#i used coal as an example but I am not an energy expert

[elalmadelmar]

It's really easy to say "[Situation] isn't complicated!" when you are looking at it as a matter of principles only. This is true regardless of the situation or the principles under discussion.

But - let's be real, that's also kind of useless for anything except propaganda and preaching to choirs.

Why? Because between principle and material reality is implementation, and that's where complexity lives. Implementation is where a principle has to be interrogated and picked apart and the innumerable questions of how get asked. People are complicated, and groups of people multiply the complexity, and the interaction of multiple groups of people multiplies the complexity yet further.

So, okay, example. Here's a simple principle: coal energy is bad and we should stop using it. This is a pretty solid principle; it's hard to argue for any positive aspects to coal burning, and the negative effects are legion and severe.

All right, next step: actually stopping it! But here's where the problems come in:

- Is there enough energy reliably supplied by other means on a global level? If not, how long will it take for that energy to be available? What steps need to be performed to accomplish this?

- Same question, national level. Even if the total energy production of the whole world is sufficient, that energy production may not be allocated equally all over the globe. Are any specific countries more reliant on coal energy than others? If yes, what are the obligations of other countries to assist, and what is the freedom of the coal-reliant countries to object to offers of assistance on the ground that those offers are poisoned with imperialistic demands or unacceptable conditions?

- Same question, regional level. See the same logic as above re: energy production not being equally distributed. Is this also the case across different regions even within a single country? Which countries, and what is their capability to fix that?

- How many jobs are reliant on the coal industry? How many people will be out of a job if the coal mines and coal power plants close down tomorrow? How can various national or international governments best assist those workers in reskilling to other careers, and how quickly can that be done? Relatedly, how much economic aid would be needed to bridge the gap? What industries have the most capacity to absorb the number of workers who will be displaced by the termination of coal, and what reskilling will be most appealing and accessible to the workers you're retraining? How much freedom will these workers have to choose the training offered to them?

- For areas where coal mines, coal processing, coal plants, or other coal-related jobs are a major employer, how well can other major regional employers be brought in to fill the gap, and what would be the cost to entice these other employers to come to town?

- What are the legal obstacles in play in forcing the shutdown of an industry? Are there existing legal grounds that could be used to accomplish this goal, and are those legal grounds ones that are generally as just/as minimally unjust as possible? If the legal grounds don't exist, can they be created without damaging the essential liberty of the country unnecessarily? Remember that every political tool will be used in the future, possibly for very different ends.

- What is to be done with the mines, plants, and other infrastructure left behind? What about the companies that were processing coal? Can the power plants be converted to generate power in other ways? Are the mines safe to leave as they are or do they represent an ongoing ecological or geological danger?

- If any of the issues raised above call for a phased transition off coal rather than an immediate hard shutdown (which they probably do), what is a realistic transition timeline and what should its phases look like? What order should the various steps be taken in? Which steps are reliant on other steps, which steps need to be taken simultaneously, which steps require new legislation to be discussed, which steps require delicate international treaties to be forged?

- How extensive is this ban? Are we talking only about industrial power generation, or are we following the concept all the way down to charcoal (not the same as fossil coal, but it's in the name and therefore the definition we're working with needs to be discussed) used for camping, barbecues, and incense burners? What about uses on the individual household level in areas without power grid infrastructure?Are there any other niche uses of coal that resist conversion to other sources of energy, and if so, are they small enough niches that their ecological impact is insignificant?

The people who just wanna state the principle and call it the end of the conversation will reject all of these issues as being excuses for never getting off coal, and it's true that objections of complexity can be used this way - but it's equally true that if you actually want to implement change, this is stuff you really do have to think about! You have to define your terms, define your scope, consider the possible unintended consequences, and consider the human impacts of any meaningful change you make. It isn't enough to decide that you want to do something; figuring out how you're going to do it is an enormous part of the work, and then riding herd on the process and making adjustments when the inevitable unforseen complications arise is even yet more.

And even if you're just an individual running your mouth on the internet with no role in making the change happen, it's worth thinking through these things, because it helps you understand what progress actually looks like. .

[your-resident-boat-person]

Thoughts on the Nimitz Class aircraft carrier?

My friend asked me

"If you were going to time travel to the Middle Ages and could bring only ONE item with you, what do you bring."

so obviously im bringing a Nimitz with me as an "item" because to quote wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimitz-class_aircraft_carrier "As a result of the use of nuclear power, the ships are capable of operating for over 20 years without refueling and are predicted to have a service life of over 50 years." Anyways you're the boat expert on my mutuals so thoughts on my plan?

My area of expertise is Ocean Liners. However, there is enough overlap between them and other ships that I think I can share my thoughts. First of all, I am extremely excited about the prospect of nuclear powered ships. It's by no means a new idea (the NV Savannah, the first nuclear-powered merchant ship, was launched on July 21, 1959), but I wouldn't say nuclear powered ships are exactly common yet either. I love the idea of being able to go for extended periods of time without refueling. When ships burned coal, the refueling process could take up to a week, and you'd have to do it after every crossing. Nuclear power is a game changer here. I've always wondered if nuclear power can generate enough steam pressure to power the propellers through a turbine, rather than turboelectric engines that are powered by the nuclear energy, but I dont know enough about the subject.

In regards to your plan, it depends on a lot of stuff. For example, if you are in the Middle Ages for more than 20 years, you'd have no way to refuel. Also, I'm not exactly sure what uses an aircraft carrier would have in the middle ages. Also, now that I think about it, a lot of the technology on board such as the navigation equipment probably wouldn't be able to function properly without access to things like GPS, radio, wifi, etc. Docking it also may be an issue, but i don't know enough about the Middle Ages to say definitively. While it would certainly be fun to spark terror in the hearts of medieval peasants with a moving object several magnitudes larger than anything they have ever seen, it might not be the best thing to bring back with you.

[kathleen-patterson]

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[litttlesilkworm]

Is it true that Gorbachev never supported Valery Legasov? Did he have a "court" as they say, or did he realize that Legasov was an expert one should listen to?

Thank you for a great ask, Comrade! 💜💛💚 And please forgive me for such a belated answer! And the same goes to all the authors of all the other anon asks I received but have yet to answer - I deeply value each and every one of them and promise to respond to them very soon! 

I do think that David Dencik’s Gorbachev, though not without charm, comes across as this kind of annoyed and needy monarch in the show. The real Gorbachev, with all his shortcomings, was a lot warmer - in a folksy kind of way - and much more personable. Look at this photo for example, of a room from which the Politburo meeting room was modeled in the show, and how Gorbachev sits together with the rest of the members, and not at the head table like a king:

And as to your question more directly - I actually have just the kind of a fascinating text here that I think, will speak for itself as far as the extent to which Gorbachev listened to and trusted Valery Legasov. The text is a transcript of the Politburo meeting that took place in the morning of May 5th in 1986 - merely a week after the accident. It actually is kind of a riveting read - a glimpse into how all those decisions had to be made in real time, with only meager - and constantly changing - information available. 

I wanted everyone to enjoy it, so I translated the discussion section from Russian (please see below).

Legasov really shines in this meeting and one can easily see just how much respect he instills in people around him. There is a rather amazing passage where Legasov voices his disagreement with Velikhov’s plan on how to drain the water from under the reactor. Gorbachev immediately takes Legasov’s side and approves his plan. He then sends Shcherbina out of the room during the meeting to make an immediate phone call to Chernobyl to instruct them to ditch Velikhov’s plan and start implementing Legasov’s. That was my favorite part.

Legasov also consistently sounds like the calmest person in the room. Just calmly and intelligently doing his job, solving what is essentially a scientific problem. Even from the transcript it is easy to extrapolate how much respect he commands around the table. 

I took the liberty to include some of my own notes/comments in the translation as well. And I am happy to answer any questions I can!

@elenatria, @alyeen1, @shark-from-the-park, @drunkardonjunkyard, @green-ann, @valerafan2, @johnlockismyreligion, @attachedtofictionalpeople, @the-jewish-marxist, @potter012

SHCHERBINA: We found ourselves in front of a situation that has not been considered before, which is why there hasn’t been any protocols in place for this type of an occurrence. The very project itself is built upon never allowing such a situation. There was an uncontrollable speeding up of the reactor. Immediately after the accident, there has been a lack of preparedness on-site to evaluate the situation. The Civil Defense did not warn people. Until the evening there were weddings being held in the city. The fire had to be smothered as soon as possible, and the radioactive fallout had to be reduced. 4 thousand tonnes of materials have been dumped at the reactor. We were able to knock the surface temperature down from 500 to 200 degrees. What shall we do beneath the reactor? People have approached the pool. It is possible that there is an opportunity now to release the water.

LIGACHEV: Don’t get ahead of yourself.

RYZHKOV: We’ll need to see about that. The most important thing is to avoid the explosion.

SHCHERBINA: The most difficult thing is deactivation.

(Note: Deactivation refers to the clean-up and burial of contaminated soil and water, etc - LSW)

GORBACHEV: The most important is to deal with the danger that is below.

SHCHERBINA: People are working selflessly.

(Note: It seems like they might all be talking over each other in an agitated manner. Wish we could hear a recording of this - LSW)

LEGASOV: The work is organized the following way: Comrade Shcherbina is in charge of organizing, Comrade Meshkov studies the reasons of the accident and I work on recommendations regarding prevention of the further spread of the fallout. There are also groups in Moscow conducting the analysis.

(Note: Legasov truly shines here, stepping in calmly and intelligently to get the discussion back on track. - LSW)

The considerations regarding prevention of the consequences of the accident that are being voiced in the West should be taken into account. These aren’t just guesswork, but a result of studies, conducted with other past NPP accidents taken into account. We had to do all the calculations on site, because we didn’t have any established protocols in place.

GORBACHEV: Plus in this case, there is water under the reactor.

LEGASOV: This was done to save money, otherwise one would have to build two separate buildings. Minsredmash did not agree with that. If we had 4-5 pipes that would be stretched away from the reactor and into some distance, this would not have been a problem. This is a miscalculation of everyone working in the energy industry.

GORBACHEV: What about the containment structures?

LEGASOV: Considering the force of the explosion that took place, a containment structure would not have saved anything.

GORBACHEV: We need to focus on what comes next.

LEGASOV: 10 hours later, we were able to stop the reactor. But it continues to emit radioactivity, because after a year of being in operation, it has accumulated a lot of isotopes. The heat output of those debris has been 14 megawatt in the first 24 hours, while today it is 8.5 megawatt. This is like burning 60 tons of coal every 24 hours. Besides that, graphite is burning, too. There is 2.5 thousand tons of graphite there in total. One ton burns up every hour. This equals 24 tons per day. The graphite will burn up completely in one-third of a year.

The number one task is to create a way of filtering out the radioactive isotopes. Right now the amount of them that gets emitted into air is 100-fold less than there would be without taking measures to drop sand and other materials on the reactor from the air. The area located in the vicinity of the reactor has been sacrificed, because dumping the materials from the height of 200 meters raised dust, which increased radioactivity near the power plant.

Currently, the mass that has been melted in the reactor is moving downward. This is difficult to control, because there hasn’t been monitoring devices installed that would allow doing that. This is my fault, too. But, not a single NPP in the world has something like that.

(Note: Remarkably, Legasov accepts blame for something he hasn’t even designed. Only that he hasn’t voiced his concern about this highly improbable scenario. Or maybe he did but doesn’t think he did it strongly enough? - LSW)

On the first day after the accident, the temperature of the melted mass was 1100 degrees, while yesterday at 18:00 it was 20 degrees. It goes up by 135 degrees every day.

(Note: “20 degrees” is clearly a typo and should say ~2000 degrees, as a quick calculation can confirm: 1100 + 135 x 7 days = 2045 degrees. - LSW) 

Last night, an experiment was conducted: the melted mass fell into water, and there hasn’t been an explosion. However, if the melted mass from the reactor reaches the water below, there will be powerful formation of steam.

The situation continues to be troubling. The reactor needs to be cooled from below. An underground tunnel needs to be created, and liquid nitrogen needs to be delivered via it. In 2-3 days, we need to allow the circulation of air. Yesterday, there were no air drops to enable the draft.

Regarding the potentially dangerous zone. It cannot be larger than 250 kilometers. Within which the active zone would be 30-50 kilometers. Our institute has previously considered a “Backstop��� scenario, concerning this problem. So we have exact calculations on that account.

GORBACHEV: What would happen if the fuel reaches the ground water?

LEGASOV: This is where Velikhov and I could not find common ground. The pool needs to be emptied of water by pumping, not by shooting at it to pour it out.

GORBACHEV (to SHCHERBINA): We should let the site know, so they don’t shoot at it.

(Comrade SHCHERBINA steps out)

LEGASOV: And as for adding the concrete layer, that’s the final operation.

GORBACHEV: What about the remaining three blocks?

LEGASOV: The first two are in working condition. Barring another explosion, they will be fine. As for the third block, it might catch fire if there is another emergency.

GORBACHEV: Should we invite the foreigners? We shouldn’t do it in vain. But if we have to, then don’t be deterred by it.

LEGASOV: We were shown the cipher telegrams regarding this. Only two things were unknown to us: the French foam and the remote controlled robots from West Germany. So there is no need to send a general SOS message, whereas all the ideas originating overseas should be sent to the group for consideration.

RYZHKOV: If the strategy with pumping the water out via a pipe works, can the same pipe be used to pump the liquid nitrogen in?

LEGASOV: Yes. But it doesn’t cancel out the idea of a tunnel.

RYZHKOV: We should do both.

SHCHERBINA: I was just informed that the water pumping has begun.

(Note: looks like Shcherbina returned to the room after calling the site with this information. So, within this brief time span, Velikhov’s plan of shooting at the bubbler pool (with some sort of a projectile?) was rejected and Legasov’s idea was not only approved by Gorbachev, but actually started being implemented in real time. Amazing. - LSW)

(Note: another interesting takeaway is that they were arranging to bring Joker from West Germany way earlier than it was portrayed in the series. - LSW)

ALEXANDROV: Legasov reported everything correctly. Regarding the foreign assistance: it would be good to bring doctors who specialize in bone marrow transplants.

ALIEV: This type of a specialist is already working. 

(Note: this must be Robert Gale. - LSW).

LIGACHEV: Is there a possibility of a chain reaction?

ALEXANDROV: There is. But not an explosion, i.e. a momentary process. But there would be major steam generation.

SLAVSKY: Our Ministry is participating in limiting the consequences of the accident. My first deputy is there on site. One of the reasons for what has happened is that the Atomnadzor (Note: a nuclear watchdog/inspection agency - LSW) has done zero work. What is being done right now is correct. No further suggestions.

BREZHNEV (minister of transport infrastructure): Together with Comrades Shchadov and Usanov we went on site yesterday to survey the situation with approaching the water through drilling. The start of pumping is eased by its location. After the pumping, one must start pumping the clay-concrete mix. The drilling is complicated by the fact that the reactor cannot be approached to a distance closer than 250 meters. We have arranged with the military for them to deactivate the area so we could approach to a closer distance, 50 meters.

GORBACHEV: We should be picking up the pace. We should be working not only as if this was a wartime situation, but a nuclear one - around the clock.

RYZHKOV: Comrade Brezhnev should return on site and organize this work.

GORBACHEV: Yes.

GROMYKO: What’s the percentage of the fallout that enters the atmosphere?

LEGASOV: The SO is exceeded 22-fold. There will be zirconium. First, there was iodine coming out, and now it’s the rare earth minerals. The zone in the radius of 30 kilometers is dangerous. Iodine decays halfway in 8 days, and after 80 days there will be nothing left.

SEDUNOV (Deputy Chairman of Goskomgidromet): We are watching the situation with radiation from airplanes and the land sites. The spread of radioactivity depends on wind direction. First, the cloud went north, then west and south. There was a spread of radioactive air into Poland, Scandinavia, then into Romania and Bulgaria, yesterday - into Turkey. In Kiev, its level increased 80-fold above background, this morning it is 45-fold. A norm for the public is considered 10-fold above background over a year. In Minsk and Lithuania it’s 3-fold. In the North Caucasus, 2-fold. We suppose that in Kiev, it will start receding. But if the wind changes, the cloud can head toward Moscow. 

(Note: Goskomgidromet is the weather forecasting agency. - LSW).

SHCHERBITSKY: Someone confused roentgens and milliroentgens.

(Note: not sure what he is referring to? - LSW).

SEDUNOV: It is important to watch the isotope content of the precipitation. Iodine goes into milk. Today that’s where most of the danger is coming from.

GORBACHEV: What to do with the cattle?

SEDUNOV: No need to destroy it. The Kiev water reservoir may become polluted.

LYASHKO: The water probes are being taken every hour. Radioactivity was only found in upper parts of the Pripyat’ river. We banned the public from drinking water from open sources there.

SEDUNOV: In Moscow everything is normal so far.

SHCHADOV (minister of coal industries): It is dangerous to break through the wall. Water should be pumped out and then the mix should be pumped in. If necessary, we’ll dig under the building. 

(Note: Shchadov circles back to talking about the water problem and backs Legasov’s strategy. - LSW)

AKHROMEEV (deputy defense minister): Task number one is controlling the radiological situation. We started the deactivation of roads and other sites. Three thousand people are working on it. Today we will finish preparing the deactivation plan and report to the working group.

SOLOMENCEV: How effective is the cleanup?

AKHROMEEV: It reduces radioactivity by a factor of 3 to 4. We have to create burial sites for topsoil and water. We also have set up medical facilities at 7 thousand person capacity.

LIGACHEV: What does Akhromeev think about approaching the water under the reactor?

AKHROMEEV: My opinion is to break it with a cumulative projectile. 

(Note: I think this means an anti-tank missile. A true military man’s response, and one vote for Velikhov’s plan. - LSW)

RYZHKOV: There are enough people.

AKHROMEEV: If needed, we will bring more.

LYASHKO: The Dnieper system provides water for 32 million people. The water samples are taken every hour. Yesterday there was no alarm until the evening. But today, there is. On smaller rivers, radiation levels have increased and are now 10^-4, with 10^-8 being the norm. (Note: Units? - LSW). These areas were instructed to switch to water from closed sources.

Luckily, there are artesian wells here. If need be, we will bring water tanks. What would be more difficult is if we would have to dump the water out of Kiev Reservoir. There is already a water shortage in the South. We need Gosomgidromet’s recommendations on how long we should hold the water in Kiev Reservoir.

GORBACHEV: How are the evacuated people?

LYASHKO: Evacuation was carried out in 3 hours in place of planned 6. One bad thing was that we had no protocol in place for this kind of scenario, no training has ever been conducted. The food for the evacuated has been organized. There turned out to be a disconnect between the services of the 3-rd Minzdrav group and the regional medical services. (Note: Minzdrav is the Ministry of Health Services - LSW). They were kept too secret. I spoke to Comrade Burenkov about it. The situation is getting better now.

The census of the evacuated has been complicated by the fact that there were many who have left on personal transport for the holidays to other towns, to visit family, etc.

Construction workers were sent to other objects. 3.5 thousand people were assigned to the “Mayak” factory. Many went to work at agriculture jobs. They will receive medium wages. Because of property loss, people will have to be paid a compensation out of Gosstrakh (Note: a state insurance agency - LSW). The people from the countryside should be given a one-time amount of 100 rubles for the head of the household, and 50 rubles for each family member. The public insists on being provided more information and guidance: what to do in the situation they are in.

SHCHERBITSKY: It is very important right now.

GORBACHEV: I thought we have already decided to provide such information locally.

LYASHKO: We need the minister of health and the scientists to speak and broadcast these regionally. Water from under the reactor should not be let out into soil, even if it goes into a pit. A pool should be built. We can build this type of vessel. We also need vessels for the deactivated soil. But places like that should be guarded.

VLASOV: We will do that.

LYASHKO: The school year continues. The primary school needs to be let out in a week, the tenth graders should finish as usual. All the children, evacuated ones, should be taken into summer camps. I am requesting openings for them. The milk gets doubly checked. If there is contamination, it is being sent for butter and cheese production.

GORBACHEV: We have got the project of the resolution. What should we add? We should take into consideration that the situation is very difficult in all aspects: radiation, an enormous territory. There will be no definitive answers from scientists as far as the future goes. That’s why we need to work by the worst-case scenario. The top priority should be the reactor with all the options considered. The working group must consolidate all the necessary resources and mechanisms.

At the same time, the work with the public needs to be underscored: living conditions, jobs, healthcare, etc. Water is a special question. What should we do? We should carry out all the calculations, all the forecasts. Especially planning all that needs to be done in the danger zone.

Separately, we must decide how to be with the outside world. Information must be provided in a calm and balanced manner, without overconfidence but firmly. Panic is the luxury of the subordinates, and not of the Politburo or the government.

The local channels in Ukraine should broadcast more expanded information. Across the Soviet Union, primarily the facts should be broadcast. Maybe the informational frame can be expanded to the outer world, as well. Our adversaries are asking us questions that would on one hand, allow them to judge us as a whole, and on the other hand - smear us with mud. If we add more information now, it will be natural, because the time passes, and with that the amount of facts. But we should not create a picture of overconfidence. We are facing the fact that this situation is a signal to everyone. The public’s opinion should be turned toward the steps we are taking towards nuclear disarmament. This accident, on a nuclear object, tells us that a nuclear war should never be allowed to happen. We should talk about this at a press conference. So, the information needs to be added to, but responsibly.

As for bringing the foreign specialists? As I understood from Legasov, there is no need for it. If there will be a need, then we’ll decide. 

DOLGIKH: This is written in the next to last section.

GROMYKO: I agree with what Mikhail Sergeevich had said. It is correct that the situation remains serious. In the second section of the project it says: to consider.

GORBACHEV: It should say: approve the proposed measures and intensify the work.

GROMYKO: Section 10. We raised this question at the United Nations. We should use what we’ve already talked about previously.

SHCHERBITSKY: Section 9 needs to be expanded, to mention informing the populace regarding the situation.

GORBACHEV: Add this.

MEDVEDEV: Perhaps we should make a mention of periodically informing our friends.

GORBACHEV: It is already in the project. I suggest incorporating these suggestions and approving it.

POLITBURO MEMBERS: Agreed.

GORBACHEV: Boris Evdokimovich, you said that the analysis of the causes of the accident has been completed.

SHCHERBINA: Yes. On 25th of April, the power plant started conducting an experiment to test the reliability of its functioning, which has been approved by the Chief Engineer. It has been a crudest mistake to conduct such a test without taking the reactor functioning into account.

GORBACHEV: What kind of experimenting was it? This is a nuclear power plant.

SHCHERBINA: These kinds of experiments are conducted at power plants. But the nuclear watchdog agency should have been informed of that. The first scientific deputy hasn’t been there.

GORBACHEV: What about the version with hydrogen?

SHCHERBINA: No. There were two explosions inside the reactor.

GORBACHEV: What about the automated systems?

SHCHERBINA: None of the three systems worked.

GORBACHEV: There has already been resolutions regarding the improper operating procedures at Chernobyl NPP.

SHCHERBINA: The personnel have not been properly chosen.

CHEBRIKOV: We have two reactor systems - two-line (the more reliable ones) and the single-line ones. This is a single-line reactor. It doesn’t tolerate fluctuations in the operating procedure. Unplanned things lead to adverse circumstances. There are three systems in place to stop the reactor everywhere, but this one only had two. Capturing the extra heat output - that’s what the experiment was for. Its planning was done without involving the reactor designers.

SHCHERBINA: The hydrogen version was discarded right away. The problem was with the reactor vibrating and speeding up.

DOLGIKH: We should wait for the results of the final analysis.

GROMYKO: We should start discussing this in Central Planning. A big misfortune had struck us. Someone made an oversight, committed a crime and must be punished. What sort of thing they decided to experiment with. The decision should be such that many generations would not forget about this fact.

GORBACHEV: I suggest approving the resolutions regarding the liquidation of the consequences of the accident at Chernobyl and inviting Hans Blix to the USSR.

POLITBURO MEMBERS: Agreed.

The resolutions are approved.

[bountyofbeads]

Science Under Attack: How Trump Is Sidelining Researchers and Their Work https://nyti.ms/2MyL8Yw

Science Under Attack: How Trump Is Sidelining Researchers and Their Work

By Brad Plumer and Coral Davenport | Published Dec. 28, 2019, 2:58 p.m. ET | New York Times | Posted Dec 28, 2019 |

WASHINGTON — In just three years, the Trump administration has diminished the role of science in federal policymaking while halting or disrupting research projects nationwide, marking a transformation of the federal government whose effects, experts say, could reverberate for years.

Political appointees have shut down government studies, reduced the influence of scientists over regulatory decisions and in some cases pressured researchers not to speak publicly. The administration has particularly challenged scientific findings related to the environment and public health opposed by industries such as oil drilling and coal mining. It has also impeded research around human-caused climate change, which President Trump has dismissed despite a global scientific consensus.

But the erosion of science reaches well beyond the environment and climate: In San Francisco, a study of the effects of chemicals on pregnant women has stalled after federal funding abruptly ended. In Washington, D.C., a scientific committee that provided expertise in defending against invasive insects has been disbanded. In Kansas City, Mo., the hasty relocation of two agricultural agencies that fund crop science and study the economics of farming has led to an exodus of employees and delayed hundreds of millions of dollars in research.

“The disregard for expertise in the federal government is worse than it’s ever been,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, which has tracked more than 200 reports of Trump administration efforts to restrict or misuse science since 2017. “It’s pervasive.”

Hundreds of scientists, many of whom say they are dismayed at seeing their work undone, are departing.

Among them is Matthew Davis, a biologist whose research on the health risks of mercury to children underpinned the first rules cutting mercury emissions from coal power plants. But last year, with a new baby of his own, he was asked to help support a rollback of those same rules. “I am now part of defending this darker, dirtier future,” he said.

This year, after a decade at the Environmental Protection Agency, Mr. Davis left.

“Regulations come and go, but the thinning out of scientific capacity in the government will take a long time to get back,” said Joel Clement, a former top climate-policy expert at the Interior Department who quit in 2017 after being reassigned to a job collecting oil and gas royalties. He is now at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group.

Mr. Trump has consistently said that government regulations have stifled businesses and thwarted some of the administration’s core goals, such as increasing fossil-fuel production. Many of the starkest confrontations with federal scientists have involved issues like environmental oversight and energy extraction — areas where industry groups have argued that regulators have gone too far in the past.

“Businesses are finally being freed of Washington’s overreach, and the American economy is flourishing as a result,” a White House statement said last year. Asked about the role of science in policymaking, officials from the White House declined to comment on the record.

The administration’s efforts to cut certain research projects also reflect a longstanding conservative position that some scientific work can be performed cost-effectively by the private sector, and taxpayers shouldn’t be asked to foot the bill. “Eliminating wasteful spending, some of which has nothing to do with studying the science at all, is smart management, not an attack on science,” two analysts at the conservative Heritage Foundation wrote in 2017 of the administration’s proposals to eliminate various climate change and clean energy programs.

Industry groups have expressed support for some of the moves, including a contentious E.P.A. proposal  to put new constraints on the use of scientific studies in the name of transparency. The American Chemistry Council, a chemical trade group, praised the proposal by saying, “The goal of providing more transparency in government and using the best available science in the regulatory process should be ideals we all embrace.”

In some cases, the administration’s efforts to roll back government science have been thwarted. Each year, Mr. Trump has proposed sweeping budget cuts at a variety of federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. But Congress has the final say over budget levels and lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have rejected the cuts.

For instance, in supporting funding for the Department of Energy’s national laboratories, Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, recently said, “it allows us to take advantage of the United States’ secret weapon, our extraordinary capacity for basic research.”

As a result, many science programs continue to thrive, including space exploration at NASA and medical research at the National Institutes of Health, where the budget has increased more than 12 percent since Mr. Trump took office and where researchers  continue to make advances in areas like molecular biology and genetics.

Nevertheless, in other areas, the administration has managed to chip away at federal science.

At the E.P.A., for instance, staffing has fallen to its lowest levels in at least a decade. More than two-thirds of respondents to a survey of federal scientists across 16 agencies said that hiring freezes and departures made it harder to conduct scientific work. And in June, the White House ordered agencies to cut by one-third the number of federal advisory boards that provide technical advice.

The White House said it aimed to eliminate committees that were no longer necessary. Panels cut so far had focused on issues including invasive species and electric grid innovation.

At a time when the United States is pulling back from world leadership in other areas like human rights or diplomatic accords, experts warn that the retreat from science is no less significant. Many of the achievements of the past century that helped make the United States an envied global power, including gains in life expectancy, lowered air pollution and increased farm productivity are the result of the kinds of government research now under pressure.

“When we decapitate the government’s ability to use science in a professional way, that increases the risk that we start making bad decisions, that we start missing new public health risks,” said Wendy E. Wagner, a professor of law at the University of Texas at Austin who studies the use of science by policymakers.

Skirmishes over the use of science in making policy occur in all administrations: Industries routinely push back against health studies that could justify stricter pollution rules, for example. And scientists often gripe about inadequate budgets for their work. But many experts say that current efforts to challenge research findings go well beyond what has been done previously.

In an article published in the journal Science last year, Ms. Wagner wrote that some of the Trump administration’s moves, like a policy to restrict certain academics from the E.P.A.’s Science Advisory Board or the proposal to limit the types of research that can be considered by environmental regulators, “mark a sharp departure with the past.” Rather than isolated battles between political officials and career experts, she said, these moves are an attempt to legally constrain how federal agencies use science in the first place.

Some clashes with scientists have sparked public backlash, as when Trump officials pressured the nation’s weather forecasting agency to support the president’s erroneous assertion this year that Hurricane Dorian threatened Alabama.

But others have garnered little notice despite their significance.

This year, for instance, the National Park Service’s principle climate change scientist, Patrick Gonzalez, received a “cease and desist” letter from supervisors after testifying to Congress about the risks that global warming posed to national parks.

“I saw it as attempted intimidation,” said Dr. Gonzalez, who added that he was speaking in his capacity as an associate adjunct professor at the University California, Berkeley, a position he also holds. “It’s interference with science and hinders our work.”

CURTAILING SCIENTIFIC PROGRAMS

Even though Congress hasn’t gone along with Mr. Trump’s proposals for budget cuts at scientific agencies, the administration has still found ways to advance its goals.

One strategy: eliminate individual research projects not explicitly protected by Congress.

For example, just months after Mr. Trump’s election, the Commerce Department disbanded a 15-person scientific committee that had explored how to make National Climate Assessments, the congressionally mandated studies of the risks of climate change, more useful to local officials. It also closed its Office of the Chief Economist, which for decades had conducted wide-ranging research on topics like the economic effects of natural disasters. Similarly, the Interior Department has withdrawn funding for its Landscape Conservation Cooperatives, 22 regional research centers that tackled issues like habitat loss and wildfire management. While California and Alaska used state money to keep their centers open, 16 of 22 remain in limbo.

A Commerce Department official said the climate committee it discontinued had not produced a report, and highlighted other efforts to promote science, such as a major upgrade of the nation’s weather models.

An Interior Department official said the agency’s decisions “are solely based on the facts and grounded in the law,” and that the agency would continue to pursue other partnerships to advance conservation science.

Research that potentially posed an obstacle to Mr. Trump’s promise to expand fossil-fuel production was halted, too. In 2017, Interior officials  canceled a $1 million study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on the health risks of “mountaintop removal” coal mining in places like West Virginia.

Mountaintop removal is as dramatic as it sounds — a hillside is blasted with explosives and the remains are excavated — but the health consequences still aren’t fully understood. The process can kick up coal dust and send heavy metals into waterways, and a number of studies have suggested links to health problems like kidney disease and birth defects.

“The industry was pushing back on these studies,” said Joseph Pizarchik, an Obama-era mining regulator who commissioned the now-defunct study. “We didn’t know what the answer would be,” he said, “but we needed to know: Was the government permitting coal mining that was poisoning people, or not?”

While coal mining has declined in recent years, satellite data shows that at least 60 square miles in Appalachia have been newly mined since 2016. “The study is still as important today as it was five years ago,” Mr. Pizarchik said.

THE COST OF LOST RESEARCH

The cuts can add up to significant research setbacks.

For years, the E.P.A. and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences had jointly funded 13 children’s health centers nationwide  that studied, among other things, the effects of pollution on children’s development. This year, the E.P.A. ended its funding.

At the University of California, San Francisco, one such center has been studying how industrial chemicals such as flame retardants in furniture could affect placenta and fetal development. Key aspects of the research have now stopped.

“The longer we go without funding, the harder it is to start that research back up,” said Tracey Woodruff, who directs the center.

In a statement, the E.P.A. said it anticipated future opportunities to fund children’s health research.

At the Department of Agriculture, Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue announced in June he would relocate two key research agencies to Kansas City from Washington: The National Institute of Food and Agriculture, a scientific agency that funds university research on topics like how to breed cattle and corn that can better tolerate drought conditions, and the Economic Research Service, whose economists produce studies for policymakers on farming trends, trade and rural America.

Nearly 600 employees had less than four months to decide whether to uproot and move. Most couldn’t or wouldn’t, and two-thirds of those facing transfer left their jobs.

In August, Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, appeared to celebrate the departures.

“It’s nearly impossible to fire a federal worker,” he said in videotaped remarks  at a Republican Party gala in South Carolina. “But by simply saying to people, ‘You know what, we’re going to take you outside the bubble, outside the Beltway, outside this liberal haven of Washington, D.C., and move you out in the real part of the country,’ and they quit. What a wonderful way to sort of streamline government and do what we haven’t been able to do for a long time.”

The White House declined to comment on Mr. Mulvaney’s speech.

The exodus has led to upheaval.

At the Economic Research Service, dozens of planned studies into topics like dairy industry consolidation and pesticide use have been delayed or disrupted. “You can name any topic in agriculture and we’ve lost an expert,” said Laura Dodson, an economist and acting vice president of the union representing agency employees.

The National Institute of Food and Agriculture manages $1.7 billion in grants that fund research on issues like food safety or techniques that help farmers improve their productivity. The staff loss, employees say, has held up hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, such as planned research into pests and diseases afflicting grapes, sweet potatoes and fruit trees.

Former employees say they remain skeptical that the agencies could be repaired quickly. “It will take 5 to 10 years to rebuild,” said Sonny Ramaswamy, who until 2018 directed the National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

Mr. Perdue said the moves would save money and put the offices closer to farmers. “We did not undertake these relocations lightly,” he said in a statement. A Department of Agriculture official added that both agencies were pushing to continue their work, but acknowledged that some grants could be delayed by months.

QUESTIONING THE SCIENCE ITSELF

In addition to shutting down some programs, there have been notable instances where the administration has challenged established scientific research. Early on, as it started rolling back regulations on industry, administration officials began questioning research findings underpinning those regulations.

In 2017, aides to Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator at the time, told the agency’s economists to redo an analysis of wetlands protections that had been used to help defend an Obama-era clean-water rule. Instead of concluding that the protections would provide more than $500 million in economic benefits, they were told to list the benefits as unquantifiable, according to Elizabeth Southerland, who retired in 2017 from a 30-year career at the E.P.A., finishing as a senior official in its water office.

“It’s not unusual for a new administration to come in and change policy direction,” Dr. Southerland said. “But typically you would look for new studies and carefully redo the analysis. Instead they were sending a message that all the economists, scientists, career staff in the agency were irrelevant.”

Internal documents show that political officials at the E.P.A. have overruled the agency’s career experts on several occasions, including in a move to regulate asbestos more lightly, in a decision not to ban the pesticide chlorpyrifos and in a determination that parts of Wisconsin were in compliance with smog standards. The Interior Department sidelined its own legal and environmental analyses in advancing a proposal to raise the Shasta Dam in California.

Michael Abboud, an E.P.A. spokesman, disputed Dr. Southerland’s account in an emailed response, saying “It is not true.”

The E.P.A. is now finalizing a narrower version of the Obama-era water rule, which in its earlier form had prompted outrage from thousands of farmers and ranchers across the country who saw it as overly restrictive.

“E.P.A. under President Trump has worked to put forward the strongest regulations to protect human health and the environment,” Mr. Abboud said, noting that several Obama administration rules had been held up in court and needed revision. “As required by law E.P.A. has always and will continue to use the best available science when developing rules, regardless of the claims of a few federal employees.”

Past administrations have, to varying degrees, disregarded scientific findings that conflicted with their priorities. In 2011, President Obama’s top health official overruled experts at the Food and Drug Administration who had concluded that over-the-counter emergency contraceptives were safe for minors.

But in the Trump administration, the scope is wider. Many top government positions, including at the E.P.A. and the Interior Department, are now occupied by former lobbyists  connected to the industries that those agencies oversee.

Scientists and health experts have singled out two moves they find particularly concerning. Since 2017, the E.P.A. has moved to restrict certain academics from sitting on its Science Advisory Board, which provides scrutiny of agency science, and has instead increased the number of appointees connected with industry.

And, in a potentially far-reaching move, the E.P.A. has proposed a rule to limit regulators from using scientific research unless the underlying raw data can be made public. Industry groups like the Chamber of Commerce have argued that some agency rules are based on science that can’t be fully scrutinized by outsiders. But dozens of scientific organizations have warned that the proposal in its current form could prevent the E.P.A. from considering a vast array of research on issues like the dangers of air pollution if, for instance, they are based on confidential health data.

“The problem is that rather than allowing agency scientists to use their judgment and weigh the best available evidence, this could put political constraints on how science enters the decision-making process in the first place,” said Ms. Wagner, the University of Texas law professor.

The E.P.A. says its proposed rule is intended to make the science that underpins potentially costly regulations more transparent. “By requiring transparency,” said Mr. Abboud, the agency spokesman, “scientists will be required to publish hypothesis and experimental data for other scientists to review and discuss, requiring the science to withstand skepticism and peer review.”

AN EXODUS OF EXPERTISE

“In the past, when we had an administration that was not very pro-environment, we could still just lay low and do our work,” said Betsy Smith, a climate scientist with more than 20 years of experience at the E.P.A. who in 2017 saw her long-running study of the effects of climate change on major ports get canceled.

“Now we feel like the E.P.A. is being run by the fossil fuel industry,” she said. “It feels like a wholesale attack.”

After her project was killed, Dr. Smith resigned.

The loss of experienced scientists can erase years or decades of “institutional memory,” said Robert J. Kavlock, a toxicologist who retired in October 2017 after working at the E.P.A. for 40 years, most recently as acting assistant administrator for the agency’s Office of Research and Development.

His former office, which researches topics like air pollution and chemical testing, has lost 250 scientists and technical staff members since Mr. Trump came to office, while hiring 124. Those who have remained in the office of roughly 1,500 people continue to do their work, Dr. Kavlock said, but are not going out of their way to promote findings on lightning-rod topics like climate change.

“You can see that they’re trying not to ruffle any feathers,” Dr. Kavlock said.

The same can’t be said of Patrick Gonzalez, the National Park Service’s principle climate change scientist, whose work involves helping national parks protect against damages from rising temperatures.

In February, Dr. Gonzalez testified before Congress about the risks of global warming, saying he was speaking in his capacity as an associate adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also using his Berkeley affiliation to participate as a co-author on a coming report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that synthesizes climate science for world leaders.

But in March, shortly after testifying, Dr. Gonzalez’s supervisor at the National Park Service sent the cease-and-desist letter warning him that his Berkeley affiliation was not separate from his government work and that his actions were violating agency policy. Dr. Gonzalez said he viewed the letter as an attempt to deter him from speaking out.

The Interior Department, asked to comment, said the letter did not indicate an intent to sanction Dr. Gonzalez and that he was free to speak as a private citizen.

Dr. Gonzalez, with the support of Berkeley, continues to warn about the dangers of climate change and work with the United Nations climate change panel using his vacation time, and he spoke again to Congress in June. “I’d like to provide a positive example for other scientists,” he said.

Still, he noted that not everyone may be in a position to be similarly outspoken. “How many others are not speaking up?” Dr. Gonzalez said.

[phroyd]

China, Russia and Canada’s current climate policies would drive the world above a catastrophic 5C of warming by the end of the century, according to a study that ranks the climate goals of different countries.

The US and Australia are only slightly behind with both pushing the global temperature rise dangerously over 4C above pre-industrial levels says the paper, while even the EU, which is usually seen as a climate leader, is on course to more than double the 1.5C that scientists say is a moderately safelevel of heating.

The study, published on Friday in the journal Nature Communications, assesses the relationship between each nation’s ambition to cut emissions and the temperature rise that would result if the world followed their example.

The aim of the paper is to inform climate negotiators as they begin a two-year process of ratcheting up climate commitments, which currently fall far short of the 1.5-to-2C goal set in France three years ago.

The related website also serves as a guide to how nations are sharing the burden of responding to the greatest environmental threat humankind has ever faced:

http://paris-equity-check.org/warming-check

Among the major economies, the study shows India is leading the way with a target that is only slightly off course for 2C. Less developed countries are generally more ambitious, in part because they have fewer factories, power plants and cars, which means they have lower emissions to rein in.

On the opposite side of the spectrum are the industrial powerhouse China and major energy exporters who are doing almost nothing to limit carbon dioxide emissions. These include Saudi Arabia (oil), Russia (gas) and Canada, which is drawing vast quantities of dirty oil from tar sands. Fossil fuel lobbies in these countries are so powerful that government climate pledges are very weak, setting the world on course for more than 5C of heating by the end of the century.

Only slightly better are the group of countries that are pushing the planet beyond 4C. Among them are the US, which has huge emissions from energy, industry and agriculture somewhat offset by promises of modest cuts and more renewables. Australia, which remains heavily dependent on coalexports, is also in this category.

The wealthy shopping societies of Europe fare slightly better – largely because emissions on products are calculated at the source of manufacture rather than the point of consumption – but the authors of the paper say their actions lag behind their promises to set a positive example.

“It is interesting is to see how far out some countries are, even those that are considered leaders in the climate mitigation narrative,” said the study’s author, Yann Robiou du Pont of Melbourne University.

The study is likely to be controversial. Under the Paris agreement, there is no top-down consensus on what is a fair share of responsibility. Instead each nation sets its own bottom-up targets according to a number of different factors, including political will, level of industrialisation, ability to pay, population size, historical responsibility for emissions. Almost every government, the authors say, selects an interpretation of equity that serves their own interests and allows them to achieve a relative gain on other nations.

To get around these differing concepts of fairness, the paper assesses each nation by the least stringent standards they set themselves and then extrapolates this to the world. In doing so, the authors say they can “operationalise disagreements”.

Taking account of the different interpretations, they say the world needs to commit to a virtual 1.4C target in order to achieve a 2C goal. They hope their equity metric can be used in next month’s UN climate talks in Katowice and in climate litigation cases.

The authors said the study could in future be extended to the subnational level, such as individual US states. They also note that a few key sectors are currently omitted, including land-use change (which is fundamental in rapidly deforesting nations such as Brazil, Argentina and Indonesia), international shipping and aviation.

Although the study highlights the huge gap between political will and scientific alarm, Robiou du Pont said it should inspire rather than dispirit people.

“The positive outcome of this study is that we have a metric to assess the ratcheting up of ambition. Civil society, experts and decision-makers can use this to hold their governments accountable, and possibly undertake climate litigation cases as happened recently in the Netherlands,” he said. “This metric translates the lack of ambition on a global scale to a national scale. If we look at the goal of trying to avoid damage to the Earth, then I am pessimistic as this is already happening. But this should be a motivation to ratchet up ambition and avoid global warming as much and as rapidly as possible. Every fraction of a degree will have a big impact.”

Commenting on the study, other academics said it could be used by anyone to show how climate action can be navigated in a world in which each country ranks itself based on what they consider to be fair.

“This paper provides a means for countries to check how their contribution might be perceived by other countries and thus judge whether they are perceived as a climate leader or laggard,” said Joeri Rogelj of Imperial College London.

Phroyd

[dipulb3]

Opinion: This town powered America for decades. What do we owe them?

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/opinion-this-town-powered-america-for-decades-what-do-we-owe-them/

Opinion: This town powered America for decades. What do we owe them?

Moving away from coal is essential to fighting back against worsening droughts, storms and sea-level rise around the world. That fight will only get harder if America keeps burning coal.

I drove here in January after Steve Gray, a 56-year-old resident who’s been laid off from both the coal and oil industries in northeastern Wyoming, left Appradab a voicemail after the 2020 presidential election. I’ve been exploring your questions about the climate crisis as part of an ongoing series for Appradab Opinion, and Gray’s message seemed to bring up some of the toughest questions concerning what must be a rapid transition away from fossil fuels.

“Everybody in this town is afraid that it is going to become a ghost town,” he said.

Implicitly, Gray seemed to be asking: What will happen to Gillette — and other fossil fuel towns — as the coal industry recedes and clean-energy goals are realized? And what difference could the Biden administration or Congress make for a dying town built on coal?

Climate advocates tend to lump solutions to all of these issues under an umbrella term: “just transition.” Not like, “just get on with this transition already.” “Just” as in fair.

Gray, the man who called Appradab, doesn’t see anything fair about it.

“People are getting left behind,” he told me.

He and others I met in Gillette want the rest of the country to realize that they’ve worked hard, for decades, to supply the United States with electricity. They didn’t own the companies that got rich off the boom in coal and other fossil fuels — companies that hid research showing the disastrous effects of climate change, or that funded disinformation campaigns.

They were just working.

Working in an industry created by federal policies that failed to price carbon pollution — that encouraged the mining of coal on land owned by the US government.

And now they’re being asked to stop.

Both by markets, which value cheaper energy sources.

And, importantly, by climate advocates like myself, who understand, based on science that’s been amassing for decades, that global warming poses an existential threat to humanity.

What do we owe Gillette and its workers?

Boomtown

There’s an important irony hidden in the story of Gillette.

The US government willed much of this place into existence.

This nudge came in a few forms. One was federal support for domestic energy production in the early 1970s — a time when overseas markets were seen as volatile and problematic.

Another was environmental regulation.

The Clean Air Act of 1970 and its 1990 amendments targeted, among other pollutants, sulfur dioxide, which is a component of smog and acid rain. Powder River Basin coal just so happens to be naturally lower in sulfur than coal found in Appalachia and elsewhere.

Before 1970, there were a few coal mines and oil rigs in the Gillette area, Robert Henning, director of a local history museum, the Campbell County Rockpile Museum, told me. We were standing in front of a wall-sized image of 1920s Gillette, which had the look of a sepia-tone Western outpost — a dusty landscape with wooden fences and magnificent rolling hills on the horizon. Gillette was founded in the late 1800s as a railroad town — named for a surveyor. But after 1970 and the Clean Air Act, Henning told me, the then-localized mining industry exploded.

In 1960, the population of Campbell County, which includes Gillette, was about 5,800.

By 1970, it had more than doubled — to nearly 13,000.

During the boom, the town was so crowded and chaotic that some families lived in tents, said Jim Ford, a Gillette resident who advises local government agencies and non-profits on economic and energy issues. Ford told me that when he was a child, his elementary school adopted a two-shift schedule to accommodate all the students. One group started at 6:00 AM and went until noon. Then the other started, ending at 6:00 p.m.

Steve Gray told me that his family was one of the ones that came to the region to work in the fossil fuel industry in the early 1970s. His dad worked in the oil fields, and so did Gray, at least for a time.

That was when life was good. Work was free-flowing. Wages were high.

The coal in the Powder River Basin sits near the surface and is mined with giant trucks carrying shovels so big you can fit a large family inside. The scale of the operation is difficult to comprehend. “Our largest mine is roughly 90 square miles,” said Shannon Anderson, staff attorney at the Powder River Basin Resource Council, an environmental group.

These mines grew and grew.

But any boomtown worker knows that kind of growth can’t last forever.

‘The economy just collapsed’

The year 2016 — that was the worst of it, according to the mayor.

That was when the “economy just collapsed.”

“The energy industries always have been boom-and-bust, but this was a big one,” said Gillette Mayor Louise Carter-King, who keeps an image of her father, who also was mayor of Gillette, hanging behind her desk. Her roots in the community are deep, and her husband works in coal. From her office window, you can see one of two coal-fired power-plants puffing smoke into the sky. “It was like a perfect storm because oil went down, coal went down, natural gas — everything.” The bust was caused primarily by lower natural gas and renewable energy prices, less demand from coal-fired power plants, which continue to close, and concerns about climate-change regulations, according to economists.

Most of the coal mined near Gillette sits on public land, meaning that the state government collects royalty payments and other taxes on its production. Wyoming doesn’t have a state income tax and its property and sales taxes are notoriously low. Many years, well over half of the state’s tax revenue comes from the coal, oil and gas industries.

After the bust, Carter-King said she knew Gillette would have rethink everything.

Gray told me that his call to Appradab was influenced by how things fell apart with the oil and coal industries shortly before and after 2016, the year US voters elected President Donald Trump — who’d promised to bring back “beautiful, clean coal.” Nearly 90% of Campbell County residents voted for Trump again in 2020. But you won’t find too many people in Gillette who believe Trump kept his promises to coal workers — or that it was even possible to keep them.

Wyoming coal production peaked in 2008 at 468 million short tons, according to the US Energy Information Administration. By 2016, it was 297 million tons, creeping down to 277 million in 2019, nearing the end of Trump’s term. Last year’s figures are not yet available, but the Covid-19 pandemic’s impact on demand for energy is known to have contributed to widespread collapse in the energy industry.

Gray says he was laid off from an oil field job in 2015, then subsequently from another job in oil and then one in coal last year. His wife left him shortly after the first layoff, he said.

These days, Gray is working again, driving railroad workers to and from job sites — part of a broader industry that supports the mines and fossil fuels. (Mayor Carter-King estimates most people’s jobs in Gillette are linked to coal and other fossil fuel industries — whether directly or indirectly). But Gray said that he’s eaten through his savings.

My “bank accounts were drained — lost my house, all the repossessions,” he said.

“It was tough.”

He’s living on the razor-thin margins of a bust economy.

‘The coal industry’s on its last leg’

Here’s an inconvenient truth: Towns like Gillette tend to fail.

I asked economists, environmentalists and policy experts. None could provide a sunny case study — the story of a town whose main industry didn’t take the initiative to remake itself.

“There’s not a sterling example,” said Jake Higdon, a senior US climate policy analyst at the Environmental Defense Fund who has contributed to several reports on fossil fuel communities.

Timber towns, auto towns, military town, mining towns — the logical progression is toward “ghost town” status if the town isn’t big enough, or industries aren’t diverse enough.

In even trying to rebuild, then, Gillette aims to do something unprecedented.

That doesn’t mean it’s impossible. “Maybe our chances of remaking our community in a generation — so my kids have something to come back to — are 10%,” said Ford, the county consultant. “But I know if we don’t try, the chances are zero.”

On a recent snowy morning, I dropped by Lula Belle’s Café — “non-smoking as of 4/1/2020” — near the railyard in Gillette. It’s a welcoming, chatty kind of place — fruit pies on display behind the diner counter. I wanted to learn whether people here were in denial about coal’s demise.

“Will the mines bounce back? No,” said Doug Wood, a retired coal miner with a mustache that’s twirls at the tips. “The coal industry’s kind of on its last leg.”

What’s next then?

“I don’t know if you’re familiar with a TV show called ‘The Jetsons?'”

I found that sentiment — the coal part, not the Jetsons — to be a common refrain in Gillette. Frankly, I was stunned by the degree to which the mayor, county development officials and people like Gray accept the unsettling facts of coal’s decline.

Phil Christopherson, CEO of Energy Capital Economic Development, a local non-profit that’s funded by industry as well as city and county government, told me that he hopes children who are growing up in Gillette 50 years from now won’t even know that this was a coal town.

“It’s going to be a tough transition for this community,” Christopherson said, “and we’re doing our best to prepare for that, so we still have a community here in five, 10 or 50 years.”

Carbon Valley

Yet, Gillette remains conflicted.

While claiming it wants something new, local and state leadership continues to push coal products and technologies — many of them expensive and unproven — as the future.

You’ll hear some people calling Gillette “Carbon Valley” — as in the Silicon Valley of coal. Coal research, they say, is what’s next. As are new and supposedly cleaner uses for coal.

One such project, called the Wyoming Integrated Test Center, or ITC, sits at the base of a coal-fired power plant — painted blue and white as if it might blend into the sky.

Jason Begger, the project’s managing director, told me to think of the site as an “RV park” for researchers interested in capturing carbon-dioxide pollution from the power plant and doing something else with it — potentially “sequestering” the gas deep in the rock underfoot.

The idea is that if most of that CO2 pollution is captured and stored away somewhere, coal can keep burning, because it wouldn’t contribute heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere. It’s reasonable to place some hope in the technology given the fact that carbon pollution needs to reach “net zero” by about 2050 in order to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. But carbon-capture and storage has proven to be costly and troublesome compared to alternatives.

Begger told me the world needs to recalibrate its expectations.

“I have a 2-year-old daughter, and it’s kind of like saying, ‘Well, in 20 years, she’ll be in the Olympics,” he said. “We [would] have to see if she can crawl and walk” before signing her up for the Olympics.

The state has been trying coal-spending technology for years, said Anderson, the environmentalist, with little to no results. She says she remains “very skeptical” of it — as do I.

Wyoming, meanwhile, also has some of the nation’s greatest potential for wind energy, according to the American Clean Power Association, an industry group. PacifiCorp, the massive power company that is retiring some of its coal power plants in Wyoming, recently opened a large wind farm — 520 megawatts, enough to power about 150,000 homes, according to Laine Anderson, the company’s director of wind operations — about an hour-and-a-half drive south of Gillette.

Yet, Wyoming is a rare state that also taxes wind power — rather than incentivizing its production as a much-needed clean energy source.

“Wyoming’s leaders have done little to pivot our state’s economy away from this volatile industry,” the Casper Star-Tribune’s editorial board wrote of coal in 2019.

Just transition

Perhaps Gillette is less a place of contradictions than one of surprises.

Steve Gray lives in a small apartment complex near the highway. He answered the door on a recent blizzardy morning wearing a denim, pearl-snap shirt and fuzzy red slippers.

After his layoffs from the oil and coal industries, he lost the house he shared with his ex-wife and son, who is now 25. For a while, he moved back in with his father. But now here’s here, and when he welcomes you in you can feel the pride he takes in the place.

On the living room walls are the portraits he’s taken with his son, an oil field worker in a community south of Gillette, and Steve’s grandchildren. In these photos, Steve wears his trademark cowboy hat, a broomstick mustache and a contented grandfather’s grin.

Nearby, you’ll find the military honors — a Purple Heart and Bronze Star — bestowed on his elder relatives. Gray says he, too, served in the Navy and he values service to country.

It’s hard to talk here about a “just transition” for fossil fuel workers — as if any transition for workers in dying US industries ever has been “just.” Jason Walsh, executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, which aims to unite labor and environmental interests around the issue of a transition for dislocated fossil fuel workers, told me there’s no justice in what happened to auto workers or timber workers — or in what’s happening to fossil fuel workers now.

“We are insisting that policy makers pay attention,” Walsh said. “It is not acceptable to leave any workers or any communities behind. We have an obligation to fulfill to workers and communities that have powered this country for generations and have often paid a very stiff price in terms of the health of their environments and their people and their workers.”

I agree with that sentiment. In seeking a transition away from fossil fuels — which, again, is required by science if we want to continue living on a habitable planet — we must learn from the mistakes of the past. That’s the only way America can inch closer toward justice.

Among history’s lessons, according to Walsh: The investments must be bigger than before.

Walsh advised the Obama administration on a grants program — called the POWER+ Plan — that aimed to help diversify the economies of coal towns in the Appalachian Mountains.

That program and others failed to fully address the full needs of these communities, according to policy experts I interviewed. But there’s a consensus emerging on what’s needed now, including: job retraining, community college investments, wage replacement, healthcare extensions, pension extensions — and jobs that help repair land scarred from decades of intensive mining. Advocates are, smartly, in my view, pushing the White House to create an office focused on this economic transition — assisting fossil fuel communities and creating new jobs, according to advocates involved in these efforts.

Colorado recently took a step in this direction by creating an Office of Just Transition. Wyoming and other fossil-fuel states should do the same. And, importantly, it would be wise of the Biden administration to make good on its campaign promises to fight climate change aggressively — getting to “net zero” emissions as soon as possible — while also creating jobs.

Their focus should be on struggling towns like Gillette.

Listening to them — and helping — could be both a political and moral victory.

Wyoming is a state as red as they come.

President Joe Biden and the Democrats who now control Congress could earn respect, if not votes, for telling coal country the truth — that coal must be phased out of the national energy mix, but that workers will not be left behind. That means they should get job training, health care, wage replacement and, when possible, jobs in the new industries that are popping up to replace fossil fuels. This suite of policy solutions is complex, but they must be taken seriously, and the discussion must forward the voices of fossil-fuel workers. Workers need to know that climate advocates respect and support them before we can move forward.

This requires risk.

It requires trust.

That’s something Gray showed when he reached across cultural lines to call Appradab.

“I figured, well, yeah, I’m going to call. I’ll never get any return, but it’ll make me feel better, you know?” Gray said. “I just — I’m kind of glad that you guys did contact me.”

The Biden administration should answer the call, too.

[deniscollins]

A War Against Climate Science, Waged by Washington’s Rank and File

What would you do if you were a university professor who received a federal grant that paid for researching how meeting the Paris Agreement’s carbon reduction targets would affect extreme weather events, and prior to publication the Energy Department told you to either: (1) remove “red flag words” like Paris Agreement and acknowledge the agency funding, or (2) keep them and not mention the grant that funded your research? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

Efforts to undermine climate change science in the federal government, once orchestrated largely by President Trump’s political appointees, are now increasingly driven by midlevel managers trying to protect their jobs and budgets and wary of the scrutiny of senior officials, according to interviews and newly revealed reports and surveys.

A case in point: When John Crusius, a research chemist at the United States Geological Survey, published an academic paper on natural solutions to climate change in April, his government affiliation never appeared on it. It couldn’t.

Publication of his study, after a month’s delay, was conditioned by his employer on Dr. Crusius not associating his research with the federal government.

“There is no doubt in my mind that my paper was denied government approval because it had to do with efforts to mitigate climate change,” Dr. Crusius said, making clear he also was speaking in his personal capacity because the agency required him to so. “If I were a seismologist and had written an analogous paper about reducing seismic risk, I’m sure the paper would have sailed through.”

Government experts said they have been surprised at the speed with which federal workers have internalized President Trump’s antagonism for climate science, and called the new landscape dangerous.

“If top-level administrators issued a really clear public directive, there would be an uproar and a pushback, and it would be easier to combat,” said Lauren Kurtz, executive director of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, which supports scientists. “This is a lot harder to fight.”

An inspector general’s report at the Environmental Protection Agency made public in May found that almost 400 employees surveyed in 2018 believed a manager had interfered with or suppressed the release of scientific information, but they never reported the violations. A separate Union of Concerned Scientists survey in 2018 of more than 63,000 federal employees across 16 agencies identified the E.P.A. and Department of Interior as having the least trustworthy leadership in matters of scientific integrity.

Findings published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE in April on a subset of those agencies found that 631 workers agreed or strongly agreed that they had been asked to omit the phrase “climate change” from their work. In the same paper, 703 employees said they avoided working on climate change or using the phrase.

“They’re doing it because they’re scared,” said Maria Caffrey, a former geography specialist at the National Park Service who battled managers as they tried to delete humanity’s role in climate change from a recent report on sea-level rise. “These are all people who went to the March for Science rallies, but then they got into the office on Monday and completely rolled over.”

Examples are plentiful, not all of them new. But increasingly, scientists are willing to speak out.

On April 24, 2017, Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University, published a study showing the links between extreme weather events and climate change. Since the research was funded in part by Obama-era Energy Department grants that included more than $1.3 million for Dr. Diffenbaugh’s project, he credited the agency in the paper’s acknowledgments.

On April 25, emails show, the researchers were told that acknowledgment of Energy Department support would require additional review.

“It was alarming to receive this email because it was so far outside of our normal practice as a scientific community,” Dr. Diffenbaugh said.

Full disclosure of funding, he noted, is required by most scientific journals and by the university.

The emails said managers in the Energy Department’s biological and environmental research program, known as B.E.R., felt their program was “under attack internally” and were worried about certain terms, including “extreme event attribution,” which refers to how much a given weather event can be linked to global warming.

They also worried about references in Dr. Diffenbaugh’s research paper to terms like the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era regulation on coal-fired power plants; the social cost of carbon, a principle that puts a price on climate-warming carbon dioxide emissions; and the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Citing those three subject areas, a research supervisor wrote to Dr. Diffenbaugh six days after his study was published, “Was trying not to put too much of this in writing, but the concern here is avoiding the impression that B.E.R. is supporting research directly focused on policy evaluation.”

Those were exactly the subjects of Dr. Diffenbaugh’s federally funded research.

A subsequent paper examined how meeting the Paris Agreement’s carbon reduction targets would affect extreme weather events. When Dr. Diffenbaugh submitted it for approval, he was told Energy Department officials felt it was “solid on the science” but contained “red flag words” like Paris Agreement, emails show.

His choice was to either remove those phrases and acknowledge the agency funding, or keep them and not mention the grant.

Dr. Diffenbaugh and Stanford decided that the research should not be changed and would be published with the so-called red-flag words and the disclosure of funding sources. Department officials later notified the project leaders that funding would be cut in half. Dr. Diffenbaugh’s project was zeroed out.

Jess Szymanski, a spokeswoman for the Department of Energy, said in a statement: “There is no Department of Energy policy banning the mention of ‘climate change’ or ‘Paris Agreement,’ nor is there department guidance to withhold funding for projects including this language. To allege so is false.”

Then there is the case of Marcy Rockman. Until she resigned from the Park Service in November 2018, Dr. Rockman served for seven years as a climate change adaptation coordinator; five of those years were spent developing a strategy to protect cultural resources from climate change. But when the strategy was issued in late January 2017, her supervisors decided to drop plans to send copies to each national park.

“There was no appetite for any of my management chain to write a memo that would have their signature on it that said, ‘I am distributing the climate change strategy,’” she said.

The European Association of Archaeologists took notice anyway and invited Dr. Rockman to present her work in the Netherlands. Her boss approved the trip, and then retired.

But several months later, Dr. Rockman said, she was informed that she needed to reapply for approval. Her supervisors suggested she play down climate change. Then the trip was denied.

“I was responsible for making and carrying out decisions that no one above me wanted to make,” she said.

The Department of Interior declined to comment on Dr. Rockman’s case, citing pending litigation.

Patrick Gonzalez, the principal climate change scientist at the National Park Service, requested policy approval in March 2018 to publish a paper based on analysis of more than a century of climate data across 417 national parks.

His supervisor did not get past the opening sentence: “Anthropogenic climate change is altering ecological and human systems globally.”

“Without reading any more of the manuscript, she said, ‘I’m going to have to ask you to change that,’” Dr. Gonzalez recalled. He said in an interview that he was speaking in his own capacity and not on behalf of the federal government.

Emails and other documents show that Dr. Gonzalez then approached John Dennis, the agency’s deputy chief scientist, to protest. Dr. Dennis encouraged compromise.

Documents show that Dr. Dennis highlighted the phrase “anthropogenic,” or human-caused. “Is this word here necessary to the basic scientific thesis of the paper — which I interpret to be ‘climate change is revealed already to have had major impacts to parks?’” he asked.

“From a policy standpoint, it might be too strong for a DOI person to say ‘anthropogenic climate change,’” Dr. Dennis wrote, suggesting instead “carbon dioxide driven climate change.”

Dr. Gonzalez refused to make the change and, after three months, the agency backed down. The study was published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research Letters in September 2018, without changes.

Conner Swanson, an Interior Department spokesman, said Dr. Gonzalez’s research was about “adaptation to climate change rather than cause of climate change and, as a result, the integrity of the science did not require discussing the cause of climate change in a situation where such use could divert attention from the scientific findings of the article.”

That same summer, the Park Service tried to delete every mention of humanity’s role in climate change in a report on sea level rise. Its lead author, Dr. Caffrey, objected. It was released after more than a year’s delay without the attempted edits. Dr. Caffrey, however, said she was then demoted before her position was eliminated.

Dr. Gonzalez said he was taking a risk telling his story. But, he said, “I aim to serve as a positive example of standing strongly for science.”

Mr. Swanson said that since Mr. Trump took office, the Interior Department had “improved scientific integrity by following the law, using the best available science and relying on the expertise of our professional career staff.”

Trump administration officials have noted that in almost all of these cases, the science was ultimately published.

But scientists said that came at a cost. Dr. Crusius was given informal approval in the summer of 2019 to publish research in the well-regarded journal Earth’s Future, which is published by the American Geophysical Union. Then, in September, after the paper had gone through a round of peer review, his employer, the U.S. Geological Survey, reversed course and opposed publication.

“I appealed this decision, and I was allowed to publish this as a private citizen,” he said.

Dr. Crusius said the research, on the environmental benefits and risks of storing carbon in trees, soil, ocean and wetlands to delay climate impacts, was important because climate change is a problem the government ultimately will need solid science to confront.

“We need all the help we can get, including from both federal and academic scientists,” he said.

The U.S.G.S. denied that the paper was not approved because it dealt with climate change.

Lawmakers and others who work with scientists said publication of the research did not diminish the hurdles thrown in the way, which served to signal that writing about politically disfavored topics comes at a personal price.

At least one case predates the Trump administration. Danny Cullenward, a Stanford Law School lecturer, said the Energy Department tried in 2015 to distance itself from his research, which showed the United States could not meet its Paris Agreement goals with the policies that President Barack Obama was pushing.

It is now widely acknowledged those policies most likely would not have cut emissions enough to meet those goals. But at the time, the Obama administration was working to persuade global leaders that the president’s plans would get the country substantially toward that goal.

Dr. Cullenward, then a research fellow working with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said a lab adviser initially told him the research could not be released before the Paris Agreement talks. After he objected, he was told the study would require further review.

“I interpreted that to be, ‘We’re going to stick this thing in a black hole,’” Dr. Cullenward said. He resigned his affiliation with the lab.

John German, a spokesman for Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said Dr. Cullenward had been free to publish his work on his own but that Energy Department research must meet strict peer review standards that had not yet occurred.

Dr. Cullenward said his experience did not compare with the scale of violations in the Trump administration. But, he said, a pro-climate change president would not automatically make scientists’ work secure.

“We can’t get partisan about what scientific integrity means,” he said.

[pechefemme]

7 Answers To The Most Frequently Asked Questions About Concrete Decorative Tile

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I am thrilled Using the way my cinder block planter turned out, it’s best inside the corner of my succulent zen backyard, and does an excellent work of hiding the unsightly corner!

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Just before starting out making your very own concrete block planter, Have in mind the blocks are certainly significant. I must have moved Every cinder block at the least 10 instances in the process of building my planter, and my back was sore the following day!

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End the Joints Based on the sizing of your respective challenge plus the velocity with which you're employed, you'll periodically must smooth and end the joints amongst blocks.

Retaining wall is demanding to put in Because the pressure of your soil on another Section of the wall may cause the wall to receive damaged after some time. Experts be certain that the wall can hold the force devoid of bulging. That is no effortless feat, particularly when the soil will not be that tough.

[jimbartholomew]

“Because the cops don't need you and man they expect the same”       Bob Dylan, Just like Tom Thumb’s Blues

America, as continents go, was big, wide-open and sprawling when it was “discovered” by Europeans. It presented tremendous opportunities for anyone who would be willing to exploit the abundant resources contained in the Western Hemisphere. The English weren’t the first ones to figure this out, but once the Spanish, French and Dutch began to benefit from their American colonies, the English came on strong, pushing the limits of “Mercantilism” until full-blown Capitalism popped out.

Capitalism is a great system for exploiting resources to develop wealth. Unfortunately, along with wealth for some, comes poverty for others. The trick is to be one of the people that benefits rather than one of the resources. Capitalism has little to offer resources that no longer produce wealth. Those resources become expendable. One example of a played-out resource is the Appalachian Mountains. Once the coal was gone, that country was left to fend for itself; and that included the land and the miners. It is not good to become an expendable resource under American Capitalism.

It is an establish fact that America is tough on the people it does not need. I say this from the standpoint of an older member of the work force, as well as a student of American History. Luckily, although I no longer serve a purpose as a producer within the system, being recently retired, I still have value as a consumer, so I am safe for a while. I hope. When the day comes that I can no longer play a role within the system, I, too, will become expendable.

Two recent cultural “happenings” (for lack of a better word), the recent Covid Pandemic and the epidemic of videotaped killing of black Americans by the police, have torn away the curtain to reveal the truths regarding who in America today is considered essential and who is expendable. How else can anyone possibly explain the blatant indifference to the deaths in nursing homes and elderly facilities, and the murder of primarily young black men who were not convicted of Capital offenses? I don’t mean for this to be an anti-Republican screed (Democrats are not without fault here), but the current administration and the Senate have been particularly slow to react when faced with these issues. The virus victimized the elderly and the poor first and foremost; the police “happen” to kill black people. The greatest fear expressed by the President and the Majority Leader McConnell during the nation’s shutdown was that doing what the experts said would save lives, would hurt the economy, by which they mean mid-sized business owners and the Stock Market reliant class. The administration’s response to the epidemic of violence was to decry the “war against the police”. It is clear where they stand. It is equally clear who matters to them. There are people in America who are expendable.

None of this should come as a surprise to anyone with a little knowledge of American History. America has always been indifferent to the suffering and abuse of people that were not willing to give their all for America’s wealth, even when it came at the hands of government agents. The elimination of indigenous people because they were in the way of American expansion is the subtext behind every story of “Manifest Destiny”, and at the heart of official government policy, from the very beginning. Start with Columbus and the Taino, observe the Pilgrims with the Wampanoag Indians of eastern Massachusetts, follow the Trail of Tears, and end with the hunt for Chief Joseph; the course of American Empire is ineluctable. Native Americans were not acceptable as citizens, and would not be slaves, therefore they would be eliminated. Their land was needed, but they were expendable.

The willingness to accept and condone the murder of black citizens by Federal, State and local policing agencies is well-documented and beyond question. It is one more aspect of the same fact: black Americans have always been seen as expendable by the majority culture. If you are at all shocked at my saying this, take even a quick look at the historic record. Once slavery was ended in the South, except for a brief period of time during Reconstruction, the prevailing actions of the government were aimed at minimizing black participation in American life. Sharecropping, the Black Codes, the KKK all followed from a single stream of thought: black people in America were expendable.

Over the years, the black community has worked hard to been seen to serve a valuable purpose within American Capitalism, beyond the limited role of black consumer. The value of black workers, athletes, musicians and scholars has been recognized, and yet there are still far too many people who feel that contributions to our culture by black men and women were not really necessary. There has always been more money and energy expended keeping black people “in their place” than helping them take their rightful place as full members of society. The length of time it has taken for America to become outraged at the incarceration and killing of young black men specifically, speaks to the fact that the dominant culture in America sees black people as expendable.

The current administration’s war against primarily Spanish-speaking immigrants – both legal and illegal – shines a clear light on America’s willingness to punish and suppress populations that it sees as expendable. The cruelty of the measures used against people seeking asylum, often from economic and political situations that we have helped create, shows clearly that we simply don’t value their humanity. The most often presented argument from those in power to creating clearer paths to entering the country is purely economic: farmers, orchards and some industries need these workers. This simply attests to the fact that they are only wanted as long as they perform an economic function. By limiting legal immigration, and keeping Hispanic workers on the fringes of society, businesses can actually benefit by keeping wages low and benefits non-existent.

In recent years, America has identified an entirely new group of people that it doesn’t really need: young people. With older people retiring at a later age, there simply aren’t enough jobs for restless and ambitious youths. The solution has been to keep them in school a lot longer and tie them down with an incredible debt burden. Give them a Master’s Degree, $150,000 in (unforgiveable) debt obligation, and an entry level job somewhere and they will serve their purpose as consumers and will keep quiet. Provide them with drugs and the internet and maybe you won’t have to worry about why they’re still living in your basement. Of course, the social and economic elite doesn’t want this for their children; luckily they can afford the private schools that we see more and more as part of their educational agenda. The willingness of the authorities to forcefully suppress the youth movement known as Occupy Wall Street was a clear sign that the Majority Society was more than willing to marginalize and criminalize children who were not willing to accept their assigned role and stay quiet.

Between the social and economic (read: white) elite and the expendable masses, is a thin blue line of police officers, who toiled under a simple mandate: “Protect us and our property. Do whatever you need to do, as long as we don’t need to see it on the nightly news”. And the police fulfilled this mandate, as well as they could, for a long time. But as the need to maintain order and safety in a world in which the distance between the haves and have nots continued to grow became more and more difficult. It became harder and harder to use the once-tolerated methods of policing without causing local, and now national, outrage. Camera phones reveal the story of what happens to expendable people who step out of line in America. It is not a new problem. It is also not a problem of police training, or “bad apples”. It is a long standing part of the American justice system. It has been part of the deal for a long time; now we can see it acted out, in living color.

Where things go from here is anyone’s guess, but this situation will not be able to continue as it is. One possibility is outright fascism, which is historically the form of government that emerges when the middle class is threatened. Our only hope to avoid the anarchy and repression that looms, is to change this country at a fundamental level. The first step is to understand and face our History. America has always presented itself as a nation under Democratic rule – every man with an equal say in the way we will be governed. The reality has been vastly different. Bridging the gap between the promise and the reality will be necessary if we can ever hope to bridge the other gaps; the gap between white America and people of color, the gap between those who own America and those who built it and maintain it, the gap between those who think themselves to be irreplaceable and who have been treated as expendable.

[kayla1993-world]

“It is now too late to stop a future collapse of our communities because of climate change.”  These are not the words of a tinfoil hat-putting-on preparer. This is from a paper delivered by senior maintenance theoretical at a leading business school to the European Commission in Brussels, earlier this year. Before that, he delivered a related message to a UN audience: “Climate change is now a planetary emergency presenting a concerned threat to people.”  In the age of climate confusion, the collapse of culture has moved from being a fringe, illegal issue to a more mainstream concern.

As the world reels under each new outbreak of seriousness—record heatwaves across the Western region, terrible fires across the Amazon rainforest, the slow-moving Hurricane Dorian, extreme ice melting at the poles—the question of how bad things might get, and how soon, has become more important.  The fear of collapse is obvious in the framing of movements such as ‘Extinction Rebellion’ and in impressive warnings that business-as-usual means heading toward an unfit planet.

But more experts not only point at the standing near possibility that human culture itself is at risk; some believe that the science shows it is already too late to prevent collapse. The result of the debate on this is obviously critical: it throws light on whether and how communities should change to this uncertain view.  Yet this is not just a scientific debate. It also raises hard moral questions about what kind of action is warranted to prepare for, or attempt to avoid, the worst. Scientists may disagree about the timeline of collapse, but many argue that this is completely beside the point. While scientists and politicians argue over timelines and half measures, or how bad it'll all be, we are losing valuable time. With the valuables being a total collapse, some scientists more arguing that we should basically change the structure of the organization just to be safe. 

Jem Bendell, a former consultant to the United Nations and longtime Professor of Sustainability Leadership at the University of Cumbria’s Department of Business, delivered a paper in May 2019 explaining how people and communities might “change to climate-caused disruption.”  Bendell’s argument is not only that social collapse due to climate change is on its way, but that it is, in effect, already here. “Climate change will disrupt your way of life in your lifetimes,” he told the audience at a climate change discussion organized by the European Commission.

Terrible results, like “the down-flowing effects of public and repeated harvest failures” are now inevitable, Bendell’s paper says.  He argues this is not so much a terrible picture as a case of waking up to reality so that we can do as much as we can to save as many lives as possible. His recommended response is what he calls “Deep Adaptation,” which needs going beyond “mere changes to our existing business system and support, to prepare us for the breakdown or collapse of traditional social functions.”

Bendell’s message has since gained a mass following and high-level attention. It is partly responsible for motivating the new wave of climate protests echoing around the world.   In March, he launched the Deep Adaptation Forum to connect and support people who, in the face of “unavoidable” social collapse, want to explore how they can “reduce suffering while saving more of community and the natural world.” Over the last six months, the Forum has gathered more than 10,000 people. More than 600,000 people have downloaded Bendell’s paper, called Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating our Climate Tragedy, published by the University of Cumbria’s Institute of Leadership and Sustainability (IFALS). And many of the key organizers behind the Extinction Rebellion (XR) battle joined the protest movement after reading it.

“There will be a near-term collapse in community with serious results for the lives of readers,” ends that paper, released in 2017.  Trouble is “probable,” it adds, and destruction “is possible.” Overcoming at least 20 years, we will see the increasing hits of the coal pollution we have already pumped into the atmosphere and oceans. Even if we stopped discharges tomorrow, Bendell argues, the latest climate science shows that “we are now in a climate emergency, which will more and more disrupt our way of life… social collapse is now unavoidable within the lifetimes of readers of this paper.”

Bendell puts a rough timeline on this. The collapse will happen within 10 years and cause disruptions across nations, involving “increased levels of hunger, starvation, disease, civil conflict, and war.”  Yet this analysis opens up far more questions than it answers. I was left wondering: Which communities are at risk of collapsing due to climate change, and when? Some societies or all societies? Together or in sequence? Why some rather than others? And how long will the collapse process take? Where will it start, and in what part? How will that impact others' parts? Or will it take down all sectors of societies in one fell swoop? And what does any of this suggest for whether, or how, we might prepare for collapse?

In trying to answer these questions, I spoke to a wide range of scientists and experts and took a deep dive into the hidden but appearing science of how societies and cities collapse. I wanted to understand not just whether Bendell’s forecast was right, but to find out what range experts from climate scientists to risk analysts were digging up about the possibility of our societies collapsing in the coming years and at least 20 years.  The newly-visible science of collapse is still, unfortunately, an early field. That's because it's combined science that includes not only the incredibly complex, interconnected natural systems that contain the Earth System but also has to make sense of how those systems interact with the complex, interconnected social, political, business, and cultural systems of the Human System.

What I discovered caused a wide range of feelings. I was at times surprised and shocked, often frightened, sometimes relieved. Mostly, I was disturbed. Many scientists exposed flaws in Bendell’s argument. Most rejected the idea of unavoidable near-term collapse completely. But to figure out whether a near-term collapse picture of some kind was likely led me far beyond Bendell. Some world-leading experts told me that such a scenario might, in fact, be far more reasonable than ordinarily assumed.  According to Penn State professor Michael Mann, one of the world’s most famous climate scientists, Bendell’s grab of climate science is deeply flawed.

“To me, this paper is a perfect storm of misguidedness and wrongheadedness,” he told me.  Bendell’s original paper had been rejected for writing by the double-checked Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal. According to Bendell, the changes that opinion reviewers said were necessary to make the article fit for publication made no sense. But among them, one referee asked whether Bendell’s presentation of climate data actually supported his end: “I am not sure that the long presentation of climate data supports the core argument of the paper in a meaningful way.”

In his response, sent in the form of a letter to the journal’s chief editor, Bendell wrote: “Yet the summary of science is the core of the paper as everything then flows from the end of that analysis. Note that the science I summarise is about what is happening right now, rather than models or explanations of the complex made systems that the reviewer would have preferred.”  But in Mann’s view, the paper’s failure to pass fact-checking was not simply because it didn’t fit old theoretical behaviour, but for the far more serious reason that it doesn’t have scientific difficulty. Bendell, he said, is simply “wrong on the science and hits: There is no actual proof that we face ‘inevitable near-term collapse.’”

Dr. Gavin Schmidt, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who is also world-famous, was even meaner.  “There are both valid points and non-justified statements throughout,” he told me about Bendell's paper. “Model projections have not underestimated temperature changes, not everything that is non-linear is therefore ‘out of control.’ Blaming ‘increased nature from more energy in the atmosphere’ for anything is silly. The data for ‘inevitable social collapse’ is very weak to non-existent.”

Schmidt did not rule out that we are likely to see more events of local collapse events. “Obviously we have seen such collapses in particular locations connected with extreme storm hits,” he said. He listed off some examples—Puerto Rico, Barbuda, Haiti, and New Orleans—explaining that while local collapses in certain areas could be possible, it's a "much harder case to make" at a worldwide level. "And this paper doesn't make it. I’m not especially cheerful about what is going to happen, but this is not based on anything real.”  Jeremy Lent, systems person and author of The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, argues that throughout Bendell’s paper he often slips between the terms “unavoidable,” “probably,” and “likely.”

“If he chooses to go with his gut feeling and end collapse is unavoidable, he has every right to do so,” Lent said, “but I believe it’s irresponsible to package this as a scientifically valid end, and in that way criticize those who understand the data otherwise as being in dealing.”  When I pressed Bendell on this issue, he pushed back against the idea that he was putting forward a hard, scientifically-valid forecast, describing it as a “guess”: “I say in the original paper that I am only guessing at when the social collapse will happen. I have said or written that every time I talk about that time limit.”

But why offer this guess at all? “The problem I have with the argument that I should not give a time limit like 10 years is that not deciding on a time horizon acts as a mental escape from facing our situation. If we can push this problem out into 2040 or 2050, it somehow feels less pressing. Yet, look around. Already harvests are failing because of weather made worse by climate change.”  Bendell points out that such results are already damaging more capable, poorer nations than our own. He says it is only a matter of time before they damage the healthy functioning of “most countries in the world.”

According to Dr. Wolfgang Knorr, Principal Investigator at Lund University’s Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services in a Changing Climate Program, the risk of near-term collapse should be taken far more seriously by climate scientists, because so much is unknown about climate points: “I am not saying that Bendell is right or wrong. But the criticism of Bendell’s points in time focuses too much on the detail and in that way intensely tries to avoid the bigger picture. The available data points to the fact that some terrible climate change is unavoidable.”  Bendell argues that the main trigger for some sort of collapse—which he defines as “an uneven ending of our traditional modes of food, security, pleasure, identity, meaning, and hope”—will come from speeding-up failures in the worldwide food system.

We know that it is a clear possibility that common multi-breadbasket failures (when major yield reductions happen together across farming areas producing staple crops like rice, wheat, or maize) can be triggered by climate change—and have already happened.  As shown by American physicist Dr. Yaneer Ban Yam and his team at the New England Complex Systems Institute, in the years previous 2011, worldwide food price spikes linked to climate breakdown played a role in triggering the ‘Arab Spring’ efforts. And according to hydroclimatologist Dr. Peter Gleick, climate-caused aridity increased the hit of socio-political and financial running, causing farming failures in Syria. These drove mass movements within the country, in turn preparing for limited tensions that spilled over into a lengthy conflict.

In my own work, I found that the Syrian conflict was not just triggered by climate change, but a range of intersecting factors—Syria’s domestic oil production had peaked in the mid-90s, leading state funds to bleed as oil production and exports lowered. When worldwide climate disorder triggered food price spikes, the state had begun cutting domestic fuel and food payments, already upset from the hit of financial running and crime resulting in huge deficit levels. And so, a large young population flooded with unemployment and made bold by 20 years of political control took to the streets when they could not afford basic bread. Syria has since collapsed into endless war.  This is a case of what Professor Thomas-Homer Dixon, University Research Chair in the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Environment, describes as “continuous failure”—when multiple, interconnected things increase over time before triggering self-reinforcing returns which result in them all failing at the same time. In his book, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization, he explains how the resulting coming together of problems puzzles different political, economic and regulatory functions, which are not designed for such complex events.

From this lens, climate-caused collapse has already happened, though it is worsened by and increases the failure of many human systems. Is Syria a case-study of what is in store for the world? And is it unavoidable within the next ten years?  In a major report released in August, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that hunger has already been rising worldwide due to climate hits. A senior NASA scientist, Cynthia Rosenzweig, was a lead author of the study, which warned that the continued rise in carbon discharges would drive a rise in worldwide average temperatures of 2°C in turn starting a “very high” risk to food supplies toward mid-century. Food shortages would hit weak, poorer areas, but rich nations may also be in the firing line. As a new study from the UK Parliamentary Environment Audit Committee ends, fruit and vegetable imports to countries like Britain might be cut short if a problem breaks out.

When exactly such a problem might happen is not clear. Neither reports suggest it would result in the collapse of culture, or even most countries, within 10 years. And the UN also wants everyone to understand that it is not too late to turn away these risks through a move to organic and agro-conditional methods.  NASA’s Gavin Schmidt admitted “increasing results from climate change on worldwide food production,” but said that a collapse “is not prophesied and certainly not unavoidable.”

A few years ago, though, I discovered first-hand that a terrible collapse of the worldwide food system is possible in the coming 20 years if we don’t change course. At the time I was a visiting research fellow at Anglia Ruskin University’s Global Sustainability Institute, and I had been invited to a steering board meeting for the Institute’s Global Research Observatory (GRO), a research program developing new models of global change.  One particular model, the Dawe Global Security Model, was focused on the risk of another global food crisis, almost the same as what triggered the Arab Spring.  “We ran the model forward to the year 2040, along a business-as-usual path based on ‘do-nothing’ trends—that is, without any returns that would change the hidden course,” said institute director Aled Jones to the group of people in the room, which included UK government leaders. “The results show that based on reasonable climate courses and a total failure to change course, the worldwide food supply system would face terrible losses, and a never before seen disease of food riots. In this picture, the global community actually collapses as food production falls permanently short of consumption.”

Jones was at pains to clear up that this model-run could not be taken as a forecast, especially as reduction policies are already rising in response to concern about such an issue: “This situation is based on simply running the model forward,” he said. “The model is a periodical model. It’s not designed to run this long, as in the real world courses are always likely to change, whether for better or worse.”  Someone asked, “Okay, but what you’re saying is that if there is no change in current courses, then this is the end?”

“Yes,” Jones replied quietly.  The Dawe Global Security Model put this potential change twenty years from now. Is it unbelievable that the force might happen much earlier? And if so why aren’t we preparing for this risk?

When I asked UN disaster risk advisor Scott Williams about a near-term worldwide food situation, he pointed out that this year’s UN fleet worldwide disaster risk estimate was very much aware of the danger of another global "multiple breadbasket failure.  A projected increase in extreme climate events and a more mutual food supply system model a threat to global food security,” warned the UN Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction released in May. “For instance, local shocks can have lots of effects on global farming markets.”

Current farm modelling, the UN report said, does not adequately account for these complex interconnections. The report warns that “climate shocks and following crop failure in one of the worldwide cereal breadbaskets might have knock-on effects on the global agricultural market. The disturbances are increased if more than one of the main crop-producing countries suffers from losses together.”  Williams, who was a coordinating lead author of the UN global disaster risk evaluation, put it more directly: “In a nutshell, Bendell is closer to the mark than his masters.”

He pointed me to the second chapter of the UN report which, he said, expressed the following risk to worldwide culture in a “necessarily politically less sensitive” form. The chapter is “close to stating that ‘collapse is inevitable’ and that the methods that we—scientists, modellers, academics, etc—are using are totally failing to understand that nature of complex, uncertain ‘transitions,’ in other words, collapses.”  Williams fell short of saying that such a collapse situation was definitely sure, and the UN report—while setting out a dangerous level of risk—did not do so either. What they did make clear is that a major global food change could explode unexpectedly, with climate change as a key trigger.

[jamieclawhorn]

Have £1,000 to invest? I’d buy the FTSE 100’s Glencore today

Toxic business is dead. Or it will be, sooner rather than later. Think of the move away from traditional tobacco towards healthier smoking alternatives and the switchover to renewable energy from traditional fuels, as examples. But what happens to the big companies in these industries?

Will they turn into fossils themselves or will they become newer, better, more agile versions of their former selves?

I have been grappling with these questions in some of my recent articles, one example being oil and gas major, Royal Dutch Shell. Mining and commodity trading giant Glencore (LSE: GLEN)  is another such company to consider, with its large stakes in the coal business.

It’s now transitioning into cleaner business, and has recently committed to putting a cap on its coal production. So the question for the investor is: Can it successfully pull off a transition away from coal in the long term?

Diversified business

A fair amount of its revenue (42%) is already generated from non-coal segments. Metals and minerals alone contribute 36% of this, while agriculture products contribute to the remaining 6%. The remaining 58% of revenue comes from the energy products segment, which is dominated by coal. I am of the view, that even though coal’s share is still substantial, Glencore has enough support from other operations to push through a transition.

The financials for the metals business give the company strong impetus for shifting gears too.Metals and minerals generate more earnings for it than the coal business, even though the revenue share is smaller. In other words, the company stands to become far more efficient by moving away from coal.

Moving away from coal

The process is already under way, as is evident from capex trends. Investment in coal is down to almost nothing, while that in metals like copper, zinc and nickel continues to be relatively strong.

Plans to cap future coal production may have something to do with the dwindling capex. But I think the cap is a token gesture for right now. This is because the cap amount is actually higher than its expected production in 2019. But if that cap is retained in 2020 and beyond, it will at least mean that the company is committed to keeping coal production flat.  

Despite the generous cap, I don’t think this is reason to doubt the overall clean-up plans. In a recent release, the company detailed a five-part strategy to contribute to its plan and this includes moving capital spending towards environment-friendly commodities and reducing emissions for others.

Rising share price

So far, Glencore looks like it can transition with relative ease. Investors have started warming to it once again as well. The share price has pretty much steadily risen in 2019 so far, after a slump in December. I get that being a cyclical stock, it always carries some risk, but on the flip side it can offer huge reward. I would not put all my eggs in this investment basket, but if you have £1,000 to invest, I think it is worth seriously considering the potential increase in capital it could offer over time.

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More reading

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Manika Premsingh has no position in any of the shares mentioned. The Motley Fool UK has no position in any of the shares mentioned. Views expressed on the companies mentioned in this article are those of the writer and therefore may differ from the official recommendations we make in our subscription services such as Share Advisor, Hidden Winners and Pro. Here at The Motley Fool we believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors.

[nabilsbaybi]

English Test with Answers: Global Warming

English Test with Answers: Global Warming

Our planet is probably getting warmer. The 1980s saw the six warmest years in weather records. Burning fuels put polluting gases into the air. These gases then act like the glass in a greenhouse and keep the heat in. This is called the greenhouse effect and it leads to global warming. Carbon dioxide is the most important greenhouse gas, and millions of tonnes of it are produced by petrol, gas, and coal we burn every day. Would we benefit from a warmer world? Could we not grow more crops in a wider area? Perhaps we could in some areas, but what worries scientists most is the changes that could occur in the planet’s weather patterns. Scientists make use of supercomputers, costing many millions of pounds each, in order to predict what the weather will be like in the next century. So what are the predictions? Destructive droughts could strike more often and places which grow crops at the moment could turn semi-desert. Forests could decline and change, and wildlife would have to find new habitats. As ice on Greenland and Antarctica melts, the world oceans could creep higher onto the land. Large parts of low countries, such as Bangladesh already swept by floods and typhoons could be submerged. Cities like Miami, Venice, and New York would need to be protected from the sea. But these are only predictions. Scientists know that the Earth is warming up, but they don’t know how this will affect our weather. Some scientists think that rich, as well as poor countries, should act now to slow down the earth’s warming. They argue that the longer we wait, the more difficult it might be to solve the problem. The future may lie in the use of alternative ways of getting the energy that does not involve the use of fossil fuels. Solar and wind energy are examples. COMPREHENSION A. ARE THESE SENTENCES TRUE OR FALSE? JUSTIFY Scientists think that the sooner we find a solution to global warming, the better. 2. Animals won’t be affected by global warming. B. ANSWER THESE QUESTIONS Where does CO2 come from? Find two examples of the devastating consequences of global warming according to scientists. C. FIND IN THE TEXT WORDS OR EXPRESSIONS THAT MEAN THE SAME AS become less (paragraph 3):........................... move slowly (paragraph 3):........................... D. PICK OUT FROM THE TEXT SENTENCES OR EXPRESSIONS WHICH SHOW THAT Scientists think that the world nations must do something to prevent global warming 2. The level of water in the sea will probably increase due to global warming. E. WHAT DO THE UNDERLINED WORDS IN THE TEXT REFER TO? It (paragraph 1):........................... This (paragraph 4): ........................... F. COMPLETE THESE SENTENCES FROM THE TEXT. Scientists predict that floods and typhoons would hit ........................... areas. Alternative energy from the ........................... and the ........................... will probably replace energy from…………………….in the future. II. LANGUAGE A. FILL IN THE BLANKS WITH THE APPROPRIATE WORDS FROM THE LIST. for instance - during - consequently - because - especially - apart from - as a result - despite - whereas - moreover 1. The injured man died...........................all the doctor's efforts, 2. All the students passed the final exam...........................Ahmed who was never expected to fail. 3. A number of soldiers were seriously wounded...........................a sudden aircraft attack. 4. Tom’s offer for the job was turned down...........................he was black. 5. Aspirin is an effective drug for headaches...........................it’s very good for blood pressure. 6. There is much to do on weekends...........................you can go hiking or jogging. 7. She caught a cold...........................she could not come to the party. B. PUT THE VERBS IN BRACKETS IN THE CORRECT FORM: Two years ago, I (get)....................a job at a company called WordTech. Now, I (use)................... computers at work every day, but before I (come) ......................to the United States, I (never touch) ................. a computer. It (not take) ............... me very long to learn basic computer skills because I (already, take ) ........................ a course in typing. By 2020, I (become) ................... an expert in computing. C. REWRITE THESE SENTENCES AS INDICATED. 1. It was necessary that the patient took three pills per day. The patient................................................................... 2. Although the doctor prescribed Samir 5 tablets a day, he took more than 10. In spite of ................................................................... 3. “Why didn’t you come here yesterday?” He wanted to know................................................................... 4. It was wrong of them to hide the truth. They shouldn't................................................................... 5. I invited John, but he spoiled the party. If only................................................................... III. WRITING Royal Air Maroc is asking Moroccan students to write an article, in English, about some aspects of the Moroccan culture. The best article will be published in the RAM magazine and their writers will be given tickets to go to China and watch the Olympic games. Write an article in order to participate in this competition. Answers COMPREHENSION A. ARE THESE SENTENCES TRUE OR FALSE? JUSTIFY True. Because " They argue that the longer we wait, the more difficult it might be to solve the problem" 2. False. Because "wildlife would have to find new habitats" B. ANSWER THESE QUESTIONS Produced by petrol, gas, and coal Destructive droughts could strike more / Forests could decline and change / wildlife would have to find new habitats / the world oceans could creep higher onto the land C. FIND IN THE TEXT WORDS OR EXPRESSIONS THAT MEAN THE SAME AS Decline. Creep D. PICK OUT FROM THE TEXT SENTENCES OR EXPRESSIONS WHICH SHOW THAT Scientists think that rich, as well as poor countries, should act now. 2. The world oceans could creep higher E. WHAT DO THE UNDERLINED WORDS IN THE TEXT REFER TO? Carbon dioxide Earth’s warming / Global warming F. COMPLETE THESE SENTENCES FROM THE TEXT. Scientists predict that floods and typhoons would hit larger areas. Alternative energy from the sun and the wind will probably replace energy from fossil fuels in the future. II. LANGUAGE A. FILL IN THE BLANKS WITH THE APPROPRIATE WORDS FROM THE LIST. 1. The injured man died despite all the doctor's efforts, 2. All the students passed the final exam apart from Ahmed who was never expected to fail. 3. A number of soldiers were seriously wounded during a sudden aircraft attack. 4. Tom’s offer for the job was turned down because he was black. 5. Aspirin is an effective drug for headaches. Moreover, it’s very good for blood pressure. 6. There is much to do on weekends. For instance, you can go hiking or jogging. 7. She caught a cold. As a result/Consequently,  she could not come to the party. B. PUT THE VERBS IN BRACKETS IN THE CORRECT FORM: 1. Two years ago, I (get) got a job at a company called WordTech. Now, I (use) am using computers at work every day, but before I (come) came to the United States, I (never touch) had never touched a computer. It (not take) didn't take me very long to learn basic computer skills because I (already, take ) had already taken a course in typing. By 2020, I (become) will have become an expert in computing. C. REWRITE THESE SENTENCES AS INDICATED. 1. The patient had to take three pills per day 2. In spite of the doctor prescribing 5 tablets a day to Adil, he took more than 10. In spite of the fact that the doctor prescribed Samir 5 tablets a day, he took more than 10. 3. He wanted to know why I hadn't come there the previous day. 4. They shouldn't have hidden the truth. 5. If only I hadn't invited John.   Want to practice more?Check this test with its answers : 

English Test with Answers: Literacy and Health

    Read the full article

[simonconsultancypage]

Unless Checked, Climate Change Could Decimate U.S. Economy

Unless dramatic counter-measures are taken, annual losses to the U.S. economy from climate change could reach billions of dollars by the end of the century, according to a comprehensive interagency report from the U.S. federal government released last week. Even though the report’s subject arguably is outside this blog’s bailiwick, I am highlighting the report here out of a concern that due to the report’s publication late in the afternoon on the Friday of a holiday weekend many may have missed the report and its message. The report is sober, detailed, and serious, and should be read and studied by anyone concerned about important risks facing our national economy and business environment. The bottom line is that climate change clearly represents a significant risk for all enterprises, regardless of sector and of geographic location.

  The full November 23, 2018 report of the U.S. Climate Change Research Program can be found here. The Report-in-Brief (which I recommend for its relative brevity and ease of access) can be found here. The Summary Findings can be found here. A November 24, 2018 New York Times article about the report entitled “U.S. Climate Report Warns of Damaged Environment and Shrinking Economy” can be found here.

  Background

In the Global Change Research Act of 1990, the U.S. Congress mandated that the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) deliver a report to Congress and to the White House no less than every four years analyzing the effects of and the current trends in climate change, and to project current trends for the next 25 to 100 years. The current report is actually the fourth assessment pursuant to the congressional mandate (and thus refers to itself as NCA4). The report issued last Friday is actually the second part of a two-part report to be issued during the current reporting cycle; the first part, released last year and focused on the scientific aspects of climate change study, can be found here.

  The Report was prepared by an interagency task force lead by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and involving the participation of representatives from 13 different federal agencies, including the Department of Energy, the Department of Transportation, the Department of State, NASA, and the National Science Foundation. A team of more than 300 federal and non-federal experts volunteered their time to produce the assessment. Among other things, the report team conducted more than 40 workshops around the country, reaching more than 1,000 individuals. The ultimate report was reviewed both by external experts and by the general public. The external review included expert peer review.

  The Report’s Findings

The report concludes that the “earth’s climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization” and that the “impacts of global climate change are already being felt in the United States and are projected to intensify in the future.” Decisions made today “determine the risk exposure for current and future generations.” While mitigating steps are now being taken (such as measures to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions through the use of alternative fuel sources) “neither the global efforts to mitigate the causes of climate change nor regional efforts to adapt to the impacts currently approach the scales needed” to avoid “substantial damages” to “the U.S. economy, environment and human health and well-being over the coming decades.”

  The report’s catalog of observed climate change is sobering – temperature extremes and heavy precipitation events are increasing; glaciers, snow cover, and sea ice are shrinking; seas are warming, rising, and becoming more acidic; flooding is becoming more common along the U.S. coastline; and wildfires are becoming more frequent and more severe. Graphical exhibits in the Report-in-Brief detail the increase in the average annual U.S. temperature; the significant decline in the Western U.S. snowpack; the dramatic shrinkage of the artic sea ice; the rise in the number U.S. heating degree days and the decline in the number of cooling U.S. degree days; the significant increase in the length of the growing season throughout the U.S.; the rise of the U.S. sea level; and the increase in ocean acidity.

  In all, 17 of the 18 warmest years on record have occurred since 2000. The warming trend has been driven in large-part by land-use changes (including cutting down forests and paving over natural surfaces) and rising emissions of greenhouse gases (including carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels and methane from livestock production).

  The report specifically attributes the magnitude of climate changes to human activity: “the unambiguous long-term warming trend in global average temperature over the last century cannot be explained by natural factors alone. Greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are the only factors that can account for the observed warning over the last century.”

  These processes will continue to affect the climate in the decades ahead. The extent of the future changes depends in part on the level of greenhouse gas emissions going forward. While significant mitigation activity could ameliorate the more severe trends, without significant greenhouse gas mitigation, the increase in global annual temperature could reach nine degrees Fahrenheit or more by the end of the century. In the best scenario, high temperature extremes, heavy precipitation events, high tide flooding events along the U.S. coastline, ocean acidification and warming, and forest fires are projected to continue to increase, while land and sea ice cover, snowpack, and surface soil moisture are expected to continue to decline in the coming decades.

  These and other projected changes are expected to “increasingly impact water resources, air quality, human health, agriculture, natural ecosystems, energy and transportation infrastructure, and many other natural and human systems that support communities across the country.”

  The changes are “expected to cause substantial net damage to the U.S. economy, especially in the absence of increases adaptation efforts.” The “potential for losses” in some sectors “could reach hundreds of billions of dollars per year by the end of this century,” which is “more than the current gross domestic product (GDP) of many U.S. states.” All told, the report says, climate change could slice up to one-tenth of the gross domestic product by 2100, more than double the losses from the global financial crisis ten years ago.

  The report’s projection of the economic impact from global climate change is detailed and specific. The report notes that climate change likely will increasingly disrupt critical infrastructure and property and labor productivity. Regional economies and industries that rely on the environment or natural resources – such as agriculture, tourism, and fisheries – will be particularly vulnerable. Agricultural yields could fall to 1980s levels by midcentury and fire season could spread to the Southeast.

  Moreover, climate change will have impacts beyond our borders, and could lead to disruptions to trade, for example through disruptions to overseas operations and global supply chains. Extreme weather and climate-change events could result in risks or failures to critical systems, such as water resources, food production and distribution, energy, transportation, public health, international trade, and national security.

  The report does note that there have been important steps taken by communities, governments, and businesses to reduce the risks and costs associated with climate change by taking actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and implement adaption strategies. Among these steps are transformations of the energy sector, including in particular the displacement of coal by natural gas and the increased deployment of renewable energy. However, while these steps can help reduce climate impacts, “more immediate and substantial global greenhouse gas emission reductions, as well as regional adaptation efforts, would be needed to avoid the most severe consequences.”

  Discussion

While the report is unusually detailed and specific, in many respects the report’s message is not new. Other climate change task forces – both national and international – have sounded the alarm on global climate change. The significant messages that this report adds to the dialog  are, first, its message that global climate change is not some distant, vague, future event – it is in fact happening right now in every part of the country; and, second, its message that climate change represents a significant threat to our economy, our public health, and our national security.

  It might be expected that such a detailed message of a significant set of threats facing the country might represent a call to arms that might galvanize the country’s leadership to action, particularly given the report’s unmistakable message that climate change represents not just a threat to the economy but also to trade and to national security. However, no such action is likely. The current administration’s approach to environmental issues generally is inconsistent with the kind of inquiry, planning, and action that the report’s findings dictate. Indeed, for years, serious climate change concerns have been subordinated to the dynamics of the country’s cultural and political divide. While it could be argued that the White House did nothing to suppress this report, the reality is that the White House dropped the report after 2 pm on the Friday of a holiday weekend.

  However, for anyone serious about identifying significant risks facing the economy and facing individual businesses, the report’s messages cannot be ignored. Any enterprise with operations in coastal areas or in areas prone to wildfires; any organization dependent on an extended global supply chain; any organization with operations in the most easily identified and vulnerable sectors, such as agriculture, fisheries, and tourism; any organization dependent on aging or vulnerable infrastructure – in short, every enterprise and organization — will need to understand, assess and address the risks identified in this report.

  Moreover, it may not be sufficient for organizations simply to identify, disclose, and to try to plan for climate change vulnerabilities. In the absence of any coherent governmental action or response, it may be incumbent on private enterprise to act, if simply out of prudence and self-defense. These actions might include active measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in company operations, distribution, and transportation; examining supply chains and other operational structures to see where climate mitigating measures might be introduced; and examining operational inputs (such as raw materials) to see where vulnerabilities may exist.

  The report makes it clear that climate change represents a threat at both the economic and enterprise levels. The risks that climate change presents represent a challenge for every organization. The risks not only potentially could affect future operating success. The risks could also represent an important source of potential corporate liability, to the extent that various stakeholders seek to hold companies and their management accountable for failing to take steps to identify, address, and mitigate the risks that climate change presents.

  The possibility of liability actions arising based on action or failures to act with respect to climate change issues is not mere conjecture; just in the last few days, shareholders filed a securities class action lawsuit in connection with the California wildfires, and shareholders and others have previously filed actions based on climate change-related disclosure issues (refer here and here). I know some readers may feel I have gone on a bit too much about the kind of management liability threat that climate change-related issues might represent, but the reality is that climate change-related claims, like climate change itself, are already here. And just as climate change is likely to be an increasingly serious problem, climate change-related claims will become increasingly important as well.

The post Unless Checked, Climate Change Could Decimate U.S. Economy appeared first on The D&O Diary.

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[lawfultruth]

Unless Checked, Climate Change Could Decimate U.S. Economy

Unless dramatic counter-measures are taken, annual losses to the U.S. economy from climate change could reach billions of dollars by the end of the century, according to a comprehensive interagency report from the U.S. federal government released last week. Even though the report’s subject arguably is outside this blog’s bailiwick, I am highlighting the report here out of a concern that due to the report’s publication late in the afternoon on the Friday of a holiday weekend many may have missed the report and its message. The report is sober, detailed, and serious, and should be read and studied by anyone concerned about important risks facing our national economy and business environment. The bottom line is that climate change clearly represents a significant risk for all enterprises, regardless of sector and of geographic location.

  The full November 23, 2018 report of the U.S. Climate Change Research Program can be found here. The Report-in-Brief (which I recommend for its relative brevity and ease of access) can be found here. The Summary Findings can be found here. A November 24, 2018 New York Times article about the report entitled “U.S. Climate Report Warns of Damaged Environment and Shrinking Economy” can be found here.

  Background

In the Global Change Research Act of 1990, the U.S. Congress mandated that the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) deliver a report to Congress and to the White House no less than every four years analyzing the effects of and the current trends in climate change, and to project current trends for the next 25 to 100 years. The current report is actually the fourth assessment pursuant to the congressional mandate (and thus refers to itself as NCA4). The report issued last Friday is actually the second part of a two-part report to be issued during the current reporting cycle; the first part, released last year and focused on the scientific aspects of climate change study, can be found here.

  The Report was prepared by an interagency task force lead by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and involving the participation of representatives from 13 different federal agencies, including the Department of Energy, the Department of Transportation, the Department of State, NASA, and the National Science Foundation. A team of more than 300 federal and non-federal experts volunteered their time to produce the assessment. Among other things, the report team conducted more than 40 workshops around the country, reaching more than 1,000 individuals. The ultimate report was reviewed both by external experts and by the general public. The external review included expert peer review.

  The Report’s Findings

The report concludes that the “earth’s climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization” and that the “impacts of global climate change are already being felt in the United States and are projected to intensify in the future.” Decisions made today “determine the risk exposure for current and future generations.” While mitigating steps are now being taken (such as measures to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions through the use of alternative fuel sources) “neither the global efforts to mitigate the causes of climate change nor regional efforts to adapt to the impacts currently approach the scales needed” to avoid “substantial damages” to “the U.S. economy, environment and human health and well-being over the coming decades.”

  The report’s catalog of observed climate change is sobering – temperature extremes and heavy precipitation events are increasing; glaciers, snow cover, and sea ice are shrinking; seas are warming, rising, and becoming more acidic; flooding is becoming more common along the U.S. coastline; and wildfires are becoming more frequent and more severe. Graphical exhibits in the Report-in-Brief detail the increase in the average annual U.S. temperature; the significant decline in the Western U.S. snowpack; the dramatic shrinkage of the artic sea ice; the rise in the number U.S. heating degree days and the decline in the number of cooling U.S. degree days; the significant increase in the length of the growing season throughout the U.S.; the rise of the U.S. sea level; and the increase in ocean acidity.

  In all, 17 of the 18 warmest years on record have occurred since 2000. The warming trend has been driven in large-part by land-use changes (including cutting down forests and paving over natural surfaces) and rising emissions of greenhouse gases (including carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels and methane from livestock production).

  The report specifically attributes the magnitude of climate changes to human activity: “the unambiguous long-term warming trend in global average temperature over the last century cannot be explained by natural factors alone. Greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are the only factors that can account for the observed warning over the last century.”

  These processes will continue to affect the climate in the decades ahead. The extent of the future changes depends in part on the level of greenhouse gas emissions going forward. While significant mitigation activity could ameliorate the more severe trends, without significant greenhouse gas mitigation, the increase in global annual temperature could reach nine degrees Fahrenheit or more by the end of the century. In the best scenario, high temperature extremes, heavy precipitation events, high tide flooding events along the U.S. coastline, ocean acidification and warming, and forest fires are projected to continue to increase, while land and sea ice cover, snowpack, and surface soil moisture are expected to continue to decline in the coming decades.

  These and other projected changes are expected to “increasingly impact water resources, air quality, human health, agriculture, natural ecosystems, energy and transportation infrastructure, and many other natural and human systems that support communities across the country.”

  The changes are “expected to chase substantial net damage to the U.S. economy, especially in the absence of increases adaptation efforts.” The “potential for losses” in some sectors “could reach hundreds of billions of dollars per year by the end of this century,” which is “more than the current gross domestic product (GDP) of many U.S. states.” All told, the report says, climate change could slice up to one-tenth of the gross domestic product by 2100, more than double the losses from the global financial crisis ten years ago.

  The report’s projection of the economic impact from global climate change is detailed and specific. The report notes that climate change likely will increasingly disrupt critical infrastructure and property and labor productivity. Regional economies and industries that rely on the environment or natural resources – such as agriculture, tourism, and fisheries – will be particularly vulnerable. Agricultural yields could fall to 1980s levels by midcentury and fire season could spread to the Southeast.

  Moreover, climate change will have impacts beyond our borders, and could lead to disruptions to trade, for example through disruptions to overseas operations and global supply chains. Extreme weather and climate-change events could result in risks or failures to critical systems, such as water resources, food production and distribution, energy, transportation, public health, international trade, and national security.

  The report does note that there have been important steps taken by communities, governments, and businesses to reduce the risks and costs associated with climate change by taking actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and implement adaption strategies. Among these steps are transformations of the energy sector, including in particular the displacement of coal by natural gas and the increased deployment of renewable energy. However, while these steps can help reduce climate impacts, “more immediate and substantial global greenhouse gas emission reductions, as well as regional adaptation efforts, would be needed to avoid the most severe consequences.”

  Discussion

While the report is unusually detailed and specific, in many respects the report’s message is not new. Other climate change task forces – both national and international – have sounded the alarm on global climate change. The significant messages that this report adds to the dialog  are, first, its message that global climate change is not some distant, vague, future event – it is in fact happening right now in every part of the country; and, second, its message that climate change represents a significant threat to our economy, our public health, and our national security.

  It might be expected that such a detailed message of a significant set of threats facing the country might represent a call to arms that might galvanize the country’s leadership to action, particularly given the report’s unmistakable message that climate change represents not just a threat to the economy but also to trade and to national security. However, no such action is likely. The current administration’s approach to environmental issues generally is inconsistent with the kind of inquiry, planning, and action that the report’s findings dictate. Indeed, for years, serious climate change concerns have been subordinated to the dynamics of the country’s cultural and political divide. While it could be argued that the White House did nothing to suppress this report, the reality is that the White House dropped the report after 2 pm on the Friday of a holiday weekend.

  However, for anyone serious about identifying significant risks facing the economy and facing individual businesses, the report’s messages cannot be ignored. Any enterprise with operations in coastal areas or in areas prone to wildfires; any organization dependent on an extended global supply chain; any organization with operations in the most easily identified and vulnerable sectors, such as agriculture, fisheries, and tourism; any organization dependent on aging or vulnerable infrastructure – in short, every enterprise and organization — will need to understand, assess and address the risks identified in this report.

  Moreover, it may not be sufficient for organizations simply to identify, disclose, and to try to plan for climate change vulnerabilities. In the absence of any coherent governmental action or response, it may be incumbent on private enterprise to act, if simply out of prudence and self-defense. These actions might include active measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in company operations, distribution, and transportation; examining supply chains and other operational structures to see where climate mitigating measures might be introduced; and examining operational inputs (such as raw materials) to see where vulnerabilities may exist.

  The report makes it clear that climate change represents a threat at both the economic and enterprise levels. The risks that climate change presents represent a challenge for every organization. The risks not only potentially could affect future operating success. The risks could also represent an important source of potential corporate liability, to the extent that various stakeholders seek to hold companies and their management accountable for failing to take steps to identify, address, and mitigate the risks that climate change presents.

  The possibility of liability actions arising based on action or failures to act with respect to climate change issues is not mere conjecture; just in the last few days, shareholders filed a securities class action lawsuit in connection with the California wildfires, and shareholders and others have previously filed actions based on climate change-related disclosure issues (refer here and here). I know some readers may feel I have gone on a bit too much about the kind of management liability threat that climate change-related issues might represent, but the reality is that climate change-related claims, like climate change itself, are already here. And just as climate change is likely to be an increasingly serious problem, climate change-related claims will become increasingly important as well.

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Unless Checked, Climate Change Could Decimate U.S. Economy syndicated from https://ronenkurzfeldweb.wordpress.com/

[wionews]

Weathering Trump's scepticism, US officials still fighting global warming

US President Donald Trump has bashed international efforts to combat climate change and questioned the scientific consensus that global warming is dangerous and driven by human consumption of fossil fuels.

But there is a disconnect between what Trump says at home and what his government does abroad. While attention has been focused on Trump's rhetoric, State Department envoys, federal agencies, and government scientists remain active participants in international efforts to both research and fight climate change, according to the US and foreign representatives involved in those efforts.

"We really don't detect any change with the Americans," said one of the officials, Aleksi Härkönen of Finland, who chairs the eight-nation Arctic Council's key group of senior officials, who are charged with protecting a region warming faster than any other on Earth.

Over the past year, the United States has helped draft the rulebook for implementing the Paris climate accord, signed international memoranda calling for global action to fight climate change, boosted funding for overseas clean energy projects, and contributed to global research on the dangers and causes of the Earth's warming.

While the United States’ participation in international forums - including the Paris accord and the Arctic Council - has been reported, its continued, broad and constructive support for climate change efforts in these gatherings has not.

This business-as-usual approach has surprised some of America’s foreign partners, along with some of Trump’s allies, who had expected the new administration to match its rhetoric with an obstructionist approach to combating climate change.

"I am concerned that much of our climate policy remains on autopilot," complained Trump’s former energy adviser Myron Ebell, now a research director at the right-leaning Competitive Enterprise Institute, who said it reflects a failure by the administration to fill key positions and replace staffers who oppose the president's agenda.

The US efforts abroad to tackle climate change have been counter-balanced by Trump's aggressive push at home to increase production of the fossil fuels scientists blame for global warming. He has also ordered a wide-ranging rollback of Obama-era climate regulations and appointed a self-described climate sceptic, Scott Pruitt, as the nation’s chief environmental regulator.

And to be sure, none of the US dealings in international climate efforts since last year have committed the United States to any emissions cuts that would undermine Trump’s domestic energy agenda.

The State Department - which handles the bulk of US climate policy abroad - told Reuters it was still developing its global warming policy under Trump.

"The State Department is working with the White House and the interagency to further develop our approach to international climate change diplomacy," State Department spokesman Ambrose Sayles said in a statement before Trump sacked Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Tuesday.

"In the meantime, we will continue to participate ... to ensure a level playing field that benefits and protects US interests, and to keep all options open for the President," Sayles said.

Tillerson's departure leaves a question mark over the future of US climate policy abroad. Tillerson was in favour of the Paris accord, while his successor, Mike Pompeo, has expressed doubts about the science of climate change. Climate advocates say they hope Pompeo will be too distracted by tensions with Iran and North Korea to change the State Department’s approach to climate change.

White House spokeswoman Kelly Love declined to comment.

Trump announced last year that he was withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement to fight global warming, raising concerns among other parties to the deal that Washington might attempt to torpedo the accord or disengage from it completely.

That hasn't happened. Washington sent a 40-strong delegation to talks in Bonn in November to help draft a new rulebook that will provide rules of the road for the 200 participating nations. It was a smaller delegation than Washington had sent to past meetings, but it still won praise from fellow delegates for its work.

For example, Andrew Rakestraw - a climate negotiator for the State Department since 2013 - co-chaired discussions on how to ensure that the pledges by signatories are comparable and use the same accounting standards - a point seen as critical to the success of the accord.

Nazhat Shameem Khan, chief negotiator for Fiji, which presided over the talks, said the United States delegation was "constructive and helpful."  The UN’s climate chief, Patricia Espinosa, also called the US role constructive. 

Thomas Shannon, the State Department's chief climate negotiator in Bonn, did not respond to requests for comment. Rakestraw also did not respond to calls and emails requesting comment.

A US source familiar with the US position at the talks, who asked not to be named, said that US delegates in Bonn were pushing an agenda that resembled those of past administrations - stressing that emerging economies like China follow the same rules as developed nations and meet international standards for monitoring and reporting emissions.

There was one jarring note: Washington sponsored a side event to promote “clean coal.” Some other delegates said they were unhappy with this, as they wanted the talks to focus on renewable energies.

Under the details of the accord, the United States cannot formally withdraw until 2020.

The State Department’s delegations to the Arctic Council are also continuing their work in much the same way they did under President Barack Obama - acknowledging that warming is real and should be countered in planning everything from new shipping routes to the protection of indigenous peoples.

Some US agencies are also still bolstering international efforts to fight climate change.

The Overseas Private Investment Corporation, which seeks to advance US policy by financing foreign business ventures, doubled its support for solar projects in 2017 under a climate-friendly policy last updated by the Obama administration.

And NASA, the US space agency, continues to research climate change, publish climate change data, and contribute to international reports, spokesman Stephen Cole said.

Both OPIC and NASA are independent of the State Department, so would not be under Pompeo's sway.

Scientists representing the United States in the international research say they have also been unfettered by the Trump administration, despite concerns early in the Trump presidency that the White House would seek to silence them or restrict their work.

“There has been no pressure on US authors,” said one US scientist, who is now helping to write a United Nations report that will call for coal to be “phased out rapidly” to limit global warming -  a direct clash with Trump's pro-coal agenda.

The scientist asked not to be named because the draft report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), due to be released in October, is confidential.

"Our US colleagues know that climate change is not a hoax," said one of the non-US authors of the same report, who also spoke on condition of anonymity.

Christopher Field, a professor of environmental studies at Stanford University who co-chaired a 2014 IPCC report on the impacts of climate change, agreed: “I’ve not seen any indication that the climate denialism from Trump and other members of the administration has had any influence ... on the alignment of the US scientific community with the scientific consensus around the world."

Still, scientists worry that while the Trump administration is not interfering with their research it is ignoring it.

The Trump administration made no move to block an assessment by 300 experts last year that outlined the threats and causes of warming in the United States and concluded there is “no convincing alternative explanation” for climate change than human activity.

"But then they haven't acknowledged the findings, nor changed their climate science denying stance,” said the US scientist involved in drafting the UN coal report.

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