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The Conversation
Scientists say severe climate change is now the greatest threat to humanity. Extreme weather is expected to upend lives and livelihoods, intensifying wildfires and pushing ecosystems towards collapse as ocean heatwaves savage coral reefs. The threats are far-reaching and widespread.
So what effect would you expect this to have on the economy in coming decades? It may surprise you, but most economic models predict climate change will just be a blip, with a minor impact on gross domestic product (GDP).
Heating the planet beyond 3℃ is extraordinarily dangerous. The last time Earth was that warm was three million years ago, when there was almost no ice and seas were 20 metres higher. But economic models predict even this level of heat to have very mild impacts on global GDP per capita by century’s end. Most predict a hit of around 1% to 7%, while the most pessimistic modelling suggests GDP shrinking by 23%.
In these models, some countries are completely unaffected by climate change. Others even benefit. For most countries, the damage is small enough to be offset by technological growth. Australia’s recent Intergenerational Report suggests something similar.
This, it is becoming abundantly clear, is a failure of the modelling. To make these models, economists reach into the past to model damage from weather. But severe climate change would be a global shock that is wholly outside our experience. Inevitably, models can’t come close to capturing the upheavals climate change could cause in markets fundamental to human life, such as agriculture.
‘Red Caesarism’ is rightwing code – and some Republicans are listening
The Guardian
In June, the rightwing academic Kevin Slack published a book-length polemic claiming that ideas that had emerged from what he called the radical left were now so dominant that the US republic its founders envisioned was effectively at an end. […]
In a discussion of possible responses to this conspiracy theory, he wrote that the “New Right now often discusses a Red Caesar, by which it means a leader whose post-Constitutional rule will restore the strength of his people”. […]
The idea that the US might be redeemed by a Caesar – an authoritarian, rightwing leader – was first broached explicitly by Michael Anton, a Claremont senior fellow and Trump presidential adviser. […]
Damon Linker, a senior lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania and an author of several books on the American right, was early in noticing the extreme right’s drift towards Caesarism. […]
“Thirty years ago, if I told you that a bunch of billionaires and intellectuals on the right are waiting in the wings to impose a dictatorship on the United States, you would have said that I was insane,” he said.
“But it’s no longer insane. It’s now real. There are those people out there,” Linker added. “The question is: will they get their chance.”
Warmest September on record as 'gobsmacking' data shocks scientists
BBC News
The world's September temperatures were the warmest on record, breaking the previous high by a huge margin, according to the EU climate service.
Last month was 0.93C warmer than the average September temperature between 1991-2020, and 0.5C hotter than the previous record set in 2020.
Ongoing emissions of warming gases in addition to the El Niño weather event are driving the heat, experts believe. […]
"This month was, in my professional opinion as a climate scientist - absolutely gobsmackingly bananas," Zeke Hausfather … wrote on … Twitter. […]
Last month was around 1.75C above the temperatures during this so-called pre-industrial period - the highest figure for a single month ever recorded.
This will cause a good deal of unease among researchers.
Many scientists don’t want to tell the truth about climate change. Here’s why
Barbara Moran at WBUR
In March, the United Nations released a massive climate change report. The biggest takeaway: Global warming will soon pass the oft-mentioned target of 1.5 degrees Celsius. Honestly, as a climate journalist, that totally freaked me out. […]
After this report came out, something weird happened. Unlike the blunt Dr. Thorne, most climate scientists (and journalists) didn’t change how they publicly spoke about 1.5 C. Admitting defeat could risk “demotivation” said Pascal Lamy, the commissioner of the Climate Overshoot Commission. Scientists kept saying things like: “We need to act now to stay below 1.5” or “it’s getting harder, but still technically possible.” […]
I felt like I was being gaslit by climate scientists. I wanted to know what was going on. So, I called Kristina Dahl, the principal climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
She told me that staying under 1.5 C is now “largely unrealistic.”
But, she added, “like other climate scientists, I'm not ready to say that we have to give up on this goal.” […]
But I think that 1.5 C has moved from “ambitious goal” to “magical thinking.” And the scientists are telling themselves a story to stave off despair.
Just how bad is climate change? It’s worse than you think
Marshall Brain at WRAL TechWire
Last week I wrote an article on the coming collapse of our ecosystem and our civilization: We have destroyed our ecosystem – now we await the collapse of civilization
The article received a lot of traffic, and reactions were all over the map. Today’s article is for those people who think things aren’t that bad. They say things like:
- “Everything is going to be OK”
- “Civilization is not going to collapse”
- “We are on the road to solving climate change”
To those on this “positive” or “hopium” end of the spectrum, here is something to consider: Things are way, way worse than you think. The reason people can believe that everything is going to be OK is because they have not taken the time to comprehend all the different things that are going wrong simultaneously, nor how seriously these things are going wrong.
Therefore, let’s take a dive into the unfolding catastrophe that climate change is creating for humanity and the planet’s ecosystems.
Montana is appealing a landmark climate change ruling that favored youth plaintiffs
AP News via ABC News
The office of Montana’s Republican attorney general is appealing a landmark climate change ruling that said state agencies aren't doing enough to protect 16 young plaintiffs from harm caused by global warming.
The state filed notice on Friday that it is going to appeal the August ruling by District Court Judge Kathy Seeley, who found the Montana Environmental Policy Act violates the plaintiffs' state constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment. The 1971 law requires state agencies to consider the potential environmental impacts of proposed projects and take public input before issuing permits.
Under a change to that law passed by the 2023 Legislature, the state Department of Environmental Quality does not have to consider the effect of greenhouses gases when issuing permits for fossil fuel projects unless the federal government declares carbon dioxide a regulated pollutant.
Big Auto Screwed Itself on the E.V. Transition
The New Republic
As the United Auto Workers union continues to expand its strike against the Big Three—Stellantis, General Motors, and Ford—manufacturers and media outlets have made ominous claims about the threat of skyrocketing car prices, shipping jobs to less union-friendly places, and national economic ruin. At stake, as well, according to severalreports, is the future of vehicle electrification. […]
It’s odd to frame electrification as a trade-off between workers’ well-being and corporate investment decisions. For one, the Big Three are awash in cash—they sawprofits explode by 92 percent over the last decade and have delivered $66 billion to shareholders over that time in the form of dividends and share buybacks. If legacy automakers stumble in the transition to electric cars, it won’t be because workers, who’ve seen average real hourly earnings plummet almost 20 percent in the past 15years, are demanding a bit more of a growing pie. It’ll be because those same companies have fought back for decades against attempts to bring their business model into the future—and because no one has bothered telling them to stop.
As a 2020 investigation from E&E News revealed, Ford and GM knew as early as the 1960s that car emissions caused climate change. They spent the next several decades funding climate denial, attempting to undermine international cooperation on climate change, and lobbying against regulations in the United States that would have hemmed in their emissions. Now transportation is the biggest polluting sector in the U.S., and the majority of those emissions (58 percent) stem from personal vehicles. As the government turns toward the huge task of decarbonizing the country, the auto industry has its full attention. […]
Automakers make big cars for the same reason they want to pay workers less and offer fewer benefits: to make more money.
Is it really sustainable for everyone to own an electric car?
Norwegian SciTech News
Norway is the country with the highest market share of electric cars in the world – 2020 was the year that the sales of electric passenger vehicles exceeded sales of all other types of passenger vehicles. And this trend is continuing. The Norwegian Parliament has decided that all news cars sold beginning in 2025 should be zero-emission vehicles. […]
Electric cars seem to provide the solution to the problem of the “car” as a tool for individual mobility. But this ignores the bigger picture. […]
While it’s certainly true that electric cars are “zero-emission” during their use phase, they still require many resources for production, including the need for materials such as lithium, nickel, cobalt and copper to make batteries — all of which must be mined.
At the same time, more and more cars — whether electric or not — lead to increased urban congestion. […]
The massive focus on EVs in Norway has come at the expense of infrastructure and a built environment that could cater to cycling and walking
Tire Dust Makes Up the Majority of Ocean Microplastics, Study Finds
The Drive
When contemplating the emissions from road vehicles, our first thought is often about the various gases coming out of the tailpipe. However, new research shows that we should be more concerned with the harmful particles that are shed from tires and brakes.
Scientists have a good understanding of engine emissions, which typically consist of unburnt fuel, oxides of carbon and nitrogen, and particulate matter related to combustion. However, new research shared by Yale Environment 360 indicates that there may be a whole host of toxic chemicals being shed from tires and brakes that have been largely ignored until now. Even worse, these emissions may be so significant that they actually exceed those from a typical car's exhaust output.
Research quantifies how much microplastic is emitted into the atmosphere by sea spray
Phys.org
A new study quantifies the amount of microplastic exported into the atmosphere from sea spray. When bubbles burst on the surface of the sea, small particles, such as salt or bits of organic matter, can be flung into the air. This process moves significant amounts of matter, enough to affect global climate dynamics by influencing the radiative balance of the atmosphere and serving as cloud condensation nuclei. But can sea spray also toss microplastics, which are now ubiquitous in the ocean, into the atmosphere?
Luc Deike and colleagues explored the physical processes behind bubble-bursting ejection of microplastic in laboratory experiments using high speed photography…. Their findings have been published in PNAS Nexus.
The authors calculate that between 0.02 and 7.4 Mt of plastic—with a best guess of .1Mt of plastic—is emitted by the ocean each year. Inventories of ocean microplastics concentrations are now needed to reduce uncertainties in quantifying oceanic emissions of microplastics, according to the authors.
Climate Change Is Pushing Many of the World’s Amphibians Closer to Extinction
Smithsonian Magazine
Two in five amphibian species are at risk of extinction, and their threats are increasingly coming from climate change, according to a new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
A large team of researchers from across the world analyzed the conservation status of amphibians based on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, which categorizes animals by the degree of extinction risk they face. For species that have been elevated into a higher risk category since 2004, climate change was the most common driver of their reclassification, the assessment found.
Billionaires are responsible for large amounts of climate pollution from Hanscom, a new report finds
The Boston Globe
Executives at Suffolk Construction, owned by John Fish, have used the Boston-based company’s private jet nearly 250 times since last year to fly from Hanscom Field to destinations such as Aruba and Aspen, Barcelona and Rome, Martha’s Vineyard and Napa Valley, according to a new report.
Private jet flights have increasingly become a target of criticism from climate advocates, given the large amount of pollution generated to transport usually just a few people. […]
The report, released Monday, analyzed 18 months of flight data from Hanscom starting in January 2022, and foundthat some 31,000 flights by 2,915 private jets such as Suffolk’s produced an estimated 107,000 tons of carbon pollution. About half the flights were probably for recreational or luxury purposes, based on their resort destinations and weekend flight dates, the authors said.
Starlink carbon footprint up to 30 times size of land-based internet(alt link)
New Scientist
The space race that is seeing SpaceX, Eutelsat and Amazon launch thousands of satellites capable of providing internet service will probably carry a significant environmental cost. That is what the first attempt to calculate the carbon footprints associated with each company’s operations has concluded.
The analysis, conducted by researchers in the US and UK, found that the carbon footprint of each satellite constellation is potentially 14 to 21 times higher per internet subscriber than the emissions associated with land-based mobile internet – primarily because of rocket launch emissions like carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide.
What’s more, the polluting potential of satellite internet services may actually be much higher than this initial calculation. When the study authors considered the possible impacts of additional rocket launch particles – such as black carbon, aluminium oxide and water vapour exhaust – they calculated that the carbon footprint per subscriber might rise to between 31 and 91 times that of a land-based internet option.
South American monsoon heading towards ‘tipping point’ likely to cause Amazon dieback
The Guardian
The South American monsoon, which determines the climate of much of the continent, is being pushed towards a “critical destabilisation point”, according to a study that links regional rainfall to Amazon deforestation and global heating.
The authors of the report said they found their results “shocking” and urged policymakers to act with urgency to forestall a tipping point, which could result in up to 30% less rainfall, a dieback of the forest and a dire impact on food production.
The study, published on Wednesday in Science Advances, examines how forest degradation and monsoon circulation are interlinked. […]
Human degradation of the Amazon – by land clearance, fire, logging and mining – is pushing that system towards a tipping point, after which drier conditions would be expected to cause an abrupt “regime shift” in the rainforest, which would be unable to sustain itself and transport moisture.
Michael E. Mann at The Los Angeles Times
“The climate is always changing!” So goes a popular refrain from climate deniers who continue to claim that there’s nothing special about this particular moment. There is no climate crisis, they say, because the Earth has survived dramatic warming before.
Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy recently exemplified misconceptions about our planet’s climate past. When he asserted that “carbon dioxide as a percentage of the atmosphere is still at a relative low through human history,” he didn’t just make a false statement (carbon dioxide concentrations are the highest they’ve been in at least 4 million years). He also showed fundamentally wrong thinking around the climate crisis.
What threatens us today isn’t the particular concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or the precise temperature of the planet, alarming as those two metrics are. Instead, it’s the unprecedented rate at which we are increasing carbon pollution through fossil fuel burning, and the resulting rate at which we are heating the planet.
Climate change threatens fish in Michigan’s Great Lakes
Bridge Michigan
Geologically speaking, the Great Lakes and the aquatic life within them are relatively young at a few thousand years old. Yet in their short life, they’ve contended with many changes, from invasive species to overfishing.
Now, climate change poses a new existential threat. As fossil fuel consumption heats the world’s atmosphere, the fallout extends to a Great Lakes ecosystem that’s home to 150-plus native fish.
Warming waters are already changing the distribution of freshwater fish in the basin, causing warm water fish like bass to move into areas that formerly were too cold for them to thrive.
And conversely, warming temperatures threaten the future of cold water fish like whitefish and burbot, which spawn on ice-covered Great Lakes reefs.
New technology uses good old-fashioned wind to power giant cargo vessels
NPR News
Well over a century after the Age of Sail gave way to coal- and oil-burning ships, climate change concerns are prompting a new look at an old technology that could once again harness wind to propel commercial cargo ships — this time with the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Imagine what looks like Boeing 747 wings with movable flaps, set vertically on a ship's deck. The vessel cruises under minimum power from its giant engine as computerized sensors adjust the fiberglass wings to take advantage of the wind's speed and direction. This wind-assisted propulsion saves a substantial amount of fuel and reduces the carbon belching from the ship's stack. Many experts think the idea has the potential to navigate the notoriously dirty shipping industry toward a greener future.
"Shipping is kind of unique," says Gavin Allwright, secretary-general of the International Windship Association (IWSA), a not-for-profit trade organization that advocates for wind propulsion in commercial shipping. From antiquity, ships used clean and free wind energy, "then we carbonized and now we're going back to zero carbon."
At least that's the hope.
Wildfires, Flooding, Heat: How Climate Changed Upended Summer
The New York Times
[…] As humans continue adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, record-breaking heat will become even more common, as will extreme weather events like droughts, wildfires and floods.
This summer alone, floods ravaged Vermont and upstate New York; the seawater in South Florida was so hot it felt like a Jacuzzi; choking smoke from vast Canadian wildfires enveloped the skies over the Northeast and Midwest. Even the mosquito population in Texas suffered. In cities like New York and Chicago, a wave of summerlike temperatures flowed into September and October.
To many Americans, the season felt like a climate inflection point: a peek at what the country is facing in the future, and a new definition of summer.
Wildfire smoke from Canada has drifted as far south as Florida
USA Today
Skies over a swath of Florida were beginning to clear Wednesday as haze dissipated from smoke that swept down thousands of miles from lingering, unrelenting wildfires that have plagued Canada for months. […]
"Hazy conditions will continue this morning, however, conditions should gradually improve as the day progresses," the National Weather Service in Miami said Wednesday. […]
Historic summer wildfires prompted evacuations across much of Canada as more than 6,000 blazes burned. Smoke from Canadian wildfires has blanketed skies in parts of the United States for days at a time. […]
Natural Resources Canada stopped updating its daily fire report last week. But at that time 800-plus fires were still burning, the majority of them uncontrolled. More than 44 million acres of land burned in Canadian wildfires this year. For perspective, Florida has 39 million acres of land.
Simultaneous large wildfires will increase in Western U.S.
ScienceDaily
Simultaneous outbreaks of large wildfires will become more frequent in the Western United States this century as the climate warms, putting major strains on efforts to fight fires, new research shows.
The new study, led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), focused on wildfires of 1,000 acres or larger. It found that wildfire seasons in which several such blazes burn concurrently will become more common, with the most severe seasons becoming at least twice as frequent by the end of this century. […]
"Higher temperatures and drier conditions will greatly increase the risk of simultaneous wildfires throughout the West," said NCAR scientist Seth McGinnis, the lead author of the study. "The worst seasons for simultaneous fires are the ones that are going to increase the most in the future."
California weighs use of catastrophe models in home insurance
E&E News
California appears likely to allow insurance companies to consider risks from climate change when calculating premiums, marking a major shift in state policy as underwriters reduce their coverage amid soaring disaster costs.
State Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara plans to rewrite insurance regulations to allow wider use of catastrophe models in the nation’s most populous state for the first time in 35 years. The change is meant to entice insurers to expand their coverage to homeowners in areas that face growing perils from extreme weather.
It comes as major insurers such as State Farm have stopped writing new policies in California and other states following an intensifying barrage of disasters that, along with expanding real estate development, has fueled economic losses. The move follows a catastrophe-filled summer in which high temperature records were broken around the world.
Glacial lake bursts in India leaving 100 missing and 14 dead
CNN
More than 100 people are missing in India’s northeast after heavy rain caused a glacial lake to burst, leading to flash floods which ripped through the Himalayan state of Sikkim Wednesday, killing at least 14 and washing away roads and bridges, according to the state government.
A “sudden cloudburst” over Lhonak Lake, in the northern part of the state, sent fast-moving torrents of water surging down the Teesta River in Sikkim’s Lachen valley, raising water levels 15-20 feet higher than normal, the Indian Army said in a statement. A cloudburst is a very sudden and destructive rainstorm.
Chungthang Dam, also known as the Teesta 3 dam and part of a major hydropower project in the state, was “washed away,” according to a statement issued by the National Disaster Management Authority on Wednesday night.
Australia state swings from bush fires to flash floods in 24 hours
Reuters
Less than 24 hours since residents in parts of Australia's Victoria state fled bush fires, authorities warned on Wednesday of flooding as heavy rain douses flames and swells rivers in the southeastern state.
Flash flooding is expected through Wednesday afternoon in northeastern Victoria, according to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, as rain drenched parts of the state where as recently as Tuesday about 17,000 hectares were ablaze. […]
The rain comes during an unseasonably dry Australian spring, which began in September. Last month was the driest September on record, according to the Bureau of Meteorology, with rainfall 71% below the 1961-1990 average.
How Carbon Capture and Storage Projects Are Driving New Oil and Gas Extraction Globally
DeSmog
When Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber opens the 28th annual UN climate conference in Dubai in November, he will be juggling two roles – convincing the world of the United Arab Emirates’ leadership in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, while preserving the very industry that’s causing them.
In addition to his job as summit president, Al Jaber heads the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), which plans to increase its oil and gas output by 11 percent by 2027. The company says that more oil will mean less emissions, however — provided the industry builds enough facilities to capture carbon dioxide (CO2), the main gas causing the climate crisis.
“We must be laser-focused on phasing out fossil fuel emissions, while phasing up viable, affordable zero carbon alternatives,” Al-Jaber said at a pre-COP 28 event in Bonn in June. The statement was widely interpreted as a pitch for carbon capture.
Dubai Firm Wants a Fifth of Zimbabwe Landmass for Carbon Credits(alt link)
Bloomberg
Blue Carbon, a Dubai-based company, signed a memorandum of understanding with Zimbabwe to generate carbon credits from about a fifth of the African country’s 150,000 square-mile landmass.
The planned deal, which Blue Carbon Chairman Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum said may bring $1.5 billion of climate finance into the country, was announced on Friday in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital. […]
A single carbon credit is equivalent to one ton of carbon dioxide or its equivalent either removed from the atmosphere or prevented from entering it in the first place. The offsets are bought by emitters of the climate warming gases to compensate for their activities.
The biggest problem with carbon offsetting is that it doesn’t really work
Greenpeace
Airlines and oil companies love talking about carbon offsetting. But to be serious about tackling climate change, they need to stop carbon emissions from getting into the atmosphere in the first place. […]
Don’t get me wrong – protecting forests and restoring natural ecosystems is vital both for wildlife and the climate, but we should be doing that as well as cutting emissions directly, not as a substitute.
The big problem with offsets isn’t that what they offer is bad – tree planting or renewable energy and efficiency for poor communities are all good things – but rather that they don’t do what they say on the tin. They don’t actually cancel out – er, offset – the emissions to which they are linked.
Spain hit hard by rising price of olive oil as climate change takes its toll on production
EuroNews
Drought and extreme heatwaves have halved Spanish olive oil production. The price at origin has increased by 112 per cent since last year. […]
Drought and extreme heatwaves have halved Spanish olive oil production. The price at origin has increased by 112 per cent since last year, but farmers like Jesús Anchuelo of the Small Farmers Union say they're losing money.
"We've had higher production costs, historical ones, like never before. This oil that is now being sold, whose price is rising every second week, was paid to us at a price that we could barely cover production costs."
Critics Furious Microsoft Is Training AI by Sucking Up Water During Drought
Futurism
Microsoft's data centers in West Des Moines, Iowa guzzled massive amounts of water last year, the Associated Press reported earlier this month, to keep cool while training OpenAI's ChatGPT-4, the Microsoft-backed company's most advanced publicly available large language model.
Critics point out a further inconvenient detail: this happened in the midst of a more than three-year drought, further taxing a stressed water system that's been so dry this summer that nature lovers couldn't even paddle canoes in local rivers.
"It's a recipe for disaster," Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement organizer Jake Grobe told Futurism. "ChatGPT is not a necessity for human life, and yet we are literally taking water to feed a computer."
Central Oregon cities poke holes in state plans to tighten groundwater rules
OPB News
Oregon water managers are considering the most consequential water policy changes the state has seen in decades. These changes would crack down on new groundwater rights, making it more difficult for people to drill wells. Advocates say this is critical to protect the environment and ensure future water supplies, but opponents, such as leaders from Central Oregon’s fast-growing cities, say the state is going too far.
The Oregon Water Resources Department wants to overhaul its rules for issuing new groundwater rights. Under the proposed changes, applicants would have to show at least five years of data to prove the groundwater is stable in the area they want to access. State law since the 1950s has called on water regulators to protect “reasonably stable” aquifer levels, but officials have never defined what that means, until now.
Regulators also want updated criteria to define how wells could impact surface water. That’s because wells siphon away flows that would otherwise bubble up to feed rivers and streams. Oregon’s past approach to groundwater rights was much more permissive. For decades, regulators allowed people to pump without knowing if water was sustainably available. As a result, farmers in some places take more than nature replenishes. […]
Both cities and farms have argued that the state’s proposed rules would effectively create a moratorium on new water rights, with painful economic fallout.
Vaccine Scientist Warns Antiscience Conspiracies Have Become a Deadly, Organized Movement
Scientific American
Peter Hotez is no stranger to scientific backlash. The esteemed pediatrician and vaccinologist has been working to develop vaccines for neglected tropical diseases for decades and has encountered fierce opposition to his work. But in recent years the backlash has gained momentum and spread beyond vaccines to science and scientists in general.
Hotez, who is dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, chronicles this movement in his new book The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science. The book traces Hotez’s experiences battling the false belief that vaccines cause autism (a condition that his daughter has), the highly partisan backlash to the COVID vaccines (a low-cost version of which Hotez and his colleagues helped develop) and the authoritarian roots of the antiscience movement.
Scientific American spoke with Hotez about the book, the experiences he’s had as a target of antiscience attacks and the things that should be done to combat such threats.
Treasury's Yellen says US overdependent on China for critical supply chains
Reuters
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on Tuesday the United States has become overly dependent on China for critical supply chains, particularly in clean energy products and needs to broaden out sources of supply. […]
She said that she has not been "a strong believer" in industrial policy, but that the United States had stood by for too long while other countries built up semiconductor industries with massive subsidies.
The U.S. would face national security concerns without a robust semiconductor sector of its own, she said, adding that last year's Chips and Science Act will help reverse that trend.
Lego ditches oil-free brick in sustainability setback (alt link)
Financial Times
Lego has abandoned its highest-profile effort to ditch oil-based plastics from its bricks after finding that its new material led to higher carbon emissions, in a sign of the complex trade-offs companies face in their search for sustainability.
The world’s largest toymaker announced two years ago that it had tested a prototype brick made of recycled plastic bottles rather than oil-based ABS, currently used in about 80 per cent of the billions of pieces it makes each year.
However, Niels Christiansen, chief executive of the family-owned Danish group, told the Financial Times that using recycled polyethylene terephthalate (RPET) would have led to higher carbon emissions over the product’s lifetime as it would have required new equipment.
Lego has instead decided to try to improve the carbon footprint over time of ABS, which currently needs about 2kg of petroleum to make 1kg of plastic.
Why Clarence Thomas’ Trip to the Koch Summit Undermines His Ethics Defense
ProPublica
For months, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his allies have defended Thomas’ practice of not disclosing free luxury travel by saying the trips fell under a carve-out to the federal disclosure law for government officials.
But by not publicly reporting his trips to the Bohemian Grove and to a 2018 Koch network event, Thomas appears to have violated the disclosure law, even by his own permissive interpretation of it, ethics law experts said. The details of the trips, which ProPublica first reported last month, could prove important evidence in any formal investigation of Thomas’ conduct.
Thomas’ defense has centered on what’s known as the personal hospitality exemption, part of a federal law passed after Watergate that requires Supreme Court justices and many other officials to publicly report most gifts. […]
But there’s an additional reason the newly revealed trips should have been disclosed.
Biden Admin. Waives Dozens of Federal Laws to Build New Border Wall
RollingStone
The Biden administration announced on Wednesday that it is waiving 26 laws to expedite the construction of about 20 miles of a border wall in Starr County, Texas.
In an announcement posted by the Department of Homeland Security on the Federal Registry, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas wrote that “there is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries into the United States” in areas of “high illegal entry.”
The notice outlines a series of laws that will be waived in order to speed up the construction, many of them related to environmental regulations and reviews typically required of large-scale construction projects. They include the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, the Noise Control Act, the Solid Waste Disposal Act, the Archaeological and Historic Preservation Act, the Fish and Wildlife Act, and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act.
With Iranian Girl in Coma, Suspicion Falls on Government
The New York Times
The 16-year-old girl, her short black hair uncovered, entered a subway car in Tehran early Sunday on her way to school, security camera footage broadcast by Iran’s state television showed. Minutes later, she was dragged out unconscious and laid on the train platform.
All week, the girl, Armita Geravand, has been in a coma, guarded by security agents in the intensive care unit of a military hospital in Tehran and evoking broad comparisons with Mahsa Amini, who died last year at 22 in the custody of the morality police after being accused of violating Iran’s hijab rules, which require women to cover their hair.
Exactly what happened to Armita on Sunday is not clear, and the government has not released footage from inside the train that would reveal what made the teenager collapse.
Russian missile strike kills 50, Ukraine says, in one of the war's worst attacks on civilians
NBC News
A Russian missile tore into a small village in eastern Ukraine on Thursday as residents were gathering for a memorial service, killing more than 50 civilians, including a 6-year-old child, in one of the war’s deadliest attacks, officials in Kyiv said.
The strike killed at least 51 people and wiped out around 1/6th of the entire village of Hroza, in the eastern Kharkiv region, according to Ukrainian officials. It came as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy attended a summit of European leaders in a bid to shore up support for his country's fight amid fears of a U.S.-led wobble.
"A demonstrably brutal Russian crime — a missile attack on an ordinary grocery store, a completely deliberate act of terrorism," Zelenskyy wrote on the messaging app Telegram. "Russian terror must be stopped."
At least 80 killed as Syrian military college hit in drone attack
Al Jazeera
A drone attack on a military college in Syria’s Homs province during a graduation ceremony has killed at least 80 people and wounded 240 others, the Syrian health minister has said.
Health Minister Hassan al-Ghabash said that civilians, including six children, and military personnel were among those killed. There were concerns the death toll could rise further as many of the wounded were in serious condition.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack.
U.S. F-16 fighter jet shoots down an armed Turkish drone over Syria
CBS News
A U.S. F-16 fighter jet shot down an armed Turkish drone that was operating near American troops in Syria Thursday after several warnings, according to U.S. officials.
The shoot down came after repeated communications to stay away from U.S. ground troops near al Hasakah in northeastern Syria. This is believed to be the first time the U.S. has shot down a drone from Turkey, a NATO ally. […]
There are about 900 U.S. troops operating in Syria as a part of the mission to defeat ISIS.
Turkey has for the past several days been retaliating against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) for a suicide bombing that took place in Ankara Sunday. Turkey considers the Syrian Democratic Forces – who partner with the U.S. in the mission to defeat ISIS – as an arm of the PKK, which it has deemed a terrorist organization.
McCarthy ouster exposes the Republican Party’s destructive tendencies
The Washington Post
Nine months into their reign as the majority party in the House, Republicans have brought the legislative body to a halt and themselves to an inflection point. By ousting Rep. Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) as speaker and exposing anew the destructive tendencies of their most extreme members, Republicans now risk being returned to minority status by voters in next year’s election. […]
The blow was far more to the status of the Republican Party. And what is the party today? It is a party whose leader for its presidential nomination sits in a New York courtroom, who faces four other trials for criminal indictments ahead, and who promises vengeance and retribution if elected in 2024. It is also a party with a tight group of rebels in the House who have shown that they can make turmoil the order of the day in Congress.
That doesn’t mean Republicans will lose the election in 2024, given how closely divided the country remains politically. But nothing that happened on Tuesday can be seen as helpful in achieving that goal.
Trump allegedly discussed US nuclear subs with foreign national after leaving White House: Sources
ABC News
Months after leaving the White House, … Donald Trump allegedly discussed potentially sensitive information about U.S. nuclear submarines with a member of his Mar-a-Lago Club -- an Australian billionaire who then allegedly shared the information with scores of others, including more than a dozen foreign officials, several of his own employees, and a handful of journalists…
Prosecutors and FBI agents have at least twice this year interviewed the Mar-a-Lago member, Anthony Pratt, who runs U.S.-based Pratt Industries, one of the world's largest packaging companies.
In those interviews, Pratt described how -- looking to make conversation with Trump during a meeting at Mar-a-Lago in April 2021 -- he brought up the American submarine fleet, which the two had discussed before, the sources told ABC News.
Judge Tries to Stop Trump From Hiding His Money
The Daily Beast
The judge who doomed Donald Trump’s family business last week took an aggressive and preemptive step on Wednesday to ensure the former president can't secretly shift assets to salvage his real estate empire.
In an order that was posted on the fourth day of the former president’s bank fraud trial, Justice Arthur F. Engoron commanded that the Trumps identify any corporations they have—and come clean about any plans to move around money in an attempt to hide or keep their wealth.
It's a powerful maneuver meant to counter the sort of underhanded moves Trump has displayed so far during the three-year investigation.
The Next Targets for the Group That Overturned Roe
The New Yorker Magazine
On March 15, 2023, two conservative Christian lawyers asked a federal judge in Amarillo, Texas, for a ruling that they privately considered an almost impossible long shot. They demanded a nationwide ban on mifepristone, a pill used in half the abortions in America. The drug had been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for more than twenty years, under both Republican and Democratic administrations. During the pandemic, the agency began allowing prescriptions to be filled by mail, to accommodate social distancing.
But the lawyers, from a group called Alliance Defending Freedom, were on a winning streak. Founded three decades ago as a legal-defense fund for conservative Christian causes, A.D.F. had become that movement’s most influential arm. In the past dozen years, its lawyers had won fourteen Supreme Court victories, including overturning Roe v. Wade; allowing employer-sponsored health insurance to exclude birth control; rolling back limits on government support for religious organizations; protecting the anonymity of donors to advocacy groups; blocking pandemic-related public-health rules; and establishing the right of a baker to refuse to make a cake for a same-sex wedding. Capitalizing on its success, A.D.F. had tripled its revenue over that period, to more than a hundred million dollars a year. It now had seventy or so in-house lawyers, including the former solicitors general of Michigan and Nebraska and the former United States Attorney for Missouri. The lawyers sent to Amarillo were Erik Baptist, a former top lawyer for the Environmental Protection Agency under President Donald Trump, and Erin Hawley, a Yale Law graduate who had clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts, advised the Attorney General under President George W. Bush, and worked on the team that overturned Roe. (She is married to Senator Josh Hawley, of Missouri.)
Thanks to the rightward shift of the courts under Trump, A.D.F. lawyers now often find a sympathetic audience on the federal bench.
FBI interviewed individuals who accuse Amy Coney Barrett faith group of abuse
The Guardian
The FBI has interviewed several individuals who have alleged they were abused by members of the People of Praise (PoP), a secretive Christian sect that counts conservative supreme court justice Amy Coney Barrett as a lifelong member, according to sources familiar with the matter.
The individuals were contacted following a years-long effort by a group called PoP Survivors, who have called for the South Bend-based sect to be investigated for leaders’ handling of sexual abuse allegations. The body, which has 54 members, has alleged that abuse claims were routinely mishandled or covered up for decades in order to protect the close-knit faith group.
It is not clear whether the FBI has launched a formal investigation into the PoP.
West Virginina Metro News
U.S. marshals are being instructed to seize a 2009 Bell helicopter belonging to a company owned by Gov. Jim Justice and his family because of unpaid debt.
Caroleng Investments Limited, parent company to the Russian mining company Mechel that bought and sold properties with Justice, is seeking the seizure over a debt of $8.4 million already recognized and awarded in the federal court system.
A supplemental writ of execution filed in federal court today instructs marshals to seize the helicopter located at the Roanoke-Blacksburg Regional Airport in Virginia “or elsewhere in this district, including all logs and records, all accessories, attachments, parts, repairs, additions, accessories, substitutions, exchanges related to the helicopter.”
Bizarre year for sea ice notches another record
Ars Technica
Sometimes, data points deemed to be “outliers” are met with suspicion—possibly the result of an error in the measuring process, for example. But outliers can also represent a puzzling thing that really happened. This year’s floating sea ice cover around Antarctica falls into that latter category.
On September 25, the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) published preliminary dates and numbers for the annual maximum sea ice coverage in the Antarctic and minimum coverage in the Arctic. With the last few days of September in the books, NSIDC noted Wednesday that those determinations have held. […]
Focusing just on 2023, it’s not easy to pin down the combination of factors responsible. But some research is pointing to water temperatures, which have been notably warm recently. But this, too, depends on more than global warming pushing heat into the ocean, as the variable circulation of seawater is important to local temperatures.
Climate Collapse Could Happen Fast
The Atlantic
Ever since some of the earliest projections of climate change were made back in the 1970s, they have been remarkably accurate at predicting the rate at which global temperatures would rise. For decades, climate change has proceeded at roughly the expected pace, says David Armstrong McKay, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter, in England. Its impacts, however, are accelerating—sometimes far faster than expected. […]
In fact, a growing number of climate scientists now believe we may be careening toward so-called tipping points, where incremental steps along the same trajectory could push Earth’s systems into abrupt or irreversible change—leading to transformations that cannot be stopped even if emissions were suddenly halted. “The Earth may have left a ‘safe’ climate state beyond 1°C global warming,” Armstrong McKay and his co-authors concluded in Science last fall. If these thresholds are passed, some of global warming’s effects—like the thaw of permafrost or the loss of the world’s coral reefs—are likely to happen more quickly than expected. On the whole, however, the implications of blowing past these tipping points remain among climate change’s most consequential unknowns: We don’t really know when or how fast things will fall apart. […]
Even before the climate gets to that point, we may face a dramatic uptick in climate-related disasters, says William Ripple, a distinguished professor of ecology at Oregon State University and the lead author of a recent commentary on the “risky feedback loops” connecting climate-driven systems. There’s a sense of awe—in the original meaning of inspiring terror or dread—at witnessing such sweeping changes play out across the landscape. “Many scientists knew these things would happen, but we’re taken aback by the severity of the major changes we’re seeing,” Ripple said. Armstrong McKay likened the challenge of being a climate scientist in 2023 to that faced by medical professionals: “You put a certain emotional distance between you and the work in order to do the work effectively,” he said, “that can be difficult to maintain.”