide. Emissions associated with electric cars are mainly produced in the energy-intensive manufacturing of batteries, while the vast majority of emissions associated with internal combustion engine cars come from its use.
• Why Opening Windows Is a Key to Reopening Schools:
  • The C.D.C. is urging communities to reopen schools as quickly as possible, but parents and teachers have raised questions about the quality of ventilation available in public school classrooms to protect against the coronavirus. We worked with a leading engineering firm and experts specializing in buildings systems to better understand the simple steps schools can take to reduce exposure in the classroom.
• How does the Johnson & Johnson vaccine work? When is it available? What to know about the new shot.
  • “You now have three highly efficacious vaccines, for sure, there’s no doubt about that,” Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, said the day after the Food and Drug Administration authorized the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. “I think people need to get vaccinated as quickly and as expeditiously as possible.”
  • All in all, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is less fussy. For starters, it’s a one-stop shot. No waiting weeks for another appointment. No logistical headaches from keeping track of who needs their second dose and who’s still waiting on their first. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine does not use mRNA. Rather, it’s what’s known as an adenovirus vector vaccine. It uses the more established approach of employing a harmless cold virus to deliver a gene that carries the blueprint for the spiky protein found on the surface of the coronavirus. The virus enters cells, which then follow the genetic instructions to construct a replica of the coronavirus spike. The immune system uses these replicas to recognize — and respond to — the real thing.
  • The coronavirus vaccine produced by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca is also based on adenoviruses, as is a Johnson & Johnson-made vaccine for Ebola, which was approved by the European Medicines Agency last year. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine “doesn’t give you covid, because it’s not the virus,” Fauci said in a recent public service announcement. “It’s just one protein from the virus that induces your body to make a good response against the whole virus.”
  • Finally, the shots can be stored for months at refrigerator temperature.
  • The Johnson & Johnson vaccine completely prevented hospitalization and death, including in South Africa against a more transmissible variant, and was 85 percent effective at protecting against severe cases of illness.
  • At the pandemic’s outset, few would have predicted that Americans would have access to three vaccines within a year. “It’s extraordinary. I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Landrigan, who spent 15 years at the CDC. “I don’t think any of us expected we would have one, let alone three vaccines, in a matter of 12 months. It’s unprecedented.” He added: “So long as the virus doesn’t evade us, I think we’re on the right track.”
• ‘This is bigger than just Timnit’: How Google tried to silence a critic and ignited a movement: Big Tech has used its power to control the field of AI ethics and avoid accountability. Now, the ouster of Timnit Gebru is putting the movement for equitable tech in the spotlight.
  • Gebru had been fighting with the company over a research paper that she’d coauthored, which explored the risks of the AI models that the search giant uses to power its core products—the models are involved in almost every English query on Google, for instance. The paper called out the potential biases (racial, gender, Western, and more) of these language models, as well as the outsize carbon emissions required to compute them. Google wanted the paper retracted, or any Google-affiliated authors’ names taken off; Gebru said she would do so if Google would engage in a conversation about the decision. Instead, her team was told that she had resigned. After the company abruptly announced Gebru’s departure, Google AI chief Jeff Dean insinuated that her work was not up to snuff—despite Gebru’s credentials and history of groundbreaking research.
  • The backlash was immediate. Thousands of Googlers and outside researchers leaped to her defense and charged Google with attempting to marginalize its critics, particularly those from underrepresented backgrounds. A champion of diversity and equity in the AI field, Gebru is a Black woman and was one of the few in Google’s research organization. “It wasn’t enough that they created a hostile work environment for people like me [and are building] products that are explicitly harmful to people in our community. It’s not enough that they don’t listen when you say something,” Gebru says. “Then they try to silence your scientific voice.”
  • But on the same day that the company wrapped up its investigation, it fired Margaret Mitchell, Gebru’s co-lead and the founder of Google’s ethical AI team. Mitchell had been using an algorithm to comb through her work communications, looking for evidence of discrimination against Gebru. In a statement to Fast Company, Google said that Mitchell had committed multiple violations of its code of conduct and security policies. (The company declined to comment further on this story.)
  • For AI to work in the best interest of all members of society, the power dynamics across the industry must change. The people most likely to be harmed by algorithms—those in marginalized communities—need a say in AI’s development. “If the right people are not at the table, it’s not going to work,” Gebru says. “And in order for the right people to be at the table, they have to have power.”

What went on: 2021

What went on: 2020

What went on: 2019

What went on: 2018

What went on: 2017

What went on: 2016

What went on: 2015

What went on: 2014

RClimate Examples

• Here's the 10-day weather forecast for Mattawa, Ontario, where we have a farm, away from the noise of that blowhard tRump, the once-and-always-liar-in-chief. I try to spend as much time as I can on the farm.
• More quotes:
  • Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world. HANNAH ARENDT. From the Introduction to “Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism”, by Henry Giroux.