As Obama explains what’s at stake, Trump fires rhetorical blanks

MSNBC – MaddowBlog

As Obama explains what’s at stake, Trump fires rhetorical blanks

By Steve Benen      August 20, 2020

Obama doesn’t think Trump puts individual policies or priorities in jeopardy; he thinks his successor puts everything in jeopardy.
Barack Obama during night 3 of the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 19, 2020.

Barack Obama during night 3 of the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 19, 2020.

The idea that former presidents refrain from criticizing their successors after leaving office is popular, but it’s largely a myth. Teddy Roosevelt was scathing in his criticisms of William Taft. Herbert Hoover blasted Franklin Roosevelt. Dwight Eisenhower had plenty of unkind words about John F. Kennedy.

But I was glad to see NBC News presidential historian Michael Beschloss observe last night what I was thinking: “No former President has ever attacked his incumbent successor at a convention like Barack Obama tonight, or even come close.”

It’s one thing for a former president to criticize a successor’s vision or agenda; it’s something else when a former president makes a compelling case that his successor is putting the nation’s future in severe jeopardy.

“For close to four years now, he’s shown no interest in putting in the work; no interest in finding common ground; no interest in using the awesome power of his office to help anyone but himself and his friends; no interest in treating the presidency as anything but one more reality show that he can use to get the attention he craves. Donald Trump hasn’t grown into the job because he can’t. And the consequences of that failure are severe: 170,000 Americans dead, millions of jobs gone while those at the top take in more than ever. Our worst impulses unleashed, our proud reputation around the world badly diminished and our democratic institutions threatened like never before.”

To be sure, much of Obama’s message emphasized his hopes and inspirations — the man is who he is — but there was an element of fear undergirding the former president’s prepared remarks.

Obama described an incumbent president as a corrupt narcissist, threatening the pillars that hold our country up. “This administration has shown it will tear our democracy down if that’s what it takes to win,” the Democrat said toward the end of his remarks.

That’s a rather extraordinary 17-word sentence. The assessment is rooted in truth, of course, and that’s what matters most, but no modern voter has heard a former president explain with such candor how dangerous his successor is. Obama added:

“[H]ere’s the point: this president and those in power — those who benefit from keeping things the way they are — they are counting on your cynicism. They know they can’t win you over with their policies. So they’re hoping to make it as hard as possible for you to vote, and to convince you that your vote doesn’t matter. That’s how they win. That’s how they get to keep making decisions that affect your life, and the lives of the people you love. That’s how the economy will keep getting skewed to the wealthy and well-connected, how our health systems will let more people fall through the cracks. That’s how a democracy withers, until it’s no democracy at all. We can’t let that happen. Do not let them take away your power. Don’t let them take away your democracy.”

Obama doesn’t see Trump as a Republican opponent; he sees him as an American menace. Obama doesn’t think Trump puts individual policies or priorities in jeopardy; he thinks his successor puts everything in jeopardy.

About halfway through the speech, the former president explained that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris “understand that political opponents aren’t ‘un-American’ just because they disagree with you; that a free press isn’t the ‘enemy’ but the way we hold officials accountable; that our ability to work together to solve big problems like a pandemic depends on a fidelity to facts and science and logic and not just making stuff up.”

And it was at roughly this same point that Donald Trump made stuff up, publishing his latest unhinged tweet: “HE SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN, AND GOT CAUGHT!”

More than 70 Republican former national security officials come out in support of Biden

More than 70 Republican former national security officials come out in support of Biden

Luke Barr                  

More than 70 former Republican national security officials, including some former members of the Trump administration, came out in support of Joe Biden’s bid for president Thursday, according to an open letter that also offered a scathing rebuke of President Donald Trump’s first term in office.

“We are profoundly concerned about the course of our nation under the leadership of Donald Trump,” the officials wrote. “Through his actions and his rhetoric, Trump has demonstrated that he lacks the character and competence to lead this nation and has engaged in corrupt behavior that renders him unfit to serve as President.”

Some signers include former FBI Director William Webster, former Defense Secretary under President Obama Chuck Hagel and former CIA Director Michael Hayden.

 

The letter outlines 10 reasons the signers believe Trump isn’t fit for the Oval Office.

“Donald Trump has gravely damaged America’s role as a world leader,” the first point in the letter says. Other items include declarations that Trump is “unfit to lead during a national crisis,” “solicited foreign influence,” “aligned himself with dictators,” “disparaged our armed forces, intelligence agencies, and diplomats,” “undermined the rule of law,” “dishonored the office of the presidency,” “divided our nation,” “attacked and vilified immigrants” and “imperiled America’s security.”

“While we – like all Americans – had hoped that Donald Trump would govern wisely, he has disappointed millions of voters who put their faith in him and has demonstrated that he is dangerously unfit to serve another term. In contrast, we believe Joe Biden has the character, experience, and temperament to lead this nation,” the letter reads.

PHOTO: President Donald Trump arrives to speak to a crowd of supporters during a campaign stop at Mariotti Building Product, Aug. 20, 2020, in Old Forge, Pa.  (Evan Vucci/AP)
PHOTO: President Donald Trump arrives to speak to a crowd of supporters during a campaign stop at Mariotti Building Product, Aug. 20, 2020, in Old Forge, Pa. (Evan Vucci/AP)

 

One of the former officials who signed the letter told ABC News that she hoped Trump would rise to the occasion of being president, but in her view, he did not.

“Many of us hoped that Trump, like those before him, would rise to the honor of the office. That the mantel of leadership would weigh heavy on him and lead to a change of behavior. That perhaps the tweeting, the bullying, the coarse language would be set aside behind closed doors and that he would treat the office with the dignity and gravity it deserves. That did not happen,” Elizabeth Neumann, former assistant secretary of Homeland Security told ABC News.

“[Trump’s] leadership style is chaos; and if you study him — this is a style that he has used for decades in business,” she added. “But chaos at the top of our federal government leads to chaos throughout the government. Some see this as a way to weaken the so-called ‘deep state’ — but what it actually does is weaken our security agencies’ ability to secure and protect our nation. The botched COVID response is merely the latest example — but also one of the gravest with the cost being American lives.”

The Trump campaign did not immediately comment on the letter.

“Donald Trump’s four years in the White House have left America isolated abroad, our alliances in tatters, and autocrats like Xi and Putin emboldened,” Biden campaign spokesperson Michael Gwin said in a statement. “This endorsement is a clear sign of both how weak Donald Trump has left the United States globally, and of Vice President Biden’s unique ability to pick up the pieces next January by rebuilding critical relationships and standing up for American values and interests against the adversaries that Trump has coddled.”

Earlier this week, the former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff under former Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, Miles Taylor, came out in support of Biden.

“Given what I’ve experienced in the administration, I have to support Joe Biden for president,” Taylor said in a video posted and produced by the group Republican Voters Against Trump. “And even though I’m not a Democrat, even though I disagree on key issues, I’m confident that Joe Biden will protect the country, and I’m confident he won’t make the same mistakes as this president.”

Acting Secretary Chad Wolf blasted Taylor in a statement, accusing him of reversing course for “five minutes of fame.”

Australia could soon have roads surfaced with recycled waste from coffee cups

Australia could soon have roads surfaced with recycled waste from coffee cups

Catherine Garcia                  August 20, 2020

An Australian asphalt company is hoping it will soon be able to use discarded coffee cups to pave the country’s roads.

To make this happen, State Asphalt Services in western Sydney has teamed up with Simply Cups, a recycling program that helps turn paper and plastic cups into new products. The two entities were brought together by an organization called Closed Loop, which matches companies selling waste to companies that can turn that waste into fresh material.

State Asphalt Services has taken the different elements of used coffee cups — paper, plastic, lids, and liners — and turned them into cellulose, which binds a road surface together. A test strip held together with this substance has proven to be strong and able to withstand heavy trucks driving back and forth on it. “It’s a better performance product than what we were producing before,” State Asphalt Services director John Kypreos told The Guardian.

His company is getting closer to being able to use the product on actual roads in Australia, and Kypreos said the goal is to one day have a road made entirely of recycled material. He also hopes his collaboration inspires similar partnerships that can cut down on waste.

The Senate’s Russia Report Implicates More Than Trump’s Campaign

The Senate’s Russia Report Implicates More Than Trump’s Campaign

Eli Lake          August 18, 2020

(Bloomberg Opinion) — “This is what collusion looks like.”

That is how five Democratic senators, including vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris, view the fifth and final volume of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Their argument rests on new evidence, which they say shows that Paul Manafort, former campaign manager for President Donald Trump, “was directly connected to the Russian meddling through his communications with an individual found to be a Russian intelligence officer.”

It’s a devastating claim. The report itself, however, paints a more nuanced picture, though no less horrifying.

Start with the Russian intelligence agent. He is a 50-year old man named Konstantin Kilimnik. The committee refers to him as a “Russian intelligence officer.” But Kilimnik does not have an official role in any Russian intelligence service. Instead, he “is part of a cadre of individuals ostensibly operating outside of the Russian government but who nonetheless implement Kremlin-directed influence operations.” Those initiatives are often funded by oligarchs close to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s March 2019 report disclosed that Manafort funneled internal campaign polling and strategy documents to Kilimnik during the campaign. The Senate’s report fills in the blanks about their relationship.

Manafort has known Kilimnik since at least 2005, when Manafort began working as a consultant to former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Kilimnik, in addition to being a kind of Russian spy, was also a close aide to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Manafort had numerous business dealings with Deripaska over more than a decade, including influence operations that targeted countries in Europe, Africa and other former Soviet republics such as Georgia.

By 2016, however, Manafort and Deripaska had had a falling out. Deripaska had sued Manafort for money he lost in a joint business venture. Instead of money — perhaps in lieu of payment — Manafort sent information to Deripaska, using Kilimnik as a go-between.

The Senate committee “was unable to reliably determine why Manafort shared sensitive internal polling data or Campaign strategy with Kilimnik,” the report says. It does say that Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, “both claimed that it was part of an effort to resolve past business disputes and obtain new work with their past Russian and Ukrainian clients.”

After Manafort resigned from the Trump campaign in August 2016, he kept up his relationship with both Kilimnik and some Trump campaign officials, such as the presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner. Kilimnik and Manafort schemed, for example cooking up a plan to persuade the president-elect to endorse a “peace plan” for Ukraine that would have cemented the gains won by Russia after its stealth invasion in 2014. Both men also communicated about how to counter the narrative that Russia sought to influence the 2016 election and discussed a communications strategy to pin the election interference on Ukraine.

The report does not conclude that Kilimnik was involved in the Russian intelligence operation to hack Democratic Party emails and then publicize them through Wikileaks and other Russian backed websites. Rather, it says it has “information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to the GRU’s hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election.” It goes on to say: “While this information suggests that a channel for coordination on the GRU hack-and-leak operation may have existed through Kilimnik, the Committee had limited insight into Kilimnik’s communications with Manafort and [redacted], all of whom used sophisticated communications security practices.”

Regardless of whether Kilimnik was involved in the hacking and leaking of Democratic emails, the larger point is that Trump’s former campaign manager was so close to a Russian spy. That’s something both parties should condemn.

At the same time, the report raises some deeper questions. According to the report, Kilimnik worked for the International Republican Institute, a congressionally funded, nominally nonpartisan organization, from 1995 to 2005. He has claimed that he ended his work for the Russian government before joining. He was fired from his post in 2005, after the institute learned that he was working with Manafort.

Nonetheless, Kilimnik was in “regular contact” with personnel serving in the political section of the U.S. embassy in Kiev until late 2016. To be sure, many U.S. diplomats were wary of him. But he was able in January 2017 to secure a visa to the U.S., where he met with Manafort.

If Kilimnik was a Russian spy for this entire period — and the report gives evidence that indeed he was — then why didn’t the FBI or CIA do more to protect the U.S. embassy, or for that matter the International Republican Institute, from Kilimnik’s schemes?

A similar problem arises with Deripaska, the long-time associate of Manafort who the report accuses of masterminding political-influence campaigns from Cyprus to Montenegro. Between 2014 and 2016, the FBI tried to recruit him as a source. The bureau was rebuffed, and he reportedly told the Kremlin about the approach.

The new report finds that Christopher Steele, the former British spy who was contracted to produce the now-discredited dossier on the Trump campaign’s ties to the Kremlin, also had contracts with Deripaska — at the same time he was compiling his dossier on Trump. “The Committee found multiple links between Steele and Deripaska, including through two of Deripaska’s lawyers, and indications that Deripaska had early knowledge of Steele’s work,” the report says. “Steele had worked for Deripaska, likely beginning at least in 2012, and continued to work for him into 2017, providing a potential direct channel for Russian influence on the dossier.”

Steele’s dossier makes a number of allegations against Manafort that the FBI was never able to confirm. And yet it never mentions one damning and true fact about him: namely, Manafort’s longstanding ties to Deripaska.

Yet the FBI used that dossier to help obtain a surveillance warrant on a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page, and pressed to include its findings in the annex of the intelligence community’s assessment of Russian meddling in the 2016 election. After it became public in January 2017, the dossier also helped to shape the public narrative about Trump in the first two years of his presidency.

Finally: It’s worth noting that, for most of the last two decades, the two men most responsible for protecting America from Russian threats are Robert Mueller and James Comey, who together directed the FBI from 2001 to 2017. It’s a pity that the FBI only got around to doing something about people such as Kilimnik and Deripaska — not to mention opportunistic Americans like Paul Manafort — until after the 2016 election.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

Trump’s Ransacking of Alaska

Rolling Stone

Trump’s Ransacking of Alaska

Cassidy Randall                  August 19, 2020

On a bright July morning, in the tiny community of King Salmon on Alaska’s Bristol Bay, Nanci Morris Lyon bustles around her docked fishing boat. The water beneath is clear 15 feet down, like looking through glass. Up the slope behind Bear Trail Lodge, which Lyon has owned and operated for 11 years, the low-slung tundra unfolds for miles, stopped only by the snowy wall of mountains in the far distance.

It’s the height of the salmon run, and Lyon is readying the boat for her sport-fishing guests, who have to take a puddle-jumper plane for the hour-long flight from Anchorage — there are no roads to Bristol Bay. This season, tourists also have to abide by Alaska’s Covid-19 quarantine regulations for out-of-state travelers. But Lyon’s guests are willing to practice strict procedures; fishing in Bristol Bay represents an increasingly rare experience that’s worth the extra burdens.

Wild-salmon runs have taken a steep nosedive in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest in the past few decades, due to dams, fish hatcheries, the climate crisis, and other factors. Salmon are extinct across 40 percent of their historical range, and many of the remaining runs are threatened or endangered. But Bristol Bay, the biggest wild-salmon run on Earth, with a West Virginia-size watershed, remains a thriving refuge for all five species of Pacific salmon: Chinook, sockeye, coho, chum, and pink. From May through October, the tide pulses with walls of salmon returning to their birth rivers, a phenomenon called “red gold” for all the bounty it brings­ — $162 million in labor income alone, and more than half of the world’s annual sockeye catch. Eagles and bears flock to the water, thousands of commercial and sport fishermen descend on the bay, and indigenous people harvest the sea in a subsistence practice countless generations old.

But all of it is now at risk. In 2001, a small Canadian mining-exploration company called Northern Dynasty Minerals began plans for extracting the Pebble Mine, a massive store of copper, gold, and other minerals that lies underneath two of Bristol Bay’s most productive salmon streams. Following years of fighting led by Lyon and others, the EPA blocked the Pebble Mine in 2014 after scientists found it would result in “complete loss of fish habitat.” That decision has protected the bay, its salmon, and its people — until now.

On June 26th, 2019, Air Force One landed at Alaska’s Elmendorf Air Force Base for a refueling stop. Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican of the Trumpist mold who had effectively already kissed the ring by promising to “Make Alaska Safe Again” when he took office in 2018, boarded and spoke with the president for 20 minutes. After emerging onto the tarmac, Dunleavy bragged that Trump agreed to do “everything he can to work with us on our mining concerns and our timber concerns.”

The day after the meeting, Trump ordered his administration to remove protections on Bristol Bay. And within two months he ordered protections removed from the Tongass National Forest, in southeast Alaska, the largest intact temperate rainforest on the planet, which scientists have called the “lungs of the country.” The Tongass absorbs more carbon than any other national forest, on par with the world’s most-dense terrestrial carbon sinks in Chile and Tasmania. The author of one 2019 study called preserving the Tongass “Alaska’s best and final shot at preparing for climate change.”

But even amid the pandemic, the Trump administration has been moving full speed on stripping Bristol Bay and the Tongass of protections. The government is expected to award a permit for the Pebble Mine any day now, and to lift restrictions on logging the Tongass by late summer or early fall. And this is on top of the move to open up 1.6 million acres of the Coastal Plain in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil and gas development — a plan that was officially approved on Monday.

“It was in line with Dunleavy and Trump to date to take the most brazen actions with no thought for the people, only making the rich richer and consequences be damned,” says Alanna Hurley, executive director of United Tribes of Bristol Bay (UTBB), which represents the 15 federally recognized tribes that make up 80 percent of the region’s population.

Alaska, a red state that Trump won by nearly 15 points, has a noted pro-development streak. Residents receive annual dividends from oil and gas revenues, and a majority of residents actually support the move to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas development. But Bristol Bay and the Tongass Forest are a different story, and the people of southern Alaska have risen up in defense of these pristine ecosystems, which their livelihoods — and the planet — depend on.

“ANWR is far away, and the number of people who interact with it is tiny,” explains Tim Bristol, executive director of SalmonState, an Alaska-based advocacy group. “It’s a totally different setup in southern Alaska, with tens of thousands of people living and working in Bristol and the Tongass. In going after those, the administration woke a sleeping giant.”

When the residents around Bristol Bay first heard rumblings about a mine back in the early 2000s, they were romanced by the prospects for economic uplift. “The economy was depressed with the increased cost of living out here,” says Lyon. “A gallon of milk cost $10, just for perspective. But then we started hearing more about what the mine would actually look like.”

Northern Dynasty’s plan outlined what would be the largest open-pit mine in North America: a mine pit covering seven square miles, three-quarters of a mile deep, calling for an 86-mile private transportation route, and the supposed capacity to treat massive quantities of contaminated water in perpetuity after the mine’s eventual closure. Its construction would cross more than 200 streams and the Iliamna Lake headwaters; its dams and embankments would block critical salmon habitats; and it would destroy 81 miles of salmon streams and close to 3,500 acres of existing wetlands, lakes, and ponds.

“I never ran from a challenge,” says Lyon. Raised in Spokane, Washington, she moved to Alaska 35 years ago and became one of the first female fishing guides in the state. So when Northern Dynasty came for Bristol Bay, she turned herself into a self-taught political activist. “I have that personality, quadruple A. If you said I couldn’t do something, I would go and do it.”

She began making calls and writing letters to her state representatives and her U.S. senators. Alaskan organizations such as SalmonState and Save Bristol Bay caught wind of her activism, backed her with resources, and pointed big players like the Natural Resources Defense Council in her direction, who helped bring her to the U.S. Capitol to testify before Congress.

“Commercial, sport fisherman, and subsistence fisherman would never work all together on anything,” says Lyon. “But we’re at the same table with the same spear in our hand.”

“The tribes around Bristol have united on many other issues, like offshore drilling,” says Alannah Hurley of the UTBB, which was founded specifically to fight the mine. “But Pebble brought that unity to another level.”

For thousands of years, wild salmon have been the foundation of traditional Yup’ik, Dena’ina, and Alutiiq ways of life, for both subsistence and cultural identity. “For us to have our traditional life-ways threatened would be the extinction of our people as we know it,” Hurley says. “Our tribes weren’t going to trade our cultures based on our pristine ecosystem for short-term mining jobs.”

Hurley has been working in “the resistance,” as she calls it, since she graduated high school in 2004. She grew up in the tiny community of Dillingham. Her grandmother was born pre-statehood, one of the first to see non-native people arrive in the area. Like Lyon, Hurley taught herself how to advocate, speaking at shareholder meetings in London that helped result in major stakeholders walking away from the Pebble project, including giants Rio Tinto and Mitsubishi, leaving Northern Dynasty the solitary and woefully underfunded single owner of a project with near-unanimous regional opposition.

The UTBB is also directly responsible for the original EPA protections on Bristol Bay. In 2011, its tribes petitioned the EPA as sovereign nations to prohibit all large-scale mines in the region. In response, the EPA conducted the peer-reviewed studies of Northern Dynasty’s early plans that led to the agency blocking the mine in 2014, citing a provision in the Clean Water Act.

“Supporters in the lower 48 celebrated, thinking the door was closed,” says Lyon. “But we in the heart of it didn’t. We were fully aware that the 2014 decision didn’t remove the threat altogether.”

Sure enough, Northern Dynasty sued the EPA, reaching a settlement with the agency in 2017, and applied for a permit to initiate a federal environmental-review process. This time, the company called for a 1.4 billion-ton mine — nearly six times bigger than the 2014 scenario the EPA analyzed. A 2019 report by the Nature Conservancy found habitat losses could exceed the 2014 scenario by as much as 400 percent.

Northern Dynasty argues that the economic opportunity outweighs keeping Bristol Bay pristine. “There’s more to this story than just development versus environment,” says Mike Heatwole, Northern Dynasty’s vice president of public affairs. “What about looking at employment opportunities in a region that needs jobs? What about the copper the world needs to meet demand for moving away from fossil fuels? Wouldn’t we rather have that come from a country with strict environmental rules?”

But according to their own web site, Northern Dynasty promises only 750 to 1,000 direct jobs with the Pebble Mine, while the salmon run generates 14,000 jobs annually in addition to providing subsistence for the tribes.

And the world might demand copper, but even Republican experts agree that we shouldn’t be getting it from Bristol Bay. Last year, three former EPA administrators under four Republican presidential administrations wrote a joint public comment that concluded: “The question of whether to build a massive open pit copper and gold mine in the heart of the planet’s largest wild sockeye salmon fishery has a simple answer. The Pebble Mine is the wrong mine in absolutely the wrong place, and the answer is no.”

Even Donald Trump Jr., who Lyon took fishing in Bristol Bay in 2014, called on his father and the EPA to block the mine’s development, tweeting in early August that “the headwaters of Bristol Bay and the surrounding fishery are too unique and fragile to take any chances with.”

But on June 27th, 2019, the day after Trump and Dunleavy met on Air Force One, the EPA internally informed its staff scientists that the agency would be reversing its protections on Bristol Bay.

Lyon recalls the reaction back home as widespread panic. “I can’t tell you how many times my phone rang with people asking, ‘Nanci, what are we going to do?’ I don’t know. I’m a fishing guide, for God’s sake.”

Calls to their congressional delegation to intervene fell mostly on deaf ears. Sen. Lisa Murkowski has gone on record saying that “adverse impacts to Alaska’s world-class salmon fishery and to the ecosystem of Bristol Bay are unacceptable,” but she, Sen. Dan Sullivan, and the state’s sole representative in the House, Don Young, have all refused to take positions on the Pebble Mine, preferring to await the EPA’s final decision.

That decision was more or less finalized last month, when on July 24th, the Trump administration released its final environmental-impact statement, determining Northern Dynasty’s proposal for a 1.4 billion-ton mine to be the “least environmentally damaging” option for moving forward (out of options that included not developing a mine at all). All that’s left is for the EPA to publish the decision, which is set to happen by mid-August, and the mine will officially be green-lighted.

“We have not been heard,” says Lyon. “[Gov. Dunleavy] refuses to answer, respond or acknowledge anything any of us have said. It feels like we’re swinging on the end of a rope, and if we let go, the crocodiles will eat us. We’re at their mercy.”

Outside Kake, a tiny village on Kupreanof Island in the Tongass National Forest, Joel Jackson walks an old logging road. Skinny second-growth trees have muscled their way up on the surrounding slopes in the 40 years since Jackson built this road for his community-owned logging corporation.

“The forest all around used to be big beautiful trees,” he says, gesturing down to the sparse village on the seashore. Jackson, 63, is president of the Organized Village of Kake, home to the federally recognized Kake tribe of the Tlingit people. “When you walk into old growth, it’s like walking into a cathedral.”

At nearly 17 million acres, twice the size of Maryland, the Tongass is America’s biggest national forest, covering most of the southern Alaskan panhandle. In addition to the nearly 90,000 people who live in or just outside the forest’s borders (many in well-known hubs like Juneau, Skagway, and Ketchikan), the dripping green forest of old-growth hemlock, spruce, and cedar is a stronghold for brown bears, which have dwindled in the lower 48, and is home to the largest known concentration of bald eagles. The Tongass’ canopy, with some trees more than 800 years old, shades some of the world’s last productive salmon streams.

In the 1980’s, Kake decided that if anyone would log its old-growth surroundings, it would be its own operation, bringing jobs and income to its own people. “After the last tree fell, I looked up into these hills. It looked like a war zone,” Jackson says. “I asked myself, ‘What the hell did we just do?’”

Within months, the damage was obvious. Streams that “once held so many salmon you could walk across their backs,” says Jackson, slowly deteriorated — a devastating blow to a community that’s been dependent on salmon as the main food staple for millennia. The moose and deer the locals relied on for meat vanished, victim to increased predation by wolves that used the logging roads as hunting corridors. In a region where the cost of living is so expensive that subsistence off the landscape is crucial, food security became a serious issue. Young families moved away in search of work, and the community shrank by more than half, down to fewer than 500 people, with an 80 to 85 percent unemployment rate. Community members who remained were forced to cross 34 miles of open ocean to neighboring Admiralty Island to hunt.

The bottom fell out of the timber industry in southeast Alaska in the 1990s. “It was a typical boom-and-bust economy, and we busted,” says Jackson. “It used to be such a balance, with everything underneath the canopy. Berries, deer, bear, and the forest keeping our streams cool and pristine so the salmon could come back year after year. It was a beautiful time, and I miss those times.”

About half of the Tongass’ old-growth trees survive. They’ve been protected since 2001, when President Clinton, as one of his last acts in office, introduced the “roadless rule,” which barred the construction of roads in 58.5 million acres of undeveloped forest across the country, including more than half of the Tongass.

In 2018, Alaska’s then-Gov. Bill Walker initiated the lengthy process of making modest changes to the roadless rule to allow a few sections of the Tongass to be reopened to logging. But Dunleavy has promised to go much further. After his June 26th meeting with Trump, the president ordered the Department of Agriculture, which oversees the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), to wipe all roadless protections from the forest: a green light to begin logging its old growth again.

The move makes little sense in today’s timber economy. A recent report from the Center for Sustainable Economy documented taxpayer losses of nearly $2 billion a year from federal logging programs, largely due to the fact that demand for timber has been flagging nationally. Regardless, Trump signed an executive order in December 2018 to increase national-forest logging by 40 percent. “It’s nonsensical, but that’s the reality of what the Trump administration has brought us,” says Joel Reynolds, Western director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.  

Alaska’s federal delegation, however, joined Dunleavy in support of lifting the roadless rule, spinning it as “what Alaskans want” in op-eds, joint press releases, and statements that claim the rule was federal overreach and has for years restricted “needed access” for timber.

The communities of southeast Alaska disagree.

The Organized Village of Kake, along with several other tribes in the region, had been participating in stakeholder meetings with the USFS since late 2018. They were presented with six proposed plans, ranging from Alternative 1, leaving all protections in place for the Tongass, to Alternative 6, lifting all protections for the Tongass. In multiple meetings, the USFS focused only on Alternatives 1 to 5, says Jackson; the agency never discussed Alternative 6 in those meetings. It seemed that lifting all protections was never an option on the table.

Kake consistently advocated for no action, as did several other tribes. Communities from Ketchican and Petersburg, west to Sitka, and north to Skagway passed resolutions against lifting the roadless rule.

“The people have spoken,” says Tim Bristol of SalmonState. “We want protection for the most productive wild places left, we want a landscape that remains beautiful and allows for all these things that make living in southeast Alaska so great.”

Like Bristol Bay, southeast Alaska is home to all five species of Pacific salmon; a report from the American Fisheries Society quantified annual contributions of the Tongass and its neighboring forest, the Chugach, at 48 million salmon, with a value to commercial fisheries averaging $88 million. And thanks to its rich wildlife and pristine stretches of forest, the Tongass region hosts the highest number of tourism-related jobs in Alaska: 48 percent of the state’s total, generating $761 million annually in labor income.

But despite united local opposition to lifting the roadless rule and a national public comment period that yielded 96 percent national support for keeping protections in place, in October 2019, the USFS formally announced Alternative 6 as its preferred alternative for managing the Tongass. The Department of Agriculture is expected to issue its final decision late this summer or fall.

“I feel very disrespected by the whole process,” Jackson says. But his tribe and others are not backing down. On July 21st, nine southeast Alaska tribes submitted a petition to the Department of Agriculture to create a first-of-its-kind Traditional Homelands Conservation Rule “to save their ancestral lands in the Tongass National Forest from destruction at the hands of the agency itself.”

“All other avenues to protect our homelands have been exhausted, to little avail,” they wrote.

This new process could pause the agency’s actions on the roadless rule, as it would require identifying and protecting the “traditional use” areas of the forest. But the Department of Agriculture is not required to accept or even respond to the petition.

“They responded to the state of Alaska’s petition to lift the roadless rule in a matter of months,” says Marina Anderson, vice president of the Organized Village of Kassaan of the Haida tribe. “I hope that because this is a petition coming from nine nations, instead of one state, that they’re taking a big look at this and preparing for their response ahead of the final decision on the Tongass.”

Most experts agree that there’s slim chance the Trump administration’s final decisions on the Tongass and Bristol will reflect public will, much less any environmental protection. Some residents are hoping for a Biden administration to save the day. Some are hoping for at least a Senate flip to Democratic control, which would open new legislative strategies for protecting these places. And barring those, people are planning their last stands for the courtroom.

“I hate to say that dirty word, but litigation is all we’re left with,” says Jackson.

“We’re prepared to take legal action if necessary to protect Bristol Bay,” says Erin Whelan, staff attorney for Earthjustice, a national organization that’s been aiding local communities on the issue since 2004. To legally satisfy the Clean Water Act, she says, the environmental review has to find that the Pebble Mine as proposed won’t have unacceptable adverse effects on the fishery. “I don’t know how they could justify that when the 2014 EPA watershed assessment found that even a smaller and less destructive mine would have adverse effects.”

Lyon can barely put into words what would happen to Bristol Bay if the Pebble Mine were to go forward. It would be a slow death, she says. Mining roads would provide access to this remote place to forever change its character. The salmon would fade as the waters deteriorated, and all the people and animals that depend on them would start to disappear from the bay.

I ask how it would feel personally. Lyon pauses, for an interminable moment, and finally says, “I would feel like my guts had been ripped out. It’s my life. If you take it away, all I’ve held near and dear and protected …” She trails off, unable to finish the thought.

Hurley finishes it for her from across the bay in Dillingham. “We’ve been at it for a long time,” Hurley says. “We have not faltered. No matter what happens with this federal permit, we’re going to keep going. We don’t have a choice.”

California just saw its first plague case in 5 years. Experts explain why you shouldn’t panic

California just saw its first plague case in 5 years. Experts explain why you shouldn’t panic

Health officials in California revealed Monday that a South Lake Tahoe resident has tested positive for plague.

The patient, who has not been publicly identified, is believed to have been bitten by an infected flea while walking their dog along the Truckee River Corridor or in the Tahoe Keys area, according to a press release from El Dorado County’s Health and Human Services Agency. The patient is “currently under the care of a medical professional and is recovering at home,” the press release says.

“Plague is naturally present in many parts of California, including higher elevation areas of El Dorado County,” Dr. Nancy Williams, El Dorado County Public Health Officer, said in a statement. “It’s important that individuals take precautions for themselves and their pets when outdoors, especially while walking, hiking and/or camping in areas where wild rodents are present. Human cases of plague are extremely rare but can be very serious.”

Several areas of South Lake Tahoe have signs that warn the public about the presence of plague and ways to prevent exposure, the press release says.

Plague is a disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The plague can infect people and mammals, the CDC says, although people usually get the plague after being bitten by an infected flea or by handling an infected animal. While you don’t hear a lot about the plague these days, the disease is notorious for causing the black death pandemic in the Middle Ages.

Some people are freaking out over the news on Twitter, but infectious disease experts say there’s no need to panic. Here’s why.

The plague has been in the U.S. since 1900

It seems shocking that the plague would show up in the U.S., but it’s been in the country since it was brought over in 1900 on rat-infested steamships that sailed from infected areas, the CDC says. Back then, epidemics happened in port cities.

The last urban plague epidemic in the U.S. happened in Los Angeles from 1924 through 1925, the CDC says. After that, the plague spread from urban rats to rural rodents and “became entrenched” in many areas of the western U.S., including northern New Mexico, northern Arizona, southern Colorado, California, southern Oregon and far western Nevada, per the CDC.

Human cases of the plague don’t happen often, but they do occur. “We may have a dozen cases or so in the country each year,” Dr. Amesh A. Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, tells Yahoo Life.

There are three forms of the plague, but more than 80 percent of the cases in the U.S. have been the bubonic form, the CDC says. On average, the CDC says that the country sees between one and 17 cases annually. There have been minimal plague cases over the past few years, though — in 2016 there were four reported cases, in 2017 there were five and in 2018 there were just two reported cases.

What are the symptoms of the plague?

The symptoms of bubonic plague can include the following, according to the CDC:

  • sudden fever
  • headache
  • chills
  • weakness
  • one or more swollen, tender and painful lymph nodes

While it sounds like the symptoms are similar to those of COVID-19, the swollen lymph node is a distinguishing characteristic, Adalja says. “The swollen lymph node is usually solitary and huge,” he says.

The bacteria can spread throughout the body if it’s not treated, the CDC says.

How worried about this should people be?

“You shouldn’t be worried,” Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist and professor at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, tells Yahoo Life. However, Schaffner says, it’s best to steer clear of rodents like prairie dogs, which are known carriers of the plague in certain areas of the country. (The El Dorado County Department of Health and Human Services specifically warns about squirrels, chipmunks “and other wild rodents.”)

If you live in an area where the plague is known to surface, Schaffner says, it’s also important to keep your pets away from these rodents. “Dogs and cats can be infected with the fleas that carry the plague, and then infect you,” he says.

Even if someone happens to contract the plague, it’s “very treatable with antibiotics and patients often do well,” Dr. David Cennimo, an assistant professor of infectious disease at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, tells Yahoo Life. But, he adds, proper diagnosis is important. “The biggest worry would be missing the diagnosis, so it is important to have a good exposure history to know that we should be worried about the potential of infection,” he says.

Still, Schaffner stresses that people shouldn’t worry about this spreading. “This is a very unusual infection,” he says. “There is not going to be an outbreak.”

Extreme weather just devastated 10 million acres in the Midwest. Expect more of this.

The Guardian

Extreme weather just devastated 10 million acres in the Midwest. Expect more of this.

 

Art Cullen            August 17, 2020
<span>Photograph: Robert Franklin/AP</span>
Photograph: Robert Franklin/AP

 

I know a stiff wind. They call this place Storm Lake, after all. But until recently most Iowans had never heard of a “derecho”. They have now. Last Monday, a derecho tore 770 miles from Nebraska to Indiana and left a path of destruction up to 50 miles wide over 10m acres of prime cropland. It blew 113 miles per hour at the Quad Cities on the Mississippi River.

Grain bins were crumpled like aluminum foil. Three hundred thousand people remained without power in Iowa and Illinois on Friday. Cedar Rapids and Iowa City were devastated.

The corn lay flat.

Iowa’s maize yield may be cut in half. A little napkin ciphering tells me the Tall Corn State will lose $6 billion from crop damage alone.

We should get used to it. Extreme weather is the new normal. Last year, the villages of Hamburg and Pacific Junction, Iowa, were washed down the Missouri River from epic floods that scoured tens of thousands of acres. This year, the Great Plains are burning up from drought. Western Iowa was steeped in severe drought when those straight-line winds barreled through the weak stalks.

A multi-decade drought is under way in the Central Plains and the south-west. Wildfires are spreading from Arizona to California, and are burning ridges north of Los Angeles not licked by flames since 1968. Cattle in huge Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma feedlots will drink the Ogallala Aquifer dry in 20 years. This drought, which could rival or exceed the Medieval Drought that occurred about AD 1200, could last 30 to 50 years, according to research from the Goddard Space Institute. It will become difficult to grow corn in southern Iowa, and impossible in western Kansas. By mid-century, corn yields could decline by 30%, according to the Iowa State University climatologist Dr Gene Takle.

Takle notes that the 20th century was the wettest on record. This could be the driest.

“The last century was our Goldilocks period,” Takle said. “Just right. And that period is coming to an end.”

We have cyclone bombs in winter and derechos on top of tornadoes. We have 500-year floods every 10 years. And we have a steady increase in night-time temperatures and humidity that makes it difficult for the corn to breathe even with the latest in genetic engineering. Protein content in the kernel is falling. Livestock and plants fall prey to new diseases and pests along with extreme heat stress.

It will lead to a reckoning more quickly than most of us realize.

The pandemic exposed the fragility of the food supply when meat processing plants teetered last spring for lack of healthy workers. Prices shot up 50% at the grocery counter.

Farmers didn’t share in that windfall. Corn prices are at a 10-year low in a broken industrial system propped up by government design.

When Takle was a teenager, baling hay in 1960, there were 18-20 days a year when the temperature would get above 90 degrees. By the end of the century, Takle warns, this region could be scorched by temperatures over 100 degrees 50 to 60 days a year.

Soil that can hold water and defy heat is losing that capacity to erosion driven by extreme rains. Poor soil, combined with the extreme heat Takle describes, assures crop failures. Takle said corn crops could fail every other year if we go on with “business as usual” pumping out carbon.

It’s already happening in Latin America. Decades of drought are driving Guatemalan campesino refugees to Storm Lake to work in meatpacking. Similarly, epic migrations were driven by the Medieval Drought. It is believed that the Mill Creek people who settled here were driven north up the Missouri River to the Dakotas as they were droughted out of Iowa. That drought also led to wars in Europe, not unlike the contemporary conflicts and migrations in Africa whose roots are in failing agricultural and food systems.

The impacts of climate change are real and profound for our most basic industry: food. Fortunately, sound science tells us that we can make a real impact on climate change by planting less corn and more grass that sequesters carbon. Paying farmers to build soil health and retain water is a better investment than writing a crop insurance check for drought. Farmers on the frontlines of climate change are trying to become more resilient to extreme weather by planting permanent grass strips in crop fields, and planting cover crops for the winter that suck up nitrogen and CO2. The rate of adaptation would be quickened if conservation funding programs were not always under attack.

The derecho is yet another destructive reminder that heat leading to extreme storms will destroy our very food sources if we don’t face the climate crisis now.

  • Art Cullen is editor of the Storm Lake Times in north-west Iowa, where he won the Pulitzer prize for editorials on agriculture and the environment. He is a Guardian US columnist and author of the book, Storm Lake: Change, Resilience, and Hope in America’s Heartland

The Country Lady, Mary McLeod Bethune, Bethune – Cookman School

The Country Lady

Image may contain: 1 person, sitting

She started a school for African-American girls with $1.50. The school bordered the town dump. Make-shift desks and chairs were made from discarded crates and boxes. There were five students at the time, and the students made ink for pens from elderberry juice and pencils from burned wood.
When the the local Ku Klux Klan heard about the school, they threatened to burn it down. There were reports that they waited outside the school, but she stood in the doorway, unwilling to back down or leave her school. Other stories say that she and her students started singing spirituals. The Ku Klux Klan eventually left.
Mary McLeod Bethune was born on July 10, 1875 in a log cabin on a cotton farm in South Carolina, the 15th of 17 children of former slaves. Most of her brothers and sisters were born into slavery; she was the first child born free. She started working in the fields by the age of 5.
One day, she accompanied her mother, delivering “white people’s” wash. When she was given permission to enter the white children’s nursery, she saw a book, which fascinated her. A white girl would quickly snatch the book from her hands, telling her she didn’t know how to read. That’s when Mary realized the only difference between white and black folk was the ability to read and write.
When she got the opportunity, McLeod attended a one-room black schoolhouse, walking five miles to and from the school. When she got home, she would teach her parents and siblings what she learned. She then got an opportunity to attend the Moody Bible Institute in 1895, becoming the first African American student to graduate from the school.
She decided then she would become a missionary, sharing what she learned. But, she would be informed that no one wanted or needed a black missionary.
Rather than give up her dreams, she decided more than ever that she would eventually teach.
Flash forward to 1904, when after moving to Florida, she started the Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls, which initially had five girls aged six to twelve. With limited resources, she was determined to make the school a success, even when the Ku Klux Klan threatened her. But, eventually she received donations and support from the community, and the school grew to 30 girls by the end of the year.
Booker T. Washington would tell her of the importance of white benefactors to fund her school, so she started traveling and fundraising, receiving donations from John D. Rockefeller and establishing contacts with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.
Her little school would become even more successful after it merged with a private institute for African-American boys and became known as the Bethune-Cookman School. She was president of the college from 1923 to 1942, and 1946 to 1947, becoming one of the few women in the world to serve as a college president at that time.
After she found that one of her students needing medical care was denied the care she needed and was placed on an outside porch of the local white hospital instead of a room with a bed, she used her funding sources and connections to open the first black hospital in Daytona, Florida.
According to the Turning Point Suffragist Memorial Association, McLeod became “one of the 20th century’s most powerful and celebrated advocates for civil rights and suffrage”, holding “prominent roles, including president, in the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). She also served as president of the Florida Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, where she fought against school segregation and sought healthcare for black children. Under her leadership, the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) was founded as a unifying voice for African American women’s organizations.”
As chapter president of the Florida chapter of the National Association of Colored Women, she would become so well known for her work registering black voters that once again she received threats from the Ku Klux Klan. And, like before, she did not back down.
With her friendship with the Roosevelts, she would become appointed as a national adviser to president Roosevelt, becoming part of what was known as his Black Cabinet and advising him on concerns of black people and would be called the “First Lady of the Struggle”.
When she passed away on May 18, 1955, she was recognized across the country. One newspaper suggested “the story of her life should be taught to every school child for generations to come” and The New York Times noted she was, “one of the most potent factors in the growth of interracial goodwill in America.”
In her own words before she died, she wrote:
“I leave you love. I leave you hope. I leave you the challenge of developing confidence in one another. I leave you a thirst for education. I leave you a respect for the use of power. I leave you faith. I leave you racial dignity. I leave you a desire to live harmoniously with your fellow men. I leave you a responsibility to our young people.”
“If I have a legacy to leave my people, it is my philosophy of living and serving. I think I have spent my life well. I pray now that my philosophy may be helpful to those who share my vision of a world of Peace, Progress, Brotherhood, and Love.”

Death Valley hits 130 degrees, thought to be highest temperature on Earth in over a century

Death Valley hits 130 degrees, thought to be highest temperature on Earth in over a century

Laura Newberry             August 17, 2020
Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes in Death Valley National Park. The temperature in Death Valley hit 130 degrees Sunday, according to the National Weather Service. It could also be among the top-three highest temperatures to have ever been measured there. <span class="copyright">(Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)</span>
Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes in Death Valley National Park. The temperature in Death Valley hit 130 degrees Sunday, according to the National Weather Service. It could also be among the top-three highest temperatures to have ever been measured there. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)

Temperatures in Death Valley skyrocketed to a blistering 130 degrees on Sunday — possibly the highest mercury reading on Earth since 1913.

If the National Weather Service’s recording is correct, it would also be among the top-three highest temperatures to have ever been measured in Death Valley, as well as the highest temperature ever seen there during the month of August.

The temperature in Death Valley hit 130 degrees at 3:41 p.m. Sunday, the National Weather Service said in a tweet.

Death Valley holds the record for the highest temperature ever recorded on the planet: 134 degrees in 1913, according to Guinness World Records. That reading has been disputed, however.

Since then, a 129-degree reading was recorded in Death Valley in 2013.

The reading comes amid an epic heat wave that continues to grip most of the southwestern U.S.

Multiple daily heat records were set Saturday. The National Weather Service reported a high of 112 in Woodland Hills, breaking the record of 108 set in 1977, and a high of 92 at UCLA, breaking the record of 90 set in 2003. Downtown Los Angeles hit 98 degrees, tying a record set in 1994.

Oil Companies Wonder If It’s Worth Looking for Oil Anymore

Oil Companies Wonder If It’s Worth Looking for Oil Anymore

Laura Hurst                        August 16, 2020

(Bloomberg) — A few dots near the bottom corner of the world map in the southern Atlantic, the Falkland Islands were once at the forefront of a new era for the oil industry as companies scoured the planet for resources.

Yet a decade after the discovery of as much as 1.7 billion barrels of crude in surrounding waters, the British overseas territory known for sheep rearing and tension with Argentina looks as remote as ever. Rather than the next frontier, the project to extract energy risks being added to a list of what companies call “stranded assets” that could cost them huge sums to mothball.

As the coronavirus ravages economies and cripples demand, European oil majors have made some uncomfortable admissions in recent months: oil and gas worth billions of dollars might never be pumped out of the ground.

With the crisis also hastening a global shift to cleaner energy, fossil fuels will likely be cheaper than expected in the coming decades, while emitting the carbon they contain will get more expensive. These two simple assumptions mean that tapping some fields no longer makes economic sense. BP Plc said on Aug. 4 that it would no longer do any exploration in new countries.

The oil industry was already grappling with the energy transition, copious supply and signs of peak demand as Covid-19 began to spread. The pandemic will likely bring forward that peak and discourage exploration, according to Rystad Energy AS. The consultant expects about 10% of the world’s recoverable oil resources—some 125 billion barrels—to become obsolete.

“There will be stranded assets,” said Muqsit Ashraf, senior managing director responsible for the global energy industry at Accenture Plc. “Companies are going to have to accept the fact.”

The Sea Lion project in the Falklands promised to be a world-class resource when Rockhopper Exploration Plc found the field in 2010. Hundreds of millions of dollars later and after enduring a flare up between Argentina and Britain over the legality of the project, the first phase still hasn’t brought any oil to market.

Premier Oil Plc, Rockhopper’s partner, suspended work on Sea Lion earlier this year, and on July 15 wrote off $200 million of investment because later phases looked unlikely to happen.

Larger companies have also begun voicing that realization for other projects. BP said in June it would evaluate its portfolio of discoveries and leave some undeveloped. Chief of Staff Dominic Emery already hinted last year at what kind of resources might never “ see the light of day.” Complicated projects could be shelved in favor of fields that are quicker to develop, such as U.S. shale, he said.

The pressure to curb emissions may also prompt companies to leave the most carbon-intensive reserves in the ground, as France’s Total SE acknowledged last month when it took an $8 billion writedown on carbon-heavy assets.

Quicktake‘Stranded Assets’ Risk Rising With Climate Action and $40 Oil

The list of projects most at risk includes deepwater discoveries off Brazil, Angola and in the Gulf of Mexico, said Parul Chopra, vice president for upstream research at Rystad. Canadian oil-sands projects such as the expansion of the Sunrise development in Alberta are also in doubt, he said.

The Sunrise deposit, a joint venture between BP and Husky Energy Inc., has an abundant supply of bitumen—potentially as much as 3.7 billion barrels. Extraction, though, is complicated. Most oil-sands projects resemble mining operations. The bitumen is dug out of the ground and processed into heavy crude, which must then be diluted with lighter hydrocarbons before it can be refined into fuel.

Sunrise is more complex and more costly. The deposit is too deep to be dug up, so instead it’s injected with steam to get the bitumen flowing into a well, from where it can be pumped to the surface.

Sunrise was meant to be built in three phases, ultimately producing more than 200,000 barrels of bitumen a day over 40 years. The first 60,000-barrel-a-day stage started in 2015, just as crude prices were slumping amid the first U.S. shale boom. Since March this year, output has shrunk to around 10,000 a day, net to Husky, amid plunging prices and restrictions on pipeline capacity.

Neither Husky, which runs the project, nor BP have disclosed a timeframe for the next stages of development. They’ll require crude prices well above current levels, suggesting an expansion isn’t imminent, said Mike Coffin, an analyst at research group Carbon Tracker Initiative. (The think tank has received support from the charitable foundation of Michael Bloomberg, the majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News.)

Beyond their economic viability, carbon-intensive oil sands also sit uncomfortably with BP’s ambition to become a “net-zero” company by 2050. No new oil-sands projects fit in a world compliant with the Paris climate accord, according to Carbon Tracker.

Husky has said its long-term plans include the potential to expand Sunrise, but declined to estimate timing or the oil price required. A BP spokesman said the company is reviewing oil-sands projects.

In the Falklands, there’s still hope the outlook will improve. Rockhopper has said the challenges aren’t insurmountable, despite the remoteness of the islands and the hostility of Argentina, which fought a war with Britain in the 1980’s and still claims sovereignty over the territory.

It pointed to the involvement of other companies—Premier joined the project in 2012 and Navitas Petroleum LP is in talks to take a stake—to suggest there’s little risk Sea Lion will become a stranded asset.

But a final decision on whether to proceed won’t come until next year at the earliest, according to Premier Chief Executive Officer Tony Durrant. Previous deadlines for final investment decisions have come and gone. The company declined to comment on whether Sea Lion was at risk of turning into a “stranded asset.”

Sea Lion only needs oil prices in the low- to mid-$40’s to break even, but probably requires at least $50 a barrel to secure debt, Rockhopper said. Benchmark Brent crude is currently trading around $45, having slumped by a third this year.

Ultimately, with oil in abundance, doubts about the strength of long-term demand and pressure to eliminate the most carbon-intensive production, it’s a calculation that may become increasingly stacked against projects like Sunrise and Sea Lion.

“Many assets are already stranded from an oil-price cycle perspective,” said Christyan Malek, head of EMEA oil and gas research at JPMorgan Chase & Co. “But when you then add the carbon curve, that takes a bigger chunk out.”

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