April 18th • 3h 38m
Shownotes
Every new episode of No Agenda is accompanied by a comprehensive list of shownotes curated by Adam while preparing for the show. Clips played by the hosts during the show can also be found here.
Israel vs Hamas
Lex and Fariba - NOT the people of Iran, the Islamic Republic (of Iran)
I understand the brainwashed under educated over socialized who always look for oppressed and oppressor
But what I, we, and the show seeing that I'm tagged in or being 'called out' for is new - And it started right after Oct 7th
Zionism - borderline Zionphobia
Israel controls everything
Media
Finance
Politics
AIPAC
American Jews doing themselves no favors by staying silent
And a lot of them are quite frightened
Growing up in The Netherlands I learned a lot about WWII and The Jews
To me it feels a bit like 1933 Berlin as Dietrich Bonhoeffer described it
But we're good at calling our groups
Red Scare
Japanese
Towel head Muslims vdz
Are we perhaps mad at ourselves and the destruction we allowed the MIC to cause in the past 20 years?
Or was that also all at Israel's beck and call?
$4 Billion in Aid to Israel
Nothing compared to $900 Billion to MIC
If anything it is a huge distraction from the true evil of the Climatists and Globalists driven by evil forces
Your right freedom of movement
Your food
Your finances
Your Property
Climate Change
Dubai Grinds to Standstill as Cloud Seeding Worsens Flooding | Mint
(Bloomberg) -- Torrential rains across the United Arab Emirates prompted flight cancellations, forced schools to shut and brought traffic to a standstill.
The heavy rains that caused widespread flooding across the desert nation stemmed partly from cloud seeding. The UAE started cloud seeding operations in 2002 to address water security issues, even though the lack of drainage in many areas can trigger flooding.
The Gulf state’s National Center of Meteorology dispatched seeding planes from Al Ain airport on Monday and Tuesday to take advantage of convective cloud formations, according to Ahmed Habib, a specialist meteorologist. That technique involves implanting chemicals and tiny particles — often natural salts such as potassium chloride — into the atmosphere to coax more rain from clouds.
With global warming threatening a surge in heat-related deaths in the UAE, Dubai’s media office dubbed the downpours “rains of goodness," despite flooded houses and overflowing swimming pools.
The latest storms followed heavy rains earlier this year, according to Habib at NCM. The seeding planes have flown seven missions over the past two days, he added.
“For any cloud that’s suitable over the UAE you make the operation," he said.
The rain forced Dubai International Airport, one of the world’s busiest, to suspend operations for 25 minutes.
First law of Holes - If you are one, stop talking
Don’t blame cloud seeding for the Dubai floods | Extreme weather | The Guardian
Did cloud seeding cause the heavy rain?
In short, scientists say no.
In a statement issued to multiple news outlets, the NCM, which oversees cloud-seeding operations in the UAE, said there were no such cloud-seeding operations before or during the storm.
Omar Al Yazeedi, the deputy director general of the NCM, said: “We did not engage in any seeding operations during this particular weather event. The essence of cloud seeding lies in targeting clouds at an earlier stage, prior to precipitation. Engaging in seeding activities during a severe thunderstorm scenario would prove futile.”
Experts, meanwhile, have debunked the cloud-seeding theory. Maarten Ambaum, a professor of atmospheric physics and dynamics at the University of Reading, said that “cloud seeding, certainly in the Emirates, is used for clouds that don’t normally produce rain … You would not normally develop a very severe storm out of that.”
He added: “In the 50s and 60s, people still thought about using cloud seeding to produce these big weather events, or change these big weather events. This [has] long been recognised as just not a realistic possibility.”
Climate Change to Cause $38 Trillion a Year in Damages by 2049 - Bloomberg
Coffee: Your morning cup is about to change in a big way, whether you're ready or not.
A crop of startups, with names like Atomo, Northern Wonder, and Prefer, is calling this category of throwbacks “beanless coffee,” even though in some cases their products contain legumes. Beanless coffee “gives you that legendary coffee taste and all the morning pick-me-up you crave, while also leaving you proud that you’re doing your part to help unf—k the planet,” as the San-Francisco-based beanless coffee company Minus puts it. But it’s unclear whether coffee drinkers—deeply attached to the drink’s particular, ineffable taste and aroma—will embrace beanless varieties voluntarily, or only after the coming climate-induced coffee apocalypse forces their hand.
The Racist Origins of 7 Common Phrases
1. Tipping Point
This common phrase describes the critical point when a change that had been a possibility becomes inevitable. When it was popularized, according to Merriam-Webster, it was applied to one phenomenon in particular: white flight. In the 1950s, as white people abandoned urban areas for the suburbs in huge numbers, journalists began using the phrase tipping point in relation to the percentage of non-white neighbors it took to trigger this reaction in white city residents. Tipping point wasn’t coined in the 1950s (it first appeared in print in the 19th century), but it did enter everyday speech during the decade thanks to this topic.
Shut Up Slave!
Section 702 - Everyone is a spy
Buried in the Section 702 re-authorization bill passed by the House on Friday
is the biggest expansion of domestic surveillance since the Patriot Act.
Under
current law, the government can compel “electronic communications
service providers” that have direct access to communications to assist
the NSA in conducting Section 702 surveillance. Companies like Verizon
and Google must turn over the communications of targets, which
officially must be foreigners overseas, but this has been abused to spy
on Americans.
By changing the definition of “electronic communications surveillance
provider,” an amendment offered by House intel committee leaders and
passed by the House vastly expands the universe of entities that can be
compelled to assist the NSA.
If the bill becomes law, any company or individual that provides any
service whatsoever may be forced to assist in NSA surveillance, as long
as they have access to equipment on which communications are transmitted
or stored.
When the amendment was first unveiled, civil liberties advocates noted that
the provision would encompass hotels, libraries, and coffee shops, and
so they were excluded. But the vast majority of U.S. businesses remain
fair game. Including barber shops, laundromats, fitness centers,
hardware stores, and any small business that provides wifi to their
customers via routers.
It also includes commercial landlords that rent out offices. Which would
target journalists, lawyers, financial advisors, health care providers,
and anyone renting commercial office space.
The
amendment even includes service providers who come into our homes. Such
as house cleaners, plumbers, and IT services providers. All of whom
could be forced to serve as surrogate spies and be required to give the
NSA direct access. And none of them would be allowed to tell anyone.
They would be under a gag order, and would face heavy penalties if they
failed to comply.
Having wholesale access to domestic communications, the NSA would then be on
the “honor system” to retain only the communications of approved foreign
targets. And we know from past experience that they can not be trusted
to do this.
The Senate is scheduled to vote on the bill this week.
Section 702 expires on April 19, but the Biden administration has obtained FISA
Court approval to continue Section 702 surveillance until April of
2025.
Big Pharma
Vaccine breakthrough means no more chasing strains | UCR News | UC Riverside
The new vaccine also uses a live, modified version of a virus. However, it does not rely on the vaccinated body having this traditional immune response or immune active proteins — which is the reason it can be used by babies whose immune systems are underdeveloped, or people suffering from a disease that overtaxes their immune system. Instead, this relies on small, silencing RNA molecules.
“A host — a person, a mouse, anyone infected— will produce small interfering RNAs as an immune response to viral infection. These RNAi then knock down the virus,” said Shouwei Ding, distinguished professor of microbiology at UCR, and lead paper author.
The reason viruses successfully cause disease is because they produce proteins that block a host’s RNAi response. “If we make a mutant virus that cannot produce the protein to suppress our RNAi, we can weaken the virus. It can replicate to some level, but then loses the battle to the host RNAi response,” Ding said. “A virus weakened in this way can be used as a vaccine for boosting our RNAi immune system.”
M5M
Boeing vs Airbus
Big Tech
Ukraine vs Russia
Transmaoism
Go Podcasting!
The Contrast between M5M and Podcasts
M5M Abuses it's audience, we work WITH them as producers of the product
TV has become exploitative and cruel, says Ofcom chair Michael Grade | Michael Grade | The Guardian
STORIES
Eli Lilly weight loss drug Zepbound effective in sleep apnea trials
Thu, 18 Apr 2024 16:45
An injection pen of Zepbound, Eli Lilly's weight loss drug, is displayed in New York City, U.S., December 11, 2023.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
Eli Lilly on Wednesday said its highly popular weight loss drug Zepbound showed the potential to treat patients with the most common sleep-related breathing disorder in two late-stage clinical trials.
The initial results add to the long list of potential health benefits of weight loss and diabetes treatments, which have skyrocketed in demand over the last year despite their high prices and spotty insurance coverage.
Zepbound was more effective than a placebo at reducing the severity of obstructive sleep apnea, or OSA, in patients with obesity after a year, according to preliminary data from both trials. OSA refers to interrupted breathing during sleep due to narrowed or blocked airways. The pharmaceutical giant said it plans to present the results at an upcoming medical conference and submit them to the Food and Drug Administration and regulators in other countries in mid-2024.
Eli Lilly previously announced that the FDA granted Zepbound "fast track designation" for patients with moderate-to-severe OSA and obesity. That designation ensures that drugs that intend to both treat a serious or life-threatening condition and fill an unmet medical need get reviewed more quickly.
The results are an early sign of hope for the estimated 80 million patients in the U.S. who experience OSA, Eli Lilly said in a press release. Around 20 million of those people have moderate-to-severe forms of the disease, but 85% of OSA cases go undiagnosed, according to Eli Lilly.
OSA can lead to excessive daytime sleepiness and loud snoring, as well as contribute to serious complications, including hypertension, stroke and heart failure. Patients with the condition have limited treatment options outside of cumbersome and often uncomfortable machines that provide positive airway pressure, or PAP, to allow for normal breathing.
"Addressing this unmet need head-on is critical, and while there are pharmaceutical treatments for the excessive sleepiness associated with OSA, [Zepbound] has the potential to be the first pharmaceutical treatment for the underlying disease," Dr. Jeff Emmick, Eli Lilly's senior vice president of product development, said in the release on Wednesday.
Zepbound has slipped into shortages since receiving approval in the U.S. for weight management in November. The active ingredient in Zepbound, known as tirzepatide, is also approved under the brand name Mounjaro for diabetes.
Mounjaro and other diabetes drugs are typically covered by insurance, while Zepbound and other weight loss drugs are not. But the new data in sleep apnea patients gives Eli Lilly a "pathway to gaining Medicare Part D coverage for Zepbound," even before any changes to the federal program's coverage of obesity treatments, JPMorgan Chase analyst Chris Schott wrote in a note Wednesday.
Under new guidance issued in late March, Medicare can cover certain weight loss drugs as long as they receive FDA approval for an added health benefit. Medicare prescription drug plans administered by private insurers, known as Part D, currently cannot cover those drugs for weight loss alone.
Schott added that the new data gives Eli Lilly a path to increase the use of Zepbound among men. He said the company has suggested that men may be more likely to use a so-called GLP-1 drug such as Zepbound for sleep apnea compared to obesity.
Eli Lilly's Zepbound works by imitating two naturally produced gut hormones called GLP-1 and GIP. GLP helps reduce food intake and appetite. GIP, which also suppresses appetite, may also improve how the body breaks down sugar and fat.
Initial trial resultsThe two phase-three trials, both called SURMOUNT-OSA, tested Zepbound in two groups of patients. Notably, 70% of participants across the studies were men, Eli Lilly said in its release.
Researchers specifically examined how much the weekly injection reduced the so-called apnea-hypopnea index, or AHI, which records the number of times per hour a person's breathing shows a restricted or completely blocked airway. The index is used to evaluate the severity of obstructive sleep apnea and the effectiveness of treatments for the condition.
In both sub-studies, Zepbound was superior to the placebo in reducing AHI, which was the main goal of the trials.
Cherrybeans | Istock | Getty Images
The first study evaluated the drug in adults with moderate-to-severe obstructive sleep apnea and obesity who were not on PAP therapy.
People who took Zepbound had an average of 27.4 fewer AHI events per hour at 52 weeks, compared with an average reduction of 4.8 events per hour for the placebo, according to the results.
Zepbound also met the trial's second goal, leading to an overall AHI reduction of 55% compared with a decrease of 5% for the placebo, the results say.
The second study tested Zepbound in adults with the same conditions, but those patients were on and planned on continuing PAP therapy.
People who took Zepbound had an average of 30.4 fewer AHI events per hour at 52 weeks, compared with an average reduction of 6 events per hour for the placebo.
Zepbound led to an overall AHI reduction of nearly 63%, compared with a decrease of more than 6% for the placebo.
The results blew past Wall Street's expectations. Investors largely deemed a 50% reduction as the threshold to consider Eli Lilly's trials a success. The roughly 60% improvement shows "outsized benefits," Deutsche Bank analyst James Shin wrote in a note Wednesday.
Across the two studies, Zepbound helped patients lose around 20% of their weight. But Eli Lilly noted that men are known to achieve less weight loss than women with therapies like Zepbound.
In a note on Wednesday, Morgan Stanley analyst Terence Flynn called that weight reduction encouraging and said the firm expected 15% to 18% weight loss in the trial. Morgan Stanley views "this as another positive data point supporting the efficacy profile of tirzepatide," Flynn said.
The Racist Origins of 7 Common Phrases
Thu, 18 Apr 2024 16:44
The origins and history of the word 'cakewalk' may make you want to reconsider using it. (the_burtons/Moment/Getty Images)
Even the most nonsensical idioms in the English language originated somewhere. Some terms, like silver lining and tomfoolery, have innocuous roots, while other sayings date back to the darkest chapters in U.S. history. While these common phrases are rarely used in their original contexts today, knowing their racist origins casts them in a different light.
1. Tipping Point This common phrase describes the critical point when a change that had been a possibility becomes inevitable. When it was popularized, according to Merriam-Webster, it was applied to one phenomenon in particular: white flight. In the 1950s, as white people abandoned urban areas for the suburbs in huge numbers, journalists began using the phrase tipping point in relation to the percentage of non-white neighbors it took to trigger this reaction in white city residents. Tipping point wasn't coined in the 1950s (it first appeared in print in the 19th century), but it did enter everyday speech during the decade thanks to this topic.
2. Long Time, No See The saying long time, no see can be traced back to the 19th century. In a Boston Sunday Globe article from 1894, the words are applied to a Native American speaker. The broken English phrase was also used to evoke white people's stereotypical ideas of Native American speech in William F. Drannan's 1899 book Thirty-One Years on the Plains and in the Mountains, Or, the Last Voice from the Plains An Authentic Record of a Life Time of Hunting, Trapping, Scouting and Indian Fighting in the Far West.
It's unlikely actual Native Americans were saying long time, no see during this era. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this type of isolating construction would have been unusual for the indigenous languages of North America. Rather, it originated as a way for white writers to mock Native American speech, and that of non-native English speakers from other places like China. By the 1920s, it had become an ordinary part of the American vernacular.
3. Mumbo Jumbo Before it was synonymous with jargon or other confusing language, the phrase mumbo jumbo originated with religious ceremonies in West Africa. In the Mandinka language, the word Maamajomboo described a masked dancer who participated in ceremonies. Former Royal African Company clerk Francis Moore transcribed the name as mumbo jumbo in his 1738 book Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa. In the early 1800s, English speakers started to divorce the phrase from its African origins and apply it to anything that confused them.
4. Sold Down the River Before the phrase sold down the river meant betrayal, it originated as a literal slave-trading practice. Enslaved people from more northerly regions were sold to cotton plantations in the Deep South via the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. For enslaved people, the threat of being ''sold down the river'' implied separation from family and a guaranteed life of hard labor and brutal conditions. A journal entry from April 1835 mentions a person who, ''having been sold to go down the river, attempted first to cut off both of his legs, failing to do that, cut his throat, did not entirely take his life, went a short distance and drowned himself.''
5. No Can Do Similar to long time, no see, no can do originated as a jab at non-native English speakers. According to the OED, this example was likely directed at Chinese immigrants in the early 20th century. Today, many people who use the phrase as general slang for ''I can't do that'' are unaware of its cruel origins.
6. Indian GiverMerriam-Webster defines an Indian giver as ''a person who gives something to another and then takes it back.'' One of the first appearances was in Thomas Hutchinson's History of the Colony of Massachuset's Bay in the mid 18th century. In a note, it says ''An Indian gift is a proverbial expression, signifying a present for which an equivalent return is expected.'' In the 19th century, the stereotype was transferred from the gift to the giver, the idea of an ''equivalent return'' was abandoned, and it became used as an insult. An 1838 N.-Y. Mirror article mentions the ''distinct species of crimes and virtues'' of schoolchildren, elaborating, ''I have seen the finger pointed at the Indian giver. (One who gives a present and demands it back again.)''
Even as this stereotype about Indigenous people faded, the phrase Indian giver has persisted into the 21st century. The word Indian in Indian giver also denotes something false, as it does in the antiquated phrase Indian summer.
7. Cakewalk In the antebellum South, some enslaved Black Americans spent Sundays dressing up and performing dances in the spirit of mocking the white upper classes. The enslavers didn't know they were the butt of the joke, and even encouraged these performances and rewarded the best dancers with cake, hence the name.
Possibly because this was viewed as a leisurely weekend activity, the phrase cakewalk became associated with easy tasks. Cakewalks didn't end with slavery: For decades, they remained (with cake prizes) a part of Black American life'--but at the same time, white actors in blackface incorporated the act into minstrel shows, turning what began as a satire of white elites into a racist caricature of Black people.
A version of this story ran in 2020; it has been updated.
Coffee: Your morning cup is about to change in a big way, whether you're ready or not.
Thu, 18 Apr 2024 16:25
This story was produced by Grist and co-published with Slate.
When Henri Kunz was growing up in West Germany in the 1980s, he used to drink an instant coffee substitute called Caro, a blend of barley, chicory root, and rye roasted to approximate the deep color and invigorating flavor of real coffee. “We kids drank it,” Kunz remembered recently. “It had no caffeine, but it tasted like coffee.”
As an adult, Kunz loves real coffee. But he also believes that its days are numbered. Climate change is expected to shift the areas where coffee can grow, with some researchers estimating that the most suitable land for coffee will shrink by more than half by 2050 and that hotter temperatures will make the plants more vulnerable to pests, blight, and other threats. At the same time, demand for coffee is growing, as upwardly mobile people in traditionally tea-drinking countries in Asia develop a taste for java.
“The difference between demand and supply will go like that,” Kunz put it during a Zoom interview, crossing his arms in front of his chest to form an X, like the “no-good” emoji. Small farmers could face crop failures just as millions of new people develop a daily habit, potentially sending coffee prices soaring to levels that only the wealthy will be able to afford.
To stave off the looming threats, some agricultural scientists are hard at work breeding climate-resilient, high-yield varieties of coffee. Kunz, the founder and chair of a “flavor engineering” company called Stem, thinks he can solve many of these problems by growing coffee cells in a laboratory instead of on a tree. A number of other entrepreneurs are taking a look at coffee substitutes of yore, like the barley beverage Kunz grew up drinking, with the aim of using sustainable ingredients to solve coffee’s environmental problems—and adding caffeine to reproduce its signature jolt.
A crop of startups, with names like Atomo, Northern Wonder, and Prefer, is calling this category of throwbacks “beanless coffee,” even though in some cases their products contain legumes. Beanless coffee “gives you that legendary coffee taste and all the morning pick-me-up you crave, while also leaving you proud that you’re doing your part to help unf—k the planet,” as the San-Francisco-based beanless coffee company Minus puts it. But it’s unclear whether coffee drinkers—deeply attached to the drink’s particular, ineffable taste and aroma—will embrace beanless varieties voluntarily, or only after the coming climate-induced coffee apocalypse forces their hand.
Coffea arabica—the plant species most commonly cultivated for drinking—has been likened to Goldilocks. It thrives in shady environments with consistent, moderate rainfall and in temperatures between 64 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit, conditions often found in the highlands of tropical countries like Guatemala, Ethiopia, and Indonesia. Although coffee plantations can be sustainably integrated into tropical forests, growing coffee leads to environmental destruction more often than not. Farmers cut down trees both to make room for coffee plants and to fuel wood-burning dryers used to process the beans, making coffee one of the top six agricultural drivers of deforestation. When all of a coffee tree’s finicky needs are met, it can produce harvestable beans after three to five years of growth and eventually yield 1 or 2 pounds of green coffee beans per year.
If arabica is Goldilocks, climate change is an angry bear. For some 200 years, humans have been burning fossil fuels, spewing planet-warming carbon dioxide into the air. The resulting floods, droughts, and heat waves, as well as the climate-driven proliferation of coffee borer beetles and fungal infections, are all predicted to make many of today’s coffee-growing areas inhospitable to the crop, destroy coffee farmers’ razor-thin profit margins, and sow chaos in the world’s coffee markets. That shift is already underway: Extreme weather in Brazil sent commodity coffee prices to an 11-year high of $2.58 per pound in 2022. And as coffee growers venture into new regions, they’ll tear down more trees, threatening biodiversity and transforming even more forests from carbon sinks into carbon emitters.
At many times in the past, coffee has been out of reach for most people, so they found cheaper, albeit caffeine-free, alternatives. Caro and other quaint instant beverage mixes, like Postum in the U.S. and caffè d’orzo in Italy, were popular during World War II and in the following years, when coffee was rationed or otherwise hard to come by. But the practice of brewing noncaffeinated, ersatz coffee out of other plants is even older than that. In the Middle East, people have used date seeds to brew a hot, dark drink for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years. In pre-Columbian Central America, Mayans drank a similar beverage made from the seeds of ramón trees found in the rainforest. In Europe and Western Asia, drinks have been made out of chicory, chickpeas, dandelion root, figs, grains, lupin beans, and soybeans. These ingredients have historically been more accessible than coffee, and they sometimes confer purported health benefits.
Today’s beanless-coffee startups are attempting to put a modern spin on these time-honored, low-tech coffee substitutes. Northern Wonder, based in the Netherlands, makes its product primarily out of lupin beans—also known as lupini—along with chickpeas and chicory. Atomo, headquartered in Seattle, infuses date seeds with a proprietary marinade that produces “the same 28 compounds” as coffee, the company boasts. Singapore-based Prefer makes its brew out of a byproduct of soy milk, surplus bread, and spent barley from beer breweries, which are then fermented with microbes. Minus also uses fermentation to bring coffeelike flavors out of “upcycled pits, roots, and seeds.” All these brands add caffeine to at least some of their blends, aiming to offer consumers the same energizing effects they get from the real deal.
“We’ve tried all of the coffee alternatives,” said Maricel Saenz, the CEO of Minus. “And what we realize is that they give us some resemblance to coffee, but it ultimately ends up tasting like toasted grains more than it tastes like coffee.”
In trying to explain what makes today’s beanless coffees different from the oldfangled kind, David Klingen, Northern Wonder’s CEO, compared the relationship with the one between modern meat substitutes and more traditional soybean products like tofu and tempeh. Many plant-based meats contain soybeans, but they’re highly processed and combined with other ingredients to create a convincingly meatlike texture and flavor. So it is with beanless coffee, relative to Caro-style grain beverages. Klingen emphasized that he and his colleagues mapped out the attributes of various ingredients—bitterness, sweetness, smokiness, the ability to form a foam similar to the crema that crowns a shot of espresso—and tried to combine them in a way that produced a well-rounded coffee facsimile, then added caffeine.
By contrast, traditional coffee alternatives like chicory and barley brews have nothing to offer a caffeine addict; Atomo, Minus, Northern Wonder, and Prefer are promising a reliable daily fix.
“Coffee is a ritual and it’s a result,” said Andy Kleitsch, the CEO of Atomo. “And that’s what we’re replicating.”
Each of these new beanless coffee companies has a slightly different definition of sustainability. Northern Wonder’s guiding light is nontropical ingredients, “because we want to make a claim that our product is 100 percent deforestation free,” Klingen said. Almost all its ingredients are annual crops from Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Turkey, countries whose forests are not at substantial risk of destruction from agriculture. Annual crops grow more efficiently than coffee trees, which require years of growth before they begin producing beans. A life cycle analysis of Northern Wonder’s environmental impacts, paid for by the company, shows that its beanless coffee uses approximately a twentieth of the water, generates less than a quarter of the carbon emissions, and requires about a third of the land area associated with real coffee agriculture.
Michael Hoffmann, professor emeritus at Cornell University and the coauthor of Our Changing Menu: Climate Change and the Foods We Love and Need, said he was impressed with Northern Wonder’s life cycle analysis, which he described as nuanced and transparent about the limitations of its data. He praised the idea of using efficient crops, saying that some of those used by beanless coffee companies “yield far more per unit area than coffee, which is also a big plus.”
But there are trade-offs associated with higher yields. Daniel El Chami, an agricultural engineer who is the head of sustainability research and innovation for the Italian subsidiary of the fertilizer and plant nutrition company Timac Agro International, pointed out that higher-yield crops tend to use more fertilizer, which is manufactured using fossil fuels in a process that emits carbon. Crops that use land and other resources efficiently can require several times more fertilizer than sustainably grown coffee, he said. For this reason, El Chami just didn’t see how Northern Wonder could wind up emitting less than a quarter of coffee’s emissions.
Other beanless coffee companies are staking their sustainability pitch on the repurposing of agricultural waste. Atomo’s green cred is premised on the fact that its central ingredients, date seeds, are “upcycled” from farms in California’s Coachella Valley. Whereas date farmers typically throw seeds away after pitting, Atomo pays farmers to store the pits in food-safe tote bags that get picked up daily. Atomo’s current recipe also includes crops from farther afield, like ramón seeds from Guatemala and caffeine derived from green tea grown in India, but Kleitsch said they’re looking to add even more upcycled ingredients.
Food waste is a major contributor to climate change, and Hoffmann said repurposing it for beanless coffee is “a very good approach.” Minus, which also uses upcycled date pits, claims that its first product, a canned beanless cold brew (which is not yet available in stores), uses 94 percent less water and produces 86 percent less greenhouse gas emissions than the real thing. Those numbers are based on a life-cycle analysis that Saenz, Minus’ CEO, declined to share because it was being updated. (Atomo expects to release a life-cycle analysis this spring, and Prefer is planning to conduct a study sometime this year.)
Despite beanless coffee companies’ impressive sustainability claims, not everyone is convinced that building an alternative coffee industry from scratch is better than trying to make the existing coffee industry more sustainable—by, for instance, helping farmers grow coffee interspersed with native trees or dry their beans using renewable energy.
El Chami thinks the conclusion that coffee supply will dwindle in an overheating world is uncertain: A review of the research he co-authored found that modelers have reached contradictory conclusions about how climate change will change the amount of land suitable for growing coffee. Although rising temperatures are certainly affecting agriculture, “climate change pressures are overblown from a marketing point of view by private interests seeking to create new needs with higher profit margins,” El Chami said. He added that the multinational companies that buy coffee from small farmers need to help their suppliers implement sustainable practices—and he hoped beanless coffee companies would do the same.
Whether demand for beanless coffee will increase depends a great deal on how much consumers like the taste.
I, for one, enjoyed the $5 Atomo latte that I tried at the Midtown Manhattan location of an Australian cafe chain called Gumption Coffee—the only place on Earth where Atomo is being sold. The pale, frothy concoction tasted slightly sweet and very smooth. Atomo describes its espresso blend as having notes of “dark chocolate, dried fruit, and graham cracker.” If I hadn’t known that it was made with date seeds instead of coffee beans, I would have said it was a regular latte with a dash of caramel syrup added.
The Northern Wonder filter blend that I ordered from the Netherlands (about $12 for a little more than 1 pound of grounds, plus about $27 for international shipping) had to overcome a tougher test: I wanted to drink it black, the way I do my regular morning coffee. I brewed it in my pour-over Chemex carafe, and the dark liquid dripping through the filter certainly looked like coffee. But the aroma was closer to chickpeas roasting in the oven—not an unpleasant smell, just miles away from the transcendent scent of arabica beans. The flavor was also off, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was wrong. Was it a lack of acidity or a lack of sweetness? It wasn’t too bitter, and it left a convincing tannic aftertaste in my mouth. After a few sips, I found myself warming up to it, even though it obviously wasn’t coffee. My Grist colleague Jake Bittle had a similar experience with Northern Wonder, describing the flavor it settled into as “weird Folgers.” If real coffee suddenly became scarce or exorbitantly priced, I could see myself drinking Northern Wonder or something like it. It would certainly be better than forgoing coffee’s flavor and caffeine entirely by drinking nothing at all in the morning, or acclimating to the entirely different ritual and taste of tea.
Klingen concedes that the aroma of beanless coffee needs work. Northern Wonder is developing a beanlike product that, when put through a coffee grinder, releases volatile compounds similar to those that give real coffee its powerful fragrance, like various aldehydes and pyrazines. But beanless coffee could win over some fans even if it doesn’t mimic coffee’s every attribute. Klingen said drinkers often rate his product higher for how much they like it than for how similar it is to coffee. “With Oatly, oat milks or [other] alt milks, there you see the same,” he said. When you ask consumers if oat milk tastes like milk, they say, “ ‘Eh, I don’t know.’ But is it tasty? ‘Yes.’ ”
Just as the dairy industry has tried to prevent alternative milk companies from calling their products “milk,” some people raise an eyebrow at the term “beanless coffee.” Kunz—the German entrepreneur who grew up drinking Caro and is now trying to grow coffee bean cells in a lab—takes issue with using the word coffee to describe products made from grains, fruits, and legumes. “What we do—taking a coffee plant part, specifically a leaf from a coffee tree—it is coffee, because it’s the cell origin of coffee,” Kunz said. Drinks made from anything else, he insists, shouldn’t use the word. Kunz’s cell-cultured coffee product hasn’t been finalized yet and, much like lab-grown meat, faces fairly steep regulatory hurdles before it can be sold in Europe or the United States.
The specter of plant-based meat and dairy looms large over the nascent beanless coffee industry. A slew of startups like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods hit the scene in the 2010s with products that they touted as convincing enough to be able to put animal agriculture out of business. But in recent years, these companies have faced declining sales in the face of concerns about health, taste, and price.
Jake Berber, the CEO and co-founder of Prefer, fears that something similar could happen to beanless coffee businesses. “My hope for everyone in the industry is to keep pushing out really delicious products that people enjoy so that the whole industry of beanless coffee, bean-free coffee, can profit from that, and we can sort of help each other out,” he said.
Different beanless coffee companies are staking out different markets, with some positioning themselves as premium brands. Saenz wouldn’t say how much Minus wants to charge for its canned cold brew, but she said it will be comparable to the “high-end side of coffee, because we believe we compete there in terms of quality.” Atomo is putting the finishing touches on a factory in Seattle with plans to sell its beanless espresso to coffee shops for $20.99 per pound—comparable to a specialty roast.
“The best way to enjoy coffee is to go to a coffee shop and have a barista make you your own lovingly made product,” Kleitsch said. Atomo is aiming to give consumers a “great experience that they can’t get at home.”
In contrast, Northern Wonder and Prefer are targeting the mass market. Northern Wonder is sold in 534 grocery stores in the Netherlands and recently became available at a leading supermarket in Switzerland. Prefer, meanwhile, is selling its blend to coffee houses, restaurants, hotels, and other clients in Singapore with a promise to beat the price of their cheapest arabica beans. Berber predicts that that proposition will get more and more appealing to buyers and consumers in the coming years as the cost of even a no-frills, mediocre espresso drink approaches, and surpasses, $10. A warming planet will help turn coffee beans into a luxury product, and middle-class customers will get priced out. Then, Prefer’s bet on a climate-proof coffee replacement will pay off.
“We will, in the future, be the commodity of coffee,” Berber said.
ISIS terrorists taking 'superhuman drug' that makes them 'charge at tanks' - Daily Star
Thu, 18 Apr 2024 16:21
Sick terror cult ISIS has been flooded with party drugs that's made the terrorists feel "superhuman".
Middle East analyst Joby Warrick claims that Syria's sarin gas factories have switched to the manufacture of a synthetic party drug that makes the fighters feel like they ''could take down a tank.''
The drug, called Captagon, puts users into a ''unique state of euphoria.'' He explained to podcaster Julian Dorey: ''They call it 'The terrorist drug' because it gives you a sense of invincibility. They give it to ISIS fighters and these guys would feel like they were supermen, and they would go charging after tanks.''
READ MORE: Cartel gangsters with 'no concern for life' flood US with addictive 'super meth'
Check out more of the latest news stories from the Daily Star.
Syria had been known as a major source of sarin gas, a nerve agent over 20 times more deadly than cyanide. But most of the country's deadly stockpile was destroyed in 2014, in a daring mission that involved cruising a converted US naval vessel '' MV Cape Ray '' around a tiny area in the central Mediterranean.
The drug is said to be favoured by ISIS fighters, because it turns them into fearless 'supermen' (Image: Pictures from History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) Read MoreRelated Articles MI6 spy in suitcase 'died because he knew name of Putin's mole in GCHQ'Read MoreRelated Articles A bridge is being built in the world's deadliest jungle '' but no-one knows whyThere was massive international concern that the 1,200 tonnes of deadly nerve agent '' enough to kill the population of an entire country '' could escape and trigger a massive environmental disaster. Joby explains: "So they had this little rectangle of space in the middle Mediterranean and they just basically did laps around it for 42 days while the chemicals are being destroyed.''
But the factories that made this deadly chemical are still standing, and Syrian president Basha al-Aassad has allowed his country to become a ''narco state''. Joby continued: ''Since 2013 they're not exporting many legitimate products to the world. Their economy is completely collapsed and so those pharmaceutical plants have switched to making captagon and a few other nice things '' they make some crystal meth too.''
At least 1,500 Syrians were killed by chemical weapons launched by their own government (Image: Corbis via Getty Images) Read MoreRelated Articles Journalist spills on murky world of assassinations 'carried out by CIA and FSB'The drugs are shipped throughout the Middle East by terror groups such as Hezbollah. ''I was up on the Jordanian border,'' Joby continued. ''Jordan is a fairly stable country, but they're having to deal with armed convoys of these drug traffickers coming across the border.
''There will sometimes be three or four armoured vehicles '' maybe 70 or 80 people who are terrorists'... a lot of them are militia members but these are guys trained military people with RPGs and machine guns and and and small arms.''
Jordanian border patrols say that the drug convoys are sent whenever bad weather makes the visibility poor. Joby added: ''The Jordanians are talking about their patrols being surprised on a foggy day with these guys coming out of nowhere and shooting up their vehicles.''
A Saudi anti-drug directorate spokesman accused the "Hezbollah terrorist militia" of being "the main source smuggling them and manufacturing captagon" (Image: AFP via Getty Images) Read MoreRelated Articles 'I think MH370 was hijacked by Russia '' and order could have come from Putin'He personally witnessed a seizure of ''thousands and thousands and thousands of tablets of captagon'', but Hezbollah are also shipping vast amounts of military hardware: ''Other weird stuff, like landmines, claymore mines, machine gun parts '' just just all kinds of just weirdness coming across with these shipments, heading to God knows where.''
Captagon is now Syria's biggest export, Joby says, with Italian organised crime groups taking shipments of pills north across the Mediterranean as well as Hezbollah and Hamas moving huge quantities across the Middle East.
But it's not just terror groups and organised crime gangs involved in this deadly trade, Joby says: ''There's no doubt that some of these other terrorist groups get involved, and they they profit on it when they can but this is a government-run enterprise. There are divisions of the Syrian Army that have a piece of this.''
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Leptospirosis | CDC
Thu, 18 Apr 2024 15:53
Leptospirosis is a bacterial disease that affects humans and animals. It is caused by bacteria of the genus Leptospira. In humans, it can cause a wide range of symptoms, some of which may be mistaken for other diseases. Some infected persons, however, may have no symptoms at all.
Without treatment, Leptospirosis can lead to kidney damage, meningitis (inflammation of the membrane around the brain and spinal cord), liver failure, respiratory distress, and even death.
F-35s to cost $2 trillion as Pentagon plans longer use, says watchdog
Thu, 18 Apr 2024 15:14
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter's total cost is expected to top $2 trillion over its entire life span given the U.S. military plans to fly it longer, inflation is rising, and the Pentagon's efforts to rein in expenses are largely falling short, a government watchdog said Monday.
That price tag represents an increase from the $1.7 trillion lifetime cost the Government Accountability Office previously reported in September 2023. The revised estimate includes nearly $1.6 trillion in sustainment costs '-- a 44% increase from the $1.1 trillion sustainment price tag estimated in 2018 '-- and about $442 billion in acquisition costs, including development and procurement of the Lockheed Martin-made jet.
In the new report to lawmakers, GAO said the Defense Department now plans to fly the F-35 through 2088, 11 years longer than services most recently anticipated.
That longer projected life span is part of the reason the F-35'²s total price tag will now top $2 trillion, GAO said '-- but it's not the only reason.
Rising inflation is a major factor driving up the cost of flying the F-35, GAO said. And while the F-35 program has made attempts to bring costs back down, the report noted those efforts have had only limited success.
In a statement to Defense News, the F-35 Joint Program Office pointed to steps it took to rein in costs for the fighter.
''We have continued to reduce sustainment costs through growth and maturation of the F-35 enterprise, including JPO product support manager efforts to drive down contract costs, better alignment of U.S. services' requirements and budgets, and an active cost reduction initiative pipeline,'' the F-35 Joint Program Office said.
Those cost-control measures have cut the annual cost per tail by about a third between 2014 and 2022, from $9.4 million to $6.2 million, the JPO said, and it cut the jet's cost per flying hour from $86,800 to $33,600, in 2012 dollars.
Most F-35s flown by U.S. services '-- including the Air Force's F-35A, the Marine Corps' F-35B and the Navy's F-35C '-- are coming in under their current annual cost estimates to operate and sustain the jets, GAO said.
The Air Force is now spending $6.6 million each year to operate and sustain the average F-35A. That's a shade under the $6.8 million the service now has budgeted to fly each jet annually '-- but well over the original goal of $4.1 million.
F-35Bs are also costing about $700 million less apiece to fly than expected, and operating and sustainment costs for Navy F-35Cs are $1.7 million less than the target.
The Marine Corps' F-35Cs, however, have annual costs of $8.6 million '-- $1.8 million more than anticipated.
The reason services are making progress toward meeting their affordability targets is partly because projected flying hours have been reduced, GAO said.
In 2020, the JPO expected the F-35 fleet would fly more than 382,000 hours per year by the mid-2030s. But that estimate has now dropped to a little more than 300,000 hours per year, GAO said, due to lower-than-expected use of the F-35 so far and revised estimates about how much it will be flown in the future.
The Pentagon took steps over the last decade to reduce the F-35'²s costs, including working with contractors to find savings, restructuring the JPO to bring down fleet expenses and setting up an initiative called the ''war on cost.'' That last effort includes taking steps to improve the reliability and maintainability of parts on the jet, reducing incidents of foreign object debris entering and damaging the engine, and improving engines' reliability and availability so they can stay in a jet longer.
But while those steps could save about $84 billion over the lifetime of the F-35 program, Pentagon officials told GAO ''these efforts will not fundamentally change the [F-35'²s] estimated lifetime sustainment costs.''
Planned upgrades to the F-35 '-- particularly a program to modernize its Pratt & Whitney-made F135 engines to deliver more power and cooling ability '-- could help bring down the jets' costs, GAO said. But the F-35 program's decision to hold off on starting some of those upgrades led it to missed opportunities that could have reduced sustainment expenses.
Meanwhile, the F-35 is still far from meeting the program's goals for aircraft availability, GAO said. Mission-capable rates for F-35As fell to 52% in 2023, well below the minimum target of having 80% of jets available to carry out all its missions at any particular time.
''B'' and ''C'' variants were at nearly 60% and 62%, respectively, also below their minimum mission-capable rate goal of 75%. No version of the F-35 met its performance goals over the past five years, GAO said.
But the program has either met or is close to meeting 17 of its 24 goals for having jets available for operations and not out of service for maintenance, GAO said.
The report noted the F-35 program is still facing several challenges that harm the jets' readiness, including a heavy reliance on contractors, inadequate training, a lack of spare parts and support equipment, and a lack of technical data that could help the military perform its own sustainment work on the jets.
Stephen Losey is the air warfare reporter for Defense News. He previously covered leadership and personnel issues at Air Force Times, and the Pentagon, special operations and air warfare at Military.com. He has traveled to the Middle East to cover U.S. Air Force operations.
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Don't blame cloud seeding for the Dubai floods | Extreme weather | The Guardian
Thu, 18 Apr 2024 14:54
Severe floods inundated the United Arab Emirates this week, as a storm dumped the largest amount of rainfall the country has seen in more than 75 years, the government said.
A record 254mm (10in) of rainfall dropped in Al Ain, a city bordering Oman '' more than the country sees on average in a year. Highways turned to rivers as drivers abandoned stuck vehicles, homes and businesses have been damaged, and flights at one of the world's busiest airports have been significantly disrupted. Twenty people have reportedly been killed, and the recovery is expected to be slow: in a place known for its dry desert climate and hot temperatures where rain is rare, many areas lack drainage.
While extreme weather falls in line with the patterns climate scientists have long warned about, questions have swirled about whether cloud seeding '' a process that pushes clouds to produce more precipitation by releasing chemicals or salt particles into the air '' could instead be to blame for the catastrophic storms.
It's not just in the UAE. As torrential downpours pelted California over the last two years, online communities were abuzz with speculation over whether the state's cloud-seeding program was the cause.
Experts and officials, meanwhile, have repeatedly denied the possibility. Here's what to know.
What is cloud seeding?To talk about cloud seeding, we first must talk about clouds themselves. Composed of tiny ice crystals or water droplets, clouds form when water vapor cools in the atmosphere. Precipitation, or the water that falls to the surface as rain or snow, occurs when these droplets condense and combine with particles of dust, salt or smoke. That binding creates a drop or a snowflake (composed of millions of these droplets) that can fall from a cloud.
What the desert city of Dubai looks like after its biggest rainfall in 75 years '' videoCloud seeding is a decades-old weather-modification strategy that adds these binding agents to the atmosphere, in an attempt to get more precipitation to fall. It is used by countries around the world, usually in areas that are facing drought concerns. The process can be done from the ground, with generators, or with planes.
Meteorologists monitor the clouds closely before they are seeded, both to produce the best outcome and to time rains correctly with when they are needed most.
The Desert Research Institute (DRI), a non-profit in Nevada, uses silver iodide, a compound that their scientists say exists naturally in the environment and isn't harmful, which is burned or dropped with aircraft to reach the clouds. The UAE, which started its cloud-seeding program back in the 1990s, uses a kilogram of salt material components, CNBC reported, which is burned and shot into clouds from specially equipped aircraft. ''Our specialized aircrafts only use natural salts, and no harmful chemicals,'' the UAE's National Center of Meteorology (NCM) told CNBC in March.
Did cloud seeding cause the heavy rain?In short, scientists say no.
In a statement issued to multiple news outlets, the NCM, which oversees cloud-seeding operations in the UAE, said there were no such cloud-seeding operations before or during the storm.
Omar Al Yazeedi, the deputy director general of the NCM, said: ''We did not engage in any seeding operations during this particular weather event. The essence of cloud seeding lies in targeting clouds at an earlier stage, prior to precipitation. Engaging in seeding activities during a severe thunderstorm scenario would prove futile.''
Experts, meanwhile, have debunked the cloud-seeding theory. Maarten Ambaum, a professor of atmospheric physics and dynamics at the University of Reading, said that ''cloud seeding, certainly in the Emirates, is used for clouds that don't normally produce rain '... You would not normally develop a very severe storm out of that.''
He added: ''In the 50s and 60s, people still thought about using cloud seeding to produce these big weather events, or change these big weather events. This [has] long been recognised as just not a realistic possibility.''
A man crosses a flooded street following heavy rains in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, on Wednesday. Photograph: Ahmed Ramazan/AFP/Getty ImagesFriederike Otto, a senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London, told Reuters that rainfall was becoming much heavier around the world as the climate warms because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture. It was misleading to talk about cloud seeding as the cause of the heavy rainfall, she said.
''Cloud seeding can't create clouds from nothing. It encourages water that is already in the sky to condense faster and drop water in certain places. So first, you need moisture. Without it, there'd be no clouds,'' she said.
The sense of skepticism from some about the true cause of the catastrophe highlights a frustrating duality: the public readiness to blame weather tampering directly aligns with a reluctance to accept that other human activities are actively contributing to the climate crisis and ultimately extreme events like this one.
''It's important to understand the plausible causes of the record-shattering extreme rainfall this week across Dubai and portions of Arabian Peninsula. Did cloud seeding play a role? Likely no! But how about climate change? Likely yes!'' climate scientist Daniel Swain said in a written statement, adding that these disconnects affect ''how we collectively understand our ability to actively affect the weather on different spatial and temporal scales''.
So, what role did the climate crisis play?The huge rainfall was instead probably due to a normal weather system that was exacerbated by climate change, experts say.
A low-pressure system in the upper atmosphere, coupled with low pressure at the surface, had acted like a pressure ''squeeze'' on the air, according to Esraa Alnaqbi, a senior forecaster at the NCM.
That squeeze, intensified by the contrast between warmer temperatures at ground level and colder temperatures higher up, created the conditions for the powerful thunderstorm, she told Reuters, adding that climate change also probably contributed to the storm.
Climate scientists say that rising global temperatures, caused by human-led climate change, is leading to more extreme weather events around the world, including intense rainfall.
''Rainfall from thunderstorms, like the ones seen in UAE in recent days, sees a particular strong increase with warming. This is because convection, which is the strong updraft in thunderstorms, strengthens in a warmer world,'' Dim Coumou, a professor in climate extremes at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, told Reuters.
Will cloud seeding continue?In areas desperate for more rain or snow, cloud seeding is considered one more way to enhance what's already there naturally.
Areas that have used the strategy have seen substantial boosts in their water supply. The DRI reports a 10% bump or more per year in snowpack where cloud seeding has been conducted, and cites another study done in the Snowy mountains of New South Wales, Australia, that resulted in a 14% snowfall increase.
It's not just about getting more water, though. Cloud modification has been utilized to prevent floods, such as when scientists in Indonesia targeted clouds poised for heavy rainfall and better timed them to drop it over the ocean instead of on vulnerable communities. In China, where billions have been spent by the government to manipulate the weather, cloud seeding was used to ensure clear skies and lower pollution for a political event.
But experts are quick to point out that cloud seeding can't produce more water '' it just encourages what's there to actually drop. That means it's less effective during times of drought.
''It's just another tool in the toolbox for water supply,'' Mike Eytel, a senior water resource specialist for the Colorado River district, told Yale Environment 360. ''It's not the panacea that some people think it is.''
Reuters contributed reporting
The glare of car headlights could be a risk for heart conditions... As ever-more vehicles use dazzling LED beams | Daily Mail Online
Thu, 18 Apr 2024 14:54
Anyone who drives at night will know the terror of being suddenly blinded by powerful oncoming headlights '-- indeed 90 per cent of UK drivers complain that modern vehicle lights are particularly blinding.
So the news that the Government is launching a review this month into dazzlingly bright headlamps may bring welcome relief to many.
But tackling the problem of these lights could do more than improve road safety, suggest researchers: it might also reduce our risk of conditions such as cardiovascular disease and headaches, particularly in middle-aged or older drivers.
The move follows a campaign by the RAC and the anti-dazzle group, LightAware. In a recent RAC poll of 2,000 drivers, 85 per cent said headlight glare is getting worse.
Official figures show bright headlights were a contributory factor in an average of 280 collisions on UK roads every year since 2013.
The government is tackling bright headlamps which could help reduce our risk of conditions such as cardiovascular disease and headaches, particularly in middle-aged or older drivers
In a recent RAC poll of 2,000 drivers, 85 per cent said headlight glare is getting worse (Stock image)
The RAC blames the introduction of more powerful, LED lights and the growing popularity of four-wheel-drive and SUV models, which sit higher on the road with lights that shine directly into drivers' eyes.
LED lamps also trick brains into seeing them as brighter than they are, thanks to the perceptional phenomenon 'contrast brightness', according to a study in the Journal of Passenger Cars '-- Mechanical Systems.
When motorists were placed in front of equally powerful LED and traditional headlamps, the LED group complained the lights were more blinding.
The researchers said this is because our brains assess brightness according to the contrast between a light source and the level of light around it. (A house lamp hardly seems bright by day, for instance, while at night it lights up the room.)
Because LEDs are small and send out tight-edged beams compared with loosely-focused traditional halogen-bulb headlamps, they create a harsher contrast with the darkness around them, making the light seem brighter, according to the 2005 report. Moreover, modern LED headlights are around twice as bright '-- 6,000 lumens compared with around 3,000 for halogens, Dr John Lincoln, a retired immunologist of LightAware, told Good Health.
This LED glare can cause stress that can damage our cardiovascular system, according to research by the Karolinska Institute in Sweden.
They found that glaring headlights could trigger worrying changes even in young, healthy people. In one study, involving 19 drivers under 40 who were subjected to five sudden bursts of strong headlight glare, one volunteer showed a potentially dangerous rise in blood pressure while another temporarily developed ventricular extrasystole, a heartbeat abnormality associated with heart attacks.
Older and less healthy drivers may fare worse; the 1998 report found that drivers in their mid-40s and over who had symptoms of heart disease such as high blood pressure were also the most sensitive to sudden headlight glare and the most likely to show cardiovascular reactions '-- possibly because the bright lights heightened their 'fight or flight' response.
Over-bright headlamps may trigger migraines too, Dr Lincoln warns: 'LED headlamps cause visual stress due to contrast brightness. This can spark attacks in people who suffer light-induced migraines, making it difficult to drive safely.'
Such pain is a natural response to sudden dazzle, according to Peter Heilig, a professor of ophthalmology at the University of Vienna. 'Glare sends a warning signal to the brain that says 'Stop!'. It's comparable to the pain signal you get when you suddenly over-strain a joint.'
The UK Government has committed to launching its own independent review of brighter headlights to understand why more drivers are being dazzled on the road - and, importantly, how to tackle the issue
Dr Lincoln explains that LED headlamps can be particularly painful because, 'unlike other lighting, the intensity drops more slowly, making these lights blinding over longer distances'.
Glare pain is also intensified by the LED wavelengths, which are at the blue end of the light spectrum: this causes more discomfort than comparable levels of light at the yellowy spectrum of halogen bulbs, according to 2007 research by the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
This is particularly dazzling '--and dangerous '-- for ageing eyes. Denise Voon, a clinical adviser to The College of Optometrists, explains: 'When you're looking at a bright light and then look away you still see the after-image. With older people it can take significantly longer to recover.' And LED glare causes drivers' recovery times to increase dramatically, the NHTSA found.
Over the age of 60, our eyes' ability to recover from glare at night starts to fall significantly as the light-sensitive rod cells '-- which help with good vision in low light '-- weaken.
Moreover, the tiny muscles that control the size of our pupils (and how much light they let in) also weaken, so they don't recover quickly from closing tight when dazzled.
This explains why the NHSTA found older drivers' eyes took significantly longer to recover sensitivity after being exposed to glare '-- as long as ten seconds. Driving at 60 mph, that means travelling 268 metres, two-and-a-half football pitches, while unable to see properly.
Add to this the problem of cataracts, when proteins in the lens start to break down, causing the lens to cloud. A 2018 Harvard University study found that volunteers with cataracts driving into a glaring headlamp were far more likely to fail to spot a pedestrian crossing the road in time to avoid them.
LightAware is calling on the Government to set realistic safety standards for headlights '-- including limiting the amount of blue-spectrum light.
Meanwhile, campaigners suggest drivers avoid looking directly at approaching vehicles at night; instead, look about 20 degrees to the right, toward the white line on the right side of the road, then use peripheral vision to see ahead for those moments. Or buy night-driving glasses, which have a coating that filters out blue light.
And see your optometrist regularly, says Denise Voon. 'Things such as macular degeneration can make the problem of headlight glare a lot worse. Prescription glasses can make a big difference.'
National Public Radio Inc - Full Filing- Nonprofit Explorer - ProPublica
Thu, 18 Apr 2024 01:20
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Full text of "Full Filing" for fiscal year ending Sept. 2022
Tax returns filed by nonprofit organizations are public records. The Internal Revenue Service releases them in two formats: page images and raw data in XML. The raw data is more useful, especially to researchers, because it can be extracted and analyzed more easily. The pages below are a reconstruction of a tax document using raw data from the IRS.
About This Data Nonprofit Explorer includes summary data for nonprofit tax returns and full Form 990 documents, in both PDF and digital formats.
The summary data contains information processed by the IRS during the 2012-2019 calendar years; this generally consists of filings for the 2011-2018 fiscal years, but may include older records. This data release includes only a subset of what can be found in the full Form 990s.
In addition to the raw summary data, we link to PDFs and digital copies of full Form 990 documents wherever possible. This consists of separate releases by the IRS of Form 990 documents processed by the agency, which we update regularly.
We also link to copies of audits nonprofit organizations that spent $750,000 or more in Federal grant money in a single fiscal year since 2016. These audits are copied from the Federal Audit Clearinghouse.
Which Organizations Are Here? Every organization that has been recognized as tax exempt by the IRS has to file Form 990 every year, unless they make less than $200,000 in revenue and have less than $500,000 in assets, in which case they have to file form 990-EZ. Organizations making less than $50,000 don't have to file either form but do have to let the IRS they're still in business via a Form 990N "e-Postcard."
Nonprofit Explorer has organizations claiming tax exemption in each of the 27 subsections of the 501(c) section of the tax code, and which have filed a Form 990, Form 990EZ or Form 990PF. Taxable trusts and private foundations that are required to file a form 990PF are also included. Small organizations filing a Form 990N "e-Postcard" are not included in this data.
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Raw filing data. Includes EINs and summary financials as structured data. Exempt Organization profiles. Includes organization names, addresses, etc. You can merge this with the raw filing data using EIN numbers. Form 990 documents. Prior to 2017, these documents were obtained and processed by Public.Resource.org and ProPublica. Bulk PDF downloads since 2017 are available from the IRS. Form 990 documents as XML files. Includes complete filing data (financial details, names of officers, tax schedules, etc.) in machine-readable format. Only available for electronically filed documents. Electronic data released prior to October 2021 is also available through Amazon Web Services. Audits. PDFs of single or program-specific audits for nonprofit organizations that spent $750,000 or more in Federal grant money in a single fiscal year. Available for fiscal year 2015 and later. API The data powering this website is available programmatically, via an API. Read the API documentation >>
Dubai Grinds to Standstill as Cloud Seeding Worsens Flooding | Mint
Thu, 18 Apr 2024 00:49
(Bloomberg) -- Torrential rains across the United Arab Emirates prompted flight cancellations, forced schools to shut and brought traffic to a standstill.
The heavy rains that caused widespread flooding across the desert nation stemmed partly from cloud seeding. The UAE started cloud seeding operations in 2002 to address water security issues, even though the lack of drainage in many areas can trigger flooding.
The Gulf state's National Center of Meteorology dispatched seeding planes from Al Ain airport on Monday and Tuesday to take advantage of convective cloud formations, according to Ahmed Habib, a specialist meteorologist. That technique involves implanting chemicals and tiny particles '-- often natural salts such as potassium chloride '-- into the atmosphere to coax more rain from clouds.
With global warming threatening a surge in heat-related deaths in the UAE, Dubai's media office dubbed the downpours ''rains of goodness," despite flooded houses and overflowing swimming pools.
The latest storms followed heavy rains earlier this year, according to Habib at NCM. The seeding planes have flown seven missions over the past two days, he added.
''For any cloud that's suitable over the UAE you make the operation," he said.
The rain forced Dubai International Airport, one of the world's busiest, to suspend operations for 25 minutes.
''Operations continue to be significantly disrupted at Dubai International due to heavy rain and flooding," a spokesperson for the airport told Bloomberg. More than 40 flights were canceled and inbound services were temporarily diverted until weather conditions improve.
The UAE government issued warnings ahead of the heavy rains, asking people to stay at home and only leave ''in cases of extreme necessity." It later extended remote working until Wednesday for all federal employees.
People took to social media to share updates on the aftermath of the weather. Some videos showed cars being swept off roads, while another showed the ceiling of a shop collapsing as water inundated one of Dubai's most popular malls. The emirate's metro was disrupted.
Residents had to bail out apartments and underground car parks were flooded. Some buildings also suffered power outages.
Roads in Abu Dhabi were also flooded.
In neighboring Oman, at least 18 people have died in recent days as the heavy rains caused flooding, AP reported, citing a statement from the country's National Committee for Emergency Management.
--With assistance from Leen Al-Rashdan.
(Updates with Oman death toll in final paragraph)
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
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Google Is Laying Off More Employees
Thu, 18 Apr 2024 00:22
Several teams across Google's finance and real estate units have been affected, according to two current employees, who said staff had been informed of the cuts this week. One said that the affected teams in finance include Google's Treasury, Business Services, and Revenue Cash Operations teams.
It's unclear if other parts of the company are affected or how many roles have been cut. One current employee said the changes were "pretty large-scale" and that some roles are being moved abroad.
According to a person who saw the email, Google's finance chief Ruth Porat sent an email to staff announcing that Google would build out its "growth hubs" in locations such as Bangalore, Mexico City, and Dublin as part of the restructuring.
A Google spokesperson confirmed the cuts but declined to elaborate on the number of affected staff. They said that a small percentage of the roles will move to other offices in the US and abroad where Google is putting more investment, including India, Dublin, and Atlanta.
"As we've said, we're responsibly investing in our company's biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead," said a Google spokesperson. "To best position us for these opportunities, throughout the second half of 2023 and into 2024, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, remove layers and align their resources to their biggest product priorities. Through this, we're simplifying our structures to give employees more opportunity to work on our most innovative and important advances and our biggest company priorities, while reducing bureaucracy and layers."
They said that impacted employees could apply for open roles inside Google.
Google has been cutting staff and reorganizing the company throughout 2023 and this year as it attempts to cut back on costs and move faster in critical areas such as AI.
Alphabet's other companies, including Verily, have also chopped head count.
In January, CEO Sundar Pichai warned staff that cuts would continue throughout the year, although they would not affect every team, according to a copy of the memo seen by BI.
Are you a current or former Google employee with insight to share? Reach this reporter securely on Signal (628-228-1836).
Airframe (novel) - Wikipedia
Wed, 17 Apr 2024 20:34
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
1996 novel by Michael Crichton
Airframe is a novel by the American writer Michael Crichton, his eleventh under his own name and twenty-first overall, first published in 1996, in hardcover, by Knopf, just months after the crash of Tarom Flight 371. As a paperback, Airframe was released in 1997 by Ballantine Books. The plot follows Casey Singleton, a quality assurance vice president at the fictional aerospace manufacturer Norton Aircraft, as she investigates an in-flight accident aboard a Norton-manufactured airliner that leaves three passengers dead and 56 injured.
Airframe remains one of Crichton's few novels not adapted to film. Crichton stated this was due to the great expense needed to make such a film. The novel's dense technical details for the accident investigation may also have hindered cinematic adaptations.
Plot summary [ edit ] Over the Pacific Ocean, TransPacific Airlines Flight 545 experiences severe pitch oscillations, leading to dozens of injured passengers and several deaths. The plane, a Norton Aircraft N-22, has an excellent safety record, and the captain is highly skilled, making the possibility of human error unlikely. Casey Singleton, a vice president in quality assurance at Norton, is assigned by COO John Marder to the Incident Review Team (IRT) to investigate. The IRT has one week to identify the issue in order to prevent a major sale with China from falling apart over safety concerns.
Due to issues with the flight recorders, the team is forced to manually check each system of the aircraft. At first, all signs point to the plane's slats accidentally deploying mid-flight. Though other N-22s had exhibited similar slats errors in the past, Norton assumed the problem had been fixed. Their search uncovers a counterfeit part in the wing, but this would not have been enough to cause the accident on its own. Meanwhile, Casey grows suspicious of Bob Richman, an arrogant Norton family member assigned to assist her. Additionally, the factory union is concerned the China sale will offset the wing to China, threatening employees' jobs, and the union seeks to sabotage the deal.
An unrelated N-22 engine failure and the release of passenger camera footage from Flight 545 draws heavy media attention to Norton. Jennifer Malone, a producer for the news program Newsline, is interested in reporting on Norton's flaws and pursues the story; Marder asks Casey to conduct an interview for Newsline. Later, Casey realizes the plane was equipped with a Quick Access Recorder (QAR) '' the team did not know the plane was equipped with one because QARs are optional. Casey locates the QAR and pieces together the events that caused the accident. First, a counterfeit part caused a sensor in the plane's wing to malfunction, which produced an error message in the cockpit. This error message could be cleared by deploying and retracting the plane's slats. Although deploying the slats would change the shape of the wing, the N-22's autopilot could adjust without incident. However, the pilot at the time of the accident was the captain's son, who was not certified to fly the N-22; he manually overcorrected, overriding the autopilot and sending the plane into a series of oscillations.
Casey realizes she cannot publicize this information. Publicly pinning the blame for the accident on a TransPacific employee would sour relations with the airline, ruining future sales just as surely as any N-22 safety issues would. During her Newsline interview, she also discovers Richman has set her up to fail as part of a larger conspiracy. Richman and Marder had secretly prepared a larger sale to a South Korean airline, which included offsetting the wing. They hoped to use the accident to sink the China deal and oust CEO Harold Edgarton, confident that the accident would not jeopardize the Korean deal.
Casey thwarts the plan by allowing Malone onto a test flight for the N-22 from the accident, where it is shown a slats deployment alone would not cause the accident. Once Malone is shown the evidence, she cannot air her segment as planned without opening up Newsline to a defamation lawsuit. She is also unable to report the true story, since her boss thinks it is not exciting enough to hold people's attention. With the N-22's reputation cleared, the China deal goes off without a hitch. Afterwards, Edgarton promotes Casey to head the company's Media Relations Division. Richman is arrested in Singapore for narcotics possession, while Marder leaves the company, supposedly on good terms.
Major characters [ edit ] Casey Singleton '' The protagonist and a vice-president; Serves as a Quality Assurance representative on the company's Incident Review Team (IRT).John Marder '' Chief Operating Officer at the Norton Plant in Burbank, California; Also oversaw the production project for the N-22 widebody that was involved in the incident.Jennifer Malone '' Producer for Newsline that investigates the incident in order to create a televised segment against the N-22.Minor characters [ edit ] Doug Doherty '' An engineer who is the structure and mechanical expert on the IRT.Nguyen Van Trung '' Avionics expert on the Incident Review Team, overseeing the operation of the autopilot.Ken Burne '' Power plant expert on the IRT.Ron Smith '' Electrical expert on the IRT.Mike Lee '' Carrier representative for TransPacific Airlines to Norton Aircraft.Barbara Ross '' IRT secretaryNorma '' Casey Singleton's secretary who has been with the company for many years and knows its history.Bob Richman '' Casey Singleton's recently appointed assistant; a relative in the Norton family tree working his way through the corporate divisions.Harold Edgarton '' President of Norton Aircraft.Ted Rawley - A test pilot for Norton Aircraft who has an occasional romantic relationship with Singleton.Dick Shenk '' Segment organizer for the fictional TV program Newsline, based in New York City.Marty Reardon '' "On-talent" interviewer for NewslineFrederick Barker '' A former FAA employee and severe critic of the N-22 aircraft.Major themes [ edit ] Air safety procedures are a central theme in the novel. In illustrating the redundancies and safety measures necessary for every step of the airplane construction process as well as condemning the death of other publicly maligned aircraft such as the DC-10, Crichton challenges public perception of air safety, highlighting how the blame for accidents is often directed at the wrong party.
Another central theme, which compounds the issue mentioned above, is investigative journalism, and the consequences when sensational media agencies distort the truth to produce a better-selling story. The TV journalism subplot was singled out for praise in some reviews; Entertainment Weekly lauded it as "brutal and fresh and very funny" satire.[1] The San Francisco Chronicle calls his portrayal of TV journalists believable, noting that Crichton "doesn't mind making enemies."[2]
Airframe also continues the theme of human failure in human-machine interaction that is present across Crichton's other works. Despite malfunctions due to improper maintenance, the plane itself was functional; the incident was a result of human error by an insufficiently trained pilot.
References to real events [ edit ] In Airframe, as in most of his novels, Crichton uses the literary device of false documents, presenting numerous technical documents to create a sense of authenticity. He also takes great pains to be as accurate as possible in the novel's technical details.[3] When the characters discuss how unfavorable media coverage can be the undoing of a perfectly good aircraft, his account of the American Airlines Flight 191 crash and its causes are consistent with the known facts at the time the novel was written.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Crichton said that he drew upon the National Transportation Safety Board's aircraft accident report archives during his writing process, calling them "an unbelievable trove."[3] As a result, the N-22 accident described in the novel resembles two real-life cases:
The violent oscillations, the issue with the flap/slat handle becoming dislodged, and the importance of pilot training in order to respond properly to the characteristics of a specific aircraft type are closely modeled on the 1993 accident aboard China Eastern Airlines Flight 583.[4]A pilot allowing his son to sit at the controls was also the cause of the 1994 Aeroflot Flight 593 crash.[5] As in the novel, the son inadvertently disabled their aircraft's autopilot, and the accident could have been averted by re-engaging it. However, while the son in Airframe is a pilot, the son in this case was only 16 years old. Also unlike the novel, the Aeroflot crew did not manage to recover from their overcorrection and crashed, killing all 75 passengers and crew.Reception [ edit ] Airframe received generally positive reviews. In her San Francisco Chronicle review, Patricia Holt called it "classic Crichton," adding that readers will be "surprised, satisfied and even a bit better informed at the end."[2] The New York Times' Christopher Lehmann-Haupt said of the novel, "By playing hide and seek with his plot, Mr. Crichton writes as if he were an engineer and his readers were all outsiders. Yet at the same time, he has taken on a complex subject in Airframe and made its subtleties dramatically vivid."[6] Tom De Haven of Entertainment Weekly praised Crichton's research, saying, "I bet Michael Crichton was a kid who did his homework every night '-- and not only did it, but triple-checked it, made sure there were no smudges on the paper, then presented it to the teacher between card-stock covers secured with shiny brass fasteners."[1] The Boston Globe's Nancy Harris commended Crichton on his ability to simplify the technical intricacies of aviation, calling Airframe a "very readable book."[7]
Reviews tempered their praise with criticism of Crichton's writing style. De Haven took issue with the novel's use of genre clich(C)s and "the clunkiest of plot gimmicks."[1] Holt called it "formulaic but hard to put down" and described its characters as "cardboard."[2] Lehmann-Haupt went even further, saying, "When you finish the novel and ask yourself why you end up feeling both entertained and frustrated, you are forced to reflect that a writer clever enough to bring such material to life ought to have been able to tell his story without playing manipulative games with the reader."[6]
Though the central accident in Airframe primarily resembles China Eastern Airlines Flight 583 and Aeroflot Flight 593, Mark Lawson of The Guardian accused Crichton and his publishers of trying to capitalize on a different airplane disaster. Lawson notes that the novel was "loaded into airport bookstores shortly after the TWA 800 flight went down in the Atlantic," adding, "Crichton's profile as a writer depends on ... extreme topicality."[8]
Adaptation [ edit ] An adaptation of Airframe, alongside an adaptation of Eaters of the Dead, was in development in the 1990s with Crichton and John McTiernan producing both.[9][10]
See also [ edit ] Accident analysisList of accidents and incidents involving commercial aircraftFlight testFailure analysisAir route authority between the United States and ChinaProduct liabilityReferences [ edit ] ^ a b c De Haven, Tom (13 December 1996). "Airframe". Entertainment Weekly . Retrieved 27 July 2017 . ^ a b c Holt, Patricia (5 December 1996). "BOOKS -- Crichton Takes to The Skies / 'Airframe' formulaic but hard to put down". San Francisco Chronicle . Retrieved 27 July 2017 . ^ a b Wasserman, Steve (15 December 1996). "Between Flights With Michael Crichton". Los Angeles Times . Retrieved 27 July 2017 . ^ "Accident Description". Aviation Safety Network. Flight Safety Foundation. 27 July 2017 . Retrieved 27 July 2017 . ^ "Accident description". Aviation Safety Network. Flight Safety Foundation. 27 July 2017 . Retrieved 27 July 2017 . ^ a b Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. "A thriller not to carry on your next plane trip". The New York Times, December 5, 1996. ^ Harris, Nancy (14 April 2011). "Novel connects with headlines". The Boston Globe . Retrieved 27 July 2017 . ^ Lawson, Mark (3 December 1999). "We have been here before". The Guardian . Retrieved 27 July 2017 . ^ "Dowd inks Disney deal". Variety . Retrieved July 19, 2021 . ^ "Confessions from the crypt". www.variety.com. January 9, 2001 . Retrieved December 6, 2023 . External links [ edit ] Airframe webpage Archived 2015-06-17 at the Wayback Machine
Team At A Glance '-- Yellow Bird Counseling
Wed, 17 Apr 2024 20:29
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Dominique Cecil
Dominique is the CEO of Yellow Bird Counseling. A proud graduate of Montevallo University, Dominique has a Masters in Education and is a licensed professional counselor. Additionally, she is trained in CBT and EMDR.
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Bridget graduated from the University of Tennessee with a Master of Science in Social Work. Bridget is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and has been providing mental health services for over 10 years.
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Shekinah completed her BS in Secondary Education with honors. She went on to graduate with her Master's in Counseling from the University of Montevallo and shortly after became a Nationally Certified Counselor.
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Jennifer is a native of Birmingham, AL, and matriculated through the Birmingham City School System. Jennifer is a graduate of the University of Montevallo, where she majored in Social Work and minored in Psychology.
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Jason Perry is originally from Birmingham, AL, by way of Hoover, AL. He currently serves as the Student Diversity Recruitment and Retention Coordinator at the University of Montevallo where he coordinates the Minorities Achieving Dreams of Excellence (M.A.D.E.) Program.
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Tiffiney Hill is a licensed clinical social worker with experience working with adults to treat multiple mental health disorders including depression, anxiety, PTSD, and adjustment issues.
More about Tiffiney Tish JonesLa Tycia ''Tish'' Jones is a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker with experience in clinical social work since 2001. She currently is involved in developing tracking tools to monitor patient progress and outcomes, implementing new programs in health services, and assisting physicians in managing and completing their Medicare Quality Metric. In meeting individual quality metrics, she conducts interventions to include face-to-face visits with patients and their families in emergency rooms and physician's offices, as well as case and disease management.
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JaKeia obtained her undergraduate degree from Miles College and graduate degree from the University of Alabama. Since that time, she has worked in the fields of child welfare, substance abuse, intellectual disabilities, medical/healthcare, and geriatric hospice.
Jakeia has worked with children, adults, and the geriatric populations during her career. She has assisted those that have dual diagnoses, trauma, anxiety, depression, and those with medical conditions and shorter life expectancy.
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Kristin graduated from the University of Alabama at Birmingham with a Master of Arts in Clinical MentalHealth Counseling. She is a licensed professional counselor with experience working with individuals with depression, anxiety, self-esteem issues, substance abuse, and grief.
Kristin especially enjoys working with erotically marginalized clients, including those who have questions about their sexuality or gender identity, as well as people who identify as kinky or ethically non-monogamous.
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The Life and Death of Hollywood, by Daniel Bessner
Tue, 16 Apr 2024 21:02
In 2012, at the age of thirty-two, the writer Alena Smith went West to Hollywood, like many before her. She arrived to a small apartment in Silver Lake, one block from the Vista Theatre'--a single-screen Spanish Colonial Revival building that had opened in 1923, four years before the advent of sound in film.
Smith was looking for a job in television. She had an MFA from the Yale School of Drama, and had lived and worked as a playwright in New York City for years'--two of her productions garnered positive reviews in the Times. But playwriting had begun to feel like a vanity project: to pay rent, she'd worked as a nanny, a transcriptionist, an administrative assistant, and more. There seemed to be no viable financial future in theater, nor in academia, the other world where she supposed she could make inroads.
For several years, her friends and colleagues had been absconding for Los Angeles, and were finding success. This was the second decade of prestige television: the era of Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Homeland, Girls. TV had become a place for sharp wit, singular voices, people with vision'--and they were getting paid. It took a year and a half, but Smith eventually landed a spot as a staff writer on HBO's The Newsroom, and then as a story editor on Showtime's The Affair in 2015.
I first spoke with Smith in August of last year, four months into the strike called by the Writers Guild of America against the members of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), the biggest Hollywood studios. In 2013, she'd begun to develop the idea for what would become Dickinson, a gothic, at times surreal comedy based on the life of the poet, Emily. ''I realized you could do one of those visceral, sexy, dangerous half hours but make it a period piece,'' she said. ''I was never trying to write some middle-of-the-road thing.'' She sold the pilot and a plan for at least three seasons to Apple in 2017; she would be the showrunner, and the series had the potential to become one of the flagship offerings of the company's streaming service, which had not yet launched.
Looking back, Smith sometimes marvels that Dickinson was made at all. ''It centers an unapologetic, queer female lead,'' she said. ''It's about a poet and features her poetry in every episode'--hard-to-understand poetry. It has a high barrier of entry.'' But that was the time. Apple, like other streamers, was looking to make a splash. ''I mean, they made a show out of I Love Dick,'' Smith said, referring to the small-press cult classic by Chris Kraus, adapted into a 2016 series for Amazon Prime Video. ''That doesn't happen because people are using profit as their bottom line.''
In fact, they weren't. The streaming model was based on bringing in subscribers'--grabbing as much of the market as possible'--rather than on earning revenue from individual shows. And big swings brought in new viewers. ''It's like a whole world of intellectuals and artists got a multibillion-dollar grant from the tech world,'' Smith said. ''But we mistook that, and were frankly actively gaslit into thinking that that was because they cared about art.''
Making a show for Apple was not what she'd hoped it would be. What the company wanted from her and the series never felt clear'--there was a ''radical information asymmetry,'' she said, regarding management's priorities and metrics. After she and her colleagues completed the first season of Dickinson, they waited for the streamer to launch and the show to air. Their requests for a firm timeline and premiere date were ignored. Smith started to worry that Apple might scrap the idea for the streaming platform altogether, in which case the show might never be seen, or might even disappear'--she didn't have a copy of the finished product. It belonged to Apple and lived on the company's servers.
''It was communicated to me,'' Smith said, ''that my only choice to keep the show alive was to begin all over again and write a whole new season without a green-light guarantee. So I was expected to take on that risk, when the entities that stood to profit the most from the success of my creative labor, the platform and studio, would not risk a dime.'' ''It was also on me,'' she went on, ''to kind of fluff everybody involved in the entire making of the show, from the stars to the line producer to the costume designer, etcetera, to make them believe that we'd be coming back again and prevent them, sometimes unsuccessfully, from taking other jobs.''
Finally, in late 2019, when Smith and her colleagues were two months into production on Season 2, the show premiered as one of the streamer's four original series. It was an immediate critical success and a sensation on social media. ''In Apple TV+'s initial smattering of shows,'' wrote the Washington Post, ''only 'Dickinson' is a delicious surprise.'' It received a 2019 Peabody Award; in 2021 it made the New York Times' list of best programs of the year and won a Rotten Tomatoes prize for Fan Favorite TV Series.
But Smith was losing steam. ''I was only allowed to make the show to the extent that I was willing to take on unbelievable amounts of risk and labor on my own body perpetually, without ceasing, for years,'' she said. ''And I knew that if I ever stopped, the show would die.'' It had seemed to her that Apple didn't value the series, and she felt at a loss. Smith now knows that Dickinson was the company's most-watched show in its second and third seasons. But at the time, she had no access to concrete information about its performance. As was the habit among streamers, Apple didn't share viewership data with its writers. And without that data, Smith had no leverage. In 2020, after three seasons, she told Apple that she was done. ''I said, I can't do it anymore. And Apple said, Okay.''
''Passion can only get you so far,'' she told me. But she'd stayed in Hollywood. ''I'm an artist,'' she said, ''and I'm never going to stop creating.'' The industry was still the only place one could make a real living as a writer. ''When people say, Why stay in TV?'' she said, ''The answer is, There is nothing else. What do you mean?''
The truth was that the forces that had opened doors for Smith were the same ones that had made her individual work seem not to matter. They were the same forces that had been degrading writers' working lives for some time, and they were cannibalizing the business of Hollywood itself.
Thanks to decades of deregulation and a gush of speculative cash that first hit the industry in the late Aughts, while prestige TV was climbing the rungs of the culture, massive entertainment and media corporations had been swallowing what few smaller companies remained, and financial firms had been infiltrating the business, moving to reduce risk and maximize efficiency at all costs, exhausting writers in evermore unstable conditions.
''The industry is in a deep and existential crisis,'' the head of a midsize studio told me in early August. * We were in the lounge of the Soho House in West Hollywood. ''It is probably the deepest and most existential crisis it's ever been in. The writers are losing out. The middle layer of craftsmen are losing out. The top end of the talent are making more money than they ever have, but the nuts-and-bolts people who make the industry go round are losing out dramatically.''
Hollywood had become a winner-takes-all economy. As of 2021, CEOs at the majority of the largest companies and conglomerates in the industry drew salaries between two hundred and three thousand times greater than those of median employees. And while writer-producer royalty such as Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy had in recent years signed deals reportedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and a slightly larger group of A-list writers, such as Smith, had carved out comfortable or middle-class lives, many more were working in bare-bones, short-term writers' rooms, often between stints in the service industry, without much hope for more steady work. As of early 2023, among those lucky enough to be employed, the median TV writer-producer was making 23 percent less a week, in real dollars, than their peers a decade before. Total earnings for feature-film writers had dropped nearly 20 percent between 2019 and 2021.
Writers had been squeezed by the studios many times in the past, but never this far. And when the WGA went on strike last spring, they were historically unified: more guild members than ever before turned out for the vote to authorize, and 97.9 percent voted in favor. After five months, the writers were said to have won: they gained a new residuals model for streaming, new minimum lengths of employment for TV, and more guaranteed paid work on feature-film screenplays, among other protections.
But the business of Hollywood had undergone a foundational change. The new effective bosses of the industry'--colossal conglomerates, asset-management companies, and private-equity firms'--had not been simply pushing workers too hard and grabbing more than their fair share of the profits. They had been stripping value from the production system like copper pipes from a house'--threatening the sustainability of the studios themselves. Today's business side does not have a necessary vested interest in ''the business'''--in the health of what we think of as Hollywood, a place and system in which creativity is exchanged for capital. The union wins did not begin to address this fundamental problem.
Currently, the machine is sputtering, running on fumes. According to research by Bloomberg, in 2013 the largest companies in film and television were more than $20 billion in the black; by 2022, that number had fallen by roughly half. From 2021 to 2022, revenue growth for the industry dropped by almost 50 percent. At U.S. box offices, by the end of last year, revenue was down 22 percent from 2019. Experts estimate that cable-television revenue has fallen 40 percent since 2015. Streaming has rarely been profitable at all. Until very recently, Netflix was the sole platform to make money; among the other companies with streaming services, only Warner Bros. Discovery's platforms may have eked out a profit last year. And now the streaming gold rush'--the era that made Dickinson'--is over. In the spring of 2022, the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates after years of nearly free credit, and at roughly the same time, Wall Street began calling in the streamers' bets. The stock prices of nearly all the major companies with streaming platforms took precipitous falls, and none have rebounded to their prior valuation.
The industry as a whole is now facing a broad contraction. Between August 2022 and the end of last year, employment fell by 26 percent'--more than one job gone in every four. Layoffs hit Warner Bros. Discovery, Netflix, Paramount Global, Roku, and others in 2022. In 2023, firings swept through the representation giants United Talent Agency and Creative Artists Agency; Netflix, Paramount Global, and Roku again; plus Hulu, NBCUniversal, and Lionsgate. In early 2024, it was announced that Amazon was cutting hundreds of jobs from its Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios divisions. In February, Paramount Global laid off roughly eight hundred people. It's unclear which streamers will survive. As James Dolan, the interim executive chair of AMC Networks, told employees in late 2022 as he delivered news of massive layoffs'--roughly 1,700 people (20 percent of U.S. staff) would lose their jobs'--''the mechanisms for the monetization of content are in disarray.''
Profit will of course find a way; there will always be shit to watch. But without radical intervention, whether by the government or the workers, the industry will become unrecognizable. And the writing trade'--the kind where one actually earns a living'--will be obliterated.
Greed is not new to Hollywood. The well-off career we associate with twentieth-century screenwriting came about from a combination of worker action and federal regulation. The job was shaped in its early years, beginning in the Twenties, by a cartel of major motion-picture companies that, in 1948, would be found by the Supreme Court to have conspired to fix prices and monopolize the industry. Yet writing for the studios was good, salaried work. Up until the brink of the Depression, the companies were rolling in money. In 1931, average yearly income for a full-time, regularly employed writer was more than $14,000'--roughly $273,000 in today's money'--more than three times that of the average American.
But in 1933, both MGM and Paramount Pictures cut screenwriters' pay by 50 percent, and writers moved to form a union. The Screen Writers Guild was certified in 1938, and its first contract, in 1942, secured a guaranteed baseline pay of $125 a week'--the equivalent of roughly $2,500 today'--and the power to arbitrate over screenwriting credits, which had previously been at the whim of producers.
When the Supreme Court ruling came down, studio power was dealt another blow. The industry's eight reigning companies were each forced to enter into an agreement with the Department of Justice, collectively known as the Paramount Decrees, which prohibited them from both distributing and exhibiting the films they produced'--they could do only one or the other. The companies that owned theater chains gave up their cinemas, taking a significant hit. In the years that followed, the studios, less flush with cash, began to prefer freelance writers to salaried employees.
By the end of the Fifties, when 86 percent of Americans owned a television, writers had piecemeal established limited residual payments but wanted more. The studios'--which now made both films and television'--claimed that the fast-changing business was too uncertain to increase writers' cuts, an assertion that, according to the film and media historian Miranda Banks, later executives would repeat with each major technological innovation in distribution, from cable to VHS tapes to DVDs, and finally to streaming. In 1960, the union, now the Writers Guild of America, went on strike, soon followed by the Screen Actors Guild. Both won expanded residuals, increased minimums, pensions, and health benefits. Most writers were now freelancers, but they had established a basis for long and stable careers.
Over the next two decades, the writing profession was further bolstered by a federal government that enforced and expanded antitrust law. In 1970, the Federal Communications Commission instituted the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules'--or Fin-Syn'--which barred networks from holding ownership stakes in the prime-time and syndicated programs that they aired, effectively prohibiting film studios from owning TV networks and vice versa, and generally increasing competition. In the mid-Seventies, full-time TV staffers were paid a minimum of roughly $30,000 a year, almost twice the median family income in 1976. For high-budget feature-film screenplays, writers made a baseline of about $17,000, or around $95,000 in today's money.
It wasn't until the early Eighties, when the Reagan Revolution hit Hollywood, that the guardrails began to fall. In 1983, the Department of Justice allowed HBO, Columbia Pictures, and CBS to merge to form TriStar Pictures, combining cable, film, and broadcast-network interests in direct violation of antitrust law. Executives at other entertainment companies took note and moved to create their own conglomerates. In 1985, the DOJ went a step further, issuing a memo, later discovered by the historian Jennifer Holt, stating that it would no longer enforce the Paramount Decrees, and the studios scooped up theater chains once again. When the Clinton Administration came to power, it carried on what its Republican predecessors had begun. In 1993, the FCC began to formally repeal the Fin-Syn rules, and in 1996, Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act, which removed restrictions on the cross-ownership of broadcast networks and cable providers. In 1994, in an unprecedented deal, cable giant Viacom merged with retailer Blockbuster Video, and took over Paramount Pictures. In 1996, Disney merged with Capital Cities/ABC to become the largest entertainment conglomerate in the world. The next year, Time Warner'--already the product of two massive corporations, and previously the biggest conglomerate'--joined with Turner Broadcasting System and reclaimed the crown. The gates had been opened, and the new monopolization was only just beginning.
At first, deregulation did not seem to harm writers. The mergers and acquisitions opened up synergies across the newly diverse properties within each conglomerate, bringing in, according to the historian of Hollywood Tom Schatz, unprecedented profits. This coincided with a boom in the theatrical business and may have contributed to increasing movie budgets'--which skyrocketed during the Eighties and Nineties'--and increased pay for screenwriters. In the late Eighties and throughout the Nineties, executives seemed to have more money to spend than ever before. Studios were hungry for original material, and invested more in development. They paid writers to try out concepts, crack stories, and see what worked. Howard A. Rodman, a writer for the recent HBO series The Idol and a former president of the WGA West, had started out in 1987. ''In the era that I came up in,'' he told me in August, ''a studio might develop thirty to forty screenplays to get the one that actually sang.'' The norm was what's known as a multistep deal: studios paid up front for ideas, then scripts, then rewrites. Robin Swicord, writer of the adaptations for 1994's Little Women and 2008's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, told me: ''When you would walk into someone's office for a meeting, you'd see behind them a wall of screenplays.'' She worked with one executive who oversaw 120 scripts in development in one year.
There was a heightened interest in ''spec'' scripts'--unsolicited screenplays'--and doors seemed to fly open. The writer John Brancato had vaulted into the A-list in 1991, when he sold the script that would later become The Game, starring Michael Douglas. A year or two later, he told me, he was hired to write a major movie screenplay'--what eventually became The Net, starring Sandra Bullock'--based on only a vague conversation. Pay ranged from solid to life-changing. In 1994 and 1995, original scripts for high-budget movies brought in a minimum of around $72,000'--the equivalent of about $150,000 today.
In television, deregulation had aided the rise of cable, opening up new opportunities for writers. In the mid-Eighties, there had been fewer than fifty cable networks; by the end of the Nineties, there were more than two hundred, and nearly 70 percent of American homes had access. Multiple series from HBO, such as Sex and the City, which first aired in 1998, and The Sopranos, which debuted in 1999, were not only hits but cultural phenomena, and other cable networks dove in to scripted content.
A staff writer on a premium cable show in 1998 working for five months would make at least $2,400 a week'--adding up to more than $90,000 in today's money. Writers above the entry level would receive lump sums of more than $17,000 for authoring complete episodes. They also earned residuals. Broadcast networks often paid writers even more than cable, and writers were usually employed for longer. In September, I spoke with an A-list film and TV writer who worked on a variety of network shows in the late Nineties and early Aughts. ''You felt like you hit the majors,'' he said. ''You were on call twenty-four seven; you worked nights. But the given was that you're getting paid a gazillion dollars. It was an amazing time to be a television writer.''
Behind the scenes, however, deregulation was already allowing executives to shore up extraordinary power, and a new distance was forming between business interests and the production of film and TV. Writers' fortunes were set to change.
By the early Aughts, six enormous conglomerates'--Disney, General Electric, News Corporation, Sony, Time Warner, and Viacom'--controlled every major movie studio and broadcast network, and a substantial portion of the profitable cable businesses. The conglomerates were raking in more than 85 percent of all film revenue and producing more than 80 percent of American prime-time television. As these entities grew, business operations became much more complex, and the sleight of hand known as Hollywood accounting'--obfuscating exactly how much is spent and earned, exactly how much is due to be paid out'--became much easier for the studios.
Writers were beginning to feel the squeeze. They suspected that they were being shorted on royalties and residuals, and on their share of profits from the home-video market. At the same time, what was then called New Media'--content on the web and for mobile devices'--which wasn't covered under the union contract, was starting to eat into their overall cut. In November 2007, the WGA went on strike. But writers were still making a fairly comfortable living, and others in the industry were not as supportive as they would come to be in 2023. ''There was a sense of, 'Why are you motherfuckers putting all the dry cleaners and caterers out of work?'''' Rodman told me. ''''This is a picket line of millionaires against billionaires.'''' The strike was ultimately undercut by dissent within the guild. The WGA agreed to an AMPTP offer that established the right to bargain over New Media and granted writers residuals for material rebroadcast online, but with no increase for DVDs.
When the strike was over, it was February 2008. The United States was three months into what would later be understood as the Great Recession. In an effort to stimulate the economy, the Federal Reserve had begun cutting interest rates in September, and over the following eighteen months it provided financial institutions with more than $7.7 trillion in capital. In late 2008, the Fed reduced the interest rate to almost zero. With piles of cash and cheap credit in hand, asset-management companies and private-equity firms set out for the frontiers of various U.S. industries. Over the next decade, three asset-management companies'--BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street'--would take over American business, becoming the largest shareholders of 88 percent of the S&P 500, the roughly five hundred biggest public U.S. companies. Private-equity firms'--distinguished by their intent to sell the properties they acquire'--would eventually be the backing for at least 7 percent of American jobs.
To these speculators, Hollywood looked like a gold mine: the studios and entertainment corporations were ripe with redundancies and inefficiencies to be axed'--costs to be cut, parts to be sold, profits to be diverted to shareholders, executives, and new, often unrelated ventures. And thanks to the deregulation of the preceding decades, the industry was wide open. Financial institutions could snatch up or take over large portions of companies in any area of the business; they could even acquire or substantially invest in groups in competition with one another'--and they did, creating types of soft monopoly. Bets were even placed against the traditional industry as a whole, in the form of investments in Netflix, which promised to disrupt and dominate at-home viewing. Today the Big Three asset-management firms hold the largest stakes in most rival companies in media and entertainment. As of the end of last year, Vanguard, for example, owned the largest stake in Disney, Netflix, Comcast, Apple, and Warner Bros. Discovery. It holds a substantial share of Amazon and Paramount Global. By 2010, private-equity companies had acquired MGM, Miramax, and AMC Theatres, and had scooped up portions of Hulu and DreamWorks. Private equity now has its hands in Univision, Lionsgate, Skydance, and more.
The flood of cash from Wall Street compounded the monopolization under way, accelerating mergers and acquisitions, and transforming already massive entities into behemoths. Between 2009 and 2019, Disney, for example, purchased Marvel, Lucasfilm, and 21st Century Fox. Comcast purchased NBCUniversal, DreamWorks Animation, and Sky. And the financial firms set about extracting and multiplying short-term profits. Andrew deWaard, a scholar of the political economy of media, has found that the use of dividends, stock buybacks, and corporate venture capital, all of which siphon revenue away from reinvestment in a business and its workforce, exploded in entertainment companies between 2008 and 2023. Comcast, for instance, which through its subsidiaries owns more than ten TV networks and studios, paid out more than $3.2 billion in dividends and stock buybacks in 2008. In 2022, that number topped $18 billion.
The studios, now beholden to much larger companies and financial institutions, became subject to oversight focused on short-term horizons. This summer, I spoke with the head of a film and TV studio purchased by a private-equity firm in recent years. ''It used to be there were these big, crusty, old legacy companies that had a longer-term view,'' he said, ''that could absorb losses, and could take risks. But now everything is driven by quarterly results. The only thing that matters is the next board meeting. You don't make any decisions that have long-term benefits. You're always just thinking about, 'How do I meet my numbers?'''' Efficiency and risk avoidance began to run the game.
In the years following the recession, there was, as Howard Rodman put it, ''a slow erosion'' in feature-film writers' ability to earn a living. To the new bosses, the quantity of money that studios had been spending on developing screenplays'--many of which would never be made'--was obvious fat to be cut, and in the late Aughts, executives increasingly began offering one-step deals, guaranteeing only one round of pay for one round of work. Writers, hoping to make it past Go, began doing much more labor'--multiple steps of development'--for what was ostensibly one step of the process. In separate interviews, Dana Stevens, writer of The Woman King, and Robin Swicord described the change using exactly the same words: ''Free work was encoded.'' So was safe material. In an effort to anticipate what a studio would green-light, writers incorporated feedback from producers and junior executives, constructing what became known as producer's drafts. As Rodman explained it: ''Your producer says to you, 'I love your script. It's a great first draft. But I know what the studio wants. This isn't it. So I need you to just make this protagonist more likable, and blah, blah, blah.' And you do it.''
At the same time, the fees that writers could charge for their work were being pushed down. Talent agents, who had previously advocated for their writers to make as much money as possible, were now employed by much larger companies that derived their revenue from a variety of other sources and controlled the market for writer representation. By 2019, the major Hollywood agencies had been consolidated into an oligopoly of four companies that controlled more than 75 percent of WGA writers' earnings. And in the 2010s, high finance reached the agencies: by 2014, private equity had acquired Creative Artists Agency and William Morris Endeavor, and the latter had purchased IMG. Meeting benchmarks legible to the new bosses'--deals actually made, projects off the ground'--pushed agents to function more like producers, and writers began hearing that their asking prices were too high.
Executives, meanwhile, increasingly believed that they'd found their best bet in ''IP'': preexisting intellectual property'--familiar stories, characters, and products'--that could be milled for scripts. As an associate producer of a successful Aughts IP-driven franchise told me, IP is ''sort of a hedge.'' There's some knowledge of the consumer's interest, he said. ''There's a sort of dry run for the story.'' Screenwriter Zack Stentz, who co-wrote the 2011 movies Thor and X-Men: First Class, told me, ''It's a way to take risk out of the equation as much as possible.''
Brancato, who himself found work on Catwoman and two movies in the Terminator franchise in the early Aughts, told me that by the middle of the decade, no one wanted original scripts. IP had proved extremely valuable on the international market'--increasingly important as domestic box-office growth stagnated over the course of the Aughts and 2010s'--and it began to make up a greater and greater share of studio output. According to the media historian Shawna Kidman, franchise movies had accounted for around 25 percent of all studios' wide-release features in 2000; in 2017 they made up more than 64 percent.
The shift to IP further tipped the scales of power. Multiple writers I spoke with said that selecting preexisting characters and cinematic worlds gave executives a type of psychic edge, allowing them to claim a degree of creative credit. And as IP took over, the perceived authority of writers diminished. Julie Bush, a writer-producer for the Apple TV+ limited series Manhunt, told me, ''Executives get to feel like the author of the work, even though they have a screenwriter, like me, basically create a story out of whole cloth.'' At the same time, the biggest IP success story, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, by far the highest-earning franchise of all time, pioneered a production apparatus in which writers were often separated from the conception and creation of a movie's overall story. ''Working on these big franchises is a little bit like being a stonemason on a medieval cathedral,'' Stentz told me. ''I can point toward this little corner, or this arch, and say, That was me.'' Within this system, writers have sometimes been withheld basic information, such as the arc of a project. Joanna Robinson, co-author of the book MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, told me that the writers for WandaVision, a Marvel show for Disney+, had to craft almost the entirety of the series' single season without knowing where their work was ultimately supposed to arrive: the ending remained undetermined, because executives had not yet decided what other stories they might spin off from the show. Marvel also began to use so many writers for each project that it became difficult to determine who was responsible for a given idea. Multiple writers who worked on Guardians of the Galaxy, The Incredible Hulk, The Avengers, and Thor: Ragnarok have forced WGA arbitration with the company to recoup the credits and earnings that they believe they're due.
Marvel's practices have been widely emulated, especially for franchise productions. ''Every other studio with big tentpole movies has tried to imitate the Marvel model,'' Stentz told me, including ''throwing waves of writers at the same project.'' ''In some cases,'' he said, ''they've gone even further, by convening entire writers' rooms'''--a standard practice only in television. Both the Avatar sequels (one of which is not yet out) and Terminator: Dark Fate were developed this way, he said.
''When there's high-profile IP involved,'' Brancato told me, ''writers tend to be treated as disposable.'' ''Everybody's feeling fucked over,'' he said. ''The general sense is that you're an absolutely fungible widget, and they don't any longer take you seriously. It's so broken. I mean, really, it is fucking broken.''
The post-recession flood of cash and credit played out very differently in the world of television: for years, creative workers considered it an incredible boon. It opened the industry to new writers, new subjects, and powered an era that actually seemed defined by risk-taking.
Netflix had convinced Wall Street that its value could be measured by subscriber growth, rather than short-term profit, and the streamers that came soon after it adopted the same model. The streaming ecosystem was built on a wager: high subscriber numbers would translate to large market shares, and eventually, profit. Under this strategy, an enormous amount of money could be spent on shows that might or might not work: more shows meant more opportunities to catch new subscribers. Producers and writers for streamers were able to put ratings aside, which at first seemed to be a luxury. Netflix paid writers large fees up front, and guaranteed that an entire season of a show would be produced. By the mid-2010s, the sheer quantity of series across the new platforms'--what's known as ''Peak TV'''--opened opportunities for unusually offbeat projects (see BoJack Horseman, a cartoon for adults about an equine has-been sitcom star), and substantially more shows created by women and writers of color. In 2009, across cable, broadcast, and streaming, 189 original scripted shows aired or released new episodes; in 2016, that number was 496. In 2022, it was 849.
The need for writers was enormous. But thanks in part to the cultural success of the new era, supply soon overshot demand. For those who beat out the competition, the work became much less steady than it had been in the pre-streaming era. According to insiders, in the past, writers for a series had usually been employed for around eight months, crafting long seasons and staying on board through a show's production. Junior writers often went to the sets where their shows were made and learned how to take a story from the page to the screen'--how to talk to actors, how to stay within budget, how to take a studio's notes'--setting them up to become showrunners. Now, in an innovation called mini-rooms, reportedly first ventured by cable channels such as AMC and Starz, fewer writers were employed for each series and for much shorter periods'--usually eight to ten weeks but as little as four. The weekly pay still put most other work to shame: between 2020 and 2023, a staff writer in a ten-week mini-room made at least $5,000 a week. But getting staffed for multiple rooms in a year was a challenge at best. Residual payments'--which at the time did not account for a show's success among viewers'--were often tiny. One writer, who ran a show for Apple TV+ in 2020 and 2021, told me that his residuals were ''near zero.'' Justin Boyd, who around the same time wrote for both Netflix and AMC, said that his network residuals were roughly double what they were for the streaming platform.
Writers in the new mini-room system were often dismissed before their series went to production, which meant that they rarely got the opportunity to go to set and weren't getting the skills they needed to advance. Showrunners were left responsible for all writing-related tasks when these rooms shut down. ''It broke a lot of showrunners,'' the A-list film and TV writer told me. ''Physically, mentally, financially. It also ruined a lot of shows.''
The price of entry for working in Hollywood had been high for a long time: unpaid internships, low-paid assistant jobs. But now the path beyond the entry level was increasingly unclear. Jason Grote, who was a staff writer on Mad Men and who came to TV from playwriting, told me, ''It became like a hobby for people, or something more like theater'--you had your other day jobs or you had a trust fund.'' Brenden Gallagher, a TV writer a decade in, said, ''There are periods of time where I work at the Apple Store. I've worked doing data entry, I've worked doing research, I've worked doing copywriting.'' Since he'd started in the business in 2014, in his mid-twenties, he'd never had more than eight months at a time when he didn't need a source of income from outside the industry.
In the end, the precarity created by this new regime seems to have had a disastrous effect on efforts to diversify writers' rooms. ''There was this feeling,'' the head of the midsize studio told me that day at Soho House, ''during the last ten years or so, of, 'Oh, we need to get more people of color in writers' rooms.'''' But what you get now, he said, is the black or Latino person who went to Harvard. ''They're getting the shot, but you don't actually see a widening of the aperture to include people who grew up poor, maybe went to a state school or not even, and are just really talented. That has not happened at all.'' To the extent that this was better than no change, he said, ''Writers' rooms are more diverse just in time for there not to be any writers' rooms anymore.''
By the end of the 2010s, it was clear that something had to give or the industry would be facing a dearth of trained talent. ''The Sopranos does not exist without David Chase having worked in television for almost thirty years,'' Blake Masters, a writer-producer and creator of the Showtime series Brotherhood, told me. ''Because The Sopranos really could not be written by somebody unless they understood everything about television, and hated all of it.'' Grote said much the same thing: ''Prestige TV wasn't new blood coming into Hollywood as much as it was a lot of veterans that were never able to tell these types of stories, who were suddenly able to cut through.''
Netflix, the other streamers, and the networks weren't just destabilizing the careers of individual writers: they were stealing from the industry's future. But things were once again worse than they seemed. The streamers, which would soon employ about half of TV-series writers, were thoroughly speculative ventures, and they were set to expand and contract with the whims of the market.
In April 2022, Netflix told investors that it had lost two hundred thousand subscribers in the first quarter of the year. It expected to lose two million users in the next three months. Within days, its stock price fell by 35 percent. By September, it was down 60 percent. By November, the share price of Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of Max, had dropped by 61 percent; Paramount, by 49; Disney, by 44; and Comcast, by 38. Meanwhile, tensions between writers and executives were rising, and by the time the WGA's board of directors was preparing for its triennial negotiations with the AMPTP, in the spring of 2023, they knew they were in for a fight.
The strike was called on May Day. In July, the actors guild, SAG-AFTRA, also struck, turning up the pressure on the AMPTP, and in late September, the studios and writers made a deal. In October, just days after the new contract was ratified, I spoke with Adam Conover, writer, creator, and star of truTV's Adam Ruins Everything and a member of the 2023 WGA negotiating committee. The AMPTP had been shortsighted, he told me, locked in an old view of their labor force. ''They didn't realize that they did their job too well,'' he said. ''Workers actually got pushed out, actually got their wages cut.'' The studios' own systems had already forced many writers to take second and third jobs; the workers were not anywhere near as dependent on industry pay as they had been in the past. And they were furious. Compared with the stoppage in 2007 and 2008, one producer told me, ''this felt more like scorched earth.'' Many writers I talked to during the strike spoke of the executives with a mix of anger and disbelief. Boyd told me, ''They cannot do what we do. And they hate us for it.'' ''I don't think the studios had any reckoning,'' Rodman said, ''of the solidarity and militancy that their own greed created in the people who create their wealth.''
In the end, that solidarity succeeded in establishing a new streaming-residuals model'--based on numbers of views'--minimum staffing requirements and lengths of employment for TV writers' rooms, and at least two rounds of guaranteed work for feature screenplays. The union had also forced streamers to release some viewership data, and had established that AI could not be given writing credit for anything: a human author would have to be involved and paid, regardless of AI output.
But as the dust has settled, it has become clear that there are several significant problems with the new agreement. The writers'-room staffing rules kick in only if a showrunner decides to bring on help at the start of a deal; otherwise, they can write a season on their own. It would often benefit them to go the latter route'--budgets, after all, are shrinking'--and studios would likely prefer this. One writer told me that by the start of 2024, he'd already seen showrunners use the loophole. As for the data-sharing agreement, a closer look reveals it to be, as deWaard put it, ''very limited, and very fragile.'' The studios will share viewership information with a limited number of WGA administrators for high-budget shows. The guild can then release that information only in a summary form, which, in the words of the contract, aggregates the data ''on an overall industry level.'' The guild cannot share any information at all on the performance of individual shows. A WGA representative told me that there would be no secondary process for writers to obtain that data.
The threshold for receiving the viewership-based streaming residuals is also incredibly high: a show must be viewed by at least 20 percent of a platform's domestic subscribers ''in the first 90 days of release, or in the first 90 days in any subsequent exhibition year.'' As Bloomberg reported in November, fewer than 5 percent of the original shows that streamed on Netflix in 2022 would have met this benchmark. ''I am not impressed,'' the A-list writer told me in January. Entry-level TV staffing, where more and more writers are getting stuck, ''is still a subsistence-level job,'' he said. ''It's a job for rich kids.''
Conover said that the most important facts were that guild leadership had kept members unified and that a new streaming-residuals structure was now in place; they could fight to raise the rates during the next round of negotiations, in 2026. ''Once something is a number on a piece of paper,'' he said, ''you can do a lot with it.'' The majority of writers I spoke with this winter said that it was too soon to tell what the impact of the new contract would be. A group almost as large said that the agreement did not address the fundamental problems in the business.
Brenden Gallagher, who echoed Conover's belief that the union was well-positioned to gain more in 2026, put it this way: ''My view is that there was a lot of wishful thinking about achieving this new middle class, based around, to paraphrase 30 Rock, making it 1997 again through science or magic. Will there be as big a working television-writer cohort that is making six figures a year consistently living in Los Angeles as there was from 1992 to 2021? No. That's never going to come back.''
Since the end of the strike, the industry has continued to contract. ''It's a great shaking-out point,'' the A-list writer told me. ''A lot of people who are very smart are willing to say, 'I don't know what it is going to be in a year, but it ain't going to be this.'''' Barry Schwartz, a film and TV writer in the industry for almost two decades, told me that post-strike, mid-career writers are making ''extremely conservative choices.'' ''People aren't speccing,'' he said'--submitting uncontracted scripts'--''and if they are, it's not original stuff. People are chasing IP or waiting on an assignment.'' And younger writers, he said, are keeping their heads down.
As for what types of TV and movies can get made by those who stick around, Kelvin Yu, creator and showrunner of the Disney+ series American Born Chinese, told me: ''I think that there will be an industry move to the middle in terms of safer, four-quadrant TV.'' (In L.A., a ''four-quadrant'' project is one that aims to appeal to all demographics.) ''I think a lot of people,'' he said, ''who were disenfranchised or marginalized'--their drink tickets are up.'' Indeed, multiple writers and executives told me that following the strike, studio choices have skewed even more conservative than before. ''It seems like buyers are much less adventurous,'' one writer said. ''Buyers are looking for Friends.''
There's no reason to believe that this type of caution will pay off. The supposed sure shot of IP is currently misfiring: in 2023, Disney's The Marvels fell more than $64 million short of breaking even, and its Indiana Jones sequel drastically underperformed. The Flash, for Warner Bros. Discovery, lost millions, and the company's Shazam! Fury of the Gods flopped. (In the case of Barbie'--the loudest exception'--the writers, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, were given extraordinary free rein.) As Zack Stentz put it, ''Hollywood is based on giving audiences what they might not know. Any attempt to drive risk out of that process is sooner or later doomed to failure.'' His words played off an old adage by the screenwriter William Goldman. ''Nobody knows anything,'' he wrote. ''Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for certain what's going to work.'' But investments in the alchemy of the creative process do not perform well in quarterly reports.
The film and TV industry is now controlled by only four major companies, and it is shot through with incentives to devalue the actual production of film and television. What is to be done? The most direct solution would be government intervention. If it wanted to, a presidential administration could enforce existing antitrust law, break up the conglomerates, and begin to pull entertainment companies loose from asset-management firms. It could regulate the use of financial tools, as deWaard has suggested; it could rein in private equity. The government could also increase competition directly by funding more public film and television. It could establish a universal basic income for artists and writers.
None of this is likely to happen. The entertainment and finance industries spend enormous sums lobbying both parties to maintain deregulation and prioritize the private sector. Writers will have to fight the studios again, but for more sweeping reforms. One change in particular has the potential to flip the power structure of the industry on its head: writers could demand to own complete copyright for the stories they create. They currently have something called ''separated rights,'' which allow a writer to use a script and its characters for limited purposes. But if they were to retain complete copyright, they would have vastly more leverage. Nearly every writer I spoke with seemed to believe that this would present a conflict with the way the union functions. This point is complicated and debatable, but Shawna Kidman and the legal expert Catherine Fisk'--both preeminent scholars of copyright and media'--told me that the greater challenge is Hollywood's structure. The business is currently built around studio ownership. While Kidman found the idea of writer ownership infeasible, Fisk said it was possible, though it would be extremely difficult. Pushing for copyright would essentially mean going to war with the studios. But if things continue on their current path, writers may have to weigh such hazards against the prospect of the end of their profession. Or, they could leave it all behind.
Climate Analytics | Will 2024 be the year emissions start falling?
Tue, 16 Apr 2024 19:27
Decarbonisation targets and 1.5' pathwaysTo help governments, civil society and the private sector understand the pace of change required, we develop new methods to calculate the emission reductions needed to decarbonise in line with this planetary limit.
Vaccine breakthrough means no more chasing strains | UCR News | UC Riverside
Tue, 16 Apr 2024 18:23
Scientists at UC Riverside have demonstrated a new, RNA-based vaccine strategy that is effective against any strain of a virus and can be used safely even by babies or the immunocompromised.
Peopleimages/iStock/GettyEvery year, researchers try to predict the four influenza strains that are most likely to be prevalent during the upcoming flu season. And every year, people line up to get their updated vaccine, hoping the researchers formulated the shot correctly.
The same is true of COVID vaccines, which have been reformulated to target sub-variants of the most prevalent strains circulating in the U.S.
This new strategy would eliminate the need to create all these different shots, because it targets a part of the viral genome that is common to all strains of a virus. The vaccine, how it works, and a demonstration of its efficacy in mice is described in a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
''What I want to emphasize about this vaccine strategy is that it is broad,'' said UCR virologist and paper author Rong Hai. ''It is broadly applicable to any number of viruses, broadly effective against any variant of a virus, and safe for a broad spectrum of people. This could be the universal vaccine that we have been looking for.''
Traditionally, vaccines contain either a dead or modified, live version of a virus. The body's immune system recognizes a protein in the virus and mounts an immune response. This response produces T-cells that attack the virus and stop it from spreading. It also produces ''memory'' B-cells that train your immune system to protect you from future attacks.
The new vaccine also uses a live, modified version of a virus. However, it does not rely on the vaccinated body having this traditional immune response or immune active proteins '-- which is the reason it can be used by babies whose immune systems are underdeveloped, or people suffering from a disease that overtaxes their immune system. Instead, this relies on small, silencing RNA molecules.
''A host '-- a person, a mouse, anyone infected'-- will produce small interfering RNAs as an immune response to viral infection. These RNAi then knock down the virus,'' said Shouwei Ding, distinguished professor of microbiology at UCR, and lead paper author.
The reason viruses successfully cause disease is because they produce proteins that block a host's RNAi response. ''If we make a mutant virus that cannot produce the protein to suppress our RNAi, we can weaken the virus. It can replicate to some level, but then loses the battle to the host RNAi response,'' Ding said. ''A virus weakened in this way can be used as a vaccine for boosting our RNAi immune system.''
When the researchers tested this strategy with a mouse virus called Nodamura, they did it with mutant mice lacking T and B cells. With one vaccine injection, they found the mice were protected from a lethal dose of the unmodified virus for at least 90 days. Note that some studies show nine mouse days are roughly equivalent to one human year.
There are few vaccines suitable for use in babies younger than six months old. However, even newborn mice produce small RNAi molecules, which is why the vaccine protected them as well. UC Riverside has now been issued a US patent on this RNAi vaccine technology.
In 2013, the same research team published a paper showing that flu infections also induce us to produce RNAi molecules. ''That's why our next step is to use this same concept to generate a flu vaccine, so infants can be protected. If we are successful, they'll no longer have to depend on their mothers' antibodies,'' Ding said.
Their flu vaccine will also likely be delivered in the form of a spray, as many people have an aversion to needles. ''Respiratory infections move through the nose, so a spray might be an easier delivery system,'' Hai said.
Additionally, the researchers say there is little chance of a virus mutating to avoid this vaccination strategy. ''Viruses may mutate in regions not targeted by traditional vaccines. However, we are targeting their whole genome with thousands of small RNAs. They cannot escape this,'' Hai said.
Ultimately, the researchers believe they can 'cut and paste' this strategy to make a one-and-done vaccine for any number of viruses.
''There are several well-known human pathogens; dengue, SARS, COVID. They all have similar viral functions,'' Ding said. ''This should be applicable to these viruses in an easy transfer of knowledge.''
NPR Suspends Uri Berliner Over Accusation of Liberal Bias
Tue, 16 Apr 2024 17:58
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NPR has suspended a veteran editor who accused the outlet of having ''lost America's trust'' with consistently left-leaning ''advocacy'' content the editor called ''devastating'' to its journalism.
Longtime NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik reported Tuesday that Uri Berliner '-- NPR's senior business editor who slammed the outlet in a recent column '-- has been suspended for five days without pay.
Berliner '-- in a column for Bari Weiss' Free Press site titled, ''I've Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here's How We Lost America's Trust.'' '-- the NPR veteran sounded off about the outlet's increasingly ''liberal bent.''
''It's true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed,'' Berliner wrote. ''We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding. In recent years, however, that has changed. '... An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don't have an audience that reflects America. That wouldn't be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it's devastating both for its journalism and its business model.''
In an interview published Tuesday, Berliner told Folkenflik, ''I love NPR and feel it's a national trust. We have great journalists here. If they shed their opinions and did the great journalism they're capable of, this would be a much more interesting and fulfilling organization for our listeners.''
The move comes amid heavy criticism from conservatives about NPR's new CEO, Katherine Maher. Right-leaning pundits on social media have uncovered posts from Maher in which she '-- among other things '-- appeared to downplay rioting during social justice protests.
''In America everyone is entitled to free speech as a private citizen,'' Maher said in a statement published by NPR. ''What matters is NPR's work and my commitment as its CEO: public service, editorial independence, and the mission to serve all of the American public. NPR is independent, beholden to no party, and without commercial interests.''
The newly-suspended Berliner told Folkenflik, ''We're looking for a leader right now who's going to be unifying and bring more people into the tent and have a broader perspective on, sort of, what America is all about. And this seems to be the opposite of that.''
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House passes series of bills aimed at squeezing Tehran financially | The Hill
Tue, 16 Apr 2024 17:56
Greg NashMajority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) addresses reporters after a closed-door House Republican Conference meeting on Wednesday, March 6, 2024.
The Republican-led House on Monday voted in favor of a series of bills aimed at squeezing Iran financially in response to an unprecedented drone and missile attack launched by the Islamic Republic against Israel over the weekend.
Three separate bills were brought to the floor Monday under suspension of the rules, a fast-track process that requires two-thirds support for passage, allowing for floor votes to be taken immediately.
The bills largely seek to impose financial penalties on Iran, those that support it and its network of proxies.
Israel, in partnership with the U.S., the U.K., France, and allies in the Middle East, repelled a massive Iranian aerial assault launched Saturday night, shooting down what they said was 99 percent of nearly 300 drones and missiles.
The bills voted for on Monday night are largely noncontroversial and enjoy support from a majority of Democrats.
They include a bill to terminate the tax-exempt status of nonprofit organizations found to be supporting terrorist groups; legislation aimed at disrupting the Chinese purchase of Iranian oil and petroleum products; and an effort to cut off the Iranian government from using the U.S. financial system.
But even as Democrats support this package of bills, they are critical of Republicans for failing for weeks to bring to a vote the Senate-passed $95 billion national security supplemental, which includes aid for not only Israel but also Ukraine and Taiwan.
Rep. Brad Schneider (D-Ill.) expressed support for H.R. 6408 '-- a bill that would terminate the tax-exempt status of terrorist-supporting organizations, which he co-sponsored with Rep. David Kustoff (R-Tenn.).
But Schneider pleaded with Republicans to bring the national security supplemental legislation to the floor.
''I again want to thank my colleague, Rep. Kustoff, for his partnership and work on this legislation '... and I urge all of my colleagues to not only support this legislation, but also, as we have said, to support the essential security funding that came from the Senate,'' he said.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Monday evening unveiled a plan to Republicans to move four separate bills to address aid for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and other national security priorities. It's not yet clear how Democrats will respond to the proposals.
The White House earlier on Monday said it opposed a stand-alone bill for aid for Israel.
Earlier on Monday, a bipartisan group of lawmakers called for Johnson to put to a vote on Monday night the Senate-passed national security supplemental.
Copyright 2024 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Democracy Dies Behind Paywalls - The Atlantic
Tue, 16 Apr 2024 14:57
The case for making journalism free'--at least during the 2024 election
Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: DNY59 / Getty ImagesHow many times has it happened? You're on your computer, searching for a particular article, a hard-to-find fact, or a story you vaguely remember, and just when you seem to have discovered the exact right thing, a paywall descends. ''$1 for Six Months.'' ''Save 40% on Year 1.'' ''Here's Your Premium Digital Offer.'' ''Already a subscriber?'' Hmm, no.
Now you're faced with that old dilemma: to pay or not to pay. (Yes, you may face this very dilemma reading this story in The Atlantic.) And it's not even that simple. It's a monthly or yearly subscription'--''Cancel at any time.'' Is this article or story or fact important enough for you to pay?
Or do you tell yourself'--as the overwhelming number of people do'--that you'll just keep searching and see if you can find it somewhere else for free?
According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, more than 75 percent of America's leading newspapers, magazines, and journals are behind online paywalls. And how do American news consumers react to that? Almost 80 percent of Americans steer around those paywalls and seek out a free option.
Paywalls create a two-tiered system: credible, fact-based information for people who are willing to pay for it, and murkier, less-reliable information for everyone else. Simply put, paywalls get in the way of informing the public, which is the mission of journalism. And they get in the way of the public being informed, which is the foundation of democracy. It is a terrible time for the press to be failing at reaching people, during an election in which democracy is on the line. There's a simple, temporary solution: Publications should suspend their paywalls for all 2024 election coverage and all information that is beneficial to voters. Democracy does not die in darkness'--it dies behind paywalls.
The problem is not just that professionally produced news is behind a wall; the problem is that paywalls increase the proportion of free and easily available stories that are actually filled with misinformation and disinformation. Way back in 1995 (think America Online), the UCLA professor Eugene Volokh predicted that the rise of ''cheap speech'''--free internet content'--would not only democratize mass media by allowing new voices, but also increase the proliferation of misinformation and conspiracy theories, which would then destabilize mass media.
Paul Barrett, the deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights and one of the premier scholars on mis- and disinformation, told me he knows of no research on the relationship between paywalls and misinformation. ''But it stands to reason,'' he said, ''that if people seeking news are blocked by the paywalls that are increasingly common on serious professional journalism websites, many of those people are going to turn to less reliable sites where they're more likely to encounter mis- and disinformation.''
In the pre-internet days, information wasn't free'--it just felt that way. Newsstands were everywhere, and you could buy a paper for a quarter. But that paper wasn't just for you: After you read it at the coffee shop or on the train, you left it there for the next guy. The same was true for magazines. When I was the editor of Time, the publisher estimated that the ''pass-along rate'' of every issue was 10 to 15'--that is, each magazine we sent out was read not only by the subscriber, but by 10 to 15 other people. In 1992, daily newspapers claimed a combined circulation of some 60 million; by 2022, while the nation had grown, that figure had fallen to 21 million. People want information to be free'--and instantly available on their phone.
Barrett is aware that news organizations need revenue, and that almost a third of all U.S. newspapers have stopped publishing over the previous two decades. ''It's understandable that traditional news-gathering businesses are desperate for subscription revenue,'' he told me, ''but they may be inadvertently boosting the fortunes of fake news operations motivated by an appetite for clicks or an ideological agenda'--or a combination of the two.''
Digital-news consumers can be divided into three categories: a small, elite group that pays hundreds to thousands of dollars a year for high-end subscriptions; a slightly larger group of people with one to three news subscriptions; and the roughly 80 percent of Americans who will not or cannot pay for information. Some significant percentage of this latter category are what scholars call ''passive'' news consumers'--people who do not seek out information, but wait for it to come to them, whether from their social feeds, from friends, or from a TV in an airport. Putting reliable information behind paywalls increases the likelihood that passive news consumers will receive bad information.
In the short history of social media, the paywall was an early hurdle to getting good information; now there are newer and more perilous problems. The Wall Street Journal instituted a ''hard paywall'' in 1996. The Financial Times formally launched one in 2002. Other publications experimented with them, including The New York Times, which established its subscription plan and paywall in 2011. In 2000, I was the editor of Time.com, Time magazine's website, when these experiments were going on. The axiom then was that ''must have'' publications like The Wall Street Journal could get away with charging for content, while ''nice to have'' publications like Time could not. Journalists were told that ''information wants to be free.'' But the truth was simpler: People wanted free information, and we gave it to them. And they got used to it.
Of course, publications need to cover their costs, and journalists need to be paid. Traditionally, publications had three lines of revenue: subscriptions, advertising, and newsstand sales. Newsstand sales have mostly disappeared. The internet should have been a virtual newsstand, but buying individual issues or articles is almost impossible. The failure to institute a frictionless mechanism for micropayments to purchase news was one of the greatest missteps in the early days of the web. Some publications would still be smart to try it.
I'd argue that paywalls are part of the reason Americans' trust in media is at an all-time low. Less than a third of Americans in a recent Gallup poll say they have ''a fair amount'' or a ''a great deal'' of trust that the news is fair and accurate. A large percentage of these Americans see media as being biased. Well, part of the reason they think media are biased is that most fair, accurate, and unbiased news sits behind a wall. The free stuff needn't be fair or accurate or unbiased. Disinformationists, conspiracy theorists, and Russian and Chinese troll farms don't employ fact-checkers and libel lawyers and copy editors.
Part of the problem with the current, free news environment is that the platform companies, which are the largest distributors of free news, have deprioritized news. Meta has long had an uncomfortable relationship with news on Facebook. In the past year, according to CNN, Meta has changed its algorithm in a way that has cost some news outlets 30 to 40 percent of their traffic (and others more). Threads, Meta's answer to X, is ''not going to do anything to encourage'' news and politics on the platform, says Adam Mosseri, the executive who oversees it. ''My take is, from a platforms' perspective, any incremental engagement or revenue [news] might drive is not at all worth the scrutiny, negativity (let's be honest), or integrity risks that come along with them.'' The platform companies are not in the news business; they are in the engagement business. News is less engaging than, say, dance shorts or chocolate-chip-cookie recipes'--or eye-catching conspiracy theories.
As the platforms have diminished news, they have also weakened their integrity and content-moderation teams, which enforce community standards or terms of service. No major platform permits false advertising, child pornography, hate speech, or speech that leads to violence; the integrity and moderation teams take down such content. A recent paper from Barrett's team at the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights argues that the greatest tech-related threat in 2024 is not artificial intelligence or foreign election interference, but something more mundane: the retreat from content moderation and the hollowing-out of trust-and-safety units and election-integrity teams. The increase in bad information on the free web puts an even greater burden on fact-based news reporting.
Now AI-created clickbait is also a growing threat. Generative AI's ability to model, scrape, and even plagiarize real news'--and then tailor it to users'--is extraordinary. AI clickbait mills, posing as legitimate journalistic organizations, are churning out content that rips off real news and reporting. These plagiarism mills are receiving funding because, well, they're cheap and profitable. For now, Google's rankings don't appear to make a distinction between a news article written by a human being and one written by an AI chatbot. They can, and they should.
The best way to address these challenges is for newsrooms to remove or suspend their paywalls for stories related to the 2024 election. I am mindful of the irony of putting this plea behind The Atlantic's own paywall, but that's exactly where the argument should be made. If you're reading this, you've probably paid to support journalism that you think matters in the world. Don't you want it to be available to others, too, especially those who would not otherwise get to see it?
Emergencies and natural disasters have long prompted papers to suspend their paywalls. When Hurricane Irene hit the New York metropolitan area in 2011, The New York Times made all storm-related coverage freely available. ''We are aware of our obligations to our audience and to the public at large when there is a big story that directly impacts such a large portion of people,'' a New York Times editor said at the time. In some ways, this creates a philosophical inconsistency. The paywall says, This content is valuable and you have to pay for it. Suspending the paywall in a crisis says, This content is so valuable that you don't have to pay for it. Similarly, when the coronavirus hit, The Atlantic made its COVID coverage'--and its COVID Tracking Project'--freely available to all.
During the pandemic, some publications found that suspending their paywall had an effect they had not anticipated: It increased subscriptions. The Seattle Times, the paper of record in a city that was an early epicenter of coronavirus, put all of its COVID-related content outside the paywall and then saw, according to its senior vice president of marketing, Kati Erwert, ''a very significant increase in digital subscriptions'''--two to three times its previous daily averages. The Philadelphia Inquirer put its COVID content outside its paywall in the spring of 2020 as a public service. And then, according to the paper's director of special projects, Evan Benn, it saw a ''higher than usual number of digital subscription sign-ups.''
The Tampa Bay Times, The Denver Post, and The St. Paul Pioneer Press, in Minnesota, all experienced similar increases, as did papers operated by the Tribune Publishing Company, including the Chicago Tribune and the Hartford Courant. The new subscribers were readers who appreciated the content and the reporting and wanted to support the paper's efforts, and to make the coverage free for others to read, too.
Good journalism isn't cheap, but outlets can find creative ways to pay for their reporting on the election. They can enlist foundations or other sponsors to underwrite their work. They can turn to readers who are willing to subscribe, renew their subscriptions, or make added donations to subsidize important coverage during a crucial election. And they can take advantage of the broader audience that unpaywalled stories can reach, using it to generate more advertising revenue'--and even more civic-minded subscribers.
The reason papers suspend their paywall in times of crisis is because they understand that the basic and primary mission of the press is to inform and educate the public. This idea goes back to the country's Founders. The press was protected by the First Amendment so it could provide the information that voters need in a democracy. ''Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press,'' Thomas Jefferson wrote, ''and that cannot be limited without being lost.'' Every journalist understands this. There is no story with a larger impact than an election in which the survival of democracy is on the ballot.
I believe it was a mistake to give away journalism for free in the 1990s. Information is not and never has been free. I devoutly believe that news organizations need to survive and figure out a revenue model that allows them to do so. But the most important mission of a news organization is to provide the public with information that allows citizens to make the best decisions in a constitutional democracy. Our government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed, and that consent is arrived at through the free flow of information'--reliable, fact-based information. To that end, news organizations should put their election content in front of their paywall. The Constitution protects the press so that the press can protect constitutional democracy. Now the press must fulfill its end of the bargain.
Elon Musk predicts superhuman AI will be smarter than people next year | Elon Musk | The Guardian
Tue, 16 Apr 2024 14:54
Superhuman artificial intelligence that is smarter than anyone on Earth could exist next year, Elon Musk has said, unless the sector's power and computing demands become unsustainable before then.
The prediction is a sharp tightening of an earlier claim from the multibillionaire, that superintelligent AI would exist by 2029. Whereas ''superhuman'' is generally defined as being smarter than any individual human at any specific task, superintelligent is often defined instead as being smarter than every human's combined ability at any task.
''My guess is that we'll have AI that is smarter than any one human probably around the end of next year,'' Musk said in a livestreamed interview on his social network X. That prediction was made with the caveat that increasing demands for power and shortages of the most powerful AI training chips could limit their capability in the near term.
''Last year it was chip-constrained,'' he said. ''People could not get enough Nvidia chips. This year it's transitioning to a voltage transformer supply. In a year or two, it's just electricity supply.''
In 2023, when he predicted a five- to six-year runway for superintelligence, Musk was vocally concerned about the ramifications. Speaking alongside the launch of his AI startup, xAI, that year, he said: ''If I could press pause on AI or really advanced AI digital superintelligence I would. It doesn't seem like that is realistic so xAI is essentially going to build an AI. In a good way, sort of hopefully.
''It's actually important for us to worry about a Terminator future in order to avoid a Terminator future,'' Musk added, referencing the film where a self-aware computer system wages war on humanity.
A year on, and xAI is firmly trying to lead the development of superintelligence. In a recent interview, Musk said the latest version of its chatbot Grok AI was on par with GPT-4, the leading model from OpenAI. GPT-4 is more than a year old, and competitors have already met or exceeded its capabilities, with Anthropic's Claude 3 Opus generally seen to be the new market leader.
The entrepreneur's predictions are infamously freely made. In 2016, he wrongly forecast that within two years it would be possible for a Tesla to drive autonomously from New York to Los Angeles. That same year he said his SpaceX rocket company would fly to Mars in 2018 '' it still has not. And in 2017, Musk suggested his Neuralink brain chip startup's first product would be on the market ''in about four years''. The first human received an implant from the company seven years later.
Musk has his hands full. Over the weekend, he declared war on a Brazilian supreme court justice, calling for him to resign or be impeached over court orders levied against X requiring it to take down the accounts of some Brazilian users. On Monday, news broke of testimony he had given in court about his posts on the site in which he conceded that he ''may have done more to financially impair the company than to help it''.
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He added: ''I do not guide my posts by what is financially beneficial but by what I believe is interesting or important or entertaining to the public.''
New NPR Chief Katherine Maher's Guide to the Holidays
Tue, 16 Apr 2024 13:22
Titania McMaher. Katherine Maher, the new head of NPR , was a minor character in the Twitter Files. She was CEO of Wikimedia when the company was (like Twitter) being invited to election tabletop exercises at the Pentagon and '' Industry meetings '' with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. She also scored the rare personal triumverate of being member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a World Economic Forum young global leader, and a fellow at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Labs.
She took a job heading NPR in January, shortly before senior editor Uri Berliner set off a nuclear newsroom stink-bomb by publishing a tell-all article at The Free Press about station failures on stories like Russiagate. Berliner's piece triggered a frenzy of anti-NPR Schadenfreude , which led to a furious examinations of Maher's sitting-duck tweet history. Maher's timeline reads so much like the Titania McGrath site spoofing overeducated nonsense-babbling white ladies that it's difficult to believe she's real '-- she even looks like the fictional McGrath, if Titania had more money to spend on personal upkeep.
Maher's commentary dating back to the early Obama years is a gold mine of unintentional comedy. She's gotten the most heat for using phrases like ''As someone with cis white mobility privilege,'' and ''Sure, looting is counterproductive, but'...'' She also made an impressive Usain Bolt-like surge past Hillary Clinton in the Intersectional Gibberish Olympics:
When I spent what I admit is embarrassingly long period reading her social media history, I was struck by the random, unquenchable nature of Maher's anger. Maher at rest, commenting on literally nothing at all, sounds like this :
When some poor sap tweeted about ''Hereticon ,'' a conference of canceled-type speakers proclaiming ''dissent is essential to the progressive march of human civilization,'' Maher made an instant leap from a snapshot of ironic fifties conformism to a dead-serious KKK metaphor:
Maher is now in her second consecutive hugely influential role in American culture, yet her idea of happiness seemingly would involve torturing The Muppets until they give up the location of the patriarchy's secret headquarters (inside a volcano shaped like Elon Musk's head of course!). Reading, one wonders: does this person have a vision of enjoyment that doesn't involve self-mortification? Out of curiosity, I took one tour with her through the holiday calendar, starting with Thanksgiving. The comprehensive list:
TV has become exploitative and cruel, says Ofcom chair Michael Grade | Michael Grade | The Guardian
Mon, 15 Apr 2024 12:33
Television has become more ''exploitative and cruel'', according to Michael Grade, the chair of the broadcasting regulator, Ofcom.
''The exploitation dial has been switched up more and more for ratings,'' said the peer and former chair of the BBC board. ''It makes me mad. I really don't like it or enjoy it.
''Television has also become patronising in the sense of: 'This will do for the audience.' No mind at work behind it. No real craft thrown in. Just bread and circuses.''
In an interview to be broadcast on Boom Radio on 21 April, Lord Grade expresses concern that the public are increasingly being used as performers to entertain viewers.
Although he does not cite individual programmes, reality shows such as The Traitors, Love Island and Big Brother have attracted huge audiences and dominated terrestrial TV ratings in recent years.
''In the old days, professional entertainers used to entertain the public,'' said Grade, who was the controller of BBC One in the mid-1980s, the chief executive of Channel 4 from 1988 to 1997 and the chair of ITV in the late 00s. ''Now the public are entertaining themselves.''
The 81-year-old was made a Conservative peer in 2011 but is now a crossbencher after his appointment as Ofcom chair in 2022.
The regulator has come under increased pressure to investigate TV and radio broadcasts featuring MPs, particularly on GB News, which often employs Conservative MPs on its programmes, including Jacob Rees-Mogg and former deputy party chair Lee Anderson, now of Reform UK.
In the Boom Radio interview, Grade is pressed by presenter Jo Brand about the high number of complaints relating to GB News, but says he cannot comment as these are currently being investigated.
''However, we have to weigh up freedom of expression and the public's right to know along with the need for balance and impartiality,'' he said. ''We also don't want our broadcasters being owned and run for political reasons.''
Grade also laments the shrinking pots of money for traditional British broadcasters. He has previously argued that the BBC licence fee, which is now £169.50 a year, is ''too high'', and in an interview with the Financial Times last year he described it as a ''regressive tax'' that meant he would pay no more than a ''single mum with three kids in a rented room''.
He also said programmes had become very expensive to make.
''The big question mark is whether the money is going to be around to keep investing in the programmes which are only made for the British audience and probably don't have international appeal,'' he said. ''They remain an important part of what we expect on television these days.''
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He cited Mr Bates vs the Post Office, the recent ITV dramatisation of the Horizon IT scandal as an example.
''These programmes, however, are very expensive to make these days. Costs are going up all the time '... The Crown allegedly cost Netflix $10m for each hour's episode. But $10m ought to produce 13 hours of drama for us.''
Michael Grade says the 'exploitation dial' has been switched up for more ratings. Photograph: Paul Ellis/AFP/Getty ImagesWhile chief executive of Channel 4, Grade was described as ''pornographer-in-chief'' by Daily Mail columnist Paul Johnson. ''That will be in my obituaries,'' he said. ''I don't care, though I never transmitted anything remotely pornographic.'' He did, however, accept that Channel 4 was ''the naughty channel '' you know, you expected naughty things on it. However, it didn't hurt the brand. It helped it.''
In 1986, when he was BBC One controller, he faced a row over a sex scene in The Singing Detective, starring Michael Gambon as Philip Marlow
''I spent a whole afternoon looking at the episode, discussing it and, in the end, saying: 'It is perfectly fine as it is essential to the plot.' But then all hell broke loose with Mary Whitehouse, the clean-up-TV campaigner, going ballistic. Yet I've never transmitted anything on television I could not publicly defend.''
VIDEOS
VIDEO - Students walk out of Utah middle school to protest 'furries' - YouTube
VIDEO - Developing an International Framework for Geoengineering | Council on Foreign Relations
Thu, 18 Apr 2024 15:19
RUTH GREENSPAN BELL: Okay. The microphone works -- (laughs) -- okay.
I'm Ruth Greenspan Bell from World Resources Institute, and it's my pleasure to invite -- to welcome you here this evening. I've been on the other side of this, so I remember the ritual Council warnings, which are: would you please turn off your cell phone, even if it vibrates, because sometimes it interferes with the speaker system, and this meeting is on the record.
So our subject this evening is geoengineering, and in some parts of the environmental community, just saying the word "geoengineering" is a fighting word. It can be very contentious. In part, I think this represents some fear in some parts of the community that if you start talking about geoengineering you give up on mitigation, you give up on adaptation, and just start trying to -- try to change the environment.
There is, I think, some fear of the impression that there's a magic bullet involved. And I think -- my own personal concern is that, I'm kind of worried that when the current climate deniers kind of wake up at some point and realize something is serious happening here, that they'll be seeking easy fixes. So I'm really, really pleased that the Council has chosen to have this conversation today, and particularly with these two speakers who I think are the perfect people to be talking about this.
So we will start. We will have a conversation for about a half hour, and then we'll open it up to questions at that point. I'm not going to repeat the bios that are in the handout that you have. Needless to say, we have two very distinguished speakers.
John Steinbruner is professor of public policy at the University of Maryland, and director of the Center for International and Security Studies, and he's been a leading figure for many, many years in arms control and global security. Granger Morgan is professor and head of the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, and also, for many years, has been a leader in helping finding ways to describe scientific uncertainty and incorporate risk into public policy decisionmaking. So we have totally the perfect people here to be talking about this issue.
So I wanted to first ask Granger to sort of set the stage for us and to tell us -- to start from almost a definitional point of view: What is geoengineering? And why is this set of issues starting, really, to be discussed with some degree of seriousness at this point? What is it in the state of play of climate science and carbon regulation that might be stimulating this discussion?
M. GRANGER MORGAN: Okay, and we're running the experiment tonight to see if an engineer is capable of talking without slides. (Laughter.) Both John and I have slides that are out there on the table if you want copies of them. But I thought actually I should start just a few steps even back from what you described and make sure we're all sort of up to speed on the climate problem.
The sun shines on the earth, of course, and about 30 percent of that light is immediately reflected back into space, and the other 70 percent is absorbed by clouds, by the surface, by the oceans and so on. And, of course, if that was all that happened, the earth would rapidly heat up and we'd all fry. Somehow we've got to get the same amount of energy back out into space as got absorbed. But once it's absorbed it, can't be reradiated as light; it has to be reradiated as heat, as infrared -- you know, like a radiator radiates.
And there's the rub, because the atmosphere, while it's transparent to the visible, is not transparent in the infrared. And so what happens is that the whole temperature of the planet warms a bit, and then finally it gets to a warm enough point that the amount of heat energy radiated off the top of the atmosphere is just equal to the amount that's being absorbed, and so the planet runs in equilibrium. And that's good thing for us -- this is the so-called "greenhouse effect," and if it weren't for that, it would not -- planet Earth would not be a terribly pleasant place to be.
The two principal constituents in the atmosphere that absorb infrared are water vapor and carbon dioxide. And we have for several hundred years now been gradually increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide, and as a consequence, the mean temperature -- or the average temperature at which the planet operates goes up.
So that's all kind of theoretical. And in the slides, one of the things you will see is a picture of a couple thousand-megawatt coal-fired power plant, just west of where I live, called the "Bruce Mansfield Power Station." A plant that size uses a couple hundred of these large 100-ton hopper cars of coal every day. And so to give it sort of a more concrete sense, a plant like that takes a couple hundred -- you know, a train of 200 cars turns it into a invisible gas; puts it into the atmosphere every day, and we're doing that in hundreds of facilities like that all around the world. So though it's invisible, the mass volumes are quite large.
The -- one other thing I should say about the physics, or the science, is that unlike conventional pollutants -- unlike, say, sulfur dioxide, oxides of nitrogen, which, when you put them in the atmosphere only stay there for a few hours or days. So if I stopped emitting sulfur dioxide, it would rapidly disappear, or if I stabilized emissions, concentrations would stabilize -- CO2 and other greenhouse gasses aren't like that.
They live in the atmosphere, many of them, for 100 years or more, with the result that -- it's kind of like a big bathtub. If I had a bathtub with a small drain and a big faucet, you know, unless I really closed down the faucet, the bathtub will continue to fill up. So think of the atmosphere as like that bathtub, and unless I dramatically reduce emissions, by 80 percent or so, globally, the level of concentration -- or the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere will continue to rise.
All right, that's all the science. But since it turns out many people do not understand this cumulative effect, and the fact that one really does need to dramatically reduce emissions in order to stabilize concentration, I've started making a point of talking about this whenever I talk about climate issues.
At Carnegie Mellon we've been doing a variety of things on climate impact assessment and integrated assessment of climate problems for many years. When we first got started we looked, sort of, systematically across the whole space. And one of the things we did was get a young post-doc, David Keyes, to do quite an extensive review of geoengineering -- by which I mainly mean changing the albedo, that is, the fraction of sunlight that's reflected back to space. I told you it was about 30 percent.
So this is not a new idea. People have been talking about it sort of on the fringes of the science community for many, many years. And we did a review, and then we set it aside. Like many others, we were rather reluctant to work too seriously on the problem, in part, because, you know, you're sort of concerned that knowledge might drive intention. That is, that if you get to the point you really know how to do this, and you know what it would cost, and so on, that that might raise the likelihood that somebody would do it.
So for, I don't know, 15 years or more, having done a set of fairly comprehensive reviews, we didn't work on it anymore. But then about three years ago, given the really abysmal progress that the rest of the -- you know, the U.S. and all the rest of the world are making, in terms of reducing emissions, I began to get concerned, among other things, that somebody might wake up one day and say, 'Oh, my God, we've got a problem.' I mean, the Chinese, for example, might conclude, because of changes in precipitation, 'we can't feed our people;' or Russia might conclude that all of Siberia is turning -- with the permafrost thawing, is turning into an impenetrable bog.
And so I got worried a bit about the prospect that somebody might -- or some small group of folks might go off and unilaterally just start doing this, having concluded, 'We've got a problem, we've got to fix it.' And at that stage, I decided maybe the foreign policy community should start thinking about this issue.
So three of us at Carnegie Mellon on the technical side, and John and David Victor on the political science side, got together and -- I guess it was about two years ago now, ran an event in the old building up the street, in which a -- day-long event in which a good cross-section of leading people on the technical side of climate science sat down with a number of experts in the foreign policy community to think seriously about this.
The participation in that group was all North Americans, and we decided we needed to broaden the discourse. And so, at the invitation of the government of Portugal, we ran a similar event in Lisbon last April, in which, in addition to North Americans, we had a fair cross-section of folks from across the EU, from Russia, China, India and elsewhere around the world. And both of these had as their objective to try to get the foreign policy community at least aware of this issue and beginning to think about it.
Now, I want to talk about two other things before I turn things over to John. First of all, the word "geoengineering" turns out to be, sort of, all-inclusive. I mean, to different people it seems to mean all kinds of different stuff. The Royal Society in London did an assessment recently -- actually, the discussion in the back of that assessment, on governance, builds directly on the results of the two workshops we ran, because two of the key authors had been participants in both of those workshops.
And they did a very useful thing. They introduced two words, "solar radiation management," for stuff that involved changing the albedo -- and, actually, in a piece that we published in "Nature" about a month-and-a-half ago, "Nature" used some phrase about sunscreens, or "sun shades," which is perhaps maybe even better -- and then all the other stuff was termed "carbon dioxide removal."
And, among other things on that side -- I mean, you can actually build devices to scrub carbon dioxide directly out of the atmosphere and then sequester it, that is, put it deep under ground in appropriate strata -- those sorts of processes are inherently slow. They could be as cheap as 100 (dollars) to $200 a ton. So they're important. They set an upper bound on what the cost of controlling CO2 might be. But they're inherently slow, and you could do them within the confines of a particular nation. I don't view them as posing significant governance issues.
On the other hand, the stuff that involves changing the albedo by, for example, putting very fine particles in the stratosphere -- and we can talk a bit more about how you would go about doing that -- could be done at relatively low cost, perhaps a hundredth or less the cost of abating emissions, and could be done by a single state operating within the confines of its national borders.
I have a doctoral student right now who, in collaboration with groups at Oxford, is doing climate modeling. And while you can, indeed, reduce the average temperature of the planet, it's imperfect, and the effects are different in different parts of the world. And, over time -- for example, she has looked at how China and India's climate might (have) evolved. And while they're both closer to today's climate than they would be, say, 80 or hundred years from now, over time they -- in a space of temperature and precip, they move away from each other.
Last comment. I think that it would be a real -- well, I've published in several places recently an argument that says the time has come to mount a serious research program here. I'm not talking about an enormous amount of money, I'm just saying that, to date, there's been hardly any serious research, and for two reasons we need to get serious and understand what could be done and what it might cost.
The first reason is that there's some possibility that somebody else would do it. And then, if we thought that was a terrible idea -- because, for example, it does nothing about the ongoing acidification of the oceans, which will probably leave us without coral reefs by the end of this century, or any of a number of other impacts from rising CO2 -- if we thought it was a bad idea, we need to know enough to be able to mount coherent counterarguments.
And the other reason we need to do research is to, in the event that we have a climate disaster, we know what we're getting into if we suddenly decided we had to do this -- if we had a billion people at risk around the world, for example.
And so, in the back few slides of this thing that I've passed out is an argument that says one of the things that climate science community should start doing fairly quickly is figuring out a space in which they could do field experiments without any sort of international oversight or overview. I think if you -- I mean, we do stuff in the stratosphere all the time, of course, and so it's not as though the stratosphere is absolutely pristine. But you don't want to have people going off and doing things that involve large radiative forcings; or go on for extended periods; or, for that matter, provide lots of reactive surfaces that could result in significant ozone destruction.
So I think that one of the early requirements for the science community is to figure out: Can you define a sort of space within which -- as long as you're behaving inside that space, issues of governance are not a big deal, but doing anything outside that space requires some collective agreement that it would be appropriate to do that?
And, at that point, I'm going to stop, and John -- (laughs) -- pick up.
JOHN STEINBRUNER: (Laughs.)
BELL: Yeah, sure. Obviously, the questions then turn to governance issues, and that's what I'd like you to address. But I just -- a special question is: The U.N. negotiations have demonstrated the difficulty of getting a mutually-acceptable agreement in place on the climate issues. I'm curious whether you would also address what this tells us about getting rules into place for geoengineering?
MORGAN: And maybe before John talks about that, I should say I think that putting something in place quickly, that made it really hard to do research on modest scales, would be a disaster. But John and I may disagree.
STEINBRUNER: Now, the role I've played is to try to anticipate what kind of rules would have to be applied in a situation where there is a technique that almost certainly would work and it is not very expensive, so it's not as if there's a lot of uncertainty about what to do. There's at least one technique that would reduce -- mimicking the volcanoes, would reduce average surface temperature on the order of a half a degree centigrade in a single year. But you'd have to keep doing it year after year.
So I am anticipating a situation in which the image of global consequence becomes globally distributed and people start to get concerned about their equity in this. And though I agree that it is desirable and probably feasible to set a limited space -- such that you could say, well, field experiments in this relatively modest range are okay, I'm not sure how limited that can be, because at some point the world is going to insist on having a collective stake in this, almost certainly, because you're dealing with a global commons. The atmosphere -- (laughs) -- which everybody breathes, is a global commons if anything is, and the basic rules say, nobody gets to appropriate for personal or sovereign use, and everybody's equity has to be taken into account.
So what I'm saying is that because you can imagine having very substantial global effects on the basis very small initiatives, anticipate the need for global rules which do not currently exist. There's no direct legal structure dealing with this question, not surprisingly, because it's just coming on the horizon.
Trying to be practical about it, what I'd say is it would be a very good idea for the National Academies of Sciences to have coordinating mechanisms among themselves to set guidelines for field experiments that might, in fact, set your limits and say: This is what you can do, and these are the limits you have to adhere to. And if you go beyond those limits, what are the guidelines for doing a, globally, sort of, credible review as to the relative merits. And I presume that nobody's going to go off and try to do this with no research whatsoever, so there would be a period of time in which we are dealing with, basically, field trials.
But I don't think it's too early to anticipate the possibility of a situation arising in which suddenly there is a great deal more fear than there currently is, coming much more rapidly than the scientists anticipate clicking in. And at that point, we could have a real mess on our hands if there are no rules whatsoever. So what I'm saying is, anticipate the need for having a basic principle, which is, "Thou shalt not mess with the atmosphere unless everybody agrees in some globally representative way." And the criteria for judging this have to do with meeting a very heavy of burden of proof. You have to demonstrate that the benefit to be achieved decisively outweighs the negative consequence.
And, I would say, and this is the important point, you have to demonstrate that this is not a substitute for mitigation, because if it is, it's the equivalent of heroine addiction, basically -- once you start, you can't stop; and that you have not affected the underlying carbon build-up, acidification of the oceans, and all that just keep going.
MORGAN: You might explain why you can't stop.
BELL: Kind of, suggest --
STEINBRUNER: Why you can't stop? You cannot stop because the technique that will work, only works for a year or two. You put particles up and they come down within a year or two. The carbon dioxide stays for a century. So his bathtub analogy is --
MORGAN: But the bathtub has continued to fill. So if you stop, suddenly you get a whopping big temperature increase, which just raises --
STEINBRUNER: Right, right.
MORGAN: -- ecosystems.
STEINBRUNER: And we're messing around with the rate of temperature increase. I think it's fair to say we're projecting a rate of increase that the geological record has never seen. So we're messing around already with global balances that could conceivably put everyone at risk.
And if you want the nightmare scenario that might wake everybody up and suddenly make this a much bigger deal than it has been, it's the possibility of a surging release of frozen methane, gas hydrates that would produce a positive feedback cycle. And, you know, that could create an image of real catastrophe -- I mean, real catastrophe that would seize everybody's imagination, way out in front of what the scientists could really sort out.
And that's been hypothetical. I've been saying this for a couple of -- about a year since we've been talking about it, and people have been saying, 'Yeah, but it's, you know.' But they've just measured -- they just measured it in the Arctic Shelf. And it's the first observation, but I would say we ought to pay attention to that, because this is potentially a very big deal.
Bottom line of all this is we need to start talking about it in terms of the governance issues: What kind of rules do we need to put in place to provide adequate vetting for any initiative? And, unfortunately, it's not just big governments that could do this; it is small governments, it is billionaires, probably, could figure, "I'm going to save the world all by myself and I won't bother to mention it."
So you've got a problem -- a situation in which small initiatives could have a global effect, and we don't have any rules for dealing with that. And I'm saying it's time to start talking about the rules. I concede that on this subject, and in general, it's not popular to talk about global rules; so I'm telling you, however, we're looking at situations that's going to make it necessary, like it or not, and we ought to start thinking about it.
BELL: Can you mention what bodies you might have in mind? You mentioned an informal set of bodies through National Academies of Science that could work on these. Are there other bodies you think that would be well-suited, that you can imagine to take this responsibility?
STEINBRUNER: Well, you can imagine the coordinating mechanisms of the National Academy of Sciences working out some kind of understanding among them, and making themselves, kind of, maybe the global equivalent of an institutional review board for medical -- you know: If you do any experiment on human beings, you have to -- you have to justify yourself to the institutional (review boards, who do an ?) independent -- that they are not your, you're not subjecting the subjects to unnecessary risk.
I think they could -- using that analogy, they could set up a basic mechanism, an understanding the way Granger was talking, "Okay, if you're operating within these fairly narrow limits, where we don't think there's going to be any major global consequence, do it on your own;" or, "You can do it on your own, but there are disclosure rules, transparency rules. You got to publish what you're doing. You can't hide it." "If you go beyond these limits" -- and the limits need some agreement, then there has to be, I would say, some common vetting process that they would have to organize among themselves collectively. We all have a stake in that.
And I would say it's good to start talking about just that much. But what happens if tomorrow we get, sort of, somebody announced, 'Okay, we've got frozen gas hydrates coming out like crazy, and unless we stop this, we're all dead,' and people start believing that. What do we do?
At that point, if you're talking about real emergency things, I'm saying, well, if you're looking at the only mechanism we have at the moment for global vetting, you're talking about the U.N. Security Council. You're going to have to go through that. And if you don't like that, then think of something else, because don't think that you can do this on your own without triggering real, real reaction.
And this is something that if people think there's an (emergency), they're going to get excited about it. They're going to get really excited about it, and you're not going to be able to act unilaterally -- (inaudible) --
MORGAN: A couple more comments on, sort of, coordination, and who might do what.
As I mentioned, the Royal Society has done a study that, among other things, introduced this very useful distinction between solar radiation management and carbon dioxide removal. The Royal Society is getting geared up right now to do a second round of work on global governance issues. It'll be an informal kind of thing. In the paper that John and I and our co-authors published in "Foreign Affairs," we also raised the prospect that ICSU, the International Council on Scientific Unions, might be a candidate for coordinating at least research activities among different research groups around the world.
I want to reiterate what John said, which is I think that any research in this area needs to be open. I think it would be truly disastrous if, you know, we discovered a few years from now that there was a "black program" that some government had stood-up to sort of learn on-the-quiet how to do this.
And I also think that we do need to get a serious research program going, because the sorts of events that John's talking about -- that is, that a climate catastrophe of one sort or another, are still way out in the probability -- in the tails of the probability distributions of our uncertainty.
I don't think there are very many scientists who would say they're high-probability events. But they are out there. There is some -- I mean, it's not zero. And you don't want to be in the position of suddenly deciding you got to do something dramatic quickly if you haven't studied it and you don't know what might happen.
STEINBRUNER: Just one little bit. The burden proof on the moment quite appropriately falls very heavily on anybody who wants to proclaim a catastrophe. You have to demonstrate to confidence that -- It will shift in public a lot sooner than it'll shift among the scientists. And if it did -- if some image of a catastrophe started to take hold, it would be very difficult to disprove it also.
When you're dealing with out-on-the-tail, low-probability events, whoever carries the burden of proof to say it might happen, loses. And so what you have to worry about is some image of catastrophe that takes -- seizes broad imagination, and the scientific community cannot disprove it.
And you could get that. This frozen gas hydrate thing has some potential in that regard.
MORGAN: So you started this session by saying, many people look at this and think it's a really awful idea. And I agree. And I think it's actually a good thing that many people look at this and think it's an awful idea. I mean, messing with the planet is not something one should do lightly.
And, actually it was very interesting, the Russian participant at this workshop we were in in Portugal reminded us about various Russian attempts to, you know, redirect rivers and otherwise engineer the landscape; and, you know, pointed out that there was a lot of hubris here and it didn't work out too well. You don't want to -- so if you do, as a last resort, have to engage in such activity, you don't want to do it without knowing quite a lot about it.
STEINBRUNER: Right.
BELL: I was going to actually ask a question about the flip of the rush-to-judgment, which is if, you know, if serious scientists at some point decide -- and governments even decide at some point intervention is necessary, and you think about, kind of, the normal NIMBY writ large problem that we see in other environmental and other areas, is there any active preparation going on at this stage to kind of introduce -- I mean, I realize the Royal Society and others have issued these, but I sort of suspect they're --
MORGAN: Well, there's a bunch of stuff going on. I mean, I spent the last two days at a workshop over at the Bipartisan Commission -- I forget exactly what it's called --
STEINBRUNER: (Inaudible) -- global task force on geoengineering.
MORGAN: Yeah, which has got a task force that it's putting together on this. In a couple of weeks there's a four- or five-day event out at a -- (inaudible) -- to be trying to start some conversation on this. So there's a bunch of low-level things going on. There's this Royal Society event that I described.
But, you know, it's also politically reasonably touchy I think. I mean, John Holdren quite appropriately noted that we should not completely take this off the table. And Seth Borenstein, of course, turned it into a big article, implying that, you know, that the administration was about to embark on this; which is not, I mean -- So, you know, it's touchy. I mean, it is very pressworthy. So, you know, I'm not faulting either one of them in that case. But you can also understand why people might be a little reluctant publicly argue that we need a research program.
I don't think we need a big program at the moment. I think that some tens-of-millions of dollars, spent appropriately through places like NSF, and maybe NOAA and NASA at later stages, would be entirely appropriate at this point. I mean, it really is the case that we're almost dead in the water with respect to serious research on this problem. About the only thing that's been done has been some computer modeling using general circulation models. And it is pretty clear that one will have to do some small-scale field stuff to really understand some of the technology.
The other thing we ought to be doing is having some instrumented aircraft available, so if and when we get the next Mount Pinatubo we're all set up to go and study in detail the processes involved.
BELL: Too many earthquakes, not enough volcanos, right. (Laughs.) (Laughter.)
MORGAN: Yeah, although my suspicion is, if we had a volcano tomorrow, we wouldn't be in a position to do the --
BELL: (Laughs.) I'm not urging -- (inaudible) --
MORGAN: (Laughs.)
BELL: Okay, why don't we now actually invite the audience to join into this. We have microphones that we're going to pass around, and I would ask you to please speak directly into the microphone and state your name and affiliation.
Mr. Topping.
QUESTIONER: My name is John Topping, with the Climate Institute.
And Mike MacCracken, our chief scientist and, together with the Climate Response Fund, is essentially organizing the (Solemar ?) meeting. And, you know, the whole purpose of that is to really try to develop some guidelines that would be very useful. And, you know, both -- you know, I can't speak for, you know, exactly will come out of it. There will be about 150 experts from member countries there.
But what's interesting, I think, on -- just on this issue, is that there are a range of possibilities, some of which might be almost win-win. I mean, one idea that occurred, Russell Seitz, I think at Harvard, has essentially advanced the idea of --
STEINBRUNER: Microbubbles.
QUESTIONER: -- essentially microbubbles. Well, you know, they may or may not work. If it works -- what it does is -- presumably is to reduce evaporation, which is a huge problem in the reservoirs. So it's a kind of win-win strategy, and conceivably it's a way of -- a soft way of testing something that, you know, might work much more broadly.
You also have in the Arctic, you know -- I mean, when we talk about runaway or rapid climate change, I think the, you know, the greatest concern would be --
BELL: Can you hold the microphone up.
QUESTIONER: I'm sorry -- it would be melting, let's say, in Greenland, or obviously the, you know, the methane releases. Well, black carbon plays a very, very large role in some of that, and there's now a -- efforts under way, an ANSI study that ultimately might result in an ISO standard that essentially is looking at perhaps the possibility of establishing a regional warming -- you know, global warming potential looking at the Arctic.
What happens in the Arctic, that a large part of the black carbon essentially comes from forest fires in Alaska, Canada, you know, Siberia, open burning in Kazakhstan. Well, conceivably, better forestry practices are a way of addressing that.
And then you get into the other issues. Perhaps, rather than global geoengineering, what you might find -- if we got into the very difficult situations that, you know, we described, it might be that very localized, regional geoengineering over -- affecting Greenland or affecting the Antarctic might be feasible. At the same time, you go with an aggressive mitigation strategy.
And that's, you know, I think that's perhaps one of the things that might be on the table, but, you know, they all have to be vetted.
BELL: There are quite a few parts to that question.
Could I suggest one thing, as starting off this? A lot of this, I think, is a little bit "inside baseball." And because there's some people in the audience who've been focused on this for a really long time and some folks who are new to it, so maybe you can explain some of these things that John mentioned before we respond to it -- black carbon, you know, some of the other --
STEINBRUNER: Let me just comment on the microbubbles idea.
BELL: Yeah. Microbubbles, yeah. Can you explain what it is first?
STEINBRUNER: Microbubbles are very tiny bubbles, sort of, micro-scale bubbles that sustain themselves over very long periods of time at the right size in water. There's an issue of how much energy it takes to do it over a large scale, okay, but it's quite dramatic.
And I think Russell Seitz is now making a local, not a global claim that you can put them in lakes that are subject to evaporation; you could reduce the evaporation and have a beneficial local effect. I don't think he's -- and it's just at the laboratory basis so far, so I don't think he's ready to say, you know, we're going to put microbubbles all over the ocean and solve the problem.
If you did, though, it looks like it would have less consequence than the sulfates in the stratosphere. So one of the things that needs to be looked at is things that can be done, either locally or globally, that don't have dramatically bad side effects, or very uncertain ones.
BELL: Granger, did you want to talk about black carbon, or -- there was a second part to --
MORGAN: No, I think we should keep questioning.
BELL: Okay. Keep going, okay.
Any other questions?
Please.
QUESTIONER: Hi. I'm Cheryl Hogue, with Chemical and Engineering News.
I'd like for you all to talk a little bit about what you foresee as possible research by the U.S. government. I think there were a couple of agencies mentioned. I know that chairman of the House Science and Technology committee, Bart Gordon, is really hot for the Department of Energy to be involved in this, although that sounds more like carbon capture and sequestration rather than the, kind of, solar radiation management.
Could you talk a little bit more about that, and how you foresee the U.S. government's role in research?
MORGAN: Yeah. I think, first, that it probably is important that there be federally-supported research.
I'm troubled by the prospect of private-venture people getting into this business, because, among other things, suddenly there becomes then a, kind of, incentive to do it. And, I mean, on the one hand, I think it's terribly important that we understand what it would cost, how you would do it, what the intended and unintended consequences would be.
I think that in the early stages National Science Foundation might be actually quite a good venue because, you know, they are in the business of exploring a wide range of issues, opportunity for multiple investigators with different perspectives, opportunity for folks to work on some of the social science issues. We've actually been -- with some NSF money, doing some work in this space.
And, as I say, I don't think, at this stage, large amounts of money are needed. Later on, when you are actually trying to run some field campaigns, then NASA might be an interesting candidate, because, you know, they've got a strong capability to do things in the stratosphere. That's probably sufficient.
STEINBRUNER: Let me just say, though, that remember, the underlying situation is you don't want to do this without mitigation. And we are not -- one of the problems is we are not on course to do prudent mitigation, so part of the research effort has got to go into alternative technologies for mitigation. And that would --
MORGAN: Yeah, I'm certainly not proposing that this be "instead of," and the amount of money I'm talking about is pretty modest compared with the amounts we're now spending.
But, I mean, stop to think about it. We've been talking for a couple of decades about carbon capture and deep geologic sequestration in the context of coal-fired power plants. And we're beginning to do a few minor things, but we still haven't got the first commercial scale plant up and running. All the pieces have existed at commercial scale for quite a long time, but we just haven't spent the money to put the pieces together.
If you asked me to bet today on who will get the first commercial-scale plant up and running, I'd put more money on the Chinese than I would on the U.S. So John's absolutely right. I mean, it is really dismaying at the slow rate of progress.
And it's also dismaying that we got so many people playing "my technology is more virtuous than yours." I mean, if we're going to achieve an 80-percent reduction in emissions, it's literally going to take everything we've got, and even still, I think there are good questions about whether we'll make it.
STEINBRUNER: I was going to say I'm biting my tongue, (Steve ?), about the small reactor story -- (laughs) --
MORGAN: (Laughs.)
STEINBRUNER: -- but I'll give it -- It's very difficult to imagine how we're going to get a prudent standard without an expansion of nuclear power that is more broader than anything going on, or even imaginable, with current reactor designs.
So one of the conclusions you reach -- or current fuel cycle management practices, or current security relationship, so one of the things that you can say, I think, with some seriousness, is that one of the things we're going to have to do, in order to have any hope, is to develop small, inherently safe, sealed reactor designs that you can put around the world, and the that use them do not get at the fuel -- cannot get at the fuel.
But that's an entirely different industry from what we're currently talking about. So one of the things that absolutely needs to happen is to -- there are about there are about eight or 10 of these designs, which is too many -- there needs to be a runoff among them, and two or three of them brought to the point of commercial viability. And whatever else you do, you're not going to make it without that. But you're going to have to do a lot other things as well.
MORGAN: We got another -- yeah, over here.
BELL: Please.
QUESTIONER: Hi. Alex -- (inaudible) -- USAID.
First, I'd like to thank the Council for having something on science policy. It's very welcome. And I applaud you on, sort of, the scale of your vision and for how you're thinking about these problems.
I have a point and a question. The point is, in biological control -- whenever we've tried to use biocontrol to control certain types of pests that we want to get rid of, and we used other biological mechanisms to do so, we've failed -- (laughter) -- miserably many, many times.
And that leads to the second question, or the second -- the question that I have is, what effect, in terms of these microparticle shading? You have indicated that you've done modeling on your -- your post-doc has done modeling on temperature, modeling on precipitation, but given that, you know, there's potential heterogene(ous) effects, what is the effect on photosynthesis, and how that photosynthesis feeds back within the process?
MORGAN: Well, first of all, we're not talking about more than a couple percent change in the -- (inaudible) --
Second, after some volcanic eruptions, though there has been direct reflection, the albedo has increased. The amount of diffuse sunlight has also increased. So there's actually been a bit of an uptick in photosynthesis, and you've seen some modest increase in forest growth, and that sort of thing.
I mean, when Kate Richi (sp) -- this doctoral student and I first started working this problem, we were quite concerned about the issue of photosynthetic effects, and went out and talked with a bunch of leading ecologists. So far, we haven't been able to find anybody who can make a case that there would be a serious issue.
And there might, indeed, as I said, be some short-term boost, which, of course, alone, doesn't mean it doesn't have impacts, because, you know, different plants have different abilities to engage in photosynthesis. So, just as a richer CO2 climate -- or atmosphere favors some plants over others, so too a changed light environment changes the relative competitive advantage of different plants.
I want to hit one more time the ocean acidification issue. If you're not aware of this topic, take a look at the slide on the bottom of page 15, which has the Keeling Curve that everybody has seen. This is the curve on Mauna Loa. There are the now similar curves all over the world that show the regular increase of CO2 modulated by the annual cycle of vegetation.
What you haven't perhaps seen is this lower curve, which is the pH of the oceans, and pH is a log metric. So what this is saying is that the oceans are today 30 percent more acidic than they were in preindustrial times. This is not caused by geoengineering, but the key point is that geoengineering, while it can offset warming, doesn't do anything about this. And so here are some pictures on the next slide. They are much more striking, in color, of what coral reefs look like.
Now, I must say that when we were publishing a piece a few years ago -- and for those in the press here, I'm off the record, my editor said, "Why do you care about coral reefs? They're pretty, but." But coral reefs are, in fact, of course, the base of multiple ocean ecosystems. I'm back on the record, but I don't want to get any editors in trouble. (Laughter.)
STEINBRUNER: You're messing with the bottom of the food chain.
MORGAN: Yeah, right. Exactly.
STEINBRUNER: Not a good idea.
QUESTIONER: I'm Eli Kintisch, with Science Magazine.
The first question is for John. You deal with lots of different countries in your work on nonproliferation. Do we know anything about what the other superpowers, or the biggest players think about this?
And the second question is: Your idea was we won't mess with the atmosphere unless we all come to an agreement. But we have lots of international laws in which some countries might disagree. Why is that -- if we were all in a, if we were all in a room, and one person was drowning or something, we might act in a way that would, you know, cause discomfort to help that person.
MORGAN: This gentleman, incidentally, you should know in full disclosure, was at our meeting in Portugal, and is -- I think you're writing a book, right?
QUESTIONER: (Off mike.) It comes out next month.
MORGAN: Yeah. (Laughter.)
BELL: On geoengineering --
STEINBRUNER: I was going to --
MORGAN: Yes, on geoengineering.
STEINBRUNER: -- I was going to ask you, for that reason, what your sense of the state of major-power discussion here. But I don't think -- to put it mildly, "not very far along" would be the answer.
And I'm not aware of any -- I've gone to the State Department and talked about it, and they were kind of, 'Oh, yeah, really?' I mean, they're not doing anything, that I can detect, that is attempting to engage broad discussion on this question.
MORGAN: (Off mike.) No. I'll leave it at that.
BELL: Well, it's kind of -- may I just add? To be more specific, are the Chinese engaging in some of these discussions? For example, in Lisbon, did you have --
MORGAN: Well, I mean, we had at this meeting in Lisbon someone from China, but they didn't talk about any active research program. I, frankly, do not know.
BELL: Get your microphones.
QUESTIONER: My name is Mike Morantz (sp).
My questions are two. One is on the bubbles. I keep thinking about the conflict of trying to put fluoride in water -- the politics of that, or using gene changes in meat. There's a huge part of the population that would oppose it.
And the second is, you keep focusing on catastrophe rather than a long-term problem, as if it's going to take a catastrophe to be reactive rather than proactive. Would you comment on that?
STEINBRUNER: Well, I would like to believe that "sweet reason" propagates itself, and that the world gradually comes to believe that we have to do something about this without any image of catastrophe needing to trigger it.
Human beings being what they are, though, and political processes being what they are, it's a lot easier to believe that we will suddenly get a lot more serious, and we do have to get a lot more serious. If there is -- now, obviously, my favorite scenario is that a generation comes of age; realizes this problem; and gets a lot more serious about it spontaneously. We know enough about it to realize that we really ought to be taking prudent action.
Every time I say something like that, though, I run into -- like a friend, just a few weeks ago, who is working for somebody who I guess is going to run for governor of New York, and has done very extensive polling and asked people what do you care about? Didn't show up in New York -- didn't show up.
Now, you know, it's pretty obvious that people were worried about their jobs and that sort of thing, but it is literally not on the -- it doesn't get onto the list, never mind down the list. So if public reaction is to -- has got a long way to go before it will support the fairly dramatic changes required to really achieve mitigation. And that's why we all get driven into these catastrophe scenarios.
Plus -- you can comment on this -- (inaudible), the people watching the climate and its effects are getting nervous. I mean, they're seeing changes going a lot more rapidly than they anticipated. And although they can't come up and say, 'Now we proved that we're going over a cliff,' they're getting noticeably uneasy. And so I'm just -- I'm sensing, if you will, that we're going to have to go to a different state of public consciousness, and it's probably going to be an image of big trouble that is clearer than we currently have that would get us there.
MORGAN: So, just a quick elaboration:
First of all, of course, there is a lot of money getting spent to make sure that a very substantial portion of the public stays totally confused about this. And, I mean, it's been really quite pernicious. But there's been literally tens of millions of dollars spent on every little thing that comes along that might, you know, relate to some uncertainty. And while sure there's uncertainty about some of the details of the climate science, there isn't any uncertainty about whether we have a serious problem.
The other issue is that there are folks running around saying, 'This is going to be incredibly expensive. It's going to just totally wreck the economy.' Well, you can recall that many of those same people made precisely that same argument about the Clean Air Act. And the electricity industry met the requirements for the Clean Air Act at a cost of -- well, actually the economy met the requirements of the Clean Air Act at a price that was about a half a percent of GDP.
Now, if you were going to decarbonize the energy system on a gradual basis over the next 50 years or so -- by which I mean, for example, in electricity, roughly doubling the rate of new construction and never building anything that was not zero carbon -- you could probably decarbonize the entire system for something like 0.7 of 1 percent of GDP.
But you can make it as expensive as you want. I mean, if you hold off and hold off, and then suddenly decide, 'Oh my god, we got a real problem,' and you have to junk a lot of technology that's still got useful life, you can make it really expensive.
So the folks who say you could wreck the economy this way aren't wrong, they're just not telling you the whole story. I mean, it won't wreck the economy if you go about it in a systemic way. You will wreck the economy if you wait until the last minute and then suddenly discover that you got to junk 2,000-megawatt, relatively new coal-fired power plants.
STEINBRUNER: And to add to that, there's a lot of liquidity running around the financial system looking for the next bubble. (Laughter.) This is actually -- the energy transformation is a very productive place to put your money. You can make money doing that. And it's a productive result.
So it doesn't appear to be, at least, hopeless to convince the markets that, rather than go create some speculative Ponzi scheme, put it in -- put money into a transformation we know we're going to need, and you can make a lot of money doing it -- whoever, sort of, gets the lead, sort of, items in this area. And, you know, I think, conceivably, you can convince the markets that this is a good place to invest.
And Granger is exactly right. The problem is to try to do it on a prudent schedule, not to wait until there's some kind of crash effort that has to be --
MORGAN: But you see, because, as John says, we are human, and there is a good possibility that that's the way it will play out, I mean, my concern is that we get into a mode where we wait, we wait, we wait; 'Oh my god, there's no way we can do it fast enough, we got to do geoengineering.' And so that's another --
STEINBRUNER: Forget the other.
MORGAN: Yeah, and that's another --
STEINBRUNER: That really is (heroine addiction ?)
MORGAN: -- reason why I think you really have to understand today not just what could be the direct consequences, but what might be the down sides; and, you know, is it really, indeed, as simple and straightforward as we -- many people think? I mean, for example, there's some recent results that suggest that sulfate may not be a terribly effective strategy, that you may want to use sulfuric acid.
One of the things, of course, that people worry about is what about acid rain? Well, I mean, it turns out that the amount of material that you have to put in the stratosphere to offset is really small, in comparative terms, and so the ecological impacts of fallout are not likely to be significant.
And there are people also talking about specially-engineered particles that would self-orient, self-levitate. I mean, there's all kinds of fairly wild possibilities, but nobody's working seriously on most of them.
BELL: I think I see another --
MORGAN: Yeah, we got three here now.
BELL: Yeah.
Please.
QUESTIONER: Thank you. I'm Jim Turner, from NOAA.
First of all, thank you very much for talking about ocean acidification. But I do have a question about some of the field-scale -- the experiments that you were talking about doing. What are some of the parameters that you would need, because you certainly need something that's big enough so that you can detect an effect, and also, something that is large enough so that you could learn enough to extrapolate from it?
So can you talk about some of the parameters that -- you know, when you talk about a limited scale, you know, field test, can you talk about the kind of size you're talking about?
MORGAN: So not everything you do --
BELL: (Off mike.) Can I just?
MORGAN: Yeah, please.
BELL: Let's do this: I see two more hands, so let's cumulate the questions and then -- because we're sort of, almost at the end of the time.
MORGAN: All right, fine.
QUESTIONER: This is a general question, but besides Al Gore and the three of you, where is the leadership going to come from -- (laughter) -- to engage these projects and move forward?
BELL: And there was another, or was I mistaken?
Okay.
QUESTIONER: (Inaudible.)
I just wanted to ask whether -- a proposal I've heard, that it would be useful to paint all roofs, parking lots and roads white so the light would be reflected directly out. If that was suddenly done, would that make a measurable effect, or would it be irrelevant in the larger scheme of things?
MORGAN: I'll take the first and the last -- (laughter) -- and John can get the middle one. (Laughter.)
MORGAN: He is, after all, the political scientist up here.
Not every experiment that you'd want to do in the atmosphere needs to be a long-term measurement of changes in forcing. I mean, for example, there are serious questions about how would you introduce the material. You may want to introduce it as a -- in a gaseous or liquid form; you may -- and so you need to look at how spray technology works.
And so there are a bunch of things that you could do on a really quite small scale. There are folks talking about trying to do synchronous detection studies. So far, the numbers I've seen suggest that the forcing levels you require may be fairly high. But the notion of synchronous detection is that if you put stuff in at a phase that's not in-sync with the diurnal -- or, I mean, with the annual cycle, that you might be able to pull a signal out from the noise. But it's precisely thinking seriously about some of this stuff that needs to happen, and so far it hasn't.
On the parking lots, I've never run the numbers, but I know somebody who claims to have run the numbers that says white roofs and white parking lots don't appear to have a big effect. But I should run the numbers myself.
STEINBRUNER: As for leadership -- (laughter) -- I wish I knew. It's a little hard to see.
But, you know, you could say, if you want to be on the upside, when there really are emergency situations, usually leaders do emerge. I don't think they're out there in any -- and if you're talking about globally credible leadership on this question, it ain't there at the moment.
MORGAN: Yeah, I wrote an editorial in "Science" -- gee, a long time ago now, over a decade ago, called "Managing Carbon from the Bottom Up," that argued that we were putting altogether too much effort into global -- into trying to negotiate a global regime to which everyone would salute and sign up; that a far more plausible route forward was to get various parts of the world to each decide -- to decide, 'This is a serious problem; we got to do something about it,' and then gradually to coalesce these different regimes.
And so, you know, in this country we see California trying to do reasonably serious stuff, and we have a few others around the world who are trying to do reasonably serious stuff. I think that maybe a little less attention on trying to negotiate a single, all-encompassing agreement that has real teeth and impact, and a little more work here at home on, sort of, getting out front would be a good place to start.
And so, for example, getting a half-dozen 800-megawatt coal-fired power plants built with carbon sequestration, doing a much bigger program of nuclear rejuvenation and renewal than we have, and a whole variety of -- really going, in a serious way, after energy efficiency. You'll notice that we're looking at a whole slew of incandescent lights here, in a new LEEDS building. (Laughter.) Working on a bunch of those things would be probably very desirable.
BELL: We need to wrap this up, unfortunately.
Let me just -- two points: Some people think that the Copenhagen Accord actually represents the beginning of that bottom-up that you're suggesting, this putting commitments on the table. Who knows, I mean, it's another hour debate which we won't -- (laughs) -- go into here.
I wanted to thank you both for this. It's the beginning of a really important conversation that we all need to be having on this issue.
And I want to thank the audience for some really good questions.
And good night -- and I'm supposed to also remind everybody that this was on the record. That's what my cheat-sheet here says.
MORGAN: Except for my crack about an editor.
BELL: Except for that one, yes. (Laughter.) (Applause.) Do not record that. (Laughs.) (Applause.)
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THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT.
RUTH GREENSPAN BELL: Okay. The microphone works -- (laughs) -- okay.
I'm Ruth Greenspan Bell from World Resources Institute, and it's my pleasure to invite -- to welcome you here this evening. I've been on the other side of this, so I remember the ritual Council warnings, which are: would you please turn off your cell phone, even if it vibrates, because sometimes it interferes with the speaker system, and this meeting is on the record.
So our subject this evening is geoengineering, and in some parts of the environmental community, just saying the word "geoengineering" is a fighting word. It can be very contentious. In part, I think this represents some fear in some parts of the community that if you start talking about geoengineering you give up on mitigation, you give up on adaptation, and just start trying to -- try to change the environment.
There is, I think, some fear of the impression that there's a magic bullet involved. And I think -- my own personal concern is that, I'm kind of worried that when the current climate deniers kind of wake up at some point and realize something is serious happening here, that they'll be seeking easy fixes. So I'm really, really pleased that the Council has chosen to have this conversation today, and particularly with these two speakers who I think are the perfect people to be talking about this.
So we will start. We will have a conversation for about a half hour, and then we'll open it up to questions at that point. I'm not going to repeat the bios that are in the handout that you have. Needless to say, we have two very distinguished speakers.
John Steinbruner is professor of public policy at the University of Maryland, and director of the Center for International and Security Studies, and he's been a leading figure for many, many years in arms control and global security. Granger Morgan is professor and head of the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, and also, for many years, has been a leader in helping finding ways to describe scientific uncertainty and incorporate risk into public policy decisionmaking. So we have totally the perfect people here to be talking about this issue.
So I wanted to first ask Granger to sort of set the stage for us and to tell us -- to start from almost a definitional point of view: What is geoengineering? And why is this set of issues starting, really, to be discussed with some degree of seriousness at this point? What is it in the state of play of climate science and carbon regulation that might be stimulating this discussion?
M. GRANGER MORGAN: Okay, and we're running the experiment tonight to see if an engineer is capable of talking without slides. (Laughter.) Both John and I have slides that are out there on the table if you want copies of them. But I thought actually I should start just a few steps even back from what you described and make sure we're all sort of up to speed on the climate problem.
The sun shines on the earth, of course, and about 30 percent of that light is immediately reflected back into space, and the other 70 percent is absorbed by clouds, by the surface, by the oceans and so on. And, of course, if that was all that happened, the earth would rapidly heat up and we'd all fry. Somehow we've got to get the same amount of energy back out into space as got absorbed. But once it's absorbed it, can't be reradiated as light; it has to be reradiated as heat, as infrared -- you know, like a radiator radiates.
And there's the rub, because the atmosphere, while it's transparent to the visible, is not transparent in the infrared. And so what happens is that the whole temperature of the planet warms a bit, and then finally it gets to a warm enough point that the amount of heat energy radiated off the top of the atmosphere is just equal to the amount that's being absorbed, and so the planet runs in equilibrium. And that's good thing for us -- this is the so-called "greenhouse effect," and if it weren't for that, it would not -- planet Earth would not be a terribly pleasant place to be.
The two principal constituents in the atmosphere that absorb infrared are water vapor and carbon dioxide. And we have for several hundred years now been gradually increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide, and as a consequence, the mean temperature -- or the average temperature at which the planet operates goes up.
So that's all kind of theoretical. And in the slides, one of the things you will see is a picture of a couple thousand-megawatt coal-fired power plant, just west of where I live, called the "Bruce Mansfield Power Station." A plant that size uses a couple hundred of these large 100-ton hopper cars of coal every day. And so to give it sort of a more concrete sense, a plant like that takes a couple hundred -- you know, a train of 200 cars turns it into a invisible gas; puts it into the atmosphere every day, and we're doing that in hundreds of facilities like that all around the world. So though it's invisible, the mass volumes are quite large.
The -- one other thing I should say about the physics, or the science, is that unlike conventional pollutants -- unlike, say, sulfur dioxide, oxides of nitrogen, which, when you put them in the atmosphere only stay there for a few hours or days. So if I stopped emitting sulfur dioxide, it would rapidly disappear, or if I stabilized emissions, concentrations would stabilize -- CO2 and other greenhouse gasses aren't like that.
They live in the atmosphere, many of them, for 100 years or more, with the result that -- it's kind of like a big bathtub. If I had a bathtub with a small drain and a big faucet, you know, unless I really closed down the faucet, the bathtub will continue to fill up. So think of the atmosphere as like that bathtub, and unless I dramatically reduce emissions, by 80 percent or so, globally, the level of concentration -- or the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere will continue to rise.
All right, that's all the science. But since it turns out many people do not understand this cumulative effect, and the fact that one really does need to dramatically reduce emissions in order to stabilize concentration, I've started making a point of talking about this whenever I talk about climate issues.
At Carnegie Mellon we've been doing a variety of things on climate impact assessment and integrated assessment of climate problems for many years. When we first got started we looked, sort of, systematically across the whole space. And one of the things we did was get a young post-doc, David Keyes, to do quite an extensive review of geoengineering -- by which I mainly mean changing the albedo, that is, the fraction of sunlight that's reflected back to space. I told you it was about 30 percent.
So this is not a new idea. People have been talking about it sort of on the fringes of the science community for many, many years. And we did a review, and then we set it aside. Like many others, we were rather reluctant to work too seriously on the problem, in part, because, you know, you're sort of concerned that knowledge might drive intention. That is, that if you get to the point you really know how to do this, and you know what it would cost, and so on, that that might raise the likelihood that somebody would do it.
So for, I don't know, 15 years or more, having done a set of fairly comprehensive reviews, we didn't work on it anymore. But then about three years ago, given the really abysmal progress that the rest of the -- you know, the U.S. and all the rest of the world are making, in terms of reducing emissions, I began to get concerned, among other things, that somebody might wake up one day and say, 'Oh, my God, we've got a problem.' I mean, the Chinese, for example, might conclude, because of changes in precipitation, 'we can't feed our people;' or Russia might conclude that all of Siberia is turning -- with the permafrost thawing, is turning into an impenetrable bog.
And so I got worried a bit about the prospect that somebody might -- or some small group of folks might go off and unilaterally just start doing this, having concluded, 'We've got a problem, we've got to fix it.' And at that stage, I decided maybe the foreign policy community should start thinking about this issue.
So three of us at Carnegie Mellon on the technical side, and John and David Victor on the political science side, got together and -- I guess it was about two years ago now, ran an event in the old building up the street, in which a -- day-long event in which a good cross-section of leading people on the technical side of climate science sat down with a number of experts in the foreign policy community to think seriously about this.
The participation in that group was all North Americans, and we decided we needed to broaden the discourse. And so, at the invitation of the government of Portugal, we ran a similar event in Lisbon last April, in which, in addition to North Americans, we had a fair cross-section of folks from across the EU, from Russia, China, India and elsewhere around the world. And both of these had as their objective to try to get the foreign policy community at least aware of this issue and beginning to think about it.
Now, I want to talk about two other things before I turn things over to John. First of all, the word "geoengineering" turns out to be, sort of, all-inclusive. I mean, to different people it seems to mean all kinds of different stuff. The Royal Society in London did an assessment recently -- actually, the discussion in the back of that assessment, on governance, builds directly on the results of the two workshops we ran, because two of the key authors had been participants in both of those workshops.
And they did a very useful thing. They introduced two words, "solar radiation management," for stuff that involved changing the albedo -- and, actually, in a piece that we published in "Nature" about a month-and-a-half ago, "Nature" used some phrase about sunscreens, or "sun shades," which is perhaps maybe even better -- and then all the other stuff was termed "carbon dioxide removal."
And, among other things on that side -- I mean, you can actually build devices to scrub carbon dioxide directly out of the atmosphere and then sequester it, that is, put it deep under ground in appropriate strata -- those sorts of processes are inherently slow. They could be as cheap as 100 (dollars) to $200 a ton. So they're important. They set an upper bound on what the cost of controlling CO2 might be. But they're inherently slow, and you could do them within the confines of a particular nation. I don't view them as posing significant governance issues.
On the other hand, the stuff that involves changing the albedo by, for example, putting very fine particles in the stratosphere -- and we can talk a bit more about how you would go about doing that -- could be done at relatively low cost, perhaps a hundredth or less the cost of abating emissions, and could be done by a single state operating within the confines of its national borders.
I have a doctoral student right now who, in collaboration with groups at Oxford, is doing climate modeling. And while you can, indeed, reduce the average temperature of the planet, it's imperfect, and the effects are different in different parts of the world. And, over time -- for example, she has looked at how China and India's climate might (have) evolved. And while they're both closer to today's climate than they would be, say, 80 or hundred years from now, over time they -- in a space of temperature and precip, they move away from each other.
Last comment. I think that it would be a real -- well, I've published in several places recently an argument that says the time has come to mount a serious research program here. I'm not talking about an enormous amount of money, I'm just saying that, to date, there's been hardly any serious research, and for two reasons we need to get serious and understand what could be done and what it might cost.
The first reason is that there's some possibility that somebody else would do it. And then, if we thought that was a terrible idea -- because, for example, it does nothing about the ongoing acidification of the oceans, which will probably leave us without coral reefs by the end of this century, or any of a number of other impacts from rising CO2 -- if we thought it was a bad idea, we need to know enough to be able to mount coherent counterarguments.
And the other reason we need to do research is to, in the event that we have a climate disaster, we know what we're getting into if we suddenly decided we had to do this -- if we had a billion people at risk around the world, for example.
And so, in the back few slides of this thing that I've passed out is an argument that says one of the things that climate science community should start doing fairly quickly is figuring out a space in which they could do field experiments without any sort of international oversight or overview. I think if you -- I mean, we do stuff in the stratosphere all the time, of course, and so it's not as though the stratosphere is absolutely pristine. But you don't want to have people going off and doing things that involve large radiative forcings; or go on for extended periods; or, for that matter, provide lots of reactive surfaces that could result in significant ozone destruction.
So I think that one of the early requirements for the science community is to figure out: Can you define a sort of space within which -- as long as you're behaving inside that space, issues of governance are not a big deal, but doing anything outside that space requires some collective agreement that it would be appropriate to do that?
And, at that point, I'm going to stop, and John -- (laughs) -- pick up.
JOHN STEINBRUNER: (Laughs.)
BELL: Yeah, sure. Obviously, the questions then turn to governance issues, and that's what I'd like you to address. But I just -- a special question is: The U.N. negotiations have demonstrated the difficulty of getting a mutually-acceptable agreement in place on the climate issues. I'm curious whether you would also address what this tells us about getting rules into place for geoengineering?
MORGAN: And maybe before John talks about that, I should say I think that putting something in place quickly, that made it really hard to do research on modest scales, would be a disaster. But John and I may disagree.
STEINBRUNER: Now, the role I've played is to try to anticipate what kind of rules would have to be applied in a situation where there is a technique that almost certainly would work and it is not very expensive, so it's not as if there's a lot of uncertainty about what to do. There's at least one technique that would reduce -- mimicking the volcanoes, would reduce average surface temperature on the order of a half a degree centigrade in a single year. But you'd have to keep doing it year after year.
So I am anticipating a situation in which the image of global consequence becomes globally distributed and people start to get concerned about their equity in this. And though I agree that it is desirable and probably feasible to set a limited space -- such that you could say, well, field experiments in this relatively modest range are okay, I'm not sure how limited that can be, because at some point the world is going to insist on having a collective stake in this, almost certainly, because you're dealing with a global commons. The atmosphere -- (laughs) -- which everybody breathes, is a global commons if anything is, and the basic rules say, nobody gets to appropriate for personal or sovereign use, and everybody's equity has to be taken into account.
So what I'm saying is that because you can imagine having very substantial global effects on the basis very small initiatives, anticipate the need for global rules which do not currently exist. There's no direct legal structure dealing with this question, not surprisingly, because it's just coming on the horizon.
Trying to be practical about it, what I'd say is it would be a very good idea for the National Academies of Sciences to have coordinating mechanisms among themselves to set guidelines for field experiments that might, in fact, set your limits and say: This is what you can do, and these are the limits you have to adhere to. And if you go beyond those limits, what are the guidelines for doing a, globally, sort of, credible review as to the relative merits. And I presume that nobody's going to go off and try to do this with no research whatsoever, so there would be a period of time in which we are dealing with, basically, field trials.
But I don't think it's too early to anticipate the possibility of a situation arising in which suddenly there is a great deal more fear than there currently is, coming much more rapidly than the scientists anticipate clicking in. And at that point, we could have a real mess on our hands if there are no rules whatsoever. So what I'm saying is, anticipate the need for having a basic principle, which is, "Thou shalt not mess with the atmosphere unless everybody agrees in some globally representative way." And the criteria for judging this have to do with meeting a very heavy of burden of proof. You have to demonstrate that the benefit to be achieved decisively outweighs the negative consequence.
And, I would say, and this is the important point, you have to demonstrate that this is not a substitute for mitigation, because if it is, it's the equivalent of heroine addiction, basically -- once you start, you can't stop; and that you have not affected the underlying carbon build-up, acidification of the oceans, and all that just keep going.
MORGAN: You might explain why you can't stop.
BELL: Kind of, suggest --
STEINBRUNER: Why you can't stop? You cannot stop because the technique that will work, only works for a year or two. You put particles up and they come down within a year or two. The carbon dioxide stays for a century. So his bathtub analogy is --
MORGAN: But the bathtub has continued to fill. So if you stop, suddenly you get a whopping big temperature increase, which just raises --
STEINBRUNER: Right, right.
MORGAN: -- ecosystems.
STEINBRUNER: And we're messing around with the rate of temperature increase. I think it's fair to say we're projecting a rate of increase that the geological record has never seen. So we're messing around already with global balances that could conceivably put everyone at risk.
And if you want the nightmare scenario that might wake everybody up and suddenly make this a much bigger deal than it has been, it's the possibility of a surging release of frozen methane, gas hydrates that would produce a positive feedback cycle. And, you know, that could create an image of real catastrophe -- I mean, real catastrophe that would seize everybody's imagination, way out in front of what the scientists could really sort out.
And that's been hypothetical. I've been saying this for a couple of -- about a year since we've been talking about it, and people have been saying, 'Yeah, but it's, you know.' But they've just measured -- they just measured it in the Arctic Shelf. And it's the first observation, but I would say we ought to pay attention to that, because this is potentially a very big deal.
Bottom line of all this is we need to start talking about it in terms of the governance issues: What kind of rules do we need to put in place to provide adequate vetting for any initiative? And, unfortunately, it's not just big governments that could do this; it is small governments, it is billionaires, probably, could figure, "I'm going to save the world all by myself and I won't bother to mention it."
So you've got a problem -- a situation in which small initiatives could have a global effect, and we don't have any rules for dealing with that. And I'm saying it's time to start talking about the rules. I concede that on this subject, and in general, it's not popular to talk about global rules; so I'm telling you, however, we're looking at situations that's going to make it necessary, like it or not, and we ought to start thinking about it.
BELL: Can you mention what bodies you might have in mind? You mentioned an informal set of bodies through National Academies of Science that could work on these. Are there other bodies you think that would be well-suited, that you can imagine to take this responsibility?
STEINBRUNER: Well, you can imagine the coordinating mechanisms of the National Academy of Sciences working out some kind of understanding among them, and making themselves, kind of, maybe the global equivalent of an institutional review board for medical -- you know: If you do any experiment on human beings, you have to -- you have to justify yourself to the institutional (review boards, who do an ?) independent -- that they are not your, you're not subjecting the subjects to unnecessary risk.
I think they could -- using that analogy, they could set up a basic mechanism, an understanding the way Granger was talking, "Okay, if you're operating within these fairly narrow limits, where we don't think there's going to be any major global consequence, do it on your own;" or, "You can do it on your own, but there are disclosure rules, transparency rules. You got to publish what you're doing. You can't hide it." "If you go beyond these limits" -- and the limits need some agreement, then there has to be, I would say, some common vetting process that they would have to organize among themselves collectively. We all have a stake in that.
And I would say it's good to start talking about just that much. But what happens if tomorrow we get, sort of, somebody announced, 'Okay, we've got frozen gas hydrates coming out like crazy, and unless we stop this, we're all dead,' and people start believing that. What do we do?
At that point, if you're talking about real emergency things, I'm saying, well, if you're looking at the only mechanism we have at the moment for global vetting, you're talking about the U.N. Security Council. You're going to have to go through that. And if you don't like that, then think of something else, because don't think that you can do this on your own without triggering real, real reaction.
And this is something that if people think there's an (emergency), they're going to get excited about it. They're going to get really excited about it, and you're not going to be able to act unilaterally -- (inaudible) --
MORGAN: A couple more comments on, sort of, coordination, and who might do what.
As I mentioned, the Royal Society has done a study that, among other things, introduced this very useful distinction between solar radiation management and carbon dioxide removal. The Royal Society is getting geared up right now to do a second round of work on global governance issues. It'll be an informal kind of thing. In the paper that John and I and our co-authors published in "Foreign Affairs," we also raised the prospect that ICSU, the International Council on Scientific Unions, might be a candidate for coordinating at least research activities among different research groups around the world.
I want to reiterate what John said, which is I think that any research in this area needs to be open. I think it would be truly disastrous if, you know, we discovered a few years from now that there was a "black program" that some government had stood-up to sort of learn on-the-quiet how to do this.
And I also think that we do need to get a serious research program going, because the sorts of events that John's talking about -- that is, that a climate catastrophe of one sort or another, are still way out in the probability -- in the tails of the probability distributions of our uncertainty.
I don't think there are very many scientists who would say they're high-probability events. But they are out there. There is some -- I mean, it's not zero. And you don't want to be in the position of suddenly deciding you got to do something dramatic quickly if you haven't studied it and you don't know what might happen.
STEINBRUNER: Just one little bit. The burden proof on the moment quite appropriately falls very heavily on anybody who wants to proclaim a catastrophe. You have to demonstrate to confidence that -- It will shift in public a lot sooner than it'll shift among the scientists. And if it did -- if some image of a catastrophe started to take hold, it would be very difficult to disprove it also.
When you're dealing with out-on-the-tail, low-probability events, whoever carries the burden of proof to say it might happen, loses. And so what you have to worry about is some image of catastrophe that takes -- seizes broad imagination, and the scientific community cannot disprove it.
And you could get that. This frozen gas hydrate thing has some potential in that regard.
MORGAN: So you started this session by saying, many people look at this and think it's a really awful idea. And I agree. And I think it's actually a good thing that many people look at this and think it's an awful idea. I mean, messing with the planet is not something one should do lightly.
And, actually it was very interesting, the Russian participant at this workshop we were in in Portugal reminded us about various Russian attempts to, you know, redirect rivers and otherwise engineer the landscape; and, you know, pointed out that there was a lot of hubris here and it didn't work out too well. You don't want to -- so if you do, as a last resort, have to engage in such activity, you don't want to do it without knowing quite a lot about it.
STEINBRUNER: Right.
BELL: I was going to actually ask a question about the flip of the rush-to-judgment, which is if, you know, if serious scientists at some point decide -- and governments even decide at some point intervention is necessary, and you think about, kind of, the normal NIMBY writ large problem that we see in other environmental and other areas, is there any active preparation going on at this stage to kind of introduce -- I mean, I realize the Royal Society and others have issued these, but I sort of suspect they're --
MORGAN: Well, there's a bunch of stuff going on. I mean, I spent the last two days at a workshop over at the Bipartisan Commission -- I forget exactly what it's called --
STEINBRUNER: (Inaudible) -- global task force on geoengineering.
MORGAN: Yeah, which has got a task force that it's putting together on this. In a couple of weeks there's a four- or five-day event out at a -- (inaudible) -- to be trying to start some conversation on this. So there's a bunch of low-level things going on. There's this Royal Society event that I described.
But, you know, it's also politically reasonably touchy I think. I mean, John Holdren quite appropriately noted that we should not completely take this off the table. And Seth Borenstein, of course, turned it into a big article, implying that, you know, that the administration was about to embark on this; which is not, I mean -- So, you know, it's touchy. I mean, it is very pressworthy. So, you know, I'm not faulting either one of them in that case. But you can also understand why people might be a little reluctant publicly argue that we need a research program.
I don't think we need a big program at the moment. I think that some tens-of-millions of dollars, spent appropriately through places like NSF, and maybe NOAA and NASA at later stages, would be entirely appropriate at this point. I mean, it really is the case that we're almost dead in the water with respect to serious research on this problem. About the only thing that's been done has been some computer modeling using general circulation models. And it is pretty clear that one will have to do some small-scale field stuff to really understand some of the technology.
The other thing we ought to be doing is having some instrumented aircraft available, so if and when we get the next Mount Pinatubo we're all set up to go and study in detail the processes involved.
BELL: Too many earthquakes, not enough volcanos, right. (Laughs.) (Laughter.)
MORGAN: Yeah, although my suspicion is, if we had a volcano tomorrow, we wouldn't be in a position to do the --
BELL: (Laughs.) I'm not urging -- (inaudible) --
MORGAN: (Laughs.)
BELL: Okay, why don't we now actually invite the audience to join into this. We have microphones that we're going to pass around, and I would ask you to please speak directly into the microphone and state your name and affiliation.
Mr. Topping.
QUESTIONER: My name is John Topping, with the Climate Institute.
And Mike MacCracken, our chief scientist and, together with the Climate Response Fund, is essentially organizing the (Solemar ?) meeting. And, you know, the whole purpose of that is to really try to develop some guidelines that would be very useful. And, you know, both -- you know, I can't speak for, you know, exactly will come out of it. There will be about 150 experts from member countries there.
But what's interesting, I think, on -- just on this issue, is that there are a range of possibilities, some of which might be almost win-win. I mean, one idea that occurred, Russell Seitz, I think at Harvard, has essentially advanced the idea of --
STEINBRUNER: Microbubbles.
QUESTIONER: -- essentially microbubbles. Well, you know, they may or may not work. If it works -- what it does is -- presumably is to reduce evaporation, which is a huge problem in the reservoirs. So it's a kind of win-win strategy, and conceivably it's a way of -- a soft way of testing something that, you know, might work much more broadly.
You also have in the Arctic, you know -- I mean, when we talk about runaway or rapid climate change, I think the, you know, the greatest concern would be --
BELL: Can you hold the microphone up.
QUESTIONER: I'm sorry -- it would be melting, let's say, in Greenland, or obviously the, you know, the methane releases. Well, black carbon plays a very, very large role in some of that, and there's now a -- efforts under way, an ANSI study that ultimately might result in an ISO standard that essentially is looking at perhaps the possibility of establishing a regional warming -- you know, global warming potential looking at the Arctic.
What happens in the Arctic, that a large part of the black carbon essentially comes from forest fires in Alaska, Canada, you know, Siberia, open burning in Kazakhstan. Well, conceivably, better forestry practices are a way of addressing that.
And then you get into the other issues. Perhaps, rather than global geoengineering, what you might find -- if we got into the very difficult situations that, you know, we described, it might be that very localized, regional geoengineering over -- affecting Greenland or affecting the Antarctic might be feasible. At the same time, you go with an aggressive mitigation strategy.
And that's, you know, I think that's perhaps one of the things that might be on the table, but, you know, they all have to be vetted.
BELL: There are quite a few parts to that question.
Could I suggest one thing, as starting off this? A lot of this, I think, is a little bit "inside baseball." And because there's some people in the audience who've been focused on this for a really long time and some folks who are new to it, so maybe you can explain some of these things that John mentioned before we respond to it -- black carbon, you know, some of the other --
STEINBRUNER: Let me just comment on the microbubbles idea.
BELL: Yeah. Microbubbles, yeah. Can you explain what it is first?
STEINBRUNER: Microbubbles are very tiny bubbles, sort of, micro-scale bubbles that sustain themselves over very long periods of time at the right size in water. There's an issue of how much energy it takes to do it over a large scale, okay, but it's quite dramatic.
And I think Russell Seitz is now making a local, not a global claim that you can put them in lakes that are subject to evaporation; you could reduce the evaporation and have a beneficial local effect. I don't think he's -- and it's just at the laboratory basis so far, so I don't think he's ready to say, you know, we're going to put microbubbles all over the ocean and solve the problem.
If you did, though, it looks like it would have less consequence than the sulfates in the stratosphere. So one of the things that needs to be looked at is things that can be done, either locally or globally, that don't have dramatically bad side effects, or very uncertain ones.
BELL: Granger, did you want to talk about black carbon, or -- there was a second part to --
MORGAN: No, I think we should keep questioning.
BELL: Okay. Keep going, okay.
Any other questions?
Please.
QUESTIONER: Hi. I'm Cheryl Hogue, with Chemical and Engineering News.
I'd like for you all to talk a little bit about what you foresee as possible research by the U.S. government. I think there were a couple of agencies mentioned. I know that chairman of the House Science and Technology committee, Bart Gordon, is really hot for the Department of Energy to be involved in this, although that sounds more like carbon capture and sequestration rather than the, kind of, solar radiation management.
Could you talk a little bit more about that, and how you foresee the U.S. government's role in research?
MORGAN: Yeah. I think, first, that it probably is important that there be federally-supported research.
I'm troubled by the prospect of private-venture people getting into this business, because, among other things, suddenly there becomes then a, kind of, incentive to do it. And, I mean, on the one hand, I think it's terribly important that we understand what it would cost, how you would do it, what the intended and unintended consequences would be.
I think that in the early stages National Science Foundation might be actually quite a good venue because, you know, they are in the business of exploring a wide range of issues, opportunity for multiple investigators with different perspectives, opportunity for folks to work on some of the social science issues. We've actually been -- with some NSF money, doing some work in this space.
And, as I say, I don't think, at this stage, large amounts of money are needed. Later on, when you are actually trying to run some field campaigns, then NASA might be an interesting candidate, because, you know, they've got a strong capability to do things in the stratosphere. That's probably sufficient.
STEINBRUNER: Let me just say, though, that remember, the underlying situation is you don't want to do this without mitigation. And we are not -- one of the problems is we are not on course to do prudent mitigation, so part of the research effort has got to go into alternative technologies for mitigation. And that would --
MORGAN: Yeah, I'm certainly not proposing that this be "instead of," and the amount of money I'm talking about is pretty modest compared with the amounts we're now spending.
But, I mean, stop to think about it. We've been talking for a couple of decades about carbon capture and deep geologic sequestration in the context of coal-fired power plants. And we're beginning to do a few minor things, but we still haven't got the first commercial scale plant up and running. All the pieces have existed at commercial scale for quite a long time, but we just haven't spent the money to put the pieces together.
If you asked me to bet today on who will get the first commercial-scale plant up and running, I'd put more money on the Chinese than I would on the U.S. So John's absolutely right. I mean, it is really dismaying at the slow rate of progress.
And it's also dismaying that we got so many people playing "my technology is more virtuous than yours." I mean, if we're going to achieve an 80-percent reduction in emissions, it's literally going to take everything we've got, and even still, I think there are good questions about whether we'll make it.
STEINBRUNER: I was going to say I'm biting my tongue, (Steve ?), about the small reactor story -- (laughs) --
MORGAN: (Laughs.)
STEINBRUNER: -- but I'll give it -- It's very difficult to imagine how we're going to get a prudent standard without an expansion of nuclear power that is more broader than anything going on, or even imaginable, with current reactor designs.
So one of the conclusions you reach -- or current fuel cycle management practices, or current security relationship, so one of the things that you can say, I think, with some seriousness, is that one of the things we're going to have to do, in order to have any hope, is to develop small, inherently safe, sealed reactor designs that you can put around the world, and the that use them do not get at the fuel -- cannot get at the fuel.
But that's an entirely different industry from what we're currently talking about. So one of the things that absolutely needs to happen is to -- there are about there are about eight or 10 of these designs, which is too many -- there needs to be a runoff among them, and two or three of them brought to the point of commercial viability. And whatever else you do, you're not going to make it without that. But you're going to have to do a lot other things as well.
MORGAN: We got another -- yeah, over here.
BELL: Please.
QUESTIONER: Hi. Alex -- (inaudible) -- USAID.
First, I'd like to thank the Council for having something on science policy. It's very welcome. And I applaud you on, sort of, the scale of your vision and for how you're thinking about these problems.
I have a point and a question. The point is, in biological control -- whenever we've tried to use biocontrol to control certain types of pests that we want to get rid of, and we used other biological mechanisms to do so, we've failed -- (laughter) -- miserably many, many times.
And that leads to the second question, or the second -- the question that I have is, what effect, in terms of these microparticle shading? You have indicated that you've done modeling on your -- your post-doc has done modeling on temperature, modeling on precipitation, but given that, you know, there's potential heterogene(ous) effects, what is the effect on photosynthesis, and how that photosynthesis feeds back within the process?
MORGAN: Well, first of all, we're not talking about more than a couple percent change in the -- (inaudible) --
Second, after some volcanic eruptions, though there has been direct reflection, the albedo has increased. The amount of diffuse sunlight has also increased. So there's actually been a bit of an uptick in photosynthesis, and you've seen some modest increase in forest growth, and that sort of thing.
I mean, when Kate Richi (sp) -- this doctoral student and I first started working this problem, we were quite concerned about the issue of photosynthetic effects, and went out and talked with a bunch of leading ecologists. So far, we haven't been able to find anybody who can make a case that there would be a serious issue.
And there might, indeed, as I said, be some short-term boost, which, of course, alone, doesn't mean it doesn't have impacts, because, you know, different plants have different abilities to engage in photosynthesis. So, just as a richer CO2 climate -- or atmosphere favors some plants over others, so too a changed light environment changes the relative competitive advantage of different plants.
I want to hit one more time the ocean acidification issue. If you're not aware of this topic, take a look at the slide on the bottom of page 15, which has the Keeling Curve that everybody has seen. This is the curve on Mauna Loa. There are the now similar curves all over the world that show the regular increase of CO2 modulated by the annual cycle of vegetation.
What you haven't perhaps seen is this lower curve, which is the pH of the oceans, and pH is a log metric. So what this is saying is that the oceans are today 30 percent more acidic than they were in preindustrial times. This is not caused by geoengineering, but the key point is that geoengineering, while it can offset warming, doesn't do anything about this. And so here are some pictures on the next slide. They are much more striking, in color, of what coral reefs look like.
Now, I must say that when we were publishing a piece a few years ago -- and for those in the press here, I'm off the record, my editor said, "Why do you care about coral reefs? They're pretty, but." But coral reefs are, in fact, of course, the base of multiple ocean ecosystems. I'm back on the record, but I don't want to get any editors in trouble. (Laughter.)
STEINBRUNER: You're messing with the bottom of the food chain.
MORGAN: Yeah, right. Exactly.
STEINBRUNER: Not a good idea.
QUESTIONER: I'm Eli Kintisch, with Science Magazine.
The first question is for John. You deal with lots of different countries in your work on nonproliferation. Do we know anything about what the other superpowers, or the biggest players think about this?
And the second question is: Your idea was we won't mess with the atmosphere unless we all come to an agreement. But we have lots of international laws in which some countries might disagree. Why is that -- if we were all in a, if we were all in a room, and one person was drowning or something, we might act in a way that would, you know, cause discomfort to help that person.
MORGAN: This gentleman, incidentally, you should know in full disclosure, was at our meeting in Portugal, and is -- I think you're writing a book, right?
QUESTIONER: (Off mike.) It comes out next month.
MORGAN: Yeah. (Laughter.)
BELL: On geoengineering --
STEINBRUNER: I was going to --
MORGAN: Yes, on geoengineering.
STEINBRUNER: -- I was going to ask you, for that reason, what your sense of the state of major-power discussion here. But I don't think -- to put it mildly, "not very far along" would be the answer.
And I'm not aware of any -- I've gone to the State Department and talked about it, and they were kind of, 'Oh, yeah, really?' I mean, they're not doing anything, that I can detect, that is attempting to engage broad discussion on this question.
MORGAN: (Off mike.) No. I'll leave it at that.
BELL: Well, it's kind of -- may I just add? To be more specific, are the Chinese engaging in some of these discussions? For example, in Lisbon, did you have --
MORGAN: Well, I mean, we had at this meeting in Lisbon someone from China, but they didn't talk about any active research program. I, frankly, do not know.
BELL: Get your microphones.
QUESTIONER: My name is Mike Morantz (sp).
My questions are two. One is on the bubbles. I keep thinking about the conflict of trying to put fluoride in water -- the politics of that, or using gene changes in meat. There's a huge part of the population that would oppose it.
And the second is, you keep focusing on catastrophe rather than a long-term problem, as if it's going to take a catastrophe to be reactive rather than proactive. Would you comment on that?
STEINBRUNER: Well, I would like to believe that "sweet reason" propagates itself, and that the world gradually comes to believe that we have to do something about this without any image of catastrophe needing to trigger it.
Human beings being what they are, though, and political processes being what they are, it's a lot easier to believe that we will suddenly get a lot more serious, and we do have to get a lot more serious. If there is -- now, obviously, my favorite scenario is that a generation comes of age; realizes this problem; and gets a lot more serious about it spontaneously. We know enough about it to realize that we really ought to be taking prudent action.
Every time I say something like that, though, I run into -- like a friend, just a few weeks ago, who is working for somebody who I guess is going to run for governor of New York, and has done very extensive polling and asked people what do you care about? Didn't show up in New York -- didn't show up.
Now, you know, it's pretty obvious that people were worried about their jobs and that sort of thing, but it is literally not on the -- it doesn't get onto the list, never mind down the list. So if public reaction is to -- has got a long way to go before it will support the fairly dramatic changes required to really achieve mitigation. And that's why we all get driven into these catastrophe scenarios.
Plus -- you can comment on this -- (inaudible), the people watching the climate and its effects are getting nervous. I mean, they're seeing changes going a lot more rapidly than they anticipated. And although they can't come up and say, 'Now we proved that we're going over a cliff,' they're getting noticeably uneasy. And so I'm just -- I'm sensing, if you will, that we're going to have to go to a different state of public consciousness, and it's probably going to be an image of big trouble that is clearer than we currently have that would get us there.
MORGAN: So, just a quick elaboration:
First of all, of course, there is a lot of money getting spent to make sure that a very substantial portion of the public stays totally confused about this. And, I mean, it's been really quite pernicious. But there's been literally tens of millions of dollars spent on every little thing that comes along that might, you know, relate to some uncertainty. And while sure there's uncertainty about some of the details of the climate science, there isn't any uncertainty about whether we have a serious problem.
The other issue is that there are folks running around saying, 'This is going to be incredibly expensive. It's going to just totally wreck the economy.' Well, you can recall that many of those same people made precisely that same argument about the Clean Air Act. And the electricity industry met the requirements for the Clean Air Act at a cost of -- well, actually the economy met the requirements of the Clean Air Act at a price that was about a half a percent of GDP.
Now, if you were going to decarbonize the energy system on a gradual basis over the next 50 years or so -- by which I mean, for example, in electricity, roughly doubling the rate of new construction and never building anything that was not zero carbon -- you could probably decarbonize the entire system for something like 0.7 of 1 percent of GDP.
But you can make it as expensive as you want. I mean, if you hold off and hold off, and then suddenly decide, 'Oh my god, we got a real problem,' and you have to junk a lot of technology that's still got useful life, you can make it really expensive.
So the folks who say you could wreck the economy this way aren't wrong, they're just not telling you the whole story. I mean, it won't wreck the economy if you go about it in a systemic way. You will wreck the economy if you wait until the last minute and then suddenly discover that you got to junk 2,000-megawatt, relatively new coal-fired power plants.
STEINBRUNER: And to add to that, there's a lot of liquidity running around the financial system looking for the next bubble. (Laughter.) This is actually -- the energy transformation is a very productive place to put your money. You can make money doing that. And it's a productive result.
So it doesn't appear to be, at least, hopeless to convince the markets that, rather than go create some speculative Ponzi scheme, put it in -- put money into a transformation we know we're going to need, and you can make a lot of money doing it -- whoever, sort of, gets the lead, sort of, items in this area. And, you know, I think, conceivably, you can convince the markets that this is a good place to invest.
And Granger is exactly right. The problem is to try to do it on a prudent schedule, not to wait until there's some kind of crash effort that has to be --
MORGAN: But you see, because, as John says, we are human, and there is a good possibility that that's the way it will play out, I mean, my concern is that we get into a mode where we wait, we wait, we wait; 'Oh my god, there's no way we can do it fast enough, we got to do geoengineering.' And so that's another --
STEINBRUNER: Forget the other.
MORGAN: Yeah, and that's another --
STEINBRUNER: That really is (heroine addiction ?)
MORGAN: -- reason why I think you really have to understand today not just what could be the direct consequences, but what might be the down sides; and, you know, is it really, indeed, as simple and straightforward as we -- many people think? I mean, for example, there's some recent results that suggest that sulfate may not be a terribly effective strategy, that you may want to use sulfuric acid.
One of the things, of course, that people worry about is what about acid rain? Well, I mean, it turns out that the amount of material that you have to put in the stratosphere to offset is really small, in comparative terms, and so the ecological impacts of fallout are not likely to be significant.
And there are people also talking about specially-engineered particles that would self-orient, self-levitate. I mean, there's all kinds of fairly wild possibilities, but nobody's working seriously on most of them.
BELL: I think I see another --
MORGAN: Yeah, we got three here now.
BELL: Yeah.
Please.
QUESTIONER: Thank you. I'm Jim Turner, from NOAA.
First of all, thank you very much for talking about ocean acidification. But I do have a question about some of the field-scale -- the experiments that you were talking about doing. What are some of the parameters that you would need, because you certainly need something that's big enough so that you can detect an effect, and also, something that is large enough so that you could learn enough to extrapolate from it?
So can you talk about some of the parameters that -- you know, when you talk about a limited scale, you know, field test, can you talk about the kind of size you're talking about?
MORGAN: So not everything you do --
BELL: (Off mike.) Can I just?
MORGAN: Yeah, please.
BELL: Let's do this: I see two more hands, so let's cumulate the questions and then -- because we're sort of, almost at the end of the time.
MORGAN: All right, fine.
QUESTIONER: This is a general question, but besides Al Gore and the three of you, where is the leadership going to come from -- (laughter) -- to engage these projects and move forward?
BELL: And there was another, or was I mistaken?
Okay.
QUESTIONER: (Inaudible.)
I just wanted to ask whether -- a proposal I've heard, that it would be useful to paint all roofs, parking lots and roads white so the light would be reflected directly out. If that was suddenly done, would that make a measurable effect, or would it be irrelevant in the larger scheme of things?
MORGAN: I'll take the first and the last -- (laughter) -- and John can get the middle one. (Laughter.)
MORGAN: He is, after all, the political scientist up here.
Not every experiment that you'd want to do in the atmosphere needs to be a long-term measurement of changes in forcing. I mean, for example, there are serious questions about how would you introduce the material. You may want to introduce it as a -- in a gaseous or liquid form; you may -- and so you need to look at how spray technology works.
And so there are a bunch of things that you could do on a really quite small scale. There are folks talking about trying to do synchronous detection studies. So far, the numbers I've seen suggest that the forcing levels you require may be fairly high. But the notion of synchronous detection is that if you put stuff in at a phase that's not in-sync with the diurnal -- or, I mean, with the annual cycle, that you might be able to pull a signal out from the noise. But it's precisely thinking seriously about some of this stuff that needs to happen, and so far it hasn't.
On the parking lots, I've never run the numbers, but I know somebody who claims to have run the numbers that says white roofs and white parking lots don't appear to have a big effect. But I should run the numbers myself.
STEINBRUNER: As for leadership -- (laughter) -- I wish I knew. It's a little hard to see.
But, you know, you could say, if you want to be on the upside, when there really are emergency situations, usually leaders do emerge. I don't think they're out there in any -- and if you're talking about globally credible leadership on this question, it ain't there at the moment.
MORGAN: Yeah, I wrote an editorial in "Science" -- gee, a long time ago now, over a decade ago, called "Managing Carbon from the Bottom Up," that argued that we were putting altogether too much effort into global -- into trying to negotiate a global regime to which everyone would salute and sign up; that a far more plausible route forward was to get various parts of the world to each decide -- to decide, 'This is a serious problem; we got to do something about it,' and then gradually to coalesce these different regimes.
And so, you know, in this country we see California trying to do reasonably serious stuff, and we have a few others around the world who are trying to do reasonably serious stuff. I think that maybe a little less attention on trying to negotiate a single, all-encompassing agreement that has real teeth and impact, and a little more work here at home on, sort of, getting out front would be a good place to start.
And so, for example, getting a half-dozen 800-megawatt coal-fired power plants built with carbon sequestration, doing a much bigger program of nuclear rejuvenation and renewal than we have, and a whole variety of -- really going, in a serious way, after energy efficiency. You'll notice that we're looking at a whole slew of incandescent lights here, in a new LEEDS building. (Laughter.) Working on a bunch of those things would be probably very desirable.
BELL: We need to wrap this up, unfortunately.
Let me just -- two points: Some people think that the Copenhagen Accord actually represents the beginning of that bottom-up that you're suggesting, this putting commitments on the table. Who knows, I mean, it's another hour debate which we won't -- (laughs) -- go into here.
I wanted to thank you both for this. It's the beginning of a really important conversation that we all need to be having on this issue.
And I want to thank the audience for some really good questions.
And good night -- and I'm supposed to also remind everybody that this was on the record. That's what my cheat-sheet here says.
MORGAN: Except for my crack about an editor.
BELL: Except for that one, yes. (Laughter.) (Applause.) Do not record that. (Laughs.) (Applause.)
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Your browser does not support the audio element.The most recent meeting of the Bend Human Rights and Equity Commission began like it usually does, with roll call. As each name was read aloud, the commissioners on this volunteer advisory board offered a self-description '-- personal information like their gender, hairstyle, skin color, or what they were wearing that day '-- a practice meant to help visually-impaired people take part in discussions about how the local government can better serve those who've historically been left out of decision making.
When the meeting turned to public comment, seven people, most of them online, had signed up to say something. First in line was an 11-year-old girl who was there in person with her dad. She stepped up to the microphone in front of city hall's imposing dais just long enough to share her name, plus one thought: ''Rights for everyone,'' she said.
John Heylin was proudly filming his daughter with his phone. He stood up next to say he had brought his kids to the meeting because he ''wanted them to see that there are people in our town fighting for equality.''
In this screenshot from video, John Heylin, left, speaks at the Bend Human Rights and Equity Commission meeting, March 27, 2024, in Bend, Ore. Public comments during the meeting later prompted the city to remove the video from its public channel.
Screenshot/City of Bend / Screenshot/City of Bend
Recent public opinion surveys show that, like Heylin, the majority of Americans support DEI programs for most professions. But, political polarization is fueling a backlash with a vocal minority. Republican politicians around the country have sought to end public DEI initiatives, and opinion polling suggests that effort often appeals to people with racist views.
Bend's DEI leaders experienced this firsthand when they heard the rest of the public comments at their last meeting.
''My pronouns are fist/punch,'' began someone calling himself Chad Baseball. ''I am pretty angry about all this nonsense that's happening across the country with these equity inclusion seminars.''
Another speaker pronounced: ''DEI stands for didn't earn it,'' and another, clearly reading from a prepared statement, said: ''White people are sick and tired of being attacked, robbed, raped, and murdered.''
These snippets were just the first act in what appeared to be a coordinated and increasingly hateful performance over Zoom. More disembodied voices began to use antisemitic slurs, Nazi slogans and homophobic insults. One man chanted the N-word over and over, until city staff cut off his mic.
Bend's newly hired Equity and Inclusion Director Andr(C)s Portela III led the meeting through the hate-filled disruption and its aftermath.
''I am so sorry y'all,'' he said. ''This does not happen often. Let's take a second.''
After a 10-minute break, assistant city attorney Ian Leitheiser briefly addressed the clearly shaken room about Oregon's staunch free speech protections.
''There's a certain amount of stuff, narratives, content that you might believe '-- and that most reasonable people might believe '-- is objectionable, cowardly, spineless, utter bullshit, that you're going to have to listen to,'' Leitheiser said.
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A week later, Commissioner Carolyn Peacock Biggs remembered the intense grief she felt at that moment.
''I could not stop weeping. It felt like I was grieving for generations of pain that was in my DNA that wouldn't allow me to act like I didn't hear what I heard,'' she said in an interview.
Peacock Biggs volunteered to advise the city on its DEI efforts two years ago. Overall, she said it's been a rewarding experience.
''I'm most proud of being able to be an example to people who otherwise wouldn't know what a Black woman was like,'' she said.
Bend's population is nearly 90% white, demographics rooted in Oregon's history of racist exclusion laws. After the incident last month, Peacock Biggs now worries about being targeted personally.
''People couldn't deny or confirm that these hate people were anywhere near,'' she said. ''In Bend, in 15 minutes you can get to me if you felt like it.''
Spreading backlash to DEISince the pandemic began, virtual meeting spaces have made it simple for hostile actors to remain anonymous. Portela became Bend's equity and inclusion director eight months ago, and he wasn't surprised hateful views surfaced at a public meeting.
He's received local reports of people being called racial slurs while they're out hiking, or a business having its Pride flag stolen repeatedly. These incidents are symptoms of a bigger problem, Portela said.
''The larger issue is the wave of undoing diversity, equity, and inclusion. The folks we're working with have to hear that this space that was created to make sure that they feel safe and empowered in their government experience is going to disappear.''
Bend Equity and Inclusion Director Andr(C)s Portela III at his city hall office on April 4, 2024.
Emily Cureton Cook / OPB
Utah is the latest Western state to ban any funding for programs dedicated to promoting diversity, including at state colleges and universities. Utah, North Dakota, Texas, Tennessee, North Carolina, Florida, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Alabama all have laws restricting or banning DEI programs in public institutions. Republican lawmakers in 25 states have introduced more than 75 such bills nationwide, according to PBS NewsHour.
This is happening as recent polling shows most Americans aren't opposed to DEI programs. Surveys conducted this year by researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, suggest that on average, 7 in 10 Americans support DEI training for medical professionals, teachers, police officers, members of the U.S. armed forces and public employees, while 65% of Americans support this training for private sector employees.
The researchers found that many of those opposed to DEI have something in common '-- they hold negative views toward races other than their own, said UMass political science professor and lead researcher Tatishe Nteta.
His team gauged negative racial views by asking people questions like whether racial problems are rare in the U.S., whether white people have any advantages, or if the existence of racism makes them angry.
''What we're finding is that this is the debate over DEI, this is really a larger discussion about how fast the country should change and who we should be, going forward,'' Nteta said.
The politics underlying that debate are open to interpretation, he added.
FILE - Members of the Kentucky House of Representatives listen during a floor discussion of a House bill in Frankfort, Ky., Feb. 1, 2024. The Kentucky House voted Friday, March 15, to choke off funding for diversity, equity and inclusion offices at public universities following an impassioned debate that had a GOP lawmaker dismissing DEI efforts as a failure and Democrats defending them as pillars of support for students from underrepresented groups.
Timothy D. Easley / AP
''If you're pessimistic, this is just another example of a sort of backlash towards efforts to ensure racial equality,'' Nteta said. ''If you're more optimistic, this is in some ways a reflection of people's commitment to the notion of colorblindness and the belief that the United States has effectively achieved the goal of a race-neutral society.''
More than 60 Oregon cities have diversity, equity and inclusion programs, including Bend and Hillsboro. Oregon-based policy analyst Steve Lee said that city staff being overly optimistic about racial equity posed one of the biggest barriers he faced as the first director of DEI programs for the city of Hillsboro.
''I kept bumping up against this idea of goodness, that we're really good people here, and we're doing our best to run our government, and we just couldn't be racist,'' he said.
Lee, who is Black, said he left the Hillsboro job feeling like city employees didn't see a need to make changes to better serve people of color. A turning point came after he gave a written survey to his co-workers asking for their views about racial equity.
''I was surprised at the level of animus. Comments like, 'We're race-neutral.' 'Why are we even talking about this?' 'I don't know why you're working there.' It became really personal.''
The meeting incident in Bend showcased hateful views that many people don't want to acknowledge exist in their communities, he said, which is why the city's reaction to what happened is especially critical.
''You don't sweep it under the rug. You have to name it,'' he said. ''If you don't, there's no opportunity to transform people's experience, or how they look at the world.''
Related:U. of Florida axes DEI office under GOP-led law aimed at ridding similar programs
Shining a lightFor John Heylin, the dad who brought his kids to speak at the meeting, the hateful diatribes were a learning moment. Heylin is white.
''This was my first experience seeing that in person, and as much as I can educate myself, I'm not steeped in it like a lot of people are forced to be,'' he said in an interview.
Heylin remembered turning to his 11- and 8-year-old daughters in the meeting and telling them: ''This is why we do the work.''
For Bend Equity and Inclusion Director Portela, the immediate focus is on rebuilding local trust and a sense of safety for the commissioners and the communities they aim to serve.
One of the first steps of the city's response was taking down video of the meeting from its YouTube channel, so that it's no longer accessible except through a public records request.
''We thought about the retraumatization of someone having to watch the video online, so we took the video down,'' Portela said. ''There is a different way to center those who are directly impacted, and talk about how that becomes a part of our everyday work'... I can tell folks all day that these things exist.''
Commissioner Peacock Biggs said she understands why the city removed the footage, but she also doesn't personally agree with the decision.
''For so many centuries, we've spent our time trying to make everybody comfortable,'' she said.
''People should be allowed to hear it. And who knows, somebody's voice might be heard and be like, 'You know what? That's John. He lives on Hodge Road. I know that voice. We go fishing together.'''
Sometimes, she said, it's good to shine a light on the shadows.
FILE - Bend City Council chambers in 2017.
Bradley W. Parks / OPB
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Wed, 17 Apr 2024 23:42
BALTIMORE (WBFF) '-- Three weeks after the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, new information is surfacing surrounding the moments leading up to the crash and potential warning signs that might have been missed.
In an exclusive interview with Fox45 News, a long-time crane operator for the Port of Baltimore claims the ship was experiencing electric failures even before left the dock. Those claims come as FBI agents boarded the vessel this week to conduct a criminal investigation into the catastrophe.
Minutes before crashing, chilling video captures the Dali losing power, lights flashing on and off. Crews made a desperate mayday call mid-departure, but it was too late to save the bridge or the six construction workers who lost their lives in the collapse. Now, questions and suspicions remain over the vessel's condition hours prior.
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According to crane operator Damian Tucker, he witnessed electrical red flags firsthand.
''I ended up working 15 hours on that vessel,'' he said, ''I was radioed up from the reefer mechanic and some of the longshoremen on a ship that was lashing containers that night that they were having electrical problems getting power to the reefers.''
Reefers are refrigerated cargo containers used to transport perishable goods. In the two decades Tucker has worked at the Port of Baltimore, loading and unloading thousands of reefers, he says that type of malfunction is extremely rare.
''It doesn't happen often,'' he said.
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Tucker says he's only seen it happen twice after 23 years on the job.
Echoing his account, the Associated Press recently quoted an anonymous source with ''knowledge of the situation'' who claimed while the ship was docked ''alarms went off on some of its refrigerated containers, indicating an inconsistent power supply.''
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) would not confirm or deny the claims to FOX45 on Wednesday. Instead, they said a preliminary report of their investigation will be released in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, the Maryland Port Authority and Coast Guard have declined to comment.
