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Author: John Hanno
Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. Bogan High School. Worked in Alaska after the earthquake. Joined U.S. Army at 17. Sergeant, B Battery, 3rd Battalion, 84th Artillery, 7th Army. Member of 12 different unions, including 4 different locals of the I.B.E.W. Worked for fortune 50, 100 and 200 companies as an industrial electrician, electrical/electronic technician.
Putin’s Pals Furious Younger Russians Don’t Want to Die in Ukraine
Julia Davis – August 5, 2022
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast / Getty
As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine marches on, there is a dark undercurrent of waning public support—and it’s coming through even on tightly controlled state television. In the first days of the bloody war, the public was promised a quick victory due to the superiority of Russia’s military. Instead, the Kremlin’s offensive has been plagued by heavy losses and equipment deficiencies, to the point that state TV pundits publicly contemplate seeking aid and assistance from other pariah states—including Iran and North Korea.
Russia has reportedly been involved in discussions with Iran to purchase military drones, due to a severe shortage of its own unmanned aerial vehicles. During Thursday’s broadcast of the state TV show 60 Minutes, military expert Igor Korotchenko suggested that North Koreans could help rebuild destroyed Ukrainian regions and join Russia’s military ranks. Conversations about legalizing the participation of foreign fighters alongside Russian forces have been a recurring topic in state media, and for good reason: everyday citizens are less than enthusiastic about the prospect of going to war or dying for Putin. That doesn’t sit well with top pro-Kremlin propagandists, such as state TV host Vladimir Solovyov—twice formally recognized by Russian President Vladimir Putin for his services in the benefit of the Fatherland.
During Thursday’s broadcast of his show, The Evening With Vladimir Solovyov, the host complained: “It irritates me that our society doesn’t understand that a watershed moment is currently taking place. We either stand up, build up and end up on another level, or simply cease to exist.” His guest, political scientist Alexander Kamkin, concurred and suggested that a “cultural special operation” be conducted in Russia.
The Kremlin’s tight control over the information disseminated to the public has failed to curtail access to outside sources, with tensions rising to such a point that on Monday during Solovyov’s show, convicted Russian agent Maria Butina suggested jailing parents whose children use a VPN to access foreign media. The host was likewise disappointed with the younger generation’s lackluster involvement in Putin’s war, complaining: “People who are planning to join [the military] are mainly of the same age as me, some are a bit younger… That is the generation that was raised on Soviet movies, Soviet literature and values. But the very young people I talk to, they faint if they cut their finger—and they see that as their democratic values… The special military operation is our Rubicon. I get the feeling that many here still can’t grasp it.”
Writer Zakhar Prilepin, who is wanted by Ukraine’s SBU security service on charges of “taking part in the activity of a terrorist organization” for his involvement in Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine, added: “We really need volunteers, we aren’t hiding that. We need to replenish dislodged personnel. Meanwhile, the topic of death is silenced. The topic of perishing is curtailed. In a society motivated by comfort, you can’t talk about death. Everyone is expected to go to war, win and come back alive. Better yet, not to go in the first place. Let me remind you that the Charter of the Imperial Army included in plain language: if you have three adversaries, go to war and advance, kill all three. If you have 10, then defend yourself. If your death has come, then die. It’s written very plainly: ‘Soldier, death is part of your job. It is part of your duty and your contract with the government.’ The same principles were adopted by [Joseph] Stalin, who had an Orthodox Christian education.”
Prilepin recited the lyrics of an old Soviet song, entitled “In the woods at the frontline”: “If you have to lie in the ground, at least you have to do it only once.” He asserted: “The soldier was openly told: go and fight. If you have to die, you only have to do it once… This is a part of your duty as a citizen, as a soldier, as a warrior, as a Russian man. Today, we’re protecting everybody: the government, mothers, conscripts, everyone. We barely forced our governors to put up murals [of the fallen soldiers]… Everyone is afraid to upset society.”
Prilepin openly worried that in the event of total mobilization, the younger generation would opt to escape to neighboring countries instead of joining the fight: “The government assumes that in Russia, there is always 1 million men ready to fight. As for the rest of the country, we try not to worry them… We’ve been discussing difficult topics, which might lead to World War III and the same mobilization we’re trying to avoid right now… It’s difficult to talk about total mobilization, because I suspect that an excessive flood of people will suddenly pour into Armenia and Georgia. Borders will have to be closed. I’m talking about our younger generation.”
Solovyov suggested the rules protecting conscripts from taking part in combat should be changed: “You know what amazes me most of all? That the conscripts in our Army are not supposed to fight… So what are they supposed to do in the Army?” He complained that not many enough volunteers have joined the battle: “We have 150 million people. How many are fighting in Donbas?” The state TV host proposed a massive government-funded propaganda campaign, glorifying the participants of Russia’s so-called “special operation” in film and on television, with songs and poetry.
Gone are the days when state TV propagandists were predicting that other countries would flock to Russia’s side to join the battle against Ukraine and the West. During Thursday’s broadcast of The Evening With Vladimir Solovyov, political scientist Sergey Mikheyev summarized the current mood in Russia: “About these constant discussions as to what we can offer the world, the world can go screw itself… We don’t need to offer anything to anybody. We’re special, we need to build ourselves up.” Solovyov agreed: “We are the Noah’s Ark. First and foremost, we need to save ourselves. Ourselves!”
Saltwater toilets, desperate wildlife: Water-starved Catalina Island battles against drought
Hayley Smith – August 5, 2022
Raymond Valdez, 8, pours cool seawater on his head to rinse off the sand at the beach in Avalon. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
Island-dweller Lori Snell grimaced as she tallied her bill recently at the Avalon Laundry — nearly $50 for three large loads.
“It’s always an adventure to live in Catalina,” said Snell, 64. “It’s a joy, it’s a paradise, it’s a challenge.”
For Snell and Santa Catalina Island’s other 4,000 full-time residents, water is a bit of an obsession. When you live an hourlong ferry ride from Long Beach, a gallon of the stuff can cost six times more than it does “over town” — the islanders’ term for the mainland.
That preoccupation with water has now become critical as severe drought grips California and its Channel Islands — a rugged, eight-isle archipelago that hosts several human outposts and a handful of species that exist nowhere else on Earth.
But although some of the island’s wildlife is struggling for survival, conditions for humans are a little different today than in droughts past, due largely to a desalination plant that opened in Avalon in 2016. The plant today provides about 40% of Avalon’s drinking water.
“Over town, you’re not affected by drought as much as you are here,” said Snell, a former resident of Encino. “All the locals and businesses are very aware. Our ability to live here depends on us having fresh water.”
Conditions on Catalina Island are a little different this time around, thanks in large part to a desalination plant that opened in Avalon at the end of the last drought. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
Many Avalon residents still have vivid memories of the state’s last punishing drought, which forced them into severe Stage 3 water restrictions at the end of 2016.
Things got so bad that even some fine-dining restaurants switched to paper plates to avoid running dishwashers, and hotels ferried their linens to the mainland for laundering in an effort to cut costs and conserve tight supplies, several locals said.
But desalination has helped keep them out of similarly severe water restrictions so far this year, according to Ronald Hite, senior manager of Catalina Island for Southern California Edison, the island’s water provider.
“We run desal 100% of the time and rely on it, and then supplement with groundwater,” Hite said. “That’s bought us a year, and taken us really from the front of the line — where we were last time, going into drought restrictions and rationing — to the back of the line, which is fantastic.”
Although desalination provides potable water to Catalina’s humans, it can’t do quite as much to help the island’s wildlife, including bison, amid the worsening drought. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
Indeed, although most of mainland Los Angeles moved into Stage 3 restrictions at the start of June, Avalon in July crept into only Stage 1, even as its reservoir dropped about 100 acre-feet in the last three months. Hite said it’s a remarkable feat for an island that has no access to state or federal water supplies, and which for decades relied primarily on its reservoir to supply full-time residents and roughly 1 million visitors each year.
“This is different this time — we’re actually in a much better spot than our peers elsewhere,” he said. “And the main driver of that is that we are using every drop of our drought-resistant resources that we possibly can. … We might be facing mandatory rationing right now had we operated the system like we used to.”
That’s not to say water is taken for granted on Catalina, where conservation has largely become a way of life. According to Hite, residents use an average of 57 gallons per day — about half of the residential average in the area served by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. What’s more, there are very few lawns that require water, and most homes have saltwater toilets that keep them from flushing freshwater down the drain.
Gregg Miller, who owns Avalon’s Hotel Metropole and Market Place, which includes several restaurants and the laundromat, said he’s spent the last four years converting most of the hotel’s bathtubs into showers in order to save water. He also got rid of all their hot tubs.
“It’s such an ongoing situation,” Miller said of drought. “It never gets quite resolved, so you’re always really doing things that you hope will save some water. It’s a challenge.”
Scooping cups of water from a bucket rather than using a hose, a woman cleans the sidewalk outside the Hotel Atwater in Avalon. Water is not taken for granted on the island. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
And although he said it can be “hard to tell people paying $300 a night, ‘Don’t take a long shower,’ ” the new desalination plant has helped give everyone some breathing room.
“To some degree, the desal plant has taken a little bit of the pressure off,” Miller said. “Because unlike most other places, we don’t have any secondary source, another municipal district that could lend us water or share water with us. We have only what we have in our reservoirs and a few small wells.”
The message hasn’t necessarily registered with all of the island’s visitors, including the thousands of tourists who arrive each week via cruise ships and those who take the ferry from L.A., Long Beach and Orange County.
Phil and Cheryl Gaston, who were visiting from Georgia, said they were aware of the drought conditions plaguing the West but that it hadn’t really factored into their plans to visit the island.
“If I had been planning a vacation in Lake Mead, though, I wouldn’t go,” said Phil Gaston, 66.
Visitors enjoy snorkeling and scuba diving lessons in Avalon. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)Alex Romero manages the burger-and-dog outpost Coney Island West in Avalon. He recently converted the restaurant’s three-compartment sink into two compartments to help save water. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
Alex Romero, a 40-year resident of Avalon who runs and owns the burger-and-dog outpost Coney Island West, said that “it would be nice if [tourists] would be more conscious — their long showers really kill us.” But he also added that visitors are the lifeblood of the island and essential to the residents’ way of life. “They’re what keep us going.”
Romero recently converted the restaurant’s three-compartment sink into two compartments to help save water, he said. And instead of hosing down the patio nightly, he’s doing it once a week and using a mop the rest of the time.
“The reservoir and desal help, but we need rain this year for sure,” he said. “If not, it will get a lot worse.”
Desalination is also not without controversy. In May, plans for the massive Poseidon plant in Huntington Beach were rejected by the California Coastal Commission due to concerns about high costs, ecological hazards and other significant hurdles. The desalination process, which typically includes the discharge of hypersaline brine back into the ocean, has been criticized for negatively affecting marine life near facilities, as well as high energy consumption.
Hite, the Edison manager, said many of those effects have been mitigated at the Avalon plant because of its relatively small scale. Although the Poseidon plant would have produced up to 50 million gallons of drinking water a day, the facility in Avalon produces about 240,000.
Ava Jessie McDonald, a water and gas operator mechanic at Southern California Edison, checks the numbers on the control panel inside the desalination plant in Avalon. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
“We’ve got a couple things going for us here in terms of desal production in that number one, we are surrounded by water so we have easy access to it, and number two, we’re relatively small scale,” he said. “It’s much less of an impact for someone like us than for, say, a giant plant such as those that have been proposed recently.”
According to the most recent monitoring report submitted to state regulators, salinity levels from the plant are relatively low, around 50 parts per thousand at the discharge point and 30 to 35 parts per thousand at various depths and distances from the facility. Average ocean salinity, broadly speaking, is about 35 parts per thousand.
Hite said the reverse-osmosis plant, which is diesel-powered, also uses the high-pressure reject water to help turn its pump, enabling it to use a smaller motor and reduce electrical consumption. Edison is currently seeking a grant for a new deepwater well that would allow it to bring an older desalination facility on the island, built in the 1990s, back online, he said.
Yoram Cohen, a desalination expert and professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at UCLA who is not affiliated with the Avalon plant, said size can be a factor when it comes to the impact of the brine.
“If you discharge 20, 25 million gallons a day, that’s a lot more than 200,000 gallons a day,” he said, “so the impact on the environment, the local impact, is going to be very different. It may be easier to disperse a small volume, or a small volumetric flow, than it is a huge one.”
Visitors take a two-hour “eco-tour” with the Catalina Island Conservancy in Avalon. They explore parts of the island’s interior to see plants, landscape and wildlife, including bison. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)The water level at the Middle Ranch Reservoir in Avalon dropped 100 acre-feet in the last three months. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
Cohen said recent studies from Australia, Israel, Singapore, Saudi Arabia and other places using desalination have also shown that discharge “should not have an adverse impact” if it is done properly. But although desalination can be a helpful tool — especially for areas near the coast — it shouldn’t be the only source of supplies, he said.
“Desal alone is not going to solve the problem, but it’s an added component of our water portfolio,” Cohen said. “At the end of the day, I think that we have to keep our water portfolio diversified, just like you would keep your money invested in multiple places. You want to be safe, right? You don’t put your money in one investment.”
There are other challenges too. Many residents are now fighting a proposed rate hike by Edison that they say will make their already-pricey water even more expensive. The agency said the increase will help recoup some losses from the last drought and keep the systems running.
“Desal is not an inexpensive operation,” Avalon Mayor Anni Marshall acknowledged. She said the island’s small number of ratepayers also drive up the costs because there are fewer people to share the expense. “But I think the trade-off is, we love living here and we’re willing to sacrifice as much as we can — or as much as we have to.”
Thousands of tourists arrive each week in Catalina via cruise ships and ferries from L.A. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
Marshall said she wants the island to work toward new groundwater capture and water recycling projects in the near future. But she also noted that because most homes use saltwater toilets and don’t have frontyards, the significant 50% savings residents achieved during the last drought were hard-won.
“That large reduction we did was basically personal consumption — it was in our showers, washing dishes and that kind of thing,” she said.
The mindset is apparent all around the town, where beachgoers this week rinsed off under saltwater showers and restaurants declined to provide tap water, offering only bottles. One woman was spotted cleaning the sidewalk with a bucket and a cup, carefully doling out one splash at a time. For many, including Marshall, it’s a success story.
“It’s amazing,” she said. “The situation we’re in now is nothing compared to what it was in the previous drought.”
The water level of water at the Middle Ranch Reservoir on Catalina Island is down due to the current draught. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
But although desalination is keeping Catalina’s humans supplied with potable water, it can’t do quite as much to help the island’s flora and fauna amid worsening drought.
The famed Catalina Island fox, as well as the island’s non-native deer and bison, are “suffering mightily” due to the lack of moisture, which is tied closely to their food supply, according to Deni Porej, senior conservation director with the Catalina Island Conservancy. Lately, he said, deer have been appearing on the island’s golf course in the evenings, when they know the sprinklers will turn on and provide them with a spot of relief.
What’s more, a combination of dry conditions, deer predation and pollination problems is threatening the island’s ancient ironwood trees, of which there are only about 120 left.
“Groundwater is hugely important to us, because a lot of the plants that we have here have very deep roots, and they tap into the groundwater,” Porej said, noting that for the ironwoods, “the issue of groundwater is a matter of life and death.”
A couple takes a break from the water fun in Avalon. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s a weird feeling when you’re standing in the grove and you’re looking at basically a species dying out. It’s kind of a gut punch,” he said.
Porej said he hoped to see island officials come together to develop a more comprehensive groundwater management plan, but he also credited the desalination plant with improving some of Catalina’s conditions.
“It’s helping, but it’s not the ultimate solution, because there’s always a need for more,” he said. “We will always be looking for opportunities to have more water on the island. That’s the limiting factor to our ecosystem, it’s the limiting factor to growth. Like many parts of California, it’s about gold and water.”
3 Downpours in 8 Days: How Extreme Rain Soaked the Midwest
Amanda Holpuch – August 5, 2022
3 Downpours in 8 Days: How Extreme Rain Soaked the Midwest
Three separate downpours across three states over a span of eight days this summer swept away homes, destroyed crops and left at least 39 people dead.
The intense rainfall, in Missouri, Kentucky and Illinois, broke century-old records and destroyed swaths of communities, prompting warnings from climate experts, who said the intensity and frequency of heavy rain was likely to increase as Earth continued to warm.
Some areas of southeastern and central Illinois recorded more rain in 36 hours Monday and Tuesday than they usually get in the entire month of August. In eastern Kentucky and central Appalachia, rainfall observed from July 26 to July 30 was over 600% of normal. In Missouri, rainfall records were obliterated during a two-day downpour last week.
No one storm can be directly attributed to climate change without further analysis, but the intensity of these downpours is consistent with how global warming has led to an increase in the frequency of extreme rainfall. A warmer Earth has more water in the atmosphere, resulting in heavier rainstorms.
“We anticipate that these type of events might become even more frequent in the future or even more extreme in the future as the Earth continues to warm, which means that this is kind of a call to action that climate change is here,” said Kevin Reed, an associate professor at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University in New York. “It’s not a problem for 50 years from now. It’s a problem now.”
‘Historically Unheard-of’ Amounts of Rain
The strain on cities and states to prepare for these events was evident in Kentucky, where at least 37 people died, and Missouri, where two people died.
In Kentucky, rainfall was at times in excess of 4 inches per hour, the National Weather Service said, and swept away homes and parts of some communities.
In four days, 14-16 inches of rain fell in a narrow swath in the eastern part of the state, according to radar-based estimates from the weather service. It said that this is “historically unheard-of” and that there was a less than 1 in 1,000 chance of that much rain falling in a given year.
Earlier that week in east-central Missouri, the weather service said 7.68 inches of rain fell in a six-hour period, an event that also had a 0.1% chance of occurring in a given year.
That downpour hit the area in and around St. Louis particularly hard, forcing residents to flee their homes in inflatable boats after roadways were swamped with water.
The deluge on July 25 and 26 was the most prolific rainfall event in St. Louis since records began in 1874, according to the weather service. Roughly 25% of the area’s normal yearly rainfall came down in about 12 hours.
Neil Fox, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Missouri, said the heavy rain in Missouri was caused by thunderstorms developing over and over again in the same area, known by meteorologists as training. Training is a common cause of heavy rainfall and drove the downpours in Illinois and Kentucky as well.
“The amount the records were broken by, it’s like someone beating the 100 meter world record by a second or something,” Fox said. “It’s an incredible increase over the previous record.”
The Illinois rainfall this week was less severe, and there were no reported deaths, but the deluge caused flash flooding and damaged crops. The weather service said the highest measured rainfall in that storm was 7 inches, which has a 1% to 2% chance of occurring in a given year.
“We typically get a little over 3 inches in the month of August, and we got 5 to 7 inches just in the first two days here of August,” said Nicole Albano, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Lincoln, Illinois. “That’s pretty substantial.”
The United States and other parts of the world have seen an increase in the frequency of extreme rainstorms as a result of climate change, caused by the burning of fossil fuels such as oil and gas. The frequency of these heavy downpours is likely to increase as warming continues.
“We also expect the heaviest possible precipitation events at any given location to get heavier as temperature increases,” said Angeline Pendergrass, an assistant professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who studies extreme precipitation. “That means we should expect more precipitation records to get broken than we would without global warming.”
The Western sanctions and widespread corporate exodus from Russia since Feb. 24 have ravaged the Russian economy—and its future prospects look even bleaker, according to a new report from Yale University researchers and economists led by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, Yale School of Management professor and senior associate dean for leadership studies. It’s now become clear that the Kremlin’s “finances are in much, much more dire straits than conventionally understood” and that the large-scale “business retreats and sanctions are catastrophically crippling the Russian economy,” the researchers wrote.
Deterioration
As of Aug. 4, over 1,000 companies, including U.S. firms like Nike, IBM, and Bain consulting, have curtailed their operations in Russia. Though some businesses have stayed, the mass corporate exodus represents 40% of Russia’s GDP and reverses 30 years’ worth of foreign investment, says the Yale report.
The international retreat is morphing into a larger crisis for the country: a collapse in foreign imports and investments.
Russia has descended into a technological crisis as a result of its isolation from the global economy. It’s having trouble securing critical technology and parts. “The domestic economy is largely reliant on imports across industries…with few exceptions,” says the report. Western export controls have largely halted the flow of imported technology from smartphones to data servers and networking equipment, straining its tech industry. Russia’s biggest internet company, Yandex—the country’s version of Google—is running short of the semiconductor chips it needs for its servers.
At the same time, Russia’s “domestic production has come to a complete standstill—with no capacity to replace lost businesses, products, and talent,” the Yale report said. Russian producers and manufacturers are unable to fill the gaps left by the collapse of Western imports. Russia’s telecom sector for instance, now hopes to lean on China, India, and Israel to supply 5G equipment.
In the weeks following the Ukraine invasion, the Kremlin largely prevented a “full scale financial crisis” owing to quick and harsh measures, like restricting the movement of money out of the country and imposing a 20% emergency interest rate hike, Laura Solanko, senior adviser at the Bank of Finland Institute for Emerging Economies in Transition, an organization that researches emerging economies, told Fortunelast month. The ruble even rebounded from a March low, when it was valued at less than one U.S. cent.
Yet Russia’s financial markets are the worst-performing in the world this year, the report noted. “Putin is resorting to patently unsustainable, dramatic fiscal and monetary intervention to smooth over these structural economic weaknesses,” which has led to a government budget deficit for the first time in years and drained the Kremlin’s foreign reserves even with its continued inflow of petrodollars, the researchers wrote. The Russian government is giving subsidies to businesses and individuals to mitigate any economic shocks caused by sanctions. This “inflated level” of fiscal and social stimulus, on top of military expenditures, is “simply unsustainable for the Kremlin,” the report said.
And the ruble’s recent dramatic turnaround doesn’t indicate a strong Russian economy, but marks something far worse: the clear collapse of foreign imports. Sergei Guriev, scientific director of the economics program at Sciences Po, in France, and a research fellow at London-based think tank the Centre for Economic Policy Research, previously told Fortune that it represents a “very bad” situation for the nation.
The EU is now phasing out Russian energy, which could hit the Kremlin’s oil and gas profits. Such a scenario would severely strain the Kremlin’s finances, since Western countries have frozen half of its $300 billion in foreign reserves.
Heading toward economic oblivion
Russia’s precarious economic position means that it faces even more dire, long-term challenges ahead.
Sanctions aren’t designed to cause an immediate financial crisis or economic collapse, but are long-term tools to weaken a nation’s economy while isolating it from global markets, the report said. And the sanctions are doing exactly that for Russia.
The country is losing its richest and most educated citizens as its economy crumbles. Most estimates say that at least 500,000 Russians have fled the country since Feb. 24, with the “vast majority being highly educated and highly skilled workers in competitive industries such as technology,” the report said. Many wealthy Russians who flee are taking their money with them. One estimate is that 20% of Russia’s ultra-high-net-worth individuals have left this year. In the first quarter of 2022, official capital outflows stood at $70 billion, according to Bank of Russia estimates—but this figure is likely to be a “gross underestimate” of the actual amount of money that has left the country, the Yale team wrote.
Russian citizens are also set to become poorer, despite Putin’s minimum wage and pension income hikes. A former Putin aide predicts that the number of Russians living in poverty will likely double—and perhaps even triple, as the war continues. Russia “hasn’t seen the worst yet,” Russian political scientist Ilya Matveev, told Fortunelast month.
“There is no path out of economic oblivion as long as the allied countries remain unified in maintaining and increasing sanctions pressure against Russia,” the researchers wrote.
PARIS (Reuters) – As a third heatwave baked France this week, the heat radiating off the asphalt outside the Garnier Opera house in Paris hit 56 degrees Celsius on urban planning expert Tangui Le Dantec’s thermometer. Shade was non-existent with barely a tree in sight.
The Place de l’Opera is one of numerous so-called urban heat islands in the French capital, lacking the trees that cool cities down by providing shade and seen as a key line of defence against climate change and increasingly hot summers.
Just a minute’s walk away, in the shade along the tree-lined Boulevard des Italiens, Le Dantec’s thermometer gave a reading of 28C (82 degrees Fahrenheit).
“Immediately there’s a bit of a breeze. You can breathe,” Le Dantec, who founded Aux Arbres Citoyens, an action group opposed to tree felling.
Paris ranks poorly among global cities for its green cover. According to data from the World Cities Culture Forum, only 10% of Paris is made up of green space such as parks and gardens compared to London at 33% and Oslo at 68%.
Last month was the hottest July on record in France, according to the national weather agency Meteo France, the searing temperatures underlining the need to strengthen the capital’s natural defences against global warming.
Paris City Hall wants to create “islands of freshness” and plans to plant 170,000 trees by 2026. It is also ripping up the concrete in dozens of school yards and laying down soil and vegetation.
“It’s a massive tree and vegetation-planting project that is underway, much bigger than under previous administrations,” said Jacques Baudrier, deputy Paris mayor tasked with the green energy transition in buildings.
However, City Hall’s green ambitions have provoked some protests. Le Dantec and other ecology campaigners say the local authorities have been felling scores of decades-old trees to make way for garden spaces.
In redrawing the city’s landscape, the felling of mature trees runs counter to the authorities’ own ambitions as saplings are more vulnerable to drought and less useful in fighting heat radiation, green activists say.
In April, green activist Thomas Brail shot video of more than 70 trees being felled on the city’s northern outskirts to make way for Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s vision for a “green belt” around the city.
City Hall’s urban planners say Paris cannot be redesigned to better confront climate change without felling some trees.
But Brail said: “These trees had a role to play.”
(Reporting by Manuel Ausloos and Lea Guedj; Editing by Richard Lough and Janet Lawrence)
How Ruth Bader Ginsburg Will Have The Last Laugh on Samuel Alito
John F. Harris – August 4, 2022
Susan Walsh/AP Photo
Justice Samuel Alito, in drafting Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, said he and the other justices who joined him in ending a constitutional right to abortion had no ability to foresee what the political implications would be. Even if they could know, he added, justices have “no authority to let that knowledge influence our decision.”
Does Alito genuinely write his opinions with no concern at all of what the practical political consequences might be?
In overturning Roe v. Wade, a decision he said was “egregiously wrong,” Alito asserted that the place to decide the morality and legality of abortion is not the Supreme Court but the political process in 50 states.
So what does Alito think now, in the wake of Kansas voters resoundingly rejecting a proposal to remove protections for abortion rights from their state constitution?
These are not gotcha questions. Alito presumably would answer that what happened in Kansas on Tuesday is precisely the kind of democratic process that the Supreme Court “short-circuited,” as he wrote in Dobbs, when it established a national right to abortion by judicial edict even as the issue remained deeply unsettled in the society.
They are questions, however, that highlight how life is full of surprise and paradox, even for a Supreme Court justice who specializes in blustery self-assurance. Alito’s career as an advocate for social conservatism began long before he joined the court. His record is replete with deference to religious tradition and skepticism of loosening sexual mores on all fronts, including gay rights. His references to “abortionists” in the Dobbs opinion hardly conceal his personal disdain. There can be little doubt of how he would have cast his ballot if he were a Kansas voter.
Yet the Kansas result raises an arresting possibility: Alito’s long-term legacy may well be as the justice who facilitated a national consensus on behalf of abortion rights. Quite unintentionally, today’s hero of the “pro-life” movement could end up being a giant of the “pro-choice” movement.
Alito’s achievement was to take abortion out of the arena where it has been for a half-century — a place in which aggrieved advocates on both sides invoked a hypothetical world in which abortion is no longer legal — and move it to an emphatically real-world arena. In this new environment, all kinds of people who under ordinary circumstances would prefer not to have to think and argue about abortion must decide which side they are on.
There is good reason to be wary the old maxim of Fleet Street journalism — first simplify, then exaggerate — in some of the post-Kansas analysis. The impact of abortion politics on the mid-term elections remains murky. In most cases, voters will be choosing among candidates, not deciding a sharply framed referendum. Moreover, while Kansas is undoubtedly conservative, it is also a state with a Democratic governor and is not necessarily predictive of the dynamics in conservative states with abortion bans that took place immediately after the Supreme Court’s June ruling.
But if the Kansas result isn’t necessarily a portent of the politics of 2022 it is suggestive of the politics of 2032. Long-term, under current trends, it is easy to envisage a decisive shift that would leave a national resolution of the issue in favor of abortion rights, even in states that do not currently support that. It is hard to envisage the opposite result.
The difference lies in the gap between abstract politics and concrete politics. This is the same dynamic that makes Social Security highly popular among people who claim they disdain big government. The Kansas result, which mirrors polling showing solid majorities of people supported leaving Roe v. Wade intact, suggests that opponents of legal abortion do better when the prospect of an abortion ban is hypothetical, while abortion-rights supporters do better when the issue is tangibly real.
Values take on meaning not in the abstract but in the particular. What do you really believe when it is your adolescent child who is pregnant or has impregnated someone? Or your extramarital affair that results in a pregnancy? Or your obstetrician who calls to say she has unwelcome news from the results of a genetic test?
Thankfully, most people do not get to learn what they really believe by landing in such a situation. But lots of people — of all political persuasions — do get to learn. The Guttmacher Institute, which conducts research on abortion policy, found that about one in five pregnancies in 2020 ended in abortion. In an earlier study, from 2017, it found that about one in four women will have an abortion by age 45.
Is that number surprising? As long as abortion was a legal right, plenty of these women and their partners were likely animated by plenty of other political issues. The question now is what has changed, and Kansas suggests an answer.
Even many abortion-rights advocates acknowledge there is some truth to what Alito asserted multiple times in his opinion: That the court hindered, rather than helped, a national resolution of the abortion question. Somewhat tauntingly, the Dobbs opinion cited a 1992 speech from one of the most prominent abortion-rights supporters of all, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, that Roe “halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby, I believed, prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the issue.”
It was as if Alito was playing a joke on Ginsberg’s memory by quoting her. It seems entirely likely that she will end up having the last laugh.
Ukraine’s military intel leaks Russian soldiers discussing absurdity of orders on frontline
August 4, 2022
Russian military vehicle
One Russian serviceman breaks the news that those who are defending will not be given more medals, and will even have those that have already been issued taken away.
His interlocutor complains about the absurdity of the orders being given to the front line by senior Russian commanders:
“They sit there, send 20-200 people to their deaths and that’s it,” he says.
“Thirty people came in, 100 people came in. From the east. They f**king knocked off every single one. We went there previously. We had six 200s (killed), and six 300s (injured). One had bones crushed, and so did another one. So many had one leg hanging loose.”
Illinois gets a foot of rain, the U.S.’s 3rd 1,000-year rain in 1 week
Ben Adler, Senior Editor – August 3, 2022
The United States saw its third 1-in-1,000-year rain in a week on Monday night and Tuesday morning, as southern Illinois was drenched by 8 to 12 inches of rain in 12 hours. An area just south of Newton, Ill., recorded 14 inches of rainfall in just 12 hours, according to the National Weather Service. Thunderstorms brought damaging winds and heavy rainfall through midafternoon on Tuesday.
Heavy rain events such as this are becoming more common due to climate change.
The NWS office in Lincoln, Ill., received about 20 reports of flooding on Tuesday as roads turned into rivers. Several flash flood warnings were issued in the region.
Roughly 30,000 customers of CenterPoint Energy in the Evansville, Ill., area lost power on Tuesday, and more than 2,000 were still without power as of noon Central time on Wednesday.
The extraordinarily heavy rain in Illinois comes on the heels of similar events in Kentucky and Missouri. Record-breaking rainfall caused flash flooding in the St. Louis area last Tuesday, trapping cars, closing roads and causing at least one death. Last Thursday, rural areas of eastern Kentucky were flooded after receiving up to 14 inches of rainfall. The death toll, at the most recent count, stood at 37.
Although more rain actually fell in Illinois on Tuesday morning — a foot in the area southeast of Springfield, Ill., for example — the flooding was worse in St. Louis because urbanized areas are more heavily paved and less able to absorb water.
One-day observed precipitation on Tuesday. (National Weather Service)
All three inundations are considered 1,000-year rain events because the amount of rain that fell during such a short window has only a 0.1% chance of happening in any given year.
But that was before climate change. Due to rising concentrations of heat-trapping gases, mainly from the combustion of fossil fuels, the global average temperature has increased by 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. With each degree Celsius of increased temperature, the air can hold 7% more moisture. Therefore, unusually heavy rains are becoming more frequent and severe.
This is especially true in the already-wet Northeast and Midwest. Last year, the Detroit area got 6 inches of rain in June and 8 inches in August, flooding basements and cars, and Hurricane Ida dumped more than 3 inches of rain on New York City in just one hour, resulting in flooding that killed 11 people and shut down the subway system.
China warns that its temperatures are rising faster than global average
August 3, 2022
The Wider Image: The thaw of the Third Pole: China’s glaciers in retreat
A tree stands on the dried-up riverbed of Ai River in Dandong
SHANGHAI (Reuters) – China’s average ground temperatures have risen much more quickly than the global average over the past 70 years and will remain “significantly higher” in the future as the challenges of climate change mount, a government official said.
In its annual climate assessment published this week, China’s weather bureau described the country as “a sensitive region in global climate change”, with temperatures rising 0.26 degrees Celsius (0.47 degrees Fahrenheit) a decade since 1951, compared to the global average of 0.15 degrees.
“In the future, the increase in regional average temperatures in China will be significantly higher than the world,” said Yuan Jiashuang, vice-director of China’s National Climate Center (NCC), at a Wednesday briefing.
He warned that changing weather patterns in China will affect the balance of water resources, make ecosystems more vulnerable and reduce crop yields.
Extreme weather has wreaked havoc in recent weeks, with lengthy heatwaves causing droughts and forest fires across the world. Historically high rainfall in some countries has also caused deadly floods.
U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned last month that “no nation is immune” from climate change and said the world now had to choose between “collective action or collective suicide”.
China has already endured weeks of torrid weather, with temperatures reaching in excess of 44C (111F) in southwestern Yunnan and Hebei in the north.
As many as 131 Chinese weather stations have recorded temperatures that equalled or exceeded historical highs, up from 62 for the whole of last year, according to NCC data.
China’s 2021 climate assessment said coastal water levels last year were at their highest since 1980. Glacial retreat also accelerated, active permafrost along the Qinghai-Tibet Highway reached a record high and sea ice continued to decline.
China also recorded a 7.9% increase in vegetation cover in 2021 compared to the 2001-2020 average, and the assessment noted growth periods for many plants are starting earlier each year.
(Reporting by David Stanway; Editing by Tom Hogue)
Western U.S. faces water and power shortages due to climate change, U.N. warns
Ben Adler, Senior Editor – August 2, 2022
The two largest reservoirs in the United States are at “dangerously low levels,” threatening the supply of fresh water and electricity in six states and Mexico, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) warned on Tuesday.
Lake Mead and Lake Powell, which are both man-made reservoirs on the Colorado River, are currently at their lowest levels ever, in part because of an ongoing drought exacerbated by climate change.
“The conditions in the American West which we’re seeing around the Colorado River basin have been so dry for more than 20 years that we’re no longer speaking of a drought,” said Lis Mullin Bernhardt, an ecosystems expert at UNEP. “We refer to it as ‘aridification’ — a new, very dry normal.”
The river is also struggling thanks to overconsumption due to a growing population and an outdated agreement that guarantees allotments for its neighboring states. The reservoirs provide water for agricultural and residential use in Arizona, California, Colorado, Wyoming, Nevada and New Mexico.
If conditions don’t improve, Lake Mead and Lake Powell are at risk of reaching “dead pool” status, in which the water is so low it stops flowing out of a reservoir. That would disable the hydroelectric dams that help provide power for millions of residents of the western U.S.
“We are talking about a 20-year period of droughtlike conditions, with an ever-increasing demand on water,” Bernhardt said. “These conditions are alarming, and particularly in the Lake Powell and Lake Mead region, it is the perfect storm.”
The Hoover Dam water intake towers at Lake Mead on July 12 near Boulder City, Nev. (George Rose/Getty Images)
The falling water levels have been a concern for U.S. officials for some time. In June, Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that maintaining “critical levels” at Lake Mead and Lake Powell would require significant reductions in water deliveries.
“What has been a slow-motion train wreck for 20 years is accelerating, and the moment of reckoning is near,” John Entsminger, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, said at the Senate hearing.
Due to the declining water levels in Lake Mead, which is near Las Vegas, three dead bodies long buried under the water have recently been exposed.
Some water use restrictions have already been put in place. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California instituted emergency water curtailments in June, typically limiting outdoor watering to one or two days per week.
A sunken boat, now high and dry, on Saddle Island on July 28 in the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Nev. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
The drought in the West has had a number of effects in recent years, including unusually bad wildfire seasons.
Climate scientists say disruptions to the water cycle, especially drought, will become more common as a result of rising global temperatures.
