What Is Geoengineering—And Why Should You Care?

It’s becoming clear that we won’t cut carbon emissions soon enough to prevent catastrophic climate change. But there may be ways to cool the planet more quickly and buy us a little more time to shift away from fossil fuels.

They’re known collectively as geoengineering, and though it was once a scientific taboo, a growing number of researchers are running computer simulations and proposing small-scale outdoor experiments. Even some legislators have begun discussing what role these technologies could play (see “The growing case for geoengineering”).

But what is geoengineering exactly?

Traditionally, geoengineering has encompassed two very different things: sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky so the atmosphere will trap less heat, and reflecting more sunlight away from the planet so less heat is absorbed in the first place.

The first of these, known as “carbon removal” or “negative emissions technologies,” is something that scholars now largely agree we’ll need to do in order to avoid dangerous levels of warming (see “One man’s two-decade quest to suck greenhouse gas out of the sky”). Most no longer call it “geoengineering”—to avoid associating it with the second, more contentious branch, known as solar geoengineering.

This is a blanket term that includes ideas like setting up sun shields in space or dispersing microscopic particles in the air in various ways to make coastal clouds more reflective, dissipate heat-trapping cirrus clouds, or scatter sunlight in the stratosphere.

The word geoengineering suggests a planetary-scale technology. But some researchers have looked at the possibility of conducting it in localized ways as well, exploring various methods that might protect coral reefs, coastal redwoods, and ice sheets.

Where did the idea come from?

It’s not a particularly new idea. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee warned it might be necessary to increase the reflectivity of the Earth to offset rising greenhouse-gas emissions. The committee went so far as to suggest sprinkling reflective particles across the oceans. (It’s revealing that in this, the first ever presidential report on the threat of climate change, the idea of cutting emissions didn’t seem worth mentioning, as author Jeff Goodell notes in How to Cool the Planet.)

But the best-known form of solar geoengineering involves spraying particles into the stratosphere, sometimes known as “stratospheric injection” or “stratospheric aerosol scattering.” (Sorry, we don’t come up with the names.) That’s in part because nature has already demonstrated it’s possible.

Most famously, the massive eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the summer of 1991 spewed some 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the sky. By reflecting sunlight back into space, the particles in the stratosphere helped push global temperatures down about 0.5 °C over the next two years.

And while we don’t have precise data, huge volcanic eruptions in the distant past had similar effects. The explosion of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 was famously followed by the “Year Without a Summer” in 1816, a gloomy period that may have helped inspire the creation of two of literature’s most enduring horror creatures, vampires and Frankenstein’s monster.

Soviet climatologist Mikhail Budyko is generally credited as the first to suggest we could counteract climate change by mimicking this volcanic phenomenon. He raised the possibility of burning sulfur in the stratosphere in a 1974 book.

In the following decades, the concept occasionally popped up in research papers and at scientific conferences, but it didn’t gain much attention until the late summer of 2006, when Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Prize–winning atmospheric chemist, called for geoengineering research in an article in Climatic Change. That was particularly significant because Crutzen had won his Nobel for research on the dangers of the growing ozone hole, and one of the known effects of sulfur dioxide is ozone depletion.

In other words, he thought climate change was such a threat that it was worth exploring a remedy he knew could pose other serious dangers.

So could geoengineering be the solution to climate change, relieving us of the hassle of cutting back on fossil fuels?

No—although the idea that it does is surely why some energy executives and Republican legislators have taken an interest. But even if it works (on which more below), it’s at best a temporary stay of execution.

It does little to address other climate dangers, notably including ocean acidification, or the considerable environmental damage from extracting and burning finite fossil fuels. And greater levels of geoengineering may increase other disruptions in the climate system, so we can’t just keep doing more and more of it to offset ever rising emissions.

How is geoengineering being researched?

In the years since Crutzen’s paper, more researchers have studied geoengineering, mainly using computer simulations or small lab experiments to explore whether it would really work, how it might be done, what sorts of particles could be used, and what environmental side effects it might produce.

The computer modeling consistently shows it would reduce global temperatures, sea-level rise, and certain other climate impacts. But some studies have found that high doses of certain particles might also damage the protective ozone layer, alter global precipitation patterns, and reduce crop growth in certain areas.

Others researchers have found that these risks can be reduced, if not eliminated, by using particles other than sulfur dioxide and by limiting the extent of geoengineering.

But no one would suggest we’ve arrived at the final answer on most of these questions. Researchers in the field believe we need to do a lot more modeling work to explore these issues in greater detail. And it’s also clear that simulations can only tell us so much, which is why some are proposing small outdoor experiments.

by James Temple, MIT Technology Review |  Read more:
Image: USGS Archives
[ed. It's looking like there's no other hope. See also: the law of Unintented Consequences.]

Takeuchi Seihō, Pink Fuji 1937

via:

Case Study Houses

Case Study House No. 22

The Case Study Houses were experiments in American residential architecture sponsored by Arts & Architecture magazine, which commissioned major architects of the day, including Richard Neutra, Raphael Soriano, Craig Ellwood, Charles and Ray Eames, Pierre Koenig, Eero Saarinen, A. Quincy Jones, Edward Killingsworth, and Ralph Rapson to design and build inexpensive and efficient model homes for the United States residential housing boom caused by the end of World War II and the return of millions of soldiers.

The program ran intermittently from 1945 until 1966. The first six houses were built by 1948 and attracted more than 350,000 visitors. While not all 36 designs were built, most of those that were constructed were built in Los Angeles, and one was built in San Rafael, Northern California and one in Phoenix, Arizona. Of the unbuilt houses #19 was to have been built in Atherton, in the San Francisco Bay Area, while #27 was to have been built on the east coast, in Smoke Rise, New Jersey.

by Wikipedia |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed See also: The Bailey House, or Case Study House #21 (Wikipedia)]

Word Salad

Six weeks after the second largest bank failure in US history and about a week before the government would take over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Kamala Harris was asked how the country would be different if she were POTUS for 8 years. This was her answer.

[ed. Originally via: Walter Bragman (Twitter), but I can't figure out how to copy/share Twitter videos, so here's the YouTube version. Harris' answer starts at 0:55]

Marie-Pascale Vandewalle
via:

The Choices Facing Community Colleges

America is in the middle of another news emergency, about crises that are genuinely important. But meanwhile, other aspects of public and private life grind on, and because they will matter so much in the long run, they deserve more attention than the permanent emergency-news culture usually allows for. Like many other entries in this series, today’s is an intentionally off-news item about some of these developments that will help determine the news of the future.

At the moment I have in mind two institutions that are rarely in the news but deserve to be featured in American discussions of prospects for a better economic and civic future.

One is, of course, America’s network of libraries, as Deb Fallows has discussed over the years. She wrote about them in the print magazine, in our book Our Towns, and in recent posts like this from Brownsville, Texas, and this from New York.

The other is the constellation of 1,000-plus public community colleges across the country. Three years ago in the magazine I made the case that a reliable sign of civic progress was whether a city took its community college seriously:

Not every city can have a research university. Any ambitious one can have a community college. 

Just about every world-historical trend is pushing the United States (and other countries) toward a less equal, more polarized existence: labor-replacing technology, globalized trade, self-segregated residential-housing patterns, the American practice of unequal district-based funding for public schools. 

Community colleges are the main exception, potentially offering a connection to high-wage technical jobs for people who might otherwise be left with no job or one at minimum wage …

In travels since then, Deb and I’ve seen more examples of community colleges acting as anchors for a city or region—for instance, with the “Communiversity” that has made such a difference in eastern Mississippi, or the innovative Institute for Advanced Learning and Research in Danville, Virginia. (This IALR in Danville is neither a normal research university nor a community college but approximates some functions of each, and works with nearby two- and four-year institutions.) And I’d argue that while every branch of American education is always “important,” from preschool and K–12 to the most intense research universities, community colleges really are the crucial institutions of this economic and political moment. That is because:

1. They’re local- or state-based, and thus far freer to experiment, adapt, and innovate than most federally run institutions are at this moment of paralyzed national politics.
2. They’re more and more the institutions that feel responsible for matching people who need opportunities with the fastest-growing opportunities of this era. (For instance, in much of the country there have been more openings than candidates for relatively high-wage “skilled trade” jobs: from welding and construction, to engine and robotics maintenance, to many aspects of the ever-expanding health-care industry. Many community colleges emphasize preparing graduates for jobs that are in demand right now, with skills that will also apply for whatever jobs emerge a decade from now.)
3. Because they’re often dispersed across a state, with branches in smaller cities and rural areas, many of them have taken a lead in devising regionwide and rurally focused development plans. Most everyone knows that America outside the big cities faces its own set of challenges, from attracting new residents to creating new economic strongholds to dealing with physical and mental-health problems. The people working hardest toward solutions, at least among those I’ve met, are disproportionately at community colleges. (...)

What Deb and I learned when talking with community-college leaders in Traverse City was about the choices that they are facing—as are other members of the loose confederation of educators who are doing so much to shape the economic and civic future of the country. Based on what we heard, I think this is the list of next big choices:

• In this era of increasing nationwide interest in “placemaking,” are community colleges positioned to take the lead as stewards of a community’s development? Or do they need to follow other local institutions? (Here is an example of a four-year university that has taken the local lead. We’ve seen examples elsewhere of community colleges playing that role—for instance, in central Oregon. )

• How does a successful college set the balance between training people in hopes that they’ll stay in the area and training them for success, wherever they might end up? Should the prospect of graduates moving away affect an institution’s investment in them?

• How does a successful college think about the balance between training for specific skills, and general adaptability? How does it balance between the jobs of today, and those of a decade or two from now? (The Communiversity, in Mississippi, is wrestling with just these questions, plus the one about graduates who might move away.)

• What’s the proper way to work with private companies in the area? Is it all positive? What are the pitfalls and guidelines?

• When does it make sense to take a regional, or even statewide, approach, as opposed to programs aimed at each college’s local area?

• When does it make sense to seek out collaborations with research universities or four-year colleges?

• How should the “culture” of community colleges evolve to reflect their newly central role in American opportunity? Is there an even bigger place for ceremonies, “pomp and circumstance,” and other ways to add external signs of prestige to this experience?

by James Fallows, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: James Fallows

Peter Keane

[ed. I saw Peter years and years ago when he was the opening act for, I believe, Greg Brown. This is still one of my favorite albums. See also: You Haunt My Dreams  and Tylersville Road (Peter Keane).]

Aaron Brent Harker, Honey Bear
via:
[ed. See also: Timber Corporations Can Keep Killing Bears, Judge Rules (Courthouse News). For scratching trees. In Washington state.]

Burning Down the House

David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth expands on his 2017 article of the same name in New York, where he’s deputy editor. It quickly became that magazine’s most viewed article ever. Some accused Wallace-Wells of sensationalism for focusing on the most extreme possibilities of what may come if we keep spewing carbon compounds skyward (as suggested by his title and his ominous opening line, the answer “is, I promise, worse than you think”). Whatever the article’s lurid appeal, I felt at the time of its publication that its detractors were mainly evading the message by maligning the messenger. (...)

The preindustrial level of atmospheric carbon dioxide was 280 parts per million. We are now at 410 ppm. The last time that was the case, three million years ago, seas were about 80 feet higher. A rise of 2 degrees Celsius would be around 450 ppm, but, says Wallace-Wells, we’re currently headed beyond 500 ppm. The last time that happened on Earth, seas were 130 feet higher, he writes, envisioning an eastern seaboard moved miles inland, to Interstate 95. Forget Long Island, New York City, and nearly half of New Jersey. It’s unclear how long it takes for oceans to rise in accordance with CO2 concentrations, but you wouldn’t want to find out the hard way.

Unfortunately, we’re set to sail through 1.5 and 2 degree increases in the next few decades and keep going. We’re presently on course for a rise of somewhere between 3 and 4 degrees Celsius, possibly more—our current trajectory, the UN warns, could even reach an 8 degree increase by this century’s end. At that level, anyone still in the tropics “would not be able to move around outside without dying,” Wallace-Wells writes. (...)

Just before the 2016 elections, a respected biologist at an environmental NGO told me she actually considered voting for Trump. “The way I see it,” she said, “it’s either four more years on life support with Hillary, or letting this maniac tear the house down. Maybe then we can pick up the pieces and finally start rebuilding.” Like many other scientists Wallace-Wells cites, she has known for decades how bad things are, and seen how little the Clinton-Gore and Obama-Biden administrations did about it—even in consultation with Obama’s prescient science adviser, physicist John Holdren, who first wrote about rising atmospheric CO2 in 1969. For the politicians, it was always, foremost, about the economy.

Unfortunately, as Wallace-Wells notes:

The entire history of swift economic growth, which began somewhat suddenly in the eighteenth century, is not the result of innovation or trade or the dynamics of free trade, but simply our discovery of fossil fuels and all their raw power.

This is our daily denial, which now flies in our faces on hurricane winds, or drops as hot ashes from our immolated forests and homes: growth is how we measure economic health, and growth must be literally fueled. Other than nuclear energy, which has its own problems, no form of energy is so concentrated, and none so cheap or portable, as carbon. By exhuming hundreds of millions of years’ worth of buried organic matter and burning it in a couple of centuries, we built our dazzling modern civilization, not noticing that its wastes were amassing overhead. Now we’re finally paying attention, because hell is starting to rain down. (...)

He allows that through carbon-capture or geoengineering “or other now-unfathomable innovations, we may conjure new solutions,” but at best, he says, these will “bring the planet closer to a state we would today regard as merely grim, rather than apocalyptic.” Having read for years about geoengineering plans to reflect sunlight back into space by sending up planes to seed the stratosphere with sulfates, and to enhance the reflectivity of clouds by spraying salt to brighten them, and about machines that can suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, I know of some who might challenge that—but so far, none of these ideas has reached even a pilot level, let alone commercialization scale.

Current carbon-capture prototypes filter CO2 from a polluter’s exhaust so that it can be converted back into more carbon-based fuel. But this would require building enough machines to cleanse the entire atmosphere of emissions from every company and cookfire, and then burying all that captured CO2 so it can never escape—a huge and dubious undertaking. Likewise, a program to deflect solar radiation by spraying particles—as Mt. Pinatubo’s eruption did in 1991, slightly cooling the climate for two years before its dust settled back to Earth—would have to continue in perpetuity to work. Such a program would alter planetary rainfall patterns in unpredictable ways and do nothing to curb ocean acidification. Imagine getting all the world’s nations to agree to tinker with the atmosphere if it meant some of them might end up even drier than before. Several major environmental organizations that once opposed such schemes are now willing to discuss them (the goals of the Paris Agreement depend on yet-uninvented mass-scale technologies to remove atmospheric carbon), underscoring Wallace-Wells’s argument that the situation is dire indeed.

The Uninhabitable Earth makes only scant reference to the holocaust that climate change is wreaking on biodiversity. (One million species are now at risk of extinction, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services reported recently.) But Wallace-Wells’s impulse to focus on our own selfish stake in unfolding events probably makes sense—this future is real, and it’s ours. As desperate as we are to know what to do next, enlightening us about that isn’t his objective: getting our attention is. (...)

So how do we go on? That has been Bill McKibben’s abiding concern ever since the publication in 1989 of The End of Nature, a book so well known that people who’ve never read it regularly refer to it. Its premise is that since humans altered the entire atmosphere, which touches everything on Earth, there is no truly pristine nature left. His latest book, Falter—much like his 2010 book, Eaarth, but nearly a decade deeper into the maw—begins with a clear-eyed, detailed assessment of what we’re now up against. McKibben describes just how much trouble we’re in, yet his voice is so calm, his examples so fresh and unexpected (the book begins with a meditation on roofing, of all things), that you easily glide into his lucid, engaging contemplation of the potential end of human civilization. Later in Falter, when he describes just as equably what we must do to prevent it, you believe it’s still worth trying. (...)

In a chapter that begins “Oh, it could get very bad,” he discusses a study in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology concluding that by 2100 the oceans may be too hot for phytoplankton to photosynthesize. (Another study I’ve seen, in Nature, suggests that since 1950 phytoplankton populations worldwide may have decreased by up to 40 percent, correlating to rising sea-surface temperatures.) Just as we fail to realize how much extra CO2 is in the air because it’s invisible, it’s hard to grasp how immense—and immensely bad—this news is. Tiny phytoplankton float in the ocean practically unnoticed, yet they constitute half the organic matter on Earth and provide, as McKibben notes, “two-thirds of the earth’s oxygen.” Their loss, he quotes the study’s author, “would likely result in the mass mortality of animals and humans.”

And that’s just the effects from heat. Absorption of CO2 has already made the ocean 30 percent more acidic, with pH expected to decline “well beyond what fish and other marine organisms can tolerate” by the end of this century, he writes, citing another paper. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, current acidification rates of seas and lakes already may be the highest in 300 million years.

McKibben shares some other harrowing examples of threatened fauna, from insects to lions, but although it’s been understood since Noah’s time that we need other species, readers best relate to our own, so like Wallace-Wells McKibben soon circles back to humans. Major cities like Cape Town and São Paulo (and several in India and China) have come within mere days of running out of water; it’s just a matter of time until one does. Outdoor work and maintenance will be halted more frequently as urban thermometers exceed 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Grain harvests will drop as temperatures rise. Insurance companies will go bankrupt after successive biblical storms destroy trillions of dollars of property. Refugees running everywhere. This won’t stop.

by Alan Weisman, NYRB |  Read more:

Image: Richard Misrach: Untitled, 2007

How Digital Advertising Works

Advertising campaigns used to be planned and managed by media buyers—usually 22-year-old, newly graduated communications majors. If that media buyer needed to help a car manufacturer reach men looking to buy a car, she might place an ad in Car and Driver, or in the automotive section of the newspaper. Advertising used to be something you could place, count, then see in the front cover spread of a magazine.

But this is not digital advertising today. Digital advertising is automated, data-driven, and opaque in its mechanics. That 22-year-old communications major has had to make way for data scientists, mathematicians, and computer programmers who, behind the scenes, use statistics, calculus, and linear algebra to optimize advertising campaigns, by micro-targeting users and constantly tweaking algorithms.

Does that car manufacturer still want to reach men looking to buy a car? A data scientist may tell them the optimal target is a 39-year-old man, carrying on an extramarital affair, who’s on the brink of divorce. They can model this hypothesis (and prove it works), and advertising companies like Google and Facebook can put that into execution, finding ways to home in and target those types of people online.

When you go to a website and load a page, in the milliseconds that it takes for that page to load, there are real-time auctions running in the background that determine which ads to load on your page. Almost all online ads are delivered in this way, where highly complex auction markets make their money by competing on who can better track users and invade their privacy more thoroughly.

The targeting begins the moment you as a reader visit any website. Typically, your IP address, your location, and the URL of the page you are on are swiped from your browser without your explicit knowledge, and shared with advertising companies that run these ad auctions. The goal, of course, is to build as specific a portrait about you as possible—by linking your device with your identity—and cookies are a common tool for doing so.

A “cookie” is a small text file that a site can install on your computer when you visit. The text file fingerprints your device with a unique identifier, or “cookie ID” (such as 12345qwert). If the website knows your real identity (for example, if you log on to the site with your real name), the company can link it to your cookie (here, 12345qwert) and begin to gain an advantage in determining which ads to load onto your page.

For example, if you’re on the hypothetical URL newspaper.com/how-to-fight-melanoma, this probably means you’re reading an article about melanoma. Companies might use that information to make a prediction about whether you or someone you love may have cancer. And they most certainly use that info to determine which ads to load onto your page.

The prices that any company is able to fetch for its ads depend on two crucial factors: the ability to identify who is loading the page, and the ability to then connect the user’s identity with more information about the user.

Imagine a person visits espn.com to read an article about the upcoming Super Bowl. Assume first he doesn’t log on to the site, and blocks his browser cookies, so maybe the website he is visiting can’t know who he really is. An advertiser can nonetheless bid on the opportunity to display an ad to this anonymous reader. Maybe the slot goes to a beer brand that wants to generally reach people who like football. Perhaps the going price is a $2 CPM (cost per thousand) and the ad gets sold at this price (meaning, this is the clearing auction price).

But you’re not usually anonymous when you’re online, even when you think you are. Again, advertising companies might know your identity because you log in, or because you are using a browser that allows tracking. Now it’s not simply an anonymous person loading a page about the Super Bowl, it’s “Michael Greenberg,” of Wichita, Kansas.

Now, companies can combine Michael’s identity with other commercially available datasets in real time. For example, they might stitch Michael’s identity with the fact that he makes $1 million-plus per year, which means that they can match Michael with an ad for a private jet service instead of a Bud Lite. The private jet ad might sell at a $200 CPM as opposed to the $2 CPM beer ad targeted to an anonymous user.

“The exact same ad, on the same website, at the same time, could be worth vastly different amounts to two different buyers depending on how much they know about the consumer being targeted,” explains Ari Paparo, now founder and CEO of advertising company Beeswax and a former Google exec. “User data is everything.”

Advertisers gain an even better advantage when they’re able to track what users do as they move from site to site, app to app, site to app, and vice versa, which is exactly how Facebook and Google operate (and exactly the type of information traditional publishers don’t have).

If a company that sells online ads can know what their readers are reading on other sites, then they can target the users based on that information when the user returns to their own site. For example, say Michael visits CNBC’s website in the mornings and reads about the markets, but visits The New York Times in the evenings and only reads the book review section. CNBC knows Michael is someone who follows the markets, and might monetize his view at a $30 CPM. The Times knows that Michael is someone who likes to read books so might only monetize Michael at a $10 CPM. If the Times can somehow find out that Michael is reading CNBC in the mornings, then when Michael visits the Times book section in the evening, the Times can target him as someone who follows the markets and monetize him at $30, too.

Would CNBC want to share with the Times what Michael reads on cnbc.com? Of course not. The two are competitors on the advertising side of the market. If CNBC is selling its audience of financial readers at a cost of $30, and the Times can copy CNBC’s readers and their reading patterns, then the Times could theoretically undercut CNBC and sell ads targeted to CNBC financial readers for, say, $20 instead of $30.

But publishers like the Times and CNBC have no choice but to share this information with Facebook and Google. How, might you ask, does Facebook currently get this data from news publishers that are also advertising competitors? Well, Facebook has a number of derivative products that flow from the social network, including “Like” buttons and log-in tools. Facebook licenses Like buttons to publishers so that their readers can “like” and then “share” news stories across the Facebook social network. But Facebook now conditions these licenses on the ability to track publishers’ readers, whether the readers click the Like buttons or not, and Facebook can now use publishers’ reader data to sell its own ads.

Google, which now tracks users on over 70 percent of the top one million sites, also uses its ability to track users across the internet to extract an advantage in advertising markets. Google tracks users via its analytics and ad-serving products, which Google consolidated and rebranded last summer as the Google Marketing Platform. Google was actually the first of the two companies to consolidate products under a rubric of privacy.

The implication of all this is that the money that Google and Facebook can make selling advertising goes well beyond what other ad sellers can demand in the market. The Big Tech duopoly can track billions of users across millions of sites and mobile apps, creating longitudinal profiles on users. News publishers simply cannot compete with that kind of an informational advantage.

But there is another thing going on in these markets that explains the duopoly in the advertising market. When most people think about Google and Facebook, they think the companies make so much money by selling ads on their own properties—Google search, Gmail, the Facebook social network, Instagram, and so on. This is partly true. Google and Facebook also run auctions through which publishers now sell their own advertising.

Unlike in finance, there are several auction markets where digital ads trade. Anyone can create one. But Google and Facebook make sure their own advertising inventory (YouTube, Facebook) can only be bought through their own, proprietary auctions. Google made almost $20 billion last year from selling other companies’ ads. This is why Google today is the largest seller of advertising, globally, period.

by Dina Srinivasan, American Prospect |  Read more:

Image: Mark Lennihan/AP Photo

Yuki Ogura, Ome Branch and Bowl n/d
via:

Tough Laws, Cultural Differences Give Hawaii A Low Rate Of Gun Violence

In response to mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio that killed 31 people, Americans across the country are calling for stricter gun laws and turning their attention to states like Hawaii that appear less troubled by gun violence.

It does happen in Hawaii — just last week, a Honolulu police officer and a male suspect were shot near Pokai Bay. The last known mass shooting — known as the Xerox shootings — took place in 1999, leaving seven people dead.

But fewer people have died in Hawaii from gun violence in recent years than in any other state except Rhode Island.

In 2017, Hawaii had both the lowest number of gun deaths — 39 — and the lowest rate — 2.5 per 100,000 people, data from the federal Centers for Disease Control shows. Rhode Island beat Hawaii in 2016 and 2015.

That’s in comparison to the 3,513 gun deaths in Texas in 2017, or a rate of 12.4 per 100,000, the highest in the nation that year.

Hawaii’s strict gun laws have led some groups to sue.

“You can see how there’s this correlation,” said Laura Cutilletta, managing director of the Giffords Law Center To Prevent Gun Violence, an advocacy organization. Her organization’s analysis shows that stronger laws lead to lower gun death rates.

The center ranks Hawaii as having the seventh best gun laws out of the 50 states and a grade of A- on its scorecard, which the organization has been putting out since 2010. More than half of the states have an F.

“Hawaii is a strong state,” she said. Among other things, Hawaii requires gun dealers to get licenses and owners to register most firearms. The state regulates ammunition and restricts open carry, which prompted a federal lawsuit by local gun owners.

The Debate Over ‘Red Flag Laws’

Hawaii also put in place this year what’s known as a “red flag law,” or “extreme risk protection order,” which enables family members, medical professionals or others to prevent people from accessing guns when they appear to pose a threat.

Sixteen other states, including California, Connecticut and Florida, and Washington D.C., have passed similar laws.

State Sen. Karl Rhoads, who sponsored the Hawaii bill, said it’s meant to address the issue of people who buy their guns legally, but go through “some sort of breakdown.”

“It’s not foolproof,” Rhoads said, but it does stack the odds against a potential mass shooter.

But Harvey Gerwig, president of the Hawaii Rifle Association, said he finds these extreme risk protection orders problematic. His organization tried to defeat the bill.

“I understand with what’s been going on with all the crazy people shooting people that there’s a piqued interest in red flag laws,” he said. “But the fact is that most of these laws get abused.”

The law’s mechanism is very similar to how offenders in domestic violence incidents are barred by protective orders from accessing firearms.

A petitioner can file for a one-year protective order preventing someone from having a firearm. A hearing must be scheduled within 14 days. But in certain extreme cases, a petitioner can file for an order without notice to the respondent.

“We’re not against stopping somebody that is in fact dangerous to others,” Gerwig said. “The problem is that this law does not give any due process.” (...)

Gerwig said Hawaii’s cultural difference — the “Aloha spirit” — should be considered in accounting for the state’s low rate of gun deaths.

“Do we have a gun crime every now and then?” he said. “Yes we do. But we don’t have the level of violent crime that we’re seeing in large cities.”

Rhoads, the state senator who supports the extreme risk protection law, agreed that Hawaii benefits from a cultural difference.

“We don’t grab for a gun if we’re mad at somebody,” he said.

by Yoohyun Jung, Honolulu Civil Beat | Read more:
Image: Chris Eger/Guns.com via

Keith Haring (British, 1958-1990), The Fertility Suite: One Plate, 1983
via:

via:

Dick Sargent
via:

U.S. Farmers Exasperated by Latest Trade War Moves: 'Another Nail in the Coffin'

Trade tensions between the U.S. and China are flaring once again, and American farmers continue to bear the brunt of the implications.

In response to President Trump recently announcing 10% tariffs on $300 billion in Chinese goods, China allowed the yuan to weaken and suspended purchases U.S. agricultural products.

“The Chinese market has a large capacity and the prospect of importing high-quality U.S. agricultural products is bright," state-owned media Xinhua said on Monday. "However, we hope the U.S. will conscientiously implement the consensus reached at the [G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan] between the heads of the two countries, and implement the commitments to create the necessary conditions for cooperation in the agricultural fields between the two countries.”

America farmers were dismayed by the developments.

“This is just another nail in the coffin,” Tyler Stafslien, a North Dakota-based soybean farmer, told Yahoo Finance. “To see this thing only seems to be getting worse rather than better is very concerning, and the American taxpayers may have to foot another round of funding if this keeps up — or we could see a ton of farmers’ loss throughout this nation.”

American Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall said that the pain extended across the country.

“China’s announcement that it will not buy any agricultural products from the United States is a body blow to thousands of farmers and ranchers who are already struggling to get by,” Duvall stated.

‘Tariff policies have been doing financial harm to farmers’

Although farmers have collectively been receiving billions in market facilitation payments from the USDA, Stafslien sees these payments as “band-aids.”

The Trump administration announced in July that it would be providing an additional $16 billion in aid to farmers affected by the trade war.

“It’s certainly proof that the administration recognizes their tariff policies have been doing financial harm to farmers and rural America,” Stafslien said. (...)

Back in May 2019, U.S soybean prices reached its lowest level in a decade, dipping below $8 a bushel for the first time since 2008. But for farmers to make some kind of profit, they have still sold their crops despite the record-low prices.

“At some point, you have to sell, because we need some cash flow and when you’re selling at a loss, it’s just an ugly situation to be in,” Ziesch said. “If the price of soybeans is low because of tariffs, there’s not much I can do about it at some point,” Stafslien said. “You have to have cash flow just like any business. You may be selling at a loss just to rob Peter to pay Paul.”

‘We had developed a market with China’

Over the last year, as a means to finding a new source for soybeans, China has turned to countries like Argentina and Brazil. This has left American soybean farmers in the dust, so to speak. The S&P Global reported that Argentine and Brazilian soybean exports are projected to increase over the next marketing year, while U.S. sales are expected to fall.

Stafslien expressed his frustration at the inability for the two countries to reach a deal, particularly with the Trump administration, and the lost markets. (...)

Bob Kuylen, a wheat farmer, expressed a similar sentiment, recently telling Yahoo Finance: “This trade thing is what’s brought on by the president, and it’s really frustrating because he took away all of our markets.”

“All these countries went to different countries to get their grain,” he added. “How are we going to get the relations back with them to buy our grain again and be our customers?”

by Adriana Belmonte, Yahoo News |  Read more:

Image:Joshua Lott, Reuters

[ed. $28 billion and counting. See also: 'Is this sustainable?’: Farmers say bailouts aren’t enough in Trump’s trade war (Yahoo News) and Trump Hints At Third Farm Bailout (ZeroHedge). But there's more! See also: Trump trade-war bailout flows to richest farmers; poor, black farmers left to struggle (Salon). Of course.]

Roy De Forest, Black Dog, 1973
via:

Venezuela Hyperinflation Hits 10 million Percent. 'Shock Therapy' Next?

Venezuela's crisis has been marked by corruption, hyperinflation, one of the world's highest homicide rates, food and medicine shortages and the largest exodus "in the recent history of Latin America," according to the U.N. Refugee Agency.

Its chances to recover may start with President Nicolas Maduro stepping down or being forcibly removed — either by the opposition or through foreign military intervention. But that would just be the first step to get the ruined economy on the road to recovery. A major course of economic shock therapy will be required.

Venezuela's hyperinflation rate increased from 9,02 percent to 10 million percent since 2018, according to the International Monetary Fund, though it is expected to decline to back below 1 million percent due to recent moves by the country's central bank, according to a recent IMF forecast.

But the economic situation remains dire: The IMF says the cumulative decline of the Venezuelan economy since 2013 will reach 65% this year — for 2019 the annual decline forecast has increased from 25% to 35%. The five-year contraction is one of the worst in the world over the past half century and one of the few that was not caused by armed conflicts or natural disasters, the IMF stated earlier this week.

Some experts believe that in order to regain control over Venezuela's monetary system and zero out hyperinflation, drastic decisions will need to be taken.

"Venezuelans who have been suffering all of this time are going to be faced with a very dramatic, very draconian policy aimed at bringing their monetary system under control," said Dr. Eduardo Gamarra, professor of politics and international relations at Florida International University.

Wasted oil riches

Shock therapy measures, based on recent economic history, can include ending price controls and government subsidies, instituting higher tax rates and lower government spending to reduce budget deficits, devaluing the currency to boost foreign investments and selling state-owned industries to the private sector.

Venezuela will have to transform its current scheme of restricting foreign investment in order to fund the restoration of the energy sector, as well as its infrastructure, including the country's roads and bridges and the power grid. [ed. emphasis added]

Shock therapy supports the implementation of drastic economic policies to combat hyperinflation, shortages, reduce the budget deficit — Venezuela's current budget deficit stands at –29.95% in relation to GDP — and transition from a state-controlled economy to a mixed one.

It was used in post-communist Poland and Russia, and in other countries like Chile and Bolivia, where it successfully ended hyperinflation.

by Valentina Sanchez, CNBC |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. Whereby state assets get sold off to private interests, severe austerity measures imposed, crippling economic sanctions implemented, and voilà Venezuela is transformed into another client state of foreign capitalism (with widespread misery as an added bonus). Corporations are licking their chops. I wonder if Maduro is just biding his time to properly loot the treasury and find safe haven for himself and all 'his' money. That would be the normal game plan. See also: The Shock Doctrine (Naomi Klein). And: Trump’s Despicable Venezuela Embargo (The American Conservative)]

The Military-Industrial Jobs Scam

A Marilyn has once again seduced a president. This time, though, it’s not a movie star; it’s Marillyn Hewson, the head of Lockheed Martin, the nation’s top defense contractor and the largest weapons producer in the world. In the last month, Donald Trump and Hewson have seemed inseparable. They “saved” jobs at a helicopter plant. They took the stage together at a Lockheed subsidiary in Milwaukee. The president vetoed three bills that would have blocked the arms sales of Lockheed (and other companies) to Saudi Arabia. Recently, the president’s daughter Ivanka even toured a Lockheed space facility with Hewson.

On July 15th, the official White House Twitter account tweeted a video of the Lockheed CEO extolling the virtues of the company’s THAAD missile defense system, claiming that it “supports 25,000 American workers.” Not only was Hewson promoting her company’s product, but she was making her pitch — with the weapon in the background — on the White House lawn. Twitter immediately burst with outrage over the White House posting an ad for a private company, with some calling it “unethical” and “likely unlawful.”

None of this, however, was really out of the ordinary as the Trump administration has stopped at nothing to push the argument that job creation is justification enough for supporting weapons manufacturers to the hilt. Even before Donald Trump was sworn in as president, he was already insisting that military spending was a great jobs creator. He’s only doubled down on this assertion during his presidency. Recently, overriding congressional objections, he even declared a national “emergency” to force through part of an arms sale to Saudi Arabia that he had once claimedwould create more than a million jobs. While this claim has been thoroughly debunked, the most essential part of his argument — that more money flowing to defense contractors will create significant numbers of new jobs — is considered truth personified by many in the defense industry, especially Marillyn Hewson.

The facts tell a different story.

Lockheed Locks Down Taxpayer Dollars, While Cutting American Jobs

To test Trump’s and Hewson’s argument, we asked a simple question: When contractors receive more taxpayer money, do they generally create more jobs? To answer it, we analyzed the reports of major defense contractors filed annually with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Among other things, these reveal the total number of people employed by a firm and the salary of its chief executive officer. We then compared those figures to the federal tax dollars each company received, according to the Federal Procurement Data System, which measures the “dollars obligated,” or funds, the government awards company by company.

We focused on the top five Pentagon defense contractors, the very heartland of the military-industrial complex, for the years 2012 to 2018. As it happened, 2012 was a pivotal year because the Budget Control Act (BCA) first went into effect then, establishing caps on how much money could be spent by Congress and mandating cuts to defense spending through 2021. Those caps were never fully adhered to. Ultimately, in fact, the Pentagon will receive significantly more money in the BCA decade than in the prior one, a period when the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were at their heights.

In 2012, concerned that those caps on defense spending would cut into their bottom lines, the five top contractors went on the political offensive, making future jobs their weapon of choice. After the Budget Control Act passed, the Aerospace Industries Association — the leading trade group of the weapons-makers — warned that more than one million jobs would be at risk if Pentagon spending were cut significantly. To emphasize the point, Lockheed sent layoff notices to 123,000 employees just before the BCA was implemented and only days before the 2012 election. Those layoffs never actually happened, but the fear of lost jobs would prove real indeed and would last.

Consider it mission accomplished, since Pentagon spending was actually higher in 2018 than in 2012 and Lockheed received a sizeable chunk of that cash infusion. From 2012 to 2018, among government contractors, that company would, in fact, be the top recipient of taxpayer dollars every single year, those funds reaching their zenith in 2017, as it raked in more than $50.6 billion federal dollars. By contrast, in 2012, when Lockheed was threatening its employees with mass layoffs, the firm received nearly $37 billion.

So what did Lockheed do with those additional $13 billion taxpayer dollars? It would be reasonable to assume that it used some of that windfall (like those of previous years) to invest in growing its workforce. If you came to that conclusion, however, you would be sorely mistaken. From 2012 to 2018, overall employment at Lockheed actually fell from 120,000 to 105,000, according to the firm’s filings with the SEC and the company itself reported a slightly larger reduction of 16,350 jobs in the U.S. In other words, in the last six years Lockheed dramatically reduced its U.S. workforce, even as it hired more employees abroad and received more taxpayer dollars.

So where is all that additional taxpayer money actually going, if not job creation? At least part of the answer is contractor profits and soaring CEO salaries. In those six years, Lockheed’s stock price rose from $82 at the beginning of 2012 to $305 at the end of 2018, a nearly four-fold increase. In 2018, the company also reported a 9% ($590 million) rise in its profits, the best in the industry. And in those same years, the salary of its CEO increased by $1.4 million, again according to its SEC filings.

In short, since 2012 the number of taxpayer dollars going to Lockheed has expanded by billions, the value of its stock has nearly quadrupled, and its CEO’s salary went up 32%, even as it cut 14% of its American work force. Yet Lockheed continues to use job creation, as well as its employees’ present jobs, as political pawns to get yet more taxpayer money. The president himself has bought into the ruse in his race to funnel ever more money to the Pentagon and promote arms deals to countries like Saudi Arabia, even over the nearly unified objections of an otherwise incredibly divided Congress.

Lockheed Is the Norm, Not the Exception

Despite being this country’s and the world’s top weapons maker, Lockheed isn’t the exception but the norm. From 2012 to 2018, the unemployment rate in the U.S. plummeted from roughly 8% to 4%, with more than 13 million new jobs added to the economy. Yet, in those same years, three of the five top defense contractors slashed jobs. In 2018, the Pentagon committed approximately $118 billion in federal money to those firms, including Lockheed — nearly half of all the money it spent on contractors. This was almost $12 billion more than they had received in 2012. Yet, cumulatively, those companies lost jobs and now employ a total of 6,900 fewer employees than they did in 2012, according to their SEC filings.

In addition to the reductions at Lockheed, Boeing slashed 21,400 jobs and Raytheon cut 800 employees from its payroll. Only General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman added jobs — 13,400 and 16,900 employees, respectively — making that total figure look modestly better. However, even those “gains” can’t qualify as job creation in the normal sense, since they resulted almost entirely from the fact that each of those companies bought another Pentagon contractor and added its employees to its own payroll. CSRA, which General Dynamics acquired in 2018, had 18,500 employees before the merger, while Orbital ATK, which General Dynamics acquired last year, had 13,900 employees. Subtract these 32,400 jobs from the corporate totals and job losses at the firms become staggering.

by Nia Harris, Cassandra Stimpson, and Ben Freeman, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

Image: via
[ed. See also: Congress Spending Surge is National Suicide (Ron Paul Institute)

Life is Tough

The word extremophile didn’t exist until the 1970s. It entered wide circulation only after 1979 when the US Navy’s submersible Alvin revealed ecosystems prospering in deep-ocean hydrothermal vents. The Alvin scientists discovered organisms living in superheated water and largely metabolising hydrogen sulphide, which until then had been thought toxic and incompatible with life. Interest in extremophiles has burgeoned in proportion as scientists have come to appreciate their abundance, as well as their novel physiology. There is a journal devoted to extremophiles, focusing on creatures that survive – even, thrive – in environments that are extremely hot, cold, highly acidic or alkaline, and so forth, circumstances that would be lethal for most living things.

Not surprisingly, extremophiles tend to be relatively simple creatures, notably invertebrates and especially bacteria and archaea, although there is no bright line distinguishing, say, arctic hares, which thrive in very cold habitats, from their rabbit relatives whose habitats are more temperate. But neither compares with those life forms whose existence excites the admiration and wonder of biologists. The concept itself is nonetheless anthropocentric, since denizens of, say, blisteringly hot hydrothermal vents would perish in our ‘moderate’ temperatures and pressures, which for them would doubtless be extreme. (...)

Purists don’t include tardigrades among extremophiles, since they don’t appear to be adapted to extreme environments per se – that is, like us, they do best in comparatively benign conditions, which, in the case of tardigrades includes the moist, temperate miniworld of forest moss and lichens.

Their probability of dying increases in proportion as they are exposed to highly challenging circumstances, so, unlike classic extremophiles, tardigrades are evidently adapted to what human beings, at least, consider moderate circumstances. However, they are extraordinary in their ability to survive when their environments become extreme. Not only that, but whereas typical extremophiles specialise in going about their lives along one axis of environmental extremity – extreme heat or cold, one or another heavy metal, and so forth – tardigrades can survive when things get dicey along many different and seemingly independent dimensions, simultaneously and come what may. You can boil them, freeze them, dry them, drown them, float them unprotected in space, expose them to radiation, even deprive them of nourishment – to which they respond by shrinking in size. These creatures, also known as water bears, are featured on appealing T-shirts with the slogan ‘Live Tiny, Die Never’ and in the delightful rap song that describes their indifference to extreme situations, entitled Water Bear Don’t Care.

Tardigrades might be the toughest creatures on Earth. You can put them in a laboratory freezer at -80 degrees Celsius, leave them for several years, then thaw them out, and just 20 minutes later they’ll be dancing about as though nothing had happened. They can even be cooled to just a few degrees above absolute zero, at which atoms virtually stop moving. Once thawed out, they move around just fine. (Admittedly, they aren’t speed demons; the word ‘tardigrade’ means ‘slow walker’.) Exposed to superheated steam – 140 degrees Celsius – they shrug it off and keep on living. Not only are tardigrades remarkably resistant to a wide range of what ecologists term environmental ‘insults’ (heat, cold, pressure, radiation, etc), they also have a special trick up their sleeves: when things get really challenging – especially if dry or cold – they convert into a spore-like form known as a ‘tun’. A tun can live, if you call their unique form of suspended animation ‘living’, for decades, possibly even centuries, and thereby survive pretty much anything that nature might throw at them. In this state, their metabolism slows to less than 0.01 per cent of normal. (...)

Given that tardigrades possess the kind of powers we otherwise associate with comic-book superheroes, it might seem that they are creatures out of science fiction, but maybe it’s the other way around. Liu Cixin’s novel The Three-Body Problem (2010), a Chinese blockbuster that broke all records for sci-fi literature in its home country, became the first book not originally published in English to win the coveted Hugo Award for best science-fiction novel in 2015. It describes extraterrestrials known as Trisolarans, whose planet is associated with three suns, the real-life interactions of which – as physicists and mathematicians understand – would generate chaotically unstable conditions.

Trisolarans, therefore, are unpredictably subjected to extreme environments depending on the temporary orientation of their planet relative to its chaotically interacting stars: sometimes lethally hot, other times cold, sometimes unbearably dry and bright, other times dark, and so forth. As a result, these imagined extremophiles have evolved the ability to desiccate themselves, rolling up like dried parchment, only to be reconstituted when conditions become more favourable.

I don’t know if Liu was aware of real-life, Earth-inhabiting tardigrades when he invented his fictional Trisolarans, but the convergence is striking. (In the interest of scientific open-mindedness, it should perhaps also be considered that maybe tardigrades are real Trisolarans, refugees from a planet that was chronically exposed to intense environmental perturbations. This would explain the puzzling fact that tardigrades appear hyper-adapted, able to survive extremes that greatly exceed what they experience here on Earth.)

by David P. Barash, Aeon |  Read more:
Image: Water bear (Paramacrobiotus craterlaki) in moss. Photo by Eye of Science/Science Photo Library
[ed. Plus, Tardigrades on the Moon! (Ars Technica).]