John Hanno – Page 202 – The Tarbabys Blog

Russia plans to receive Iranian ballistic missiles against which Ukraine’s air defense is powerless

Ukrayinska Pravda

Russia plans to receive Iranian ballistic missiles against which Ukraine’s air defense is powerless

Ukrainska Pravda – January 30, 2023

There remains a threat of Russia receiving Iranian ballistic missiles, against which Ukrainian air defence in its current form is powerless.

Source: Colonel Yurii Ihnat, spokesperson for Ukraine’s Air Force, on air of the national joint 24/7 newscast

Details: Ihnat reminded that Ukraine’s air defence forces cannot counter the hostile ballistic missiles and anti-aircraft missiles flying along a ballistic trajectory. He emphasised the importance of providing our country with the Patriot PAC-3 and SAMP-T systems.

Quote: “The main threat that hangs in the air and can still be implemented is, of course, Iranian-made missiles. Russia has not abandoned its intentions to receive kamikaze drones from Iran and, in a certain way, the missiles that were announced earlier: Fateh and Zolfaghar models.

This is ballistics, we have no means against ballistics today. We understand that Russia also has ballistics in the form of the same Kinzhal missiles. This is basically a system, but air-based, which hits on a ballistic trajectory. Similarly, Kh-22 missiles… and S-300, S-400 missiles are anti-aircraft missiles that hit on a ballistic trajectory.

These are the challenges and threats we face today. It is possible to destroy them [the systems – ed.] in positions as well, but our partners also understand that means against ballistic threats are needed. Such as Patriot PAC-3 and SAMP-T.

We see a shift, Italy and France have also declared their readiness to transfer these systems to Ukraine, which is now being actively discussed after the Ramstein. Therefore, the threat is there, it has not disappeared anywhere, and we must respond to it.”

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Burned out by COVID, Chinese professionals take up nomadic life: ‘I wasted so much time’

Los Angeles Times

Burned out by COVID, Chinese professionals take up nomadic life: ‘I wasted so much time’

Stephanie Yang – January 30, 2023

Chu Fei thought she was doing everything right in life.

At 30, she lived in Beijing and worked at one of the world’s largest tech firms. She had attended China’s top school, Peking University, and gotten a master’s degree at Stanford. She felt the same pressure as anyone else to work hard, buy a home and settle down.

But last year, the striving that came so instinctively suddenly lost its meaning. She was exhausted by 12-hour workdays and long commutes, then nightmarish pandemic lockdowns. None of it seemed worth the financial payoff, the promise of which dwindled as the economy worsened.

“It just felt like my plan wouldn’t work anymore,” she said.

Stuck at home, burned out, with murmurs of layoffs at her company growing, Chu began to realize that she didn’t really like her work-driven life. So she started dreaming of a different one. In October, she quit her job, sold most of her possessions and moved to a provincial village some 800 miles from Beijing.

The growing aversion to conventional expectations — build a career, get married, buy a home, have children — is discouraged by the ruling Communist Party, which prizes social stability.

But China’s economic slowdown, jarring after years of supercharged growth and exacerbated by harsh COVID restrictions, has forced many to put their lives on hold. Tech companies, once among the most reliable and coveted employers, have slashed jobs. Millions of college graduates are struggling to find work in the toughest labor market in decades.

Observers have noticed a growing malaise among a middle class weary of toiling in a hypercompetitive environment without much promise for material gain.

“The young generation has become more aware of the precarious situation that they are in,” said Zhan Yang, assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. “They don’t want to just be stuck in one job forever, so they are experimenting with different ways of living. It’s like a small social experiment is taking place in China.”

Exact figures on how many people are living such lifestyles are elusive. But surveys show a growing interest in jobs that are more accommodating to different schedules and locations.

The number of flexible workers, such as part-timers or freelancers, in China nearly tripled to 200 million over the course of 2021, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. In a 2022 report by Peking University and Chinese recruitment platform Zhaopin, about 73% of respondents wanted to become digital nomads.

Even before the pandemic, backlash was growing over the punishing hours in China’s high-powered industries, a grind known as 996 — 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. Employees endured because they believed with enough ambition and grit, anyone could make their fortune. But social mobility has stalled in recent years, undermining that premise.

“It’s kind of like an adrenaline rush, a boost that drives people to work 996. But now the boost is gone,” Chu said. “People are saying, Whatever you do, you’re not going to get rich, you’re not going to make a lot of money, you’re not going to be successful. So why not do something you like?”

For Chu, that means leisurely mornings and afternoons spent writing, making videos and selling goods online. With income from those new endeavors, she calculates she has enough savings to support herself for a few years in smaller, cheaper cities as she fleshes out her longer-term plan.

For now, she’s settled in a once-bustling tourist town nestled between mountains and the shore of West Lake, a 40-minute drive from the city of Hangzhou.

She rents space in a villa that had been used as a hotel before the pandemic, living among the owner and his family — who moved in after tourism dried up — and often joining them for home-cooked meals. Around the village, neighbors tend to their vegetable fields and tea farms.

It’s a far cry from her life in Beijing, where she was often overwhelmed by work messages and demands. Worries about COVID tests or securing deliveries during lockdown exacerbated that fatigue, and the days began to blur together.

“There’s kind of a feeling, like what have I done for all these years? I’ve wasted so much time,” she said. “I can say I went to some good universities and worked at some big companies, but it’s not something you want to write on your tombstone, you know?”

Still, Chu doesn’t want to fully embrace the trend of tangping, or lying flat, a rejection of the country’s rat race that gained popularity a few years ago. Disillusioned youth, tired of trying to fulfill societal expectations, relished the idea of giving up and just lying down. Others coined new variations, such as yangwoqizuo, or “sit-ups,” which describes a cycle between struggle and capitulation. Chu said that doesn’t quite fit her current attitude either.

“I’m not giving up on myself and doing nothing, but I’m not standing up or running. I’m just sitting here doing things — but that’s what I think real life should be.”

She’s put off telling her parents that she left her job, because she doesn’t want them to worry. But she thinks they might come to understand. They live in Wuhan and were among the first to witness the devastation wrought by the pandemic; Chu believes they have also started to prioritize quality of life over traditional success.

For some in China that means leaving demanding jobs, trying to monetize hobbies, or hopping from town to town. Remote work hubs have popped up around the country; China’s Instagram-like platform, Xiaohongshu, said searches for digital nomads surged 650% from January to August 2022. Social media users have begun documenting their transitory lifestyles — including stays in steeply discounted hotel rooms or tourist resorts left deserted during the pandemic.

Summer Li, who quit her job at an e-commerce startup early last year, used the proliferation of such posts to plan her own travels. In May, she moved to the southern tech hub of Shenzhen for one month before returning to Beijing. In August she spent another month in Kunming, the capital of the mountainous Yunnan province, followed by a brief sojourn in Jingdezhen, the “Porcelain Capital” of China, where she studied ceramics.

“I got this information because a lot of people are doing the same thing during COVID,” said Li, who has been running an online jewelry business while on the road. “I just realized, I think going to work is not for me.”

Chu had hesitated to give up her hard-earned job security, even as she watched friends quit work and travel. And when she first told her friends her plans to roam around China, many expressed concern, she said. After she started a video blog about her new life last month, friends and strangers reached out asking for tips on how to embark on similar journeys.

“In traditional Chinese society, many would think: People like you are not very good. They would say you are the unstable element of society,” Chu said. But lately, she has felt less pressure to settle down. “The good thing is that a lot of people are feeling the same way, that we don’t need to do the things that others want you to do.”

Last year, China’s population shrank for the first time in six decades, threatening a demographic crisis with insufficient young people to work and support the elderly. To boost birthrates, local governments have begun offering more supportive policies for families raising young children, and they’ve promoted incentives to buy real estate during the housing downturn.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has warned the country’s youth against “lying flat,” even as employment prospects have dimmed. “Work is most glorious, our happy lives are created through work. Becoming rich or famous overnight is not realistic,” Xi said during a university visit in Sichuan province in June, according to state media.

But neither incentives nor admonishments have mitigated the spreading ambivalence. Some Chinese became so despondent last year that many began researching how to emigrate, spawning a new movement known as runxue, or “run philosophy.”

Other countries, including Japan and South Korea, are experiencing similar struggles with a dejected younger generation, leading to low marriage and birth rates and putting pressure on governments to alleviate their citizens’ financial stress.

“It’s basically an economic problem,” said Terence Chong, associate economics professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “Young people, they think they have no hope, housing prices are so expensive, so they just limit how hard they work.”

Chinese officials have begun walking back harsh policies in an effort to boost the economy.

Last month, China suddenly relaxed its stringent zero-COVID policy. Since then, the virus has spread rampant throughout the country, overwhelming hospitals and straining medical supplies. However, it has allowed somewhat of a resumption of normal life and work, buoying hopes for an economic recovery.

Officials have also effectively declared an end to a years-long crackdown on private enterprise that battered tech companies and the for-profit education industry.

Even if the economy recovers, Chu can’t imagine going back to Beijing, or her former life.

“I think COVID gave me a chance to really reflect on myself,” she said. “If there was this opportunity to make a lot of money and be rich overnight, would I still be living the lifestyle I’m living right now? I don’t know, probably not.”

These days, Chu feels so removed from the rest of the world that she barely noticed when China lifted all COVID restrictions, until local villagers began to get sick. Even then, the outbreak felt milder than what she was hearing and reading about Beijing.

“If I turn off my phone, this place is like paradise,” she said. “I just hope that this life can last longer.”

At night, she often takes long walks around the tranquil village. She doesn’t remember the air ever smelling quite so sweet.

David Shen of The Times’ Taipei bureau contributed to this report.

Op-Ed: L.A. ports can’t follow business as usual. Our shipping system is unsustainable

Los Angeles Times

Op-Ed: L.A. ports can’t follow business as usual. Our shipping system is unsustainable

Christina Dunbar-Hester – January 30, 2023

San Pedro, CA - August 25: An aerial view of the The Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro, Thursday, Aug. 25, 2022. The Port of Los Angeles is the nation's gateway for international commerce and is the busiest seaport in the Western Hemisphere. Located in San Pedro Bay, the Port stretches along 43 miles of waterfront. The Vincent Thomas Bridge, a 1,500-foot-long suspension bridge, crosses Los Angeles Harbor in Los Angeles, and links San Pedro with Terminal Island. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) — The Port of Los Angeles, shown last August, is the busiest seaport in the Western Hemisphere. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Ports in the Los Angeles region entered national headlines as a supply chain crisis unfurled during the pandemic. After an initial near-halt to commerce and shipping in early 2020, some of us saw bluer skies and enjoyed cleaner air for a fleeting moment.

But by 2021, consumer purchasing skyrocketed and trade came roaring back. Though that might sound good for business, it’s a status quo in which the L.A.-Long Beach port complex is Southern California’s largest single source of pollution. If California wants to live up to its reputation as an environmental leader, port operations require more scrutiny — and change.

Though the ports were built to transport general goods and commodities, their fate has been particularly tied to fossil fuels. The rise of oil from the 1920s onward spurred their development to handle a large volume of petroleum. The wealth this generated was poured back into the ports themselves, intensifying the scale of trade. Combined, Los Angeles-Long Beach makes up the largest container port complex in the Western Hemisphere, through which goods — especially from Asia— reach warehouses, retail shelves, e-commerce fulfillment centers and ultimately consumers’ homes.

The pandemic dramatically illustrated the scope of this economic engine. A spike in consumer demand coincided with labor interruptions and other snarls to supply chains, exemplified by the logjam off the coast of Southern California where dozens of ships queued waiting to dock. Residents, especially those living near the ports and distribution corridors, breathed in sharply elevated air pollution.

To preempt future disruptions, state and local officials and the Biden administration have moved to streamline and expand goods-handling in the last couple years. Biden announced that hours of port operation would be extended to keep cargo movement humming. The Port of Long Beach unveiled a new bridge built to allow larger ships’ passage (even as seas rise), and it received federal authorization to deepen its shipping channels. Local officials now fret about whether ports on the East Coast and the Gulf of Mexico will snatch away a significant share of cargo business because of disruptions in Southern California.

Economic concerns are understandable, especially since the ports are associated with thousands of jobs. But building bigger operations to move an ever-increasing volume of goods is short-sighted locally and globally. Massive ships create infrastructure demands at odds with our need to reduce carbon emissions, curb resource extraction and control environmental pollutants. Many shipped consumer goods are bound for landfills after only a very short period of use. Apparel, appliances, electronics and furniture have shorter lifespans than they did a few decades ago. The way we consume goods right now is simply not sustainable.

Meanwhile, officials and regulators have been sharply criticized for delaying measures to safeguard health for communities around the ports. As air quality activists note, cutting port emissions is urgently needed. Electrifying port and warehouse equipment is underway, but long-haul journeys, including ocean shipping itself and truck distribution, also need to transition off fossil fuel — cargo ship fuel is even dirtier than the diesel on which trucks run — and meet much lower emissions targets. San Pedro Bay’s port complex also traffics a large volume of fossil fuels in addition to consumer goods. Petroleum handling in the ports will need to be significantly diminished to meet the challenge of climate change.

The ports play a substantial role in the interlocking crises in our region, which require an expansive vision. After decades of improvement, air pollution is rising again, due to not only transportation and industrial emissions but also to bigger wildfires, which are the result of rising temperatures. Global shipping at scale also contributes to the erosion of Indigenous sovereignty by encouraging extractive practices that degrade land, which in turn drives global warming and a related biodiversity and extinction crisis.

How California tackles these threats will have effects far beyond our state. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s “30×30” plan — which made California the first state to commit to conserving 30% of its land by 2030 — will provide wildlife habitat that can help absorb carbon. Yet conservation cannot absolve California of its lethal industrial areas. We must approach even freight corridors as spaces for people and nature rather than “sacrifice zones” where toxic exposure is accepted as necessary for industrial activity.

As Angelenos, we should be planning for a future where the success of the ports and the region is not measured by year-over-year growth in goods movement. Indeed, a more livable future in this region might see the ports planning for fewer ships and fewer goods, handled more slowly and accompanied by good jobs in cleaner energy, environmental stewardship and remediation of contaminated sites.

A just energy transition will require that we examine every part of business as usual. That means reconsidering how we’ve managed the ports for the past century. We should be reimagining their role in a more democratic, far less fossil-fuel-dependent future.

Christina Dunbar-Hester is a communication professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at USC, a current member of the Institute for Advanced Study and the author of “Oil Beach.”

Florida weighs allowing concealed carry guns without permit

Politico

Florida weighs allowing concealed carry guns without permit

Matt Dixon – January 30, 2023

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Florida is set to become the 26th state to allow citizens to carry firearms without a permit under legislation outlined Monday by Republican House Speaker Paul Renner.

Conservatives and gun rights groups in Florida have long pushed to give Florida residents to ability to carry firearms with a permit, known by supporters as “constitutional carry,” but past legislation has routinely gotten bogged down. This year’s efforts are bolstered by Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has repeatedly said he would sign a permitless carry bill if lawmakers sent it to his desk.

As the 2023 legislative session approaches, though, the Renner-led House appears to be taking point on getting the bill through the Legislature.

“Florida led the nation in allowing for concealed carry, and that extends today as we remove the government permission slip to exercise a constitutional right,” Renner said Monday during a news conference, where he was flanked by a handful of county sheriffs.

Renner spearheaded the press conference, a signal it’s a clear top priority for the speaker, but the bill is being sponsored by state Rep.Chuck Brannan (R-Lake City) and state Sen. Jay Collins (R-Tampa). Lawmakers did not formally file a bill at the time of the news conference but are expected to by Monday afternoon.

Under the proposal, the state will no longer require individuals to get a permit from Florida to own a gun. The state also won’t mandate other provisions, including a training requirement needed to get a permit. Permits would still be an option for gun owners who want to get them, something needed to be able to legally carry a gun in states that do not have permitless carry.

The proposal does not address whether people will be allowed to openly carry firearms in public. Under current Florida law, gun owners are not allowed to carry guns in the open.

In 2021, Texas approved a similar “open carry” law that allows most gun owners 21 and over to carry a handgun in a holster without a permit. The Texas law allows citizens to carry the gun in the open or concealed.

Democrats blasted the bill that they say will flood the state with gun owners who are not properly trained. Shortly after Renner’s press conference, Democrats pledged to fight to defeat it during the 2023 session — but Republicans have supermajorities in both the House and Senate, giving them near unchecked power.

“We are united in opposition to this policy proposal,” said Rep. Christine Hunschofsky (D-Parkland), whose district includes the scene of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass school shooting that left 17 people dead.

Democrats also see the proposal as another in a long line of culture war-infused bills DeSantis will champion during the legislative session to further energize his conservative base as he prepares to run for president. In the past few week alone, DeSantis has asked lawmakers for a sweeping criminal justice bill packed with policies generally supported by conservatives, rejected an Advanced Placement course focused on African-American history, a move that has gotten him national criticism from those who think he is whitewashing American history and signaled he will push for legislation cracking down on teacher’s unions, which are the last bastion of reliable political support for Florida Democrats.

“This is another effort to appeal to his conservative base as he runs for president,” said state Rep. Anna Eskamani (D-Orlando).

DeSantis was not at the Tallahassee press conference, instead holding his own at the same time in Orlando focused on transportation budget requests.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this report misstated one of the cosponsors of the bill. State Rep. Chuck Brannan is co-sponsoring the bill.

Florida GOP leaders want to get rid of gun permits

Associated Press

Florida GOP leaders want to get rid of gun permits

Brendan Farrington – January 30, 2023

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Saying gun owners don’t need a government permission slip to protect their God-given rights, Florida’s House speaker proposed legislation Monday to eliminate concealed weapons permits, a move Democrats argue would make a state with a history of horrific mass shootings less safe.

Republican leaders, including Gov. Ron DeSantis, have expressed support for the idea, so the bill should not have a problem passing in a legislature with a GOP a super-majority.

“What we’re about here today is a universal right that applies to each and every man or woman regardless of race, gender, creed or background,” Speaker Paul Renner said at a news conference.

Democrats immediately responded that the proposal could lead to more gun violence and accidents. They said that the bill supporters call constitutional carry will allow people to buy guns with no training or background checks.

“Untrained carry is what it is,” said Democratic Rep. Christine Hunschofsky, who was mayor of Parkland when a former Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student fatally shot 17 students and faculty. “You are not making our communities, our schools or any places safer with this.”

Renner said law-abiding gun owners will take safety seriously.

“Anybody that is a gun owner and uses guns knows that safety comes first,” Renner said. “That’s important, but it’s not required. So the permit and all aspects of that permit will go away.”

Manuel and Patricia Oliver became advocates for tighter gun regulations after losing their 17-year-old son Joaquin in the 2018 massacre at the Parkland high school. They said with more people carrying guns without restrictions, Florida will become a more dangerous state.

“How about a little paperwork, some norms, before we take that step. It’s not right and it’s not protecting (the carrier) from anything. It is actually putting in danger a lot of people,” Manuel Oliver said.

Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey said people who want to do harm to others won’t be stopped by the permit requirement.

“Criminals don’t get a permit. Not one of them. They don’t care about obeying the law. Our law-abiding citizens have that immediate right, guarantee and freedom to protect themselves,” Ivey said.

About half the states allow people to carry a gun without a permit, a movement that has been growing particularly among conservative states.

Florida handgun owners would still have to conceal their weapons in public, though there has been discussion to allow gun owners to openly carry weapons.

Associated Press writer Terry Spencer in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, contributed to this report.

Family of Newlywed and Activist Decapitated at Utah’s Arches National Park Awarded More Than $10M

People

Family of Newlywed and Activist Decapitated at Utah’s Arches National Park Awarded More Than $10M

Melissa Montoya – January 30, 2023

A federal judge awarded more than $10 million to the family of a Ugandan human rights activist who was decapitated while on a visit to Arches National Park in 2020.

Esther “Essie” Nakajjigo’s husband Ludovic Michaud will receive $9.5 million while her mother Christine Namagembe will receive $700,000, according to the judgment filed in federal court. Essie’s father John Bocso Kateregga will receive $350,000.

Nakajjigo’s husband and parents filed a $270 million administrative claim against the National Park Service in 2021 over her death.

Nakajjigo and Michaud spent June 13, 2020, at Arches National Park in Utah as a way to celebrate their one-year anniversary of when they first met, according to the Associated Press.

The newlyweds were on their drive out with Nakajjigo in the passenger seat when a strong wind pushed the park’s entrance gate into the road, and sliced through their rental car “like a hot knife through butter,” the claim said, according to the AP.

The activist was decapitated.

Zoe Littlepage, a lead attorney on the case, told The Salt Lake Tribune, that “on behalf of the family, we are very appreciative of the judge’s attention to detail, the time he spent working on this, and for the value he put on the loss to this family of Essie.”

Esther Nakajjigo/Twitter Esther Nakajjigo

In a statement to the newspaper, U.S. Attorney for the District of Utah Trina Higgins, said Nakajjigo’s family was entitled to damages.

The trial began Dec. 5 in Utah and was meant to determine how much money was owed to the family, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.

During the trial, a U.S. attorney representing the government said, “The United States was 100 percent at fault. … And we want to express on behalf of the United States our profound sorrow for your loss,” per the newspaper.

“We respect the judge’s decision and hope this award will help her loved ones as they continue to heal for this tragedy,” the statement read. “On behalf of the United States, we again extend our condolences to Ms. Nakajjigo’s friends, family and beloved community.”

“Essie was a remarkable humanitarian and champion for women and girls. This verdict, though the largest by a federal judge in Utah history, cannot replace the immeasurable loss suffered by her husband and family. We are grateful that Judge Jenkins honored Essie’s life and legacy with this award,” Littlepage said in a statement to PEOPLE.

Higgins did not immediately return PEOPLE’s request for comment.

Nakajjigo was Uganda’s ambassador for women and girls, and ran a health center in her home country that she set up when she was just 17 years old to provide free health services to adolescents.

She was also the brains behind two reality TV shows that aimed to empower young mothers and encourage girls to stay in school.

She reportedly moved to Colorado for a social entrepreneurship program at the Watson Institute in Boulder.

Absence from work at record high as Americans feel strain from Covid

The Guardian

Absence from work at record high as Americans feel strain from Covid

Melody Schreiber – January 29, 2023

<span>Photograph: Jae C Hong/AP</span> — Photograph: Jae C Hong/AP

For many Americans it feels like everyone is out sick right now. But there is a good reason: work absences from illness are at an all-time annual high in the US and show few signs of relenting. And it’s not just acute illness and caregiving duties keeping workers away.

About 1.5 million Americans missed work because of sickness in December. Each month, more than a million people have called out sick for the past three years. About 7% of Americans currently have long Covid, which can affect productivity and ability to work, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The last time the absentee number dipped below a million Americans was in November 2019.

Last year, the trend accelerated rather than returning to normal. In 2022, workers had the most sickness-related absences of the pandemic, and the highest number since record-keeping began in 1976.

In 2022, the average was 1.58 million per month, for a total of 19 million absences for the year. The largest spike was in January 2022, when 3.6 million people were absent due to illness, about triple the pre-pandemic number for that month.

Parents and caregivers also saw the highest rates of childcare-related absences of the entire pandemic in October 2022 as illnesses surged amid relaxed precautions and lower vaccination rates among children.

Patterns in absenteeism correspond with rises and falls in the spread of Covid. But long Covid is probably contributing to sick leave rates as well.

One analysis in New York found that 71% of long Covid patients who filed for worker’s compensation still had symptoms requiring medical attention or were unable to work completely for at least six months. Two in five returned to work within two months, but still needed medical treatment. Nearly one in five (18%) of claimants with long Covid could not return to work for a year or longer after first getting sick. The majority were under the age of 60.

Workforce participation has dropped by about 500,000 people because of Covid, according to one study that looked over time at workers who were out sick for a week. But the actual number could be higher, because not all workers are able to take time off during their illnesses, Bach said.

“It’s likely that long Covid is keeping somewhere around 500,000 to a million full-time-equivalent workers out of work,” said Katie Bach, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Some affected by long Covid have reduced their hours, while others have left the workforce temporarily or permanently – a metric not captured by work absence data, but calculated in labor participation statistics.

Patients who are very sick with long Covid often “try to work for some amount of time and then eventually they drop out”, Bach said.

Between death and disability, the workforce has been reduced by as much as 2.6% during the pandemic, with 1bn days of work lost, McKinsey recently reported.

Those who stay in their jobs may need more sick leave than before because of new chronic illnesses.

“People who are on the less-sick end of long Covid, maybe they can keep working, but every now and then they might need a day or two off just because they have overdone it or something happened that triggered a symptom flare,” Bach said.

Nearly one in five Americans developed long Covid after their initial infection, with some 7.5% of all American adults currently experiencing long Covid, according to the CDC. The CDC began collecting data on how many people have long Covid in 2022.

Much more research still needs to be done on the causes of and treatments for long Covid, the researchers said. Some patients do eventually recover, for instance, but it’s not clear why or how long they will be sick.

“We don’t know how long it’s taking them to recover. There’s a lot of uncertainty there,” said Alice Burns, associate director of the program on Medicaid and the uninsured at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The more immunity people have, from vaccines and recovery from prior cases, the less likely they are to get sick in the first place, which reduces the risk of developing long Covid. But it is still possible to have long Covid even after mild or asymptomatic infection.

All of this means the US may continue to see higher-than-normal workplace absences.

“Some people just really need flexibility from their employers,” Burns said. That can include telework, unscheduled leave, flexible schedules and reduced hours.

“The challenge with that is, those supports are a lot more likely to be available to workers who have office jobs, higher-paying jobs, who are pretty well-established in the labor market,” Burns said.

“Covid in general, and long Covid too, are more likely to affect people who are minorities, who have lower levels of education, [who have] likely lower levels of income. So there may be, for many people, a mismatch between the people who need some of these employment-related supports and the types of jobs they are in.”

Employers can adjust to this new normal by offering as many accommodations as possible, both for those suffering initial bouts of Covid infection and those experiencing longer-term symptoms, Bach said. Again, some of the jobs where people are most at risk might be the least accommodating – it’s usually easier for office workers to telecommute than it is for fast-food workers – but there are still steps employers can take.

“Companies have to get creative, like: can we offer more frequent breaks?” Bach said. “Can we as a society convince Medicare and Medicaid to reimburse a little bit more where companies are employing people with long Covid? What memory aids can we put together?”

If long Covid continues to affect 7% of the country, that’s 23 million people at any given time who may require accommodations under laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act.

“But there isn’t a lot of clarity about what is a reasonable accommodation” under the law when it comes to Covid and long Covid, Burns said.

While Covid has thrown the country into disarray in every realm, including work, it is also shining a more intense light on the ways chronic illness affects productivity and workforce participation – a change that disability and chronic illness activists say is long overdue, Bach pointed out.

“My hope is that it’s big enough that we can rethink how we research and treat these diseases, and how we approach workplace accommodation,” Bach said. “In a world where any of your workers could suddenly become disabled, I think you have to be more flexible.”

‘I use it because it’s better’: why chefs are embracing the electric stove

The Guardian

‘I use it because it’s better’: why chefs are embracing the electric stove

Whitney Bauck – January 29, 2023

The evidence that gas stoves are bad for human health has grown so staggering over the last few years that the US Consumer Product Safety Commission recently announced that it would consider banning the appliances. Though a conservative backlash prompted the White House to rule out the possibility of a nationwide ban, and some states have passed pre-emptive laws that prohibit cities from ever passing gas bans, other cities including Berkeley, New York and San Francisco have already moved to bar new gas hookups due to health and environmental concerns.

One study from earlier this month found that one in eight cases of childhood asthma in the US is caused by gas stove pollution. According to the lead author on the study, Talor Gruenwald, a research associate at the non-profit Rewiring America, that means that living in a home with a gas stove is comparable to living in a home with a smoker. Gas stoves release pollutants so harmful that the air pollution they create would be illegal if it were outdoors, and that’s not just true when you’re actively cooking – gas stoves continue to emit harmful compounds like methane even when turned off. Beyond the adverse health impacts, those emissions are greenhouse gasses that also contribute to the climate crisis.

But solutions are within reach. “The most surefire way to eliminate risk of childhood asthma from gas stoves is to move to a clean cooking alternative like an induction stovetop or electric stovetop,” said Gruenwald.

Switching over to electric isn’t just a boon to your health and the planet – it also makes for a better cooking experience, according to a growing number of professional chefs. Read on to hear from three who have embraced electric and are loving the results.

Jon Kung: wok cooking that’s ‘more of an authentic experience’

Though he may be best known these days for TikTok videos showing off his kitchen prowess, deadpan humor and the occasional thirst trap, Jon Kung had been working as a chef professionally for more than a decade before pandemic lockdowns prompted him to start posting cooking videos on the internet. He was first introduced to induction cooking, which uses a magnetic field to efficiently heat pots and pans, while working in a commercial kitchen in Macau, China. He began relying heavily on induction burners in his current home of Detroit, Michigan, because he was often working pop-ups in spaces with limited ventilation.

“There was no altruistic intent in my decision to adopt induction. I use it because it’s better,” he said. “Induction stovetops are easier to clean, they’re more responsive, and they are just as powerful, if not more powerful, than gas. My induction burner can boil eight quarts of water within 11 minutes – it’s super fast.”

These days, Kung uses induction “100% of the time”. He often works on an induction wok, which features an induction cooktop with a bowl-shaped surface that a wok perfectly fits into, and rejects the critique that gas stove bans would prohibit chefs from cooking Chinese food authentically.

“You can buy a curved induction wok burner specifically made for woks and it works better than cooking on a wok on a western gas range,” he said. “That wok burner was literally made by Chinese people to cook Chinese food – when I cook in that it’s more of an authentic experience than cooking on a KitchenAid or a Viking range could ever be.”

Still, Kung admitted that there will be a learning curve for chefs when they initially make the switch. The biggest difference, he noted, is that gas stoves offer both “visual and tactile” feedback about how hot the cooking surface is, while induction cooktops require users to rely on numbers on a screen to know what temperature they’re working with. He recommended cooking with eggs when you’re first switching over to quickly get the kind of visual feedback that will help you learn to use an induction burner.

And for the small handful of dishes that truly require fire – think crème brûlée or charring peppers – he keeps a blowtorch in his kitchen. “I think flame should be a seldomly used tool for specific purposes in my kitchen, instead of putting my health at risk all the time because of these few times I need to actually use fire,” he said.

Christopher Galarza: quicker, easier to clean and a low barrier to entry

Christopher Galarza spent a decade working in conventional kitchens before he had his first experience in an all-electric commercial kitchen as an executive chef at Chatham University, a Pittsburgh institution known for its focus on sustainable food systems. Going electric changed his and his staff’s experience of working in the kitchen, partly because working with gas stoves can be a sweltering experience.

“I had a meat thermometer in my chef coat at one old restaurant job, and I looked down one day and noticed that my thermometer read 135F,” he said. In contrast, the all-electric kitchen he worked in at Chatham stayed pleasantly in the low 70s even on summer days when it was 90 degrees outside and the kitchen was in full production mode. “We were able to drastically reduce the temperature in the kitchen, which made us all more comfortable,” he added. “And for me personally, I can tell you that my mental health was better.”

He’s convinced that’s a benefit that got passed along to the guests eating the food he was cooking. “People can feel when you’re stressed,” he said, “and they can tell when you’re relaxed and happy.” But there was also a benefit to the bottom line, in that induction stoves are much quicker and easier to clean, which allowed him to spend less money on harsh cleaning chemicals and to send his kitchen staff home earlier while the “dollar per labor hour went way up”.

He cites other studies showing that the utility costs of operating a gas-powered or electric-powered kitchen are pretty similar, and notes that even for home chefs, the barrier to entry is low: “You can go on Amazon and buy an induction burner for $60 that plugs into the same outlet that you have your coffeemaker in,” he said.

Galarza is so convinced that electric is the future of professional cooking that he’s started a consultancy to help other kitchens make the switch. “Every international culinary competition in the world, from the Bocuse d’Or to the Culinary Olympics, is all electric,” he said. “The metric by which the international cooking community judges each other is on induction. And those are the best chefs on the planet.”

Even though rightwing politicos have been inciting a culture war around gas stoves in the US, he dismisses much of it as political posturing. “Ultimately, no one’s going to come into your home with a crowbar and take your stove, just like no one’s kicking down your door and checking your house for asbestos or lead paint,” he said. “The gas stove is this generation’s equivalent of lead paint. It’s something we thought was OK, that we later found out is a hazard. And now we have an opportunity to make it right.”

Tu David Phu: no better way to sear meat

Before Chef Tu David Phu worked in the kitchens of top-tier restaurants like New York’s Daniel or San Francisco’s Acquerello or appeared on shows like Top Chef or Chefsgiving, he was a “first-generation Vietnamese American kid from Oakland who grew up food insecure”, he said. His experiences with food at both ends of the economic spectrum – from childhood in a food desert to an adulthood that has included cooking for the world’s wealthiest people – have deeply shaped how he sees sustainability conversations in the context of food and cooking.

He became familiar with induction cooking in fine dining kitchens, which he said prioritized electric stovetops because they allow for chefs to work in small spaces and with greater precision – the pastry department at one of his old jobs was particularly fond of induction’s capacity for melting chocolate or making syrups without burning them. But Phu is adamant about breaking down the idea that kitchen electrification only concerns the privileged.

“I feel very passionately about including working class and poor people in this electrification movement,” he said. Black, brown and Indigenous communities are already disproportionately at risk for pollution-related health impacts, due to “modern-day redlining” that locates polluting industries in BIPOC neighborhoods, he said; they shouldn’t also be saddled with the health impacts of not having any other option than to cook on gas. “Decarbonization as a whole, not just electrification, is a justice issue,” he said. He commends the Inflation Reduction Act provisions that allow for low-income households to get as much as $840 in rebates toward electric stoves, but wants to see more initiatives focused on spreading the word about these options to the communities that need them most.

On a personal level, the Orange county, California-based chef uses induction cooktops “religiously” in his own home, and argues that there’s no better way to sear meat than by using a cast iron stove on an induction cooktop. His biggest tip for successful induction usage is to remember that induction cooktops can get to the smoking point in about 15 seconds, so he recommends staying in the low to medium power range when cooking, unless you’re boiling water.

He recognizes the importance of personal and cultural identities that get tied up in food, but he doesn’t think they should be a barrier to making changes that are necessary for the health of people and the planet. “My response to the resistance from some in the Asian community saying they can’t cook ‘authentic’ food without gas is: it doesn’t matter if you can cook a certain way or not if you don’t have an ozone or fresh air to breathe,” he said. “Throughout the course of all of our histories, we’ve prioritized our survival first, and we adjusted and modified our identities and cultures around that, because survival is more important.”

How Reagan Convinced Himself He Didn’t Sell Arms for Hostages

Daily Beast

How Reagan Convinced Himself He Didn’t Sell Arms for Hostages

Philip Taubman – January 28, 2023

Photo Illustration by Erin O'Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty Images — Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty Images

Shocking news about secret arms-for-hostage deals rocked Washington in late 1986. The first hint came with a White House announcement on November 2, that David Jacobsen, an American held hostage in Lebanon by Iranian-directed Islamic forces, had been released. As Secretary of State George Shultz read a draft White House statement about the development, he noted that it referred to freed “hostages,” with the “s” crossed out. That told him that the White House had expected Jacobsen would not be alone. Shultz suspected that the news meant that clandestine White House efforts to free captive Americans in the Middle East by sending arms via Israel to Iran might be responsible. He had first heard about the possibility in mid-1985.

Within a few weeks, the dimensions of the story expanded exponentially with word that some Iranian payments for American arms had been secretly diverted to the rebel Contra forces in Nicaragua that Washington hoped would topple the leftist Sandinista regime. The funding was in clear violation of a congressional cutoff of aid to the Contras. Overnight, the affair, quickly dubbed the Iran-Contra scandal, engulfed the White House.

Shultz realized that President Ronald Reagan faced an explosive crisis similar to Watergate that might upend his presidency. The fiasco staggered Shultz. It exposed his own failure to stop the arms-for-hostage dealing at several critical moments when he heard about pieces of it, objected to it but stopped short of forcefully intervening. He had deliberately kept his distance, telling the White House officials who managed the arms shipments to Iran that he did not want to know the details.

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan: The Ultimate ’80s Power Couple

The scandal also forced Shultz to face up to Reagan’s weaknesses as president, for the affair, at its core, was a colossal blunder. As Shultz confronted the issue, he struggled mightily to remain loyal to Reagan while simultaneously protecting his own reputation and legacy. In doing so, he barely escaped indictment for obstruction of justice.

The sudden crisis had been a long time in the making, born of two international flashpoints that the Reagan administration struggled to manage: the Middle East and Central America. The U.S.-Iran skirmish opened on November 4, 1979, when a mob of young Iranians overran the American embassy in Teheran and seized fifty-two Americans as hostages. On January 20, 1981, after 444 days in captivity, the hostages were freed moments before Reagan was sworn in as president. In the years that followed, the Khomeini regime supported Shiite proxy groups in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East that killed or kidnapped Americans.

Although Reagan administration policy clearly barred making concessions to hostage takers, Reagan yearned to free them. He also bought the untenable proposition that by selling arms to Iran he could establish a less adversarial relationship with the ayatollahs and turn Iran into a moderating Shiite influence in the region. Israel, for its part, offered to sell American arms in its arsenal to Iran to secure the release of hostages.

While the Middle Eastern plot was taking shape, the American officials who favored it—including CIA Director William Casey, National Security Adviser Bud McFarlane, and marine lieutenant colonel Oliver North, a National Security Council staff member—grew increasingly concerned about Soviet and Cuban inroads in Central America. When congressional Democrats cut off American support to paramilitary forces trying to overthrow the Nicaraguan government, these men first looked to Israel and South Africa as potential sources of money for the Contras. Over time, the Middle East and Central America vectors converged. The result was an elaborate plot in which Israel sold American weapons to Iran in exchange for hostages, and profits from the arms sales were funneled to the Contras. Reagan enthusiastically endorsed the arms sales but was not informed about the diversion of money to the Contras.

Shultz’s first inkling about irregular activity came in mid-April 1984 during administration debates about Central America policy and possible third-country aid to the Contras. Shultz wanted to maintain American assistance to the guerrilla forces, but not by funneling foreign money to them. He preferred to persuade Congress to extend American aid, if possible. When Casey suggested enlisting South Africa’s help in April 1984, Shultz was appalled, fearing covert foreign funding might lead to the impeachment of Reagan.

The arms-for-hostages operation came up formally in a July 13, 1985, McFarlane memo to Shultz. The national security adviser described an Israeli proposal to ship American arms to Iran to encourage a political dialogue and dislodge hostages from captivity. To get the dialogue started, Iran wanted one hundred American antitank missiles. Shultz told McFarlane to “make a tentative show of interest without commitment.” Shultz neither opposed nor supported the missile transfer—he did not address the question. He advised McFarlane to manage the initiative personally. Reflecting later on his response to McFarlane, Shultz said, “I was uneasy about my response, but I well knew the pressures from the president to follow up on any possibility of gaining the release of our hostages. I felt that Bud would in fact go ahead no matter what I said and that I was better off to stay in close touch with him and thereby retain some influence over what happened.”

Eight days later, McFarlane outlined the Israeli proposal at a White House meeting. Shultz, apparently reluctant to reiterate his earlier equivocation, objected to the arms transfer, arguing that it brazenly violated the administration’s firm stance against trading guns for hostages or making any concessions to terrorists. Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger agreed. The meeting ended inconclusively, but two days later Reagan told McFarlane to move ahead with the plan. On August 20, Israel shipped 96 antitank missiles to Iran, followed by another 408 two weeks later. One American hostage, Benjamin Weir, was soon freed. Upping the ante, Iran requested a shipment of more powerful weapons, medium-range surface-to-air HAWK missiles. When Israel could not deliver the larger weapons directly to Iran and efforts to ship them via a third country failed, Oliver North enlisted the help of the CIA.

Reagan enthusiastically supported the effort, acting on a humanitarian conviction that the United States should do everything possible to gain the release of the hostages. In doing so, he persuaded himself that the United States was not trading arms for hostages but instead was engaged in a noble attempt to save the lives of his countrymen..

Once news of the deal broke into the open in November 1986, Shultz’s attempts to dent the Reagan illusion grew frantic—and perilous for him. His challenge was threefold: convince Reagan that McFarlane, Vice Admiral John Poindexter (who had succeeded McFarlane as national security adviser), Casey, and North had misled him; end the arms-for-hostage strategy; and help Reagan survive the firestorm. Reagan did not want to hear that he had approved an arms-for-hostage strategy. On November 6, three days after the Lebanese newspaper report about the McFarlane mission to Teheran, Reagan declared that news coverage of the trip had “no foundation” and denied that the U.S. was exchanging arms with Iran for the release of hostages.

Shultz tried repeatedly to convince Reagan that his administration was trading arms for hostages and brazenly violating its own policies for dealing with terrorists. Reagan repeatedly rejected his appeals and grew increasingly impatient with Shultz. As the tension escalated, Shultz ruminated about his own failure to act more decisively in 1985 and 1986 as evidence of the operation caught his attention. “I felt I should have asked more, demanded more, done more, but I did not see how,” he recalled. “Did I have myself to blame for the aggrandizement of the NSC staff? I agonized. Ever since my first days as secretary of state, I had sought to make the national security adviser my channel to the White House and, on day-to-day matters, to the president.”

On one level, he was right. Secretaries of state cannot operate independent of the White House and the national security adviser. But on another level, Shultz was wrong. His willingness to rely on the White House national security staff after repeated setbacks caused by the incompetence and ideological rigidity of the staff does not make for a persuasive defense of his failure to act more decisively to stop the Iran-Contra affair before it reached critical mass.

Shultz’s assertion at the time that he was unaware of many incremental developments in the arms-for-hostage operation, a defense repeated in his memoirs, does not conform with detailed notes kept by Charles Hill, Shultz’s executive assistant. The memory lapse can be explained by the dizzying demands that descend daily on a secretary of state and Hill’s failure to capture all the relevant information about Shultz’s awareness of the Iran-Contra activities when he reviewed his notes for Shultz to help prepare Shultz’s congressional testimony. But Shultz’s selective memory also evoked Richard Nixon’s years-earlier warning to Reagan that Shultz had “a wonderful ability to, when things look iffy or are going wrong, he’ll contend he never heard about the issue and was never briefed and was not a part.”

Shultz’s defective memory, compounded by Hill’s handling of his notes, nearly proved disastrous when Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh discovered that Shultz had withheld relevant information about the Iran-Contra affair in his 1987 congressional testimony, delivered under oath. Walsh weighed charging Shultz with obstruction of justice but ultimately found that “Shultz’s testimony was incorrect, but it could not be proven that it was willfully false.”

Shultz’s faith in Reagan was shaken by the scandal. The president’s refusal to acknowledge the reality of exchanging arms for hostages was dumbfounding. In a nationally televised address on November 13, 1986, Reagan said he had authorized a small shipment of arms to Iran but was not bartering arms for hostages. “We did not—repeat—did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we.” After the speech, Shultz tried to make sense of Reagan’s blind spot. “The president’s speech convinced me that Ronald Reagan still truly did not believe that what had happened had, in fact, happened. To him the reality was different. I had seen him like this before on other issues. He would go over the ‘script’ of an event, past or present, in his mind, and once the script was mastered, that was the truth—no fact, no argument, no plea for reconsideration, could change his mind.”

On November 16, Shultz made a fateful appearance on the CBS News Sunday-morning interview program Face the Nation. When host Lesley Stahl repeatedly pressed Shultz to state whether any further arms shipments would be made to Iran, he replied, “Under the circumstances of Iran’s war with Iraq, its pursuit of terrorism, its association with those holding our hostages, I would certainly say, as far as I’m concerned, no.” Stahl then asked if Shultz was speaking for the entire administration. “No,” he answered. It was a stunning moment—the secretary of state acknowledging that he could not speak for the U.S. government.

He barely survived his candid answer. The White House announced that Shultz did speak for the administration and that Reagan had “no desire” and “no plans” to send further arms to Iran. Yet Reagan continued to defend the operation privately. Meanwhile, Poindexter and North kept working on plans for new arms shipments. Sensing that Shultz’s persistence was annoying Reagan, Casey urged the president to select a new secretary of state.

The same day Casey urged the president in writing to do so, he joined Bush, Shultz, Weinberger, Poindexter and others at the White House for a National Security Planning Group meeting with Reagan to hear from Attorney General Edwin Meese. Reagan had commissioned Meese to investigate the arms-for-hostage operation. Reagan brushed aside Shultz’s objections.

That evening, as Shultz lamented the latest developments, Poindexter, who had strongly defended the operation earlier in the day, called from the White House. His tone was entirely different—mild, even meek. The change in tone pleased but puzzled Shultz. Two days later he learned the reason behind the turnabout: Meese aides had discovered the secret payments to the Contras. When top officials gathered again at the White House, Meese told the group that between $10-30 million dollars had been sent to the Contras. Reagan had not approved the diversion or even known about it. As a result, Poindexter was out and North reassigned. On November 26, three weeks after the first news reports about the deals broke, Shultz and Reagan stilled the rancor that had agitated their relationship and agreed Shultz should stay on as secretary of state through the end of the Reagan presidency.

Philip Taubman is a lecturer at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. Before joining CISAC, Taubman worked at the New York Times as a reporter and editor for nearly 30 years. He is the author of The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb (2012); Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Hidden Story of America’s Space Espionage (2003); and In The Nation’s Service: The Life and Times of George P. Shultz (2023).

There’s almost unlimited clean, geothermal energy under our feet. New tech could help unleash that potential in New Mexico.

Albuquerque Journal, N.M

There’s almost unlimited clean, geothermal energy under our feet. New tech could help unleash that potential in New Mexico.

Kevin Robinson-Avila, Albuquerque Journal, N.M. – January 28, 2023

Jan. 28—Canadian company Eavor Inc. drilled an 18,000-foot well bore this past fall in southwest New Mexico to prove it could hammer its way through deep-underground, hard-granite rock to reach previously untapped geothermal energy.

Eavor’s well now stands as the deepest hole ever drilled in New Mexico, successfully demonstrating that the company’s new technology can potentially crack open access to vast subsurface hot-rock formations that offer massive amounts of clean, renewable energy.

Eavor’s success is just the latest achievement in what could soon become a global renaissance in geothermal development that’s got both industry experts and public officials hyped about the potential for unleashing a virtually unlimited source of clean energy for electric generation, and for heating and cooling of homes and buildings.

“We have massive geothermal resources sitting below our feet, but it’s been elusive to tap into the deep subsurface areas we need to reach to extract that energy economically and use it,” Eavor Vice President of Business Development Neil Ethier told the Journal. “… Our drilling project in southwest New Mexico showed that our technology can unlock that geothermal potential, and it’s now ready for commercial development.”

In fact, the company is preparing to break ground in Nevada on its first 20-megawatt geothermal power plant in the U.S. using its new technology to exploit deep hot-rock formations. The project will supply power to local utility NV Energy, pending approval by state regulators in Nevada.

That project could be the first of many new power plants Eavor expects to build in western states, where geothermal energy is more readily accessible at levels closer to the surface than in other places. Eventually, that could include New Mexico as well, which has the sixth-highest geothermal potential in the nation, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado.

“New Mexico’s geothermal resource is very good,” Ethier said. “It’s a wonderful opportunity for New Mexico to develop clean, firm, baseload electricity that employs New Mexicans.”

Eavor is one of many companies now aggressively pursuing geothermal development with modern drilling technologies that allow them to tap into the deep underground rock formations that eluded the industry in years past.

Texas-based Fervo Technologies, for example, has also signed new power purchase agreements in western states to build modern geothermal power plants, including three separate projects with utilities in California for a combined total of nearly 100 MW of generation. And, as that company perfects its drilling techniques — and as economies of scale kick in to lower costs — Fervo expects to target a lot more places for geothermal development, including New Mexico, said Fervo Senior Associate for Policy and Regulatory Affairs Laura Singer.

“We definitely see New Mexico as an opportunity for the future once we get our drilling costs lower and our techniques fully hammered out,” Singer told the Journal.

State legislation

Both Eavor and Fervo met with a geothermal working group last year that state Sen. Gerald Ortiz y Pino, D-Albuquerque, formed to explore local development potential, paving the way for newly proposed legislation in this year’s session to promote the industry.

Ortiz y Pino has filed the Geothermal Resources Development Act, Senate Bill 8, to provide $25 million in state money for grants and loans for research and development of geothermal energy projects around New Mexico. And he filed a second bill, SB-173, to offer up to $10 million annually in tax breaks for new geothermal projects.

The legislation could inspire more investment in both geothermal electric generation, and use of geothermal energy to heat and cool homes and buildings.

Heating-and-cooling technology is well developed. But it requires more education and promotional incentives to encourage broad market adoption and deployment.

In contrast, geothermal electric generation based on today’s emerging technologies that target deep hot-rock formations is still evolving. But it’s nearing the commercial break-out point.

“We’re on the cusp of it,” Ortiz y Pino told the Journal. “Eavor just drilled a hole nearly 19,000 feet deep to show it can do this. That opens the door to a lot more potential development as other energy companies jump in.”

Both of Ortiz y Pino’s bills have bipartisan support, with two Republican senators co-sponsoring them. And more bipartisan backing is likely, Ortiz y Pino said.

That’s because, apart from offering clean “baseload” energy that can operate 24/7 all year long, today’s emerging technology could also create direct employment opportunities for workers in the oil and gas industry as the state diversifies away from fossil fuels.

Drilling for heat, not hydrocarbons

Indeed, it’s the modern drilling technologies developed by the oil and gas industry that are opening the gateway to deep underground geothermal energy, making the drilling rigs and skilled workforce that manage today’s oil and gas operations essential for companies like Eavor and Fervo to bust through hard, subsurface granite to reach hot-rock formations.

“We’re piggybacking off technology advancements in oil and gas drilling,” Ethier said. “But instead of drilling for hydrocarbons, we’re drilling for heat. Fifteen years ago we couldn’t do this.”

Modern hydraulic fracturing methods that include hardened drill bits to crack open tough shale beds — plus advanced seismic sensor technology and data analysis to pinpoint and accurately target underground hydrocarbon deposits — all contributed to the shale gas revolution, allowing the industry to exploit previously untapped oil-and-gas reservoirs.

More recently, horizontal drilling technology has pushed oil and gas operations into unprecedented levels of development, permitting operators to penetrate laterally into shale beds stretching in all directions to reach more pockets of hydrocarbons.

Now, those same drilling techniques — combined with further technology development by the geothermal companies themselves — is creating a paradigm shift that, for the first time, lets developers dig far below the shallow hot water aquifers that the geothermal industry has traditionally targeted to instead bore deeper down into hot-rock formations.

That capability opens up access to far more geothermal energy in many more places, because developers are no longer limited to exploring and developing around volcanos and fault lines where natural subsurface fracturing has created pools of relatively shallow, underground reservoirs. Such conditions are relatively rare and are concentrated in certain places, such as the western U.S.

“The industry has been historically limited to conventional wet, steamy reservoirs where developers look for the steam and natural fault lines,” Singer said. “We don’t need steam now. We look instead for hot rock at reasonable depths. Subsurface heat exists everywhere — it’s just a matter of how deep it is.”

Nearly 20 years ago, extensive research showed that intense subsurface heat is ubiquitous and basically inexhaustible nearly everywhere below the Earth’s crust, with heat level depending on depth, said Shari Kelly, a senior geophysicist and field geologist with the state Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources.

“We came to realize that no matter where you are in the U.S. — even if it’s Connecticut — if you drill deep enough you can reach temperatures that are usable for heat and electricity,” Kelly told the Journal. “… That really shifted the perspective on geothermal development.”

The challenge, however, has been lack of adequate drilling technology that could slice through hard rock to reach the necessary depths while also withstanding extreme subsurface temperatures that can shut down drilling equipment.

“Today’s drilling technology allows developers to reach those deep depths,” Kelly said. “It’s a game changer.”

Advancing the technology

Companies like Fervo and Eavor are now building on oil and gas drilling technology to develop techniques and methods specifically geared toward deep geothermal development.

Fervo, for example, has developed advanced data analytics using down-hole fiber optics to gather and analyze real-time data on flow, temperature and performance of geothermal resources, Singer said. That provides much greater insight into subsurface behavior, allowing the company to precisely identify where the best resources exist and optimize well performance.

Once the hole is drilled and fracked, the company pumps cold water down into the well bore, where it’s heated to between 350 and 400 degrees Fahrenheit and then brought back to the surface to create steam to run a turbine generator.

Conventional wells that tap into existing hot water aquifers usually don’t penetrate below 3,000 feet down, and those wells generally only produce between 200- and 300-degree heat. In contrast, Fervo is targeting rock formations at 8,000-10,000 feet down, providing much greater heat for more efficient and abundant generating capacity.

“Some companies are looking to drill extremely deep into extremely hot rock,” Singer said. “We’re not. We’re targeting more moderate depths that allow us to use existing oil and gas drill bits and equipment.”

Eavor, meanwhile, has created new technology to drill far deeper wells of up to 23,000 feet or more, Ethier said. That requires extreme temperature-resistant equipment with reinforced drill bits to break through hard granite rock.

To do that, it’s created proprietary insulated drill pipes and partnered with industry vendors to design new drill bits. It’s also developed advanced down-well control technology to precisely place liquid-filled pipes through two well bores that pump water down for heating at the geothermal resource and then bring it back up again.

And the entire process is contained in a novel, closed-loop system where the water being heated never leaves the underground or surface pipes. Rather, it absorbs heat from the hot-rock bed like a radiator, using horizontal drilling to place piping offshoots directly next to the geothermal resource, which then heats up the water inside the tubes before it’s brought back to the surface.

“We have over 30 patents covering a lot of technology components, including proprietary software, hardware and system design,” Ethier said.

Eavor directly tested most of its technology in the New Mexico Bootheel at a drill site located next to the Lightning Dock geothermal power plant near Lordsburg. That’s the only conventional geothermal facility currently operating in the state.

“We met all our technology milestones,” Ethier said.

Future employment opportunities

That test operation also demonstrated lucrative future employment potential for oil and gas industry workers. Two conventional drilling rigs were used on the project, which lasted from August to December last year.

“We had more than 50 people employed at the rig site throughout construction,” Ethier said. “And that doesn’t include local services we used for fuel and water delivery, or for sewage and garbage disposal. It was also a boon for local hotels and restaurants in the area.”

As industry development gains momentum and companies begin drilling deeper wells for power plants, and for heating and cooling applications, a lot more employment opportunities could emerge for skilled oil and gas drilling crews, engineers and seasoned industry professionals.

In fact, most companies now pursuing modern geothermal development are largely run by former oil and gas executives and staffed by industry workers. Helmerich & Payne Inc., for example — an oil and gas drilling rig operator — is an investor in Eavor.

Global drilling company Baker Hughes also formed a partnership with two industry giants, Continental Resources and Chesapeake Energy, to test whether they can profitably turn spent natural gas wells into geothermal facilities, according to Politico. And Chevron New Energies, a subsidiary of Chevron Corp., is partnering with Sweden’s Baseload Capital to develop new geothermal technologies, starting with a new project in Weepah Hills mountains in Nevada.

“We’re not taking away from the oil and gas industry, but adding stability to it,” Ethier said. “This can provide a just transition for energy diversification that offers other options for employment.”

Forging ahead

Full-scale deployment of emerging geothermal technology — now called enhanced geothermal systems, or ESG — is still a few years off, but it’s a lot closer that many think, Singer said.

“We’re ready to deploy,” she said. “This is not technology that needs to be reinvented, because the technology and skills are there. It’s a matter of just starting to drill wells, and we’re ready to go.”

As momentum accelerates, it will allow drilling and development costs to decline through economies of scale and continuous technology and system efficiency improvement, making ESG more economical compared with fossil fuels like natural gas, Singer added.

“One reason for the shale gas revolution success was continuous drilling and constantly evolving technology and techniques to bring down costs,” Singer said. “Geothermal has not yet experienced that, and it’s what’s needed.”

Challenges remain. More temperature-resistant drilling technology, for example, is critical as wells go deeper, and a lot more subsurface research is needed to identify the best places for geothermal development.

Permitting issues could also cause problems, slowing development down the same way transmission projects are routinely held up through local, state and federal regulatory requirements that delay planning and construction for years.

But federal- and state-level investment and incentives can help with all those challenges. The U.S. Department of Energy announced in September a new “Energy Earthshot” to lower the costs for ESG by 90% to $45 per megawatt hour by 2035, which would make it significantly more affordable than today’s prices for natural gas.

That includes $44 million in new investment’s in ESG through the DOE’s Frontier Observatory for Geothermal Energy Research laboratory in Utah, plus $84 million in funding under the federal Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment law to support four ESG demonstration projects in different locations.

State-level initiatives like Ortiz y Pino’s bills can also help. And apart from potential bipartisan legislative support, environmental organizations are getting on board, given geothermal’s potential to provide clean backup power for intermittent solar and wind facilities as the state transitions from fossil fuels to renewables.

Some environmental activists took leading roles in Ortiz y Pino’s working group, and environmental organizations are expected to firmly back the senator’s bills in this year’s session.

“It’s such a great opportunity for us to supplement wind and solar in a sustainable fashion,” Ortiz y Pino said. “Geothermal runs 24/7, 365 days a year. It doesn’t go away, and it makes freeing ourselves from fossil fuels much more realistic.”

Sandia National Laboratories’ drilling research, long used by oil and gas firms, is being put to use for clean geothermal energy development

Sandia wants to make those efforts more efficient and less expensive…

In the near future, clean geothermal energy could heat and cool the entire University

The University of New Mexico’s Utility Services Department could in the near future he…