Manafort Is Mueller’s Opening Salvo

Esquire

Manafort Is Mueller’s Opening Salvo

The first round of indictments in the Russia investigation are just that: the first.

Getty

By Charles P. Pierce October 30, 2017

Ten months. It took Richard Nixon four years to get himself tangled up with serious felonies. It took Ronald Reagan five years to sign off on arming the Contras in contravention of federal law. Hell, it was almost three years—and two special prosecutors—into Bill Clinton’s term before anybody was indicted with the remotest connection to whatever the Whitewater affair really was all about.

Ten months is all it took for the president*’s former campaign manager, a guy who ran the president*’s campaign for almost twice as long as evil genius Steve Bannon did, and his principal aide, who was still hanging around the White House as recently as last June, to get hauled into FBI headquarters early Monday morning to begin what may be several years worth of similar perp walks. Ten months. This is impressive. From The New York Times:

“The charges against Mr. Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, were not immediately clear but represent a significant escalation in a special counsel investigation that has cast a shadow over the president’s first year in office. Also charged was Mr. Manafort’s former business associate Rick Gates, who was also told to surrender on Monday, the person said.Mr. Manafort walked into the F.B.I.’s field office in Washington at about 8:15 a.m. with his lawyer. Mr. Gates is a longtime protégé and junior partner of Mr. Manafort. His name appears on documents linked to companies that Mr. Manafort’s firm set up in Cyprus to receive payments from politicians and business-people in Eastern Europe, records reviewed by The New York Times show. Mr. Manafort had been under investigation for violations of federal tax law, money laundering and whether he appropriately disclosed his foreign lobbying.”

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Later reporting on Monday morning confirmed that at least some of the charges against Manafort concern tax fraud, which could mean almost anything up to and including sweetheart deals involving Russian oligarchs. This is what makes the indictment of Gates every bit as intriguing as the indictment of Manafort. As the NYT reported in June:

“As investigators examine Mr. Manafort’s financial and political dealings at home and abroad, they are likely to run into Mr. Gates wherever they look. During the pair’s heady days in Ukraine, it was Mr. Gates who flew to Moscow for meetings with associates of Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch. His name appears on documents linked to shell companies that Mr. Manafort’s firm set up in Cyprus to receive payments from politicians and business-people in Eastern Europe, records reviewed by The New York Times show.”

These indictments are possibly the least important part of what happened on Monday morning, although one of the 12 counts—“conspiracy against the United States”—sounds pretty damn serious. (In what manner did Manafort allegedly “conspire against the United States” and with whom? Legal beagles will have to explain if one can conspire against the United States simply by laundering money for one’s own pecuniary gain, or whether said alleged laundering has to have a specific purpose other than that. Here’s the statute. It looks like money laundering and/or tax fraud would fit under the “or any agency thereof” specification. Sounds worse than it is, maybe, but it still sounds very bad. And who might the other conspirators be?)

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What is most important, of course, is that the snowball has started to roll downhill. For a while on Monday, whomever in the White House is charged with the task of hiding the presidential* telephone had done a fairly good job. The president*’s Twitter account was rigged for silent running. Republican congress-critters also were maintaining a discreet distance in the immediate aftermath of the news. (Congressman Sean Duffy of Wisconsin popped up on Three Dolts On A Divan to say “dossier,” “Hillary,” and “uranium” a few times, but his heart didn’t seem to be in it.)

At the very least, it would seem to me, Republican congressional leaders ought to be forced to take a position as to what they would do if the president* fired Robert Mueller now that the first shoe has dropped. This should be an easy one, of course, but there is that tax bill to pass, and all that money to shove upwards to the donors, so obligations to the Constitution can wait.

The snowball has started to roll downhill.

More significant is the fact that Mueller is apparently investigating every damn thing he can get his hands on. The role of the Bank of Cyprus in all of this has taken on a critical importance and it’s important to remember that Wilbur Ross, the current Secretary of Commerce, used to be on the board of that bank before he joined Camp Runamuck. This damn thing could go everywhere.

And the backlash, while muted as Monday dawned and indictments broke over Washington, is going to be fierce. For example, throughout the endless Clinton snipe hunts of the 1990s, one of the prime movers was the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, which was run back then by a fanatic named Robert Bartley. It was the WSJ editorial page that gave us the consequential headline, “Who Is Vincent Foster?” It hounded the unfortunate Clinton White House counsel to the point at which Bartley’s operation earned the distinction of being the first editorial page to be specifically cited as a cause of action in a suicide note, as well as making the WSJ editorial page the source of noxious and fantastical theories about Foster’s suicide that persisted right into last November’s political campaign, when the president* resurrected them because he is a vicious and soulless man.

Anyway, they’re apparently suiting up again. Over the weekend, the WSJ ran an editorial demanding that Mueller resign. It also published an op-ed by a couple of Bush 2 lawyers advising the president* to pardon everyone—a move that likely would set off cranial detonations at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue and the birthing of bovines generally throughout the country. Nevertheless, when the WSJ editorial page last drifted into the plak tow, the vast conservative media apparatus was still in its larval stages. God alone knows what will happen now that it’s fully gestated and howling across the landscape. With the Republican congressional leadership so far hiding behind the curtains, there’s nothing to restrain the beast and, sooner or later, the president* is going to find his phone.

Great day in the morning, it’s going to be bloody.

New Study Shows Human Glyphosate Levels Have More than Doubled in 23 Years

Organic Authority-Chew News

New Study Shows Human Glyphosate Levels Have More than Doubled in 23 Years

by Emily Monaco October 30, 2017

iStock/ImagineGolf

A new study has shown that glyphosate levels in humans have more than doubled since 1993; glyphosate-resistant GMO crops were first introduced into the United States in 1994.

The research, which compared glyphosate levels in the urine of 100 people in California, was conducted by the San Diego School of Medicine and was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“Prior to the introduction of genetically modified foods, very few people had detectable levels of glyphosate,” says study author Paul Mills, of the University of California at San Diego School of Medicine. “Our exposure to these chemicals has increased significantly over the years but most people are unaware that they are consuming them through their diet.”

Researchers found that detectable amounts of the herbicide increased from an average of 0.2 micrograms per liter to .44 micrograms per liter in 2014-2016. The daily limit set by the EPA is 1.75 milligrams per kilogram.

Mills indicated that the next step for researchers would be to examine the general health of individuals who had higher levels of the herbicide in their urine.

“I am concerned,” he tells Radio New Zealand. “This is one of the reasons I put together this study, because there wasn’t such information in the biomedical literature, and I thought we needed it, and we needed to start having some good data to have a conversation around these questions.”

Glyphosate, which is most often sold under the brand name Roundup by Monsanto, is used as an herbicide with genetically modified glyphosate-resistant soy and corn crops. It is also used on non-GMO oats and wheat, which are sprayed to dry them out in preparation for harvest.

Use of glyphosate has increased approximately 500 percent since the early ’90s, according to the study authors.

“Prior to the introduction of genetically modified foods, very few people had detectable levels of glyphosate,” says Mills.

The World Health Organization found that glyphosate was a probable human carcinogen in 2015. Last Tuesday, the European Parliament called for use of the herbicide to be phased out over the next five years throughout the European Union. The non-binding resolution should have been voted on Wednesday, but the vote has been postponed for the time being.

Puerto Rico’s Contract With Whitefish Is As Bad As It Looks, Say Experts

HuffPost

Puerto Rico’s Contract With Whitefish Is As Bad As It Looks, Say Experts

Jennifer Bendery, HuffPost October 29, 2017

WASHINGTON ― Something does not look right with the contract the Puerto Rican government signed last week with Whitefish Energy Holdings to restore the island’s power.

Never mind that the massive $300 million contract went to Whitefish, a two-year-old firm based in Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s Montana hometown that had just two full-time employees when Hurricane Maria hit the island.

There’s language in the contract ― a full copy is here ― that looks like Whitefish is about to screw over the government and the people of Puerto Rico as they struggle to recover from the devastation of the hurricane. Even Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rosselló is concerned with PREPA’s deal. On Sunday, he called for canceling the contract with Whitefish.

For one, the contract, which Whitefish signed with the government-owned Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, or PREPA, states that, “In no event shall [government bodies] have the right to audit or review the cost and profit elements.” That gives Whitefish an incredible amount of discretion and privacy over how it uses $300 million in American taxpayer money.

The contract also “waives any claim against Contractor related to delayed completion of the work,” which means the government can’t do much if Whitefish drags out its work restoring electricity to the 3.4 million Americans living on the island. It’s been more than a month since the hurricane destroyed Puerto Rico’s infrastructure and 80 percent of people still have no power ― a particularly precarious reality for hospitals that have been relying on temporary generators to keep people alive.

But what do we know about contracts? Maybe this is standard language for these kinds of agreements. HuffPost reached out to some experts in government contracting to see if this is as bad a deal for Puerto Rico as it sounds. The answer was a resounding yes.

“Outrageous,” said Charles Tiefer, a professor of government contracting at the University of Baltimore law school.

“The clause that shields the contractor from audit or review is a red flag of overcharging,” said Tiefer. “The contractor works for PREPA, not the other way around. I can’t imagine how any responsible government official could put such an anti-audit clause into a government contract.”

Anthony Varona, a professor and vice dean at American University’s Washington College of Law and an expert in contracts law, said it is “entirely inappropriate” for a private contractor to prevent the government from auditing how taxpayer money was spent.

“The prohibition as written in this agreement is a blatant attempt to blindfold and tie the hands of the government officials responsible for overseeing the contract’s performance,” said Varona. “It strikes me as an open invitation for fraud and abuse.”

There are other concerning details in the contract, like the high rates Whitefish is charging for labor. The company is paying $240 an hour for a general foreman and $227 for a lineman. For some context, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says first-line supervisors of construction sites make about $43 an hour and construction laborers make about $23 an hour.

Whitefish is also paying for expensive food and lodging for its employees. The contract states that each person can spend nearly $80 a day for meals and $332 a day for lodging. Flights for employees are being billed at $1,000 each way.

Steve Schooner, a former high-ranking government contracting official who currently teaches government contracts at George Washington University, said the Whitefish contract gives him great material for his upcoming classes because there’s so many problems with it.

“The contract ― both the process and the content ― rivals, and in some ways exceeds, some of the best final exams I’ve written for my students over the last two decades,” he said.

Requests for comment from PREPA and from Whitefish were not returned.

Not everyone said the contract was stunningly out of the ordinary. Scott Amey, general counsel for the Project On Government Oversight, wrote a blog post about why he thinks the contract is concerning but mostly normal, given bigger problems that happen with many federal contracts.

Still, he told HuffPost that it’s “odd” that the contract gives Whitefish the ability to delay its work without any accountability. He said the company could use that clause to prolong its work so it gets paid the entire $300 million ― and then could push to extend the contract for even more money.

“Damage provisions often are included to incentivize the work’s completion,” he said. “Waiving claims could jeopardize the completion of the work in the agreed on one-year term.”

As fishy as it looks that a tiny company in the Montana hometown of the U.S. interior secretary landed such a big contract, Zinke insists he had nothing to do with it.

Tiefer, for one, said the facts aren’t out yet but it’s clear something “went very wrong” with the way this was awarded.

“Let’s put it this way,” he said. “Whitefish didn’t make the shortlist because of a world class reputation.”

As globe warms, Trump doubles down on fossil fuels

USA Today

As globe warms, Trump doubles down on fossil fuels

The Editorial Board, USA TODAY October 29, 2017

First the Paris climate accord. Now the Clean Power Plan: Our view

(Photo: George Frey, Getty Images)

As if any more evidence were needed that climate change is making extreme heat more likely, take a look at what happened in Southern California last week. On Tuesday at Dodger Stadium, the first-pitch temperature for the opening game of the World Series was a record-shattering 103 degrees. The same day, two other locations hit 108, matching the hottest weather the nation has seen so late in the year.

And how is the Trump administration responding to these flashing-red warning signs of global warming on the West Coast and elsewhere around the world? By systematically dismantling the Obama administration’s environmental initiatives.

Just five months ago, President Trump broke with nearly 200 other countries in taking the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, a stunning move given that the accord regulated nothing, relying only on peer pressure and transparency to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Nicaragua recently joined the Paris pact, leaving the United States and war-ravaged Syria as the odd nations out.

Now the Trump administration is turning its attention to gutting the Clean Power Plan, the 2015 Obama initiative aimed at curbing greenhouse gases from energy plants. This latest effort to kill the Clean Power Plan demonstrates sheer contempt for laws governing clean air and the benefits of environmental regulation.

Power plants generate about a third of the 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide America pumps into the atmosphere each year. The Clean Power Plan offered a reasonable pathway to reducing these emissions by a third by 2030, giving each state flexibility to reach that goal. The plan was the next best idea to a market-based carbon tax that would be rebated to consumers.

Yes, it would undoubtedly result in less burning of coal, the dirtiest fuel. But coal was already in decline — with or without new environmental regulations — as utilities embraced cleaner-burning natural gas and alternatives such as wind and solar.

U.S. coal mining jobs have fallen to fewer than 77,000, while those in renewable energy have hit 800,000 and keep increasing. Some of the nation’s largest power companies this month shrugged off Trump’s regulatory rollback, arguing that clean energy has proved to be good business and vowing to keep reducing emissions.

The Supreme Court narrowly voted last year to temporarily block implementation of the plan amid challenges that it represented regulatory overreach. An appellate panel can still reach a decision and should do so.

Regardless, the Environmental Protection Agency remains compelled by law to significantly reduce carbon dioxide. A 2007 Supreme Court ruling established the gas as a pollutant and subject to reduction if EPA found it a danger to public health. The EPA made such a finding two years later, courtesy of a mountain of scientific evidence.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s proposal for dismantling the Clean Power Plan mentions drafting a new method for reducing carbon dioxide. We’ll believe that when we see it.

If there’s any good news, it’s that the Clean Power Plan — or some similar action to significantly reduce greenhouse gases gushing from the nation’s electricity sector — is likely to survive this effort at sabotage. But that might take years of bureaucratic and legal wrangling, consuming precious time as the planet grows warmer.

USA TODAY’s editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view — a unique USA TODAY feature. To respond to this editorial, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.

This one quote shows what angry white guys mean when they talk about government overreach

VOX

This one quote shows what angry white guys mean when they talk about government overreach

Updated by David Roberts October 29, 2017

(YouTube)

Before Donald Trump, GOP elites — policymakers, intellectuals, DC operators — were in the grips of a comforting illusion: that their party was united around the principles of limited government and free markets. The family values and national security stuff rounded out the picture, of course, but small-government economics was the core.

That is how the elite — with help from a compliant media — interpreted the Tea Party uprising that followed Obama’s election. Here were patriots devoted to reducing burdensome regulations and defending economic freedom.

Post-Trump, this illusion has become untenable. Trump never paid lip service to conservative economic ideology. He doesn’t even possess the vocabulary, the catechisms that virtually every Republican candidate can recite by heart. He bypassed small-government ideology almost entirely in favor of white resentment. And Republicans, at least a plurality of them, embraced him for it.

“We’ve had this view that the voters were with us on conservatism — philosophical, economic conservatism,” said conservative intellectual Avik Roy in an interview with Zack Beauchamp. “In reality, the gravitational center of the Republican Party is white nationalism.”

The story of how the language of small government became a handmaiden to ethnonationalism has been told on Vox several times, in excellent pieces by Andrew Prokop, Rich Yeselson, and Lee Drutman, among others. My contribution today is that I found a funny quote.

Rolling coal, just as the Founding Fathers intended

It comes about halfway through a New York Times story from 2016 on “rolling coal.” You’ve probably heard about rolling coal, the practice of modifying a truck’s diesel engine so that it spews thick, toxic black smoke in order to … well, to be obnoxious. There were several trend pieces about it a few years back.

Apparently it is still a thing, to the point that some states, like New Jersey (and possibly Illinois, though not Colorado), are passing laws against it.

Entire dissertations could be written about rolling coal. Even more than Trump’s ascension, it seems to perfectly capture a moment in time, an inarticulate yawp of protest from angry white men. They feel disdained and overlooked and they will blow thick black smoke in your face until you pay attention.

There’s no faux nostalgia involved. Unlike with, say, hunting, there’s no tale of rugged rural self-sufficiency to draw on. This is not some sturdy heartland tradition with which meddlesome elites want to interfere.

Rolling coal is new; it just caught on a few years ago. It does not improve the performance of a truck. It has no practical application or pragmatic purpose of any kind. It is purely aggressive, a raw expression of defiance: I can pollute your air, for no reason, and no one can stop me.

It is what it is. And now lawmakers are cracking down on it.

Which brings us to our quote.

But to diesel owners like Corey Blue of Roanoke, Ill., the very efforts to ban coal rolling represent the worst of government overreach and environmental activism. “Your bill will not stop us!” Mr. Blue wrote to Will Guzzardi, a state representative who has proposed a $5,000 fine on anyone who removes or alters emissions equipment.

“Why don’t you go live in Sweden and get the heck out of our country,” Mr. Blue wrote. “I will continue to roll coal anytime I feel like and fog your stupid eco-cars.”

Sweden, where one lives if one wants to avoid coal rolling.(Shutterstock)

My apologies to Mr. Blue for using him as a synecdoche here, but … this really captures something.

The core of the ethnonationalist perspective is that a country’s constituent groups and demographics are locked in a zero-sum struggle for resources. Any government intervention that favors one group disfavors the others. Government and other institutions are either with you or against you.

What FOX and talk radio have been teaching the right for decades is that native-born, working- and middle-class whites are locked in a zero-sum struggle with rising Others — minorities, immigrants, gays, coastal elitists, hippie environmentalists, etc. — and that the major institutions of the country have been co-opted and are working on behalf of the Others.

Here’s my favorite Rush Limbaugh quote, from back in 2009:

“We really live, folks, in two worlds. There are two worlds. We live in two universes. One universe is a lie. One universe is an entire lie. Everything run, dominated, and controlled by the left here and around the world is a lie. The other universe is where we are, and that’s where reality reigns supreme and we deal with it. And seldom do these two universes ever overlap. …

The Four Corners of Deceit: government, academia, science, and media. Those institutions are now corrupt and exist by virtue of deceit. That’s how they promulgate themselves; it is how they prosper.”

That is the right-wing media’s message, delivered with relentless consistency: Government has become an agent of the Others. That’s what ethnonationalists mean when they talk about big government — not that government is exceeding some libertarian theorist’s notion of constitutional limits, but that government is on the wrong side, backing the wrong team.

From an ethnonationalist perspective, government overreach is when government tells people like me what to do. The proper role of government is to defend my rights and privileges against people like them.

After all, even the strictest libertarian acknowledges that the government has a policing role, to protect citizens from direct harm. What could be more direct harm than having unfiltered diesel smoke blown in your face?

But to Corey Blue of Roanoke, Illinois, the government is not protecting anybody — it’s targeting people like him, punishing him on behalf of the liberals, dope smokers, and heathens who prefer “eco-cars.”

Blowing toxic black smoke into the air “anytime I feel like” is his way of showing that it’s still his America, that he can still do what he wants and doesn’t have to follow a bunch of namby-pamby rules imposed by liberal bureaucrats. He and other coal rollers may dress this sentiment up in the language of small government, but what they’re expressing is a long, long way from conservative economic philosophy.

Why Wind Energy Is Booming in the U.S.

The Motley Fool

Why Wind Energy Is Booming in the U.S.

Falling costs aren’t the driver of wind energy’s resurgence in the U.S. — there are two more important factors driving the installation boom.

Travis Hoium, TMFFlushDraw October 29, 2017

The U.S. wind industry has had a resurgence in the last few years as utilities and companies search for new renewable energy generation. That demand could be filled by solar energy just as easily as wind, but there’s a good reason wind energy is the power plant of choice in the U.S. right now. Capacity factors are up over the past decade, and subsidies favor wind over other renewables.

As companies like Amazon, Alphabet Inc, and renewable energy yieldcos look to expand their generation, we’ll se even more wind power plants built.

Image source: Getty Images.

Where wind energy stands today

The chart below shows just how big wind energy has become in the U.S. Through the end of 2016, 82.1 GW of wind has been installed, and that figure will only grow over the next five years.

Image source: AWEA U.S. Wind Industry Annual Market Report and Quarterly Market Reports.

Improving technology and subsidies are working together to make wind an attractive energy source for developers today as well.

Technology is getting better fast

What’s interesting about wind power is that turbines aren’t actually getting cheaper on a cost-per-watt basis. The chart below shows the cost of projects since 1982; you can see that the early part of the 21st century saw projects installed for much lower cost than they are today.

Image source: U.S. DOE’s 2016 Wind Technologies Market Report.

What’s changed is that wind projects have a higher capacity factor, meaning each watt of wind generation installed is generating more electricity per year. Think of it like a new wind turbine spinning more often than it did in the past. From 1998 to 2001, capacity factor was 25.4%, and projects built in 2015 had a capacity factor of 42.6%. Each watt installed generated 67% more electricity.

Image source: U.S. DOE’s 2016 Wind Technologies Market Report.

On top of the higher capacity factor, wind projects are benefiting from a more advantageous subsidy environment than competing solar projects.

Subsidies play into wind energy’s hands

Wind and solar have both seen their cost of electricity fall over the past decade, but wind has a hidden advantage right now, and it’s because of the subsidy it gets from the federal government. Wind gets a production tax credit, and solar gets an investment tax credit; here’s how that creates an advantage for wind energy.

If a solar system’s cost is $1 per watt, has a 25% capacity factor, a 25-year useful life, and investors required a 7% rate of return, it would have a cost of 3.92 cents per kWh of electricity. A wind project with a cost of $1.80 per watt, a 45% capacity factor and the same life and return profile would have the same electricity cost of 3.92 cents per kWh.

The difference is that the solar subsidy is a 30% investment tax credit, effectively lowering the cost of a project by 30%. The result would be an electricity cost of 2.74 cents per kWh. Wind power is given a 2.4 cent credit for its production, meaning the developer would only need to charge 1.52 cents per kWh to break even.

By virtue of having a production subsidy rather than an investment subsidy, wind has a big advantage over solar in the U.S., even if their underlying unsubsidized costs for electricity are identical.

This subsidy will slowly sunset, starting with projects that began construction in 2017 when an annual 20% reduction in the subsidy begins until it’s gone. But projects that began construction last year can still be built with the full subsidy, which we’ve seen recently at the second-biggest wind farm in the world that won’t be completed until mid-2020.

The companies dominating wind in the U.S.

If wind turbine manufacturers can continue to cut costs and increase capacity factor, the industry will continue to grow. The companies with the most to gain are General Electric, Vestas, and Siemens, who are top three in market share in the U.S.

Image source: U.S. DOE’s 2016 Wind Technologies Market Report.

With the booming demand for renewable energy and improving technology of wind turbines themselves, I think investors should be bullish on the future of wind energy.

Solar Windows Could Meet Nearly All of America’s Electricity Demand

EcoWatch

By Global Citizen

Transparent panels can be used as windows while they generate electricity. Michigan State University

Solar Windows Could Meet Nearly All of America’s Electricity Demand

By Joe McCarthy October 25, 2017

There’s an estimated 5 to 7 billion square meters of glass surfaces in the U.S. For windows on homes, cars and buildings, these glass surfaces perform a few basic functions—letting light and fresh air in when open, and blocking bugs and keeping the cold out when closed.

Now they could all serve another, altogether revolutionary, purpose—generating electricity.

A new paper in the journal Nature Energy describes how transparent solar panels could be placed over all windows and transparent surfaces in the U.S. to generate energy and decrease reliance on fossil fuels.

If that happens, nearly all the electricity demands of the U.S. could be met in conjunction with rooftop solar panels, and as long as storage capabilities are improved.

“Highly transparent solar cells represent the wave of the future for new solar applications,” said Richard Lunt, leader author of the report at Michigan State University, in a press release. “We analyzed their potential and show that by harvesting only invisible light, these devices can provide a similar electricity-generation potential as rooftop solar while providing additional functionality to enhance the efficiency of buildings, automobiles and mobile electronics.”

Lunt’s team at Michigan State University created a plastic technology called a transparent luminescent solar concentrator. You simply place the plastic over a glass surface—a house or car window or even a cellphone screen—and it begins to convert sunlight into electricity.

The plastic doesn’t obscure visibility because it’s harvesting invisible wavelengths from the sun. This energy is then passed onto strips of photovoltaic solar cells that exist on the outer edges of the sheet.

The technology is currently far less efficient than traditional solar panels—5 percent efficiency versus around 15 percent to 18 percent efficiency—and it isn’t market-ready, but Lunt and his team believe the technology will become just as efficient and ubiquitous as normal panels in the years ahead.

After all, the technology is new and could follow the same rapid arc of efficiency improvement that traditional panels followed.

“Traditional solar applications have been actively researched for over five decades, yet we have only been working on these highly transparent solar cells for about five years,” Lunt said in the press release. “Ultimately, this technology offers a promising route to inexpensive, widespread solar adoption on small and large surfaces that were previously inaccessible.”

In recent years, advances in solar and wind power technology have made renewable energy more competitive as countries around the world strive to uphold the Paris climate agreement.

In the U.S., for instance, the price of solar has dropped by 60 percent in less than a decade and this decrease is expected to continue as China invests enormous amounts of money into research and development of solar technology.

Offshore wind power has recently become a viable investment, and has the potential to provide all of the world’s energy needs, according to a recent study.

According to The Global Wind Energy Council, Denmark gets more than 40 percent of its energy from wind power, and China and the U.S. get around 4 percent to 5 percent, which is closer to the global average. Solar, meanwhile, generates around 1.3 percent of global electricity demands.

Fossil fuels still account for the vast majority of electricity generation—but with advances like transparent solar sheets, that could soon change.

Global Citizen campaigns on the Global Goals, which call for the use of renewable energy. You can take action on this issue here.

Reposted with permission from our media associate Global Citizen.

Northern California may need years to recover from wildfires

Associated Press

Northern California may need years to recover from wildfires

Kathleen Ronayne, Associated Press October 29, 2017

SANTA ROSA, Calif. (AP) — It will take at least months and likely years to fully recover from devastating wildfires that ripped through Northern California earlier this month, destroying at least 8,900 structures and killing 42 people, Sonoma County officials said Saturday.

“We don’t control these things, and it makes you realize how small you are in the world when something like this happens,” Sheriff Rob Giordano said. “I don’t think we understand the level at which it is going to impact lives, and the community will be different.”

Giordano spoke before hundreds of people gathered at a college in Santa Rosa, one of the hardest-hit cities, for a memorial service to honor the lives lost in the deadliest series of wildfires in California history. The fires sparked Oct. 8, eventually forcing 100,000 people to evacuate.

Before a bell rung 42 times to commemorate the dead, Giordano and other officials praised the ordinary and extraordinary acts of heroism by first responders and community members as the firefight raged on for more than a week. Some firefighters worked days on the front line, refusing to take breaks, while sheriff’s dispatchers continued taking calls even as the fire came close to taking out their building.

“The night of Oct. 8, we were all tested,” Santa Rosa fire Chief Tony Gossner said.

U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and five members of Congress spent Saturday attending the memorial, touring the fire ravaged areas and gathering advice from federal, state and local officials on what Congress can do to aid the recovery efforts. In a briefing in Santa Rosa, officials asked them to ease red tape that will make it easier to erect temporary housing and to ensure the Environmental Protection Agency has the resources it needs to clean up any hazardous material before it infiltrates the water supply.

The EPA has assessed 740 properties so far, while the Federal Emergency Management Agency has given out $6 million worth of rental and other assistance to displaced Californians, officials said. Officials estimate the cleanup of debris and other hazardous materials will last into early 2018. The losses are estimated to be at more than $1 billion.

Pelosi and U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson, who represents Santa Rosa, said they must make their fellow lawmakers in Washington understand the unprecedented nature of the fires, the deadliest in California history. They drove through a neighborhood near Coffey Park where entire streets are wrecked, with only burned-out cars and charred remains of once-standing houses lining the streets.

“It was just unfathomable the amount of destruction that we saw,” Pelosi said. “My colleagues will have to understand this is different from anything else, many times over.”

But Pelosi said Northern California’s response to the fires can serve as a national model for disaster response if done right. She urged her colleagues in Congress to think beyond the incremental rebuilding needs to consider the big picture of helping the region better prepare for and mitigate damage from future disasters. Obtaining the appropriate amount of relief money will require detailed documentation of homes lost and other destruction, she said.

Santa Rosa alone lost five percent of its housing stock, Pelosi said.

“What would we like to see the result be? Let’s engineer it back from there,” she said of the rebuilding efforts.

Thompson and other members of Congress, meanwhile, were asked to look at ensuring immigrants living in the country illegally are not at risk if they contact the Federal Emergency Management Agency. They were also asked to look into improving the system for alerting people of pending disasters, a more difficult task now that more homes rely on cellphones instead of landlines.

Trump is guilty of conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman

Salon

Trump is guilty of conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman

The Uniform Code of Military Justice has something to teach the commander in chief

Lucian K. Truscott IV October 28, 2017

It was the spring of 1970, and I was in a shitload of trouble in the Army when the powers that be at Fort Carson, Colorado, decided to charge me with Article 133 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, “Conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.” They were looking for a way to run me out of the Army because I had had the temerity to suggest after I had lost two soldiers in my platoon to heroin that we had a real problem with hard drugs in the Army. Soldiers were coming back from Vietnam with heroin habits, and the Mob was moving into the towns near Army posts and supplying this new market with the drug the addicted soldiers craved. One soldier in my platoon had been shot in the stomach with a sawed-off shotgun because he was dealing, and the Mob didn’t want rogue operators like him poaching on their market.

After two guys in my platoon died, another of my men came to me and admitted that he was addicted and wanted to get detoxed and rehabilitated. I put him in my car and drove him to the post hospital and together, we went to check him into their rehab unit. When the nurse asked him how much he was drinking, he explained that alcohol wasn’t his problem. He was addicted to heroin. The nurse picked up the phone and called the MPs. Within an hour, he was under arrest and in the stockade going through withdrawal cold turkey.

The offense I committed was to suggest to the commanding general at Fort Carson, (then) Major General Bernard Rogers, that he should order an amnesty program so that soldiers seeking treatment for heroin addiction could get rehabbed, not arrested. In a meeting in his office, Rogers told me if he instituted such a program, he would lose his career. I told him I wasn’t really interested in his career, because I had two guys in my platoon who hadn’t lost their careers, they’d lost their lives.

This was not the way a second lieutenant was supposed to talk to a major general, and after spending every one of my 22 years on the earth in the Army and having a general for a grandfather, I knew it. I had had more men die in six months than a typical platoon lost in the same amount of time in Vietnam. I knew that I had just signed the death warrant for my Army career, but I didn’t give a shit. I was finished being a good little West Point graduate and lieutenant. The Army I had grown up in wasn’t the Army I was serving in. It was coming apart at the seams. Fifteen percent of the 5th Mechanized Infantry Division was addicted, and Rogers knew it. The Pentagon knew the problem was a huge one, not only in Vietnam, but all over the Army. They weren’t going to do anything about it because it would be bad for the Army’s image.

The easiest way to get me out of the Army was to charge me with insubordination and court martial me. But the officer to whom I had been insubordinate was Major General Rogers, and he didn’t want to testify at a court martial in which he could be questioned about the details of the insubordination I was charged with. They knew I would take the opportunity of the court martial to put the Army’s drug policy — and the way Rogers was implementing it — on trial. So the word was passed down to the brigade commander to get me on something under the Army’s catch-all charge. “Conduct unbecoming” could be anything they said it was.

It just so happened there was a Specialist Fourth Class (Spec-4) who had recently been caught with marijuana, so the brigade commander told my battalion commander to offer him a deal. They would drop the charges against him if he reported that I had flashed a peace sign at him instead of saluting when we passed in the battalion area. The Spec-4 got word to me through one of the cooks in the mess hall that I was being set up. Sure enough, I was called into the battalion commander’s office and charged with conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman. The charge was that I had formed a “V” with my forefingers and flashed the peace sign when the Spec-4 saluted me. And what do you know, but they had pressured two of the other lieutenants in my company to say that they had witnessed this grave offense against the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Late that day I met with the Spec-4 and my fellow lieutenants. They wanted to know what they should do. I told them to just play along, that I had something up my sleeve. The next morning I was informed that an “Article 32” hearing would be held that afternoon. They were in a hurry. This was the Army’s equivalent of a grand jury, when evidence would be presented establishing that there was sufficient cause to hold a court martial. My friends and the Spec-4 would be called to testify at the Article 32 hearing.

By this time, I had been made aware by a friend of mine in division headquarters that there was a first lieutenant assigned to the battalion who was in reality a military intelligence agent looking for “subversion” in the ranks, and that the main subversive he was spying on was me. I knew this guy had a direct pipeline to the powers that be at Fort Carson, so I invited him over to my mess hall for a cup of coffee. I told him as soon as we finished our coffee, I was getting in my car and driving over to the provost marshal’s office and charging the brigade commander with theft of government property, since I had it on good authority that he had ordered a sergeant I knew to steal wood that was supposed to be used to build dugouts for the Little League field, so he could use the wood to put up a waist-high stockade fence around his headquarters. In fact, there was a brand new stockade fence that we could see out the window of the mess hall, and a couple of soldiers were in the process of painting it white.

The first lieutenant quickly finished his coffee and fled the mess hall in the direction of the parking lot. A couple of hours later, I was called in by the battalion S-1, the personnel officer, and told that my Article 32 hearing had been cancelled. No explanation was given.

Article 133 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice reads: “Any commissioned officer, cadet, or midshipman who is convicted of conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.” The Manual for Courts Martial defines conduct unbecoming as lacking “moral attributes” involving “acts of dishonesty, unfair dealing, indecency, indecorum, lawlessness, injustice, or cruelty.”

Broadly defined? Just a tad. But not so broadly that they would charge me subsequently with “lawlessness” I actually engaged in by blackmailing my way out of that court martial. They abandoned using the law and turned instead to a chapter in the Army’s personnel regulations that allowed separation “for the good of the service.” I was entitled to a hearing, but waived my rights and was discharged administratively a couple of months later.

I was 22, and I was an arrogant hothead, but I was right. A year after I left the Army, the Pentagon sent a brigadier general and a chaplain to Capitol Hill to testify before the House Armed Services Committee, where they announced that the Army was beginning an amnesty program designed to deal with its burgeoning problem of heroin addiction, which now involved at least 10 percent of the force. All three of the others involved in the Great Peace Sign Court Martial were out of the Army by that time. A couple of years after that, in March of 1973, the last American combat troops pulled out of Vietnam. The draft was ended that June, and on July 1, 1973, the “all volunteer” military was instituted.

Donald J. Trump, with four draft deferments for college and a designation as medically unfit (4-F) for a bone spur on his heel, was never subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution states that “The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” I’m still an arrogant hothead, and I am among those who say that as commander in chief, he should be subject to military law today. Article 133 would seem to be tailor-made for Donald Trump. Lacking “moral attributes” involving “dishonesty, unfair dealing, indecency, indecorum, lawlessness, injustice, or cruelty” — the Uniform Code of Military Justice could have been written with Trump specifically in mind.

At the very least, it is the duty of any leader to set an example for others to follow. Trump hasn’t so much set an example as become a poster boy for all of the behavior proscribed by Article 133. He hasn’t even bothered to be subtle about it. One of the first things his lawyers did after he took office was to assert that the laws regarding ethical behavior by officers of the Executive Branch of our government did not apply to him.

Well, that’s now an argument before the courts. But the commander in chief who orders soldiers into harm’s way, the man whose orders soldiers are following when they give their lives, has an obligation not to engage in conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman whether he is subject to military law or not. It’s the least he can do for those he leads, not to embarrass them every time he opens his mouth or twiddles his thumbs, not to send them into battle with their heads hung in shame.

Uniform Code of Military Justice

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives on the East End of Long Island and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better. He can be followed on Facebook at The Rabbit Hole and on Twitter @LucianKTruscott.

5 Things That Happen to Your Body When You Eat Greasy Food

Time

5 Things That Happen to Your Body When You Eat Greasy Food

Jamie Ducharme,Time October 25, 2017

Sometimes, a juicy cheeseburger and an order of hot, crispy fries simply call your name. (Greasy foods are so beloved that they have an entire day devoted to them; National Greasy Foods Day is October 25.) While it’s fine to give in to your cravings now and then, it’s important to know how your nutrition choices, and those greasy foods in particular, affect your health.

Does greasy food cause acne? Why does it make your stomach feel weird? And why is greasy food bad for you, anyway? We consulted Ayla Barmmer, a Boston-based registered dietitian, to find out. Here’s what eating greasy foods does to your body.

It strains your digestive system

“When we eat greasy foods like fried food, the sheer volume of fat puts a lot of pressure on our digestive system,” Barmmer said in an email to TIME. Of fat, carbs and protein, fat is the most slowly digested, and it requires enzymes and digestive juices, like bile and stomach acid, to break it down, she says. Everything from stress to medication can lower levels of these digestive juices, so many people are deficient to begin with, Barmmer says. Add in fat, and your digestive system will be working overtime, often leading to bloating, nausea and discomfort.

It makes you run to the bathroom

The most common symptom of digestive strain is an unpleasant one. “Not only will food just sit in your stomach, but it may enter the intestines inadequately digested,” Barmmer says. “Sometimes you wind up seeing greasy or oily stools in these cases.” Many people also experience diarrhea and stomach pain after eating greasy food.

It throws your gut bacteria out of whack

More and more evidence suggests that what you eat affects your gut bacteria, also known as your microbiome. Downing a cheeseburger and fries, Barmmer says, isn’t doing those microorganisms any favors. “Greasy foods do not contain the nourishing, healthy fats that we find in things like avocados, fish, extra virgin olive oil and even butter,” she says. Eating more refined vegetable oils than nourishing fats, she says, tips the body’s balance of fatty acids, which in turn may throw off everything from hormone levels to immune health.

Greasy food may cause acne

You may not see zits directly after a big meal, but Barmmer says that greasy food likely does play a role in acne. “The effect is indirect, occurring over time and as a result of a dietary pattern of eating,” she says. “Acne is largely caused by hormonal imbalances and/or bacterial imbalances, so greasy foods cause acne by way of harming gut health.”

It raises your risk for heart disease and diabetes

If your diet consistently includes greasy foods, Barmmer says, you’ll likely see your risk for chronic conditions—particularly heart disease—go up. A 2014 study from researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that people who ate fried foods between four and six times per week saw their risk for Type 2 diabetes climb 39%, and their risk for coronary heart disease increase by 23%. For people who ate it every day, those percentages only got higher.