Veterans – Patriotism – Page 178

Experts call for an active hurricane season as the tropics rumble awake

The Weather Network

Experts call for an active hurricane season as the tropics rumble awake

Dennis Mersereau August 5, 2021

We could be in for a hectic peak to the hurricane season over the next couple of months.

Experts who specialize in long-range tropical weather predictions expect more than a dozen tropical storms and hurricanes to develop in the Atlantic basin through this fall.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) still expects above-average hurricane activity in the Atlantic Ocean, according to the agency’s mid-summer outlook issued on Wednesday.

Forecasters with Colorado State University issued their own prediction on Thursday, concurring that the ingredients are in place for a busy peak to this year’s hurricane season.

While the Atlantic basin has been unusually quiet for the past month, the serenity won’t last long. There are already a few disturbances out near Africa, and forecasters expect plenty more to follow in the weeks and months ahead.

EXPERTS CALL FOR 15 TO 21 NAMED STORMS THIS SEASON

NOAA predicts that this year’s hurricane season could end with a final tally of 15 to 21 named storms. A system in the Atlantic basin earns a name when it strengthens into a tropical storm.

NOAA / CSU Hurricane Forecasts Aug 5 2021 — NOAA / CSU Hurricane Forecasts Aug 5, 2021

More than half of those storms could become hurricanes, the outlook notes, and several of those hurricanes could grow into major hurricanes, packing maximum sustained winds of 178 km/h or stronger.

Colorado State University’s forecast cuts straight down the middle, calling for 18 named storms. The school’s prediction also calls for eight hurricanes, four of which could strengthen into major hurricanes.

An average Atlantic hurricane season would see 14 named storms, seven hurricanes, and three major hurricanes, which are rated category three or higher on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale.

The climatological peak of the Atlantic hurricane season occurs on September 10, though heightened tropical activity is common from August through October. The season officially runs from June 1 to November 30.

THE INGREDIENTS EXIST FOR A FLURRY OF ACTIVITY

The predictions from both NOAA and Colorado State University rely on a combination of factors that include low wind shear, warm ocean temperatures, and an increase in tropical waves moving off the western coast of Africa, according to statements released by each group this week.

Tropical cyclones are powerful but fragile storms. A hurricane needs warm waters, moist air, low wind shear, and intense thunderstorms in order to develop and strengthen. Lacking any of those ingredients can spell doom for a budding storm.

WE’RE WATCHING A FEW DISTURBANCES NEAR AFRICA THIS WEEK

The outlooks couldn’t come at a better time. After the Atlantic fell unusually quiet through most of July, the tropics are growing more active as tropical waves begin to roll off the African coast.

The West African monsoon season produces complexes of thunderstorms that travel west and move over the eastern Atlantic Ocean. These clusters of storms, or waves, are the seeds from which many named storms form at the height of the hurricane season.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center’s 5-day tropical weather outlook on Thursday, August 5, noted several disturbances in the eastern Atlantic for potential tropical development through the weekend. We should expect more activity like this in the coming weeks as we approach the peak of the season in September.

WE’VE ALREADY SEEN FIVE STORMS SO FAR THIS YEAR

Despite July’s inactivity, we’ve already seen five named storms so far this year. The season’s first named storm formed in May, kicking off this year’s hurricane season before the official start date for a record seventh year in a row.

Atlantic Hurricane Tracks Through Aug 5 2021

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The Atlantic’s most recent named storm was Hurricane Elsa, which broke several records with its formation in the Caribbean Sea at the beginning of July. Elsa’s remnants produced as much as 92 mm of rain in New Brunswick.

The next name on the list is Fred, followed by Grace, Henri, and Ida.

WE COULD DIVE DEEP INTO THE LIST OF STORM NAMES AGAIN

It’s notable that the upper end of NOAA’s outlook would bring the season to the end of the list of 21 names allotted for each hurricane season. We’ve only exhausted the official list of names twice before, first in 2005 and again during last year’s historic hurricane season.

The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season was the most active on record, amassing 30 named storms between May 16 and November 18. The season ran through the list of 21 names by the middle of September, requiring the use of nine Greek letters to name the remaining storms.

The World Meteorological Organization has since abolished the use of Greek letters once the list of names runs out, opting instead to establish an alternate list of names if we see 22 or more storms in a single season.

However, it’s unlikely that we’ll see more than 21 storms this year.

Stay with The Weather Network for the latest updates throughout hurricane season.

Donziger: Facing Prison for Fighting Chevron

Greg Palast – Investigative Journalism

Donziger: Facing Prison for Fighting Chevron

Rights Attorney Pays Price for Defending Indigenous in Ecuador Poisoned by Oil

Greg Palast August 6, 2021

Look at his face. Emergildo Criollo, Chief of the Cofan people of the Amazon in Ecuador. Determined, dignified, in war paint, bare-chested.

Cofan Chief Emergildo Criollo, Ecuador

It was back in 2007, when I found him in his thatched stilt home in the rainforest. Criollo told me his 5-year-old son had jumped into a swimming hole, covered with an enticing shine. The shine was oil sludge, illegally dumped. His son came up vomiting blood, then dropped dead in the Chief’s arms.

I followed him to the courthouse in the dusty roustabout town of Lago Agrio (Bitter Lake) where, with a sheaf of papers, Criollo sought justice for his son.

Behind Criollo, the court clerks, in their white shirts and ties, were giggling and grinning at each other, nodding toward this “indio” painted up and half naked, thinking he can file a suit against a giant. A giant named Chevron.

In 2011, they stopped laughing. That’s when an Ecuadorian court ordered Chevron to pay Criollo and other indigenous co-plaintiffs $9.5 billion. The courts found that Chevron’s Texaco operation had illegally dumped 16 billion gallons of deadly oil waste.

Steven Donziger with Indigenous clients
(courtesy AmazonWatch)

What the gigglers didn’t know is that the Chief had a secret weapon: Steven Donziger, a US attorney, classmate of Barack Obama at Harvard law, who gave up everything — literally everything — to take on Criollo’s case.

It’s been a decade, and Chevron still hasn’t paid a dime. But Donziger has paid big time: For the last two years, he’s been under house arrest, longer than any American in history never convicted of a crime.

But weeks ago, he was convicted of contempt by a judge who denied him a jury. (The Constitution? Faggedaboudit.) And on October 8, this contemptible judge will sentence Donziger, and could put him behind bars.

Who was the prosecutor? Not the US government, but Chevron’s law firm. The first-ever criminal prosecution by a US corporation.

Say what?

On Friday, August 6 at 4pm Pacific, I will be speaking at the Free Donziger Rally at the Chevron Station on the corner of Laurel Canyon Blvd and Sunset Blvd. This is one of more than a dozen rallies on Friday from San Francisco to Tel Aviv. Check the list.

I can’t make this up.

Chevron set out to destroy Donziger, to make an example of a human rights lawyer that dares take on the petroleum pirates.

They filed suits against Donziger and the Cofan and found a former tobacco industry lawyer judge Lewis Kaplan to find Donziger in contempt for refusing to turn over his cell phone and computer to Chevron — an unprecedented attack on attorney-client privilege. To give Chevron the names of indigenous activists in South America can be a death sentence.

When Donziger said he’d appeal, the judge charged him with criminal contempt — that’s simply unprecedented. But a far more dangerous precedent was set. When federal prosecutors in New York laughed off and rejected Kaplan’s demand that they charge Donziger, the judge appointed Chevron’s lawyers, Gibson Dunn, to act as the prosecutors!

So far, 60 Nobel Laureates, several US Senators and Congresspeople, and a Who’s Who of human rights groups have publicly registered their horror at this new corporate prosecution. (Note: Gibson Dunn represented me. Never again. I’ve taken the trash to the curb.)

Chevron also went after journalists, in one case, filing a complaint against the BBC Television reporter that broke the story that Chevron had destroyed key evidence in the case. I was that reporter — and survived with my job after a year of hearings. But Chevron’s prosecution did a damn good job of scaring off other journalists.

Some were scared off; some bought off. PBS News Hour wouldn’t touch the death-by-oil story. The official chief sponsor of the PBS News Hour? Chevron.

Here’s the story, broadcast by BBC and, in the US, by Democracy Now!, the story you won’t find on the Petroleum Broadcast System.

****

Palast with oil sludge on stick Ecuador

I’ve gone way out of my way to get ChevronTexaco’s side of the story. I finally chased them down in Ecuador’s capital, Quito. I showed them a study of the epidemic of childhood leukemia centered on where their company dumped oil sludge. Here’s their reply:

“And it’s the only case of cancer in the world? How many cases of children with cancer do you have in the States?”

Texaco’s lawyer, Rodrigo Perez, was chuckling and snorting.

“Scientifically, nobody has proved that crude causes cancer.”

OK, then. But what about the epidemiological study about children with cancer in the Amazon traced to hydrocarbons?

The parents of the dead kids, he said, would have some big hurdles in court:

“If there is somebody with cancer there, they must prove it is caused by crude or by the petroleum industry. And, second, they have to prove that it is OUR crude.”

Perez leaned over with a huge grin.

“Which is absolutely impossible.”

He grinned even harder.

Maybe some guy eating monkeys in the jungle can’t prove it. And maybe that’s because the evidence of oil dumping was destroyed.

Deliberately, by Chevron.

Jaime Varela, Chevron Attorney, Quito, Ecuador

I passed the ChevronTexaco legal duo a document from their files labeled “Personal y confidential.” They read in silence. They stayed silent quite a while. Jaime Varela, Chevron’s lawyer, was wearing his tan golf pants and white shoes, an open shirt and bespoke blue blazer. He had a blow-dried bouffant hairdo much favored by the ruling elite of Latin America and skin whiter than mine, a color also favored by the elite.

Jaime had been grinning too. He read the memo. He stopped grinning. The key part says,

“Todos los informes previos deben ser sacados de las oficinas principales y las del campo, y ser destruidos.”

“. . . Reports . . . are to be removed from the division and field offices and be destroyed.”
It came from the company boss in the States, “R. C. Shields, Presidente de la Junta.”

Removed and destroyed. That smells an awful lot like an order to destroy evidence, which in this case means evidence of abandoned pits of deadly drilling residue. Destroying evidence that is part of a court action constitutes fraud.

In the United States, that would be a crime, a jail-time crime. OK, gents, you want to tell me about this document?

“Can we have a copy of this?” Varela asked me, pretending he’d never seen it before in his life.
I’ll pretend with them, if that gets me information. “Sure. You’ve never seen this?”

The ritual of innocence continued as they asked a secretary to make copies. “We’re sure there’s an explanation,” Varela said. I’m sure there is. “We’ll get back to you as soon as we find out what it is.”

I’m still waiting.

4 ways extreme heat hurts the economy

The Conversation

4 ways extreme heat hurts the economy

Derek Lemoine August 2, 2021

Associate Professor of Economics, University of Arizona

<span class="caption">Corn yields can suffer in high heat. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="link rapid-noclick-resp" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/WholesalePrices/8c2c2c03df9f41298d1e7624bb1de30b/photo?Query=heat%20wave%20farm&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=101&currentItemNo=34" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank" data-ylk="slk:AP Photo/Seth Perlman">AP Photo/Seth Perlman</a></span> — AP Photo/Seth Perlman. Corn yields can suffer in high heat.

Summer 2021 will likely be one of the hottest on record as dozens of cities in the West experience all-time high temperatures. The extreme heat being felt throughout many parts of the U.S. is causing hundreds of deaths, sparking wildfires and worsening drought conditions in over a dozen states.

How does all this broiling heat affect the broader economy?

As an economist who has studied the effects of weather and climate change, I have examined a large body of work that links heat to economic outcomes. Here are four ways extreme heat hurts the economy – and a little good news.

1. Growth takes a hit

Research has found that extreme heat can directly hurt economic growth.

For example, a 2018 study found that the economies of U.S. states tend to grow at a slower pace during relatively hot summers. The data shows that annual growth falls 0.15 to 0.25 percentage points for every 1 degree Fahrenheit that a state’s average summer temperature was above normal.

Laborers in weather-exposed industries such as construction work fewer hours when it’s hotter. But higher summer temperatures reduce growth in many industries that tend to involve indoor work, including retail, services and finance. Workers are less productive when it’s hotter out.

2. Crop yields drop

Agriculture is obviously exposed to weather: After all, crops grow outdoors.

While temperatures up to around 85 F to 90 F (29-32 C) can benefit crop growth, yields fall sharply when thermostats rise further. Some of the crops hit hard by extreme heat include corn, soybeans and cotton. These reductions in yields could be costly for U.S. agriculture.

For example, a recent study I conducted found that an additional 2 degrees Celsius of global warming would eliminate profits from an average acre of farmland in the Eastern U.S.

A prominent example of this was the collapse of the Russian wheat harvest in response to the country’s 2010 heat wave, which raised wheat prices throughout the world.

3. Energy use soars

Of course, when it’s hot, energy use goes up as people and businesses run their air conditioners and other cooling equipment at full blast.

A 2011 study found that just one extra day with temperatures above 90 F increases annual household energy use by 0.4%. More recent research shows that energy use increases the most in places that tend to be hotter, probably because more households have air conditioning.

This increase in electricity use on hot days stresses electric grids right when people depend on them most, as seen in California and Texas during recent heat waves. Blackouts can be quite costly for the economy, as inventories of food and other goods can spoil and many businesses either have to run generators or shut down. For instance, the 2019 California blackouts cost an estimated $10 billion.

4. Education and earnings suffer

A long-term impact of increasingly hotter weather involves how it affects children’s ability to learn – and thus their future earnings.

Research has shown that hot weather during the school year reduces test scores. Math scores decrease more and more as the temperature rises beyond 70 F (21 C). Reading scores are more resistant high temperatures, which this research claims is consistent with how different regions of the brain respond to heat.

One study suggested that students in schools that lack air conditioning learn 1% less for every 1 degree Fahrenheit increase in the school year’s average temperature. It also found that minority students are especially affected by hotter school years, as their schools are especially likely to lack air conditioning.

Lost learning results in lower lifetime earnings and hurts future economic growth.

The impact of extreme heat on development, in fact, begins before we’re even born. Research has found that adults who were exposed to extreme heat as fetuses earn less during their lifetimes. Each extra day with average temperature above 90 F (32 C) reduces earnings 30 years later by 0.1%.

Air conditioning can help – to a point

Air conditioning can offset some of these effects.

For example, studies have found that having a working air conditioner means fewer people die, student learning isn’t compromised and extreme heat outside during pregnancy doesn’t hurt fetuses.

Not everyone has air conditioning, however, especially in normally cooler areas like Oregon, Washington and Canada that have experienced unusually extreme temperatures this year. And many people can’t afford to own or operate them. Survey data from 2017 found that around half of homes in the Pacific Northwest lacked air conditioning. And about 42% of U.S. classrooms lack an air conditioner.

While heat waves are shown to induce more households to install air conditioning, it’s hardly a panacea. By 2100, higher use of air conditioning could increase residential energy consumption by 83% globally. If that energy comes from fossil fuels, it could end up amplifying the heat waves that caused the higher demand in the first place.

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And in the U.S. South, where air conditioning is omnipresent, hotter-than-usual summers take the greatest toll on states’ economic growth.

In other words, as temperatures rise, economies will continue to suffer.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Derek Lemoine, University of Arizona.

Read more:

Derek Lemoine does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

When turning on faucets is a source of stress: Climate change shapes where Americans relocate

USA Today

When turning on faucets is a source of stress: Climate change shapes where Americans relocate

Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy, USA TODAY August 4, 2021

Garrett and Megan Warren, with their son, Reeve, 6, decided to relocate to Portland, Ore., from Los Angeles in 2016 because of drought conditions in California.

Megan Warren, who grew up in Southern California, had lived in Los Angeles for 15 years when she decided she’d had enough.

During periods of drought, when the city tried to conserve water and added plastic balls to the reservoir to reduce evaporation, neighbors in the Miracle Mile didn’t seem to care, she says.

She’d drive down her street and see one of them hosing off his driveway and others using sprinklers on their lawns. She had removed the “brown, dry and crispy grass” and water-dependent landscaping from her lawn and replaced it with succulents and ground cover that could survive in dry conditions.

“Every time I turned on the faucet to wash my dishes, it was really a source of stress for me,” she says. “I just wanted to go to a place where I could take a shower without worrying about water.”

As she explored her options, the Pacific Northwest seemed like a “dreamland.”

“There’s plentiful water, and everything is green and lush and growing,” she says. “And they have four seasons, and it’s beautiful.”

‘I don’t care that I’m overpaying’: Here’s how to win a real estate bidding war.

In 2016, her family picked Portland, Oregon, as their new home because the city had made ecological advances such as composting 67% of its waste, offered great public transportation options and had residents who seemed environmentally conscious.

Warren is among a growing number of Americans who may be starting to factor climate change into decisions about where they live.

Though there is no clear data about how many Americans have moved because of climate-related trends such as wildfires, heat waves, drought and hurricanes, there are signs that people may be weighing these risks when purchasing a home.

Will climate change prompt moves?

Nearly half (49%) of respondents say they plan to move in the next year, blaming extreme temperatures and the increasing frequency or intensity of natural disasters, according to a survey commissioned this year by real estate website Redfin. The survey involved 2,000 U.S. residents contacted from Feb. 25 to March 1.

Based on that insight, Redfin will announce Tuesday that it is adding local climate risk data to its site, the company told USA TODAY exclusively.

Redfin will integrate data from ClimateCheck, a startup that lets people access climate data using any address in the USA. Homebuyers who want to understand the risk of fire, heat, drought and storms will be able to see a rating from 0-100 associated with the county, city, ZIP code and neighborhood of the home they’re considering. On the scale, 0 indicates very low risk and 100 indicates very high risk of climate-related hazards for the home compared with others in the USA through the year 2050, a period within the lifespan of a 30-year mortgage signed today.

Previously, the site displayed only flood risk data.

Though climate change poses an increasingly large risk of higher insurance costs or displacement for homeowners, affordability and personal preferences have dictated homebuying decisions, economists say.

Are savings worth the risk?

“One of the reasons people haven’t been considering climate change when buying a home up to this point is because they don’t have the information in front of them,” says Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin. “Am I willing to buy a home that’s maybe 10% cheaper but has a 10-point higher flood risk?

“It’s hard to make those trade-offs when you don’t have that information at your fingertips,” she says.

Daryl Fairweather says homebuyers don't always have the information they need on climate-based risks.

Jenny Miller, who grew up near San Antonio, remembers spending her summers playing outside and camping.

Her 6-year-old son has experienced a very different kind of summer.

“My son doesn’t even want to go out and ride his bike,” Miller says. “The heat is super unbearable to the point where you really can’t do anything outdoors unless you want to be in water.”

After 30 years in the Lone Star State, Miller and her husband decided to relocate across the country to Kennebunk, Maine.

She cites climate change – which contributed to her husband’s worsening allergies – as the biggest factor in their decision to move.

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The average summer temperature in San Antonio has risen by 3.5 degrees since the 1970s, and the number of days each year when temperatures hit 100 degrees or more has climbed from one in 1970 to 25 in 2020, according to an analysis based on National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data by Climate Central, a science organization based in New Jersey.

Megan Warren and her family moved from Los Angeles to Portland, Ore., in 2016 to get away from drought conditions in California.

High risk, higher population growth

As temperatures rise, the probability of wildfires has increased in some regions.

Cal Inman, CEO of ClimateCheck, says people deserve to be informed about the current and future risk of wildfire. The six counties most at risk for wildfires are among the fastest-growing counties in the country, according to an analysis by ClimateCheck. Those fire-prone areas are in California, Idaho, Utah and Washington.

San Antonio had 25 days of above 100-degree-temperatures in 2020.

The population of Placer County, California, which has the highest wildfire risk – 98 out of 100 – in the country, grew by 7% in recent years, making it one of the fastest-growing counties in the country. Similarly, Morgan County in Utah grew by 17.5% and has a wildfire risk of 95 out of 100.

The other four counties that saw population growth and faced a severe risk of wildfire are Chelan County in Washington, Franklin County in Idaho, Weber County in Utah and Ventura County in California.

Access to climate change data

Inman, who is also a real estate developer, says his “aha moment” moment came when he discovered that real estate investors such as banks and insurance companies used climate risk data to inform their investing decisions.

Megan Warren and her son, Reeve, 6, prepare dinner together at their home in Portland, Ore., on July 26. Warren says that when the family lived in Los Angeles, they tried to save water from cooking to use for watering their plants because they had to conserve water as much as possible.

In his annual letter to business leaders last year, Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, wrote that “investors are recognizing that climate risk is investment risk.”

“What will happen to the 30-year mortgage – a key building block of finance – if lenders can’t estimate the impact of climate risk over such a long timeline, and if there is no viable market for flood or fire insurance in impacted areas?” Fink asked in the letter.

Inman, of ClimateCheck, says he wanted all the great research from the government and universities accessible to anyone buying a home.

“I don’t think people are factoring climate risk into the decision-making the way they do price point, proximity to work, proximity to school,” he says. “We’re just trying to arm the consumer with one more data point to make a decision about where to live.”

Matthew Kahn, professor of economics at the University of Southern California and author of “Climatopolis,” says regions that make smart decisions through good public policy will eventually win out.

“Those places that, either due to God or good public policy, are better able to adapt to Mother Nature’s punches and coach themselves to be more livable will be rewarded with a larger tax base as more people in jobs move there,” he says.

“If consumers have more information about the climate risks they could face before they purchase a home, they’re less likely to regret their choices,” he says.

From wildfires to milder winters

Andrea Clark and Jason Smith, a couple in their 30s, moved from Napa, California, to Cedar Springs, Michigan, last fall after three consecutive summers of wildfire-related evacuation alerts and coping with frequent power outages.

The air would be thick with smoke and their cars would be covered in ash even though the wildfires burned a considerable distance away.

“Your hair smelled of smoke, and you felt like you were at a campfire all the time when you were outside,” Clark says.

Clark, who worked at an alcohol rehabilitation center in Sonoma County, says the treatment center had to be evacuated last year.

There were times when she couldn’t get to work.

“All the routes that I would take to get to work, like quite literally, had fires on them,” she says. “Fire is definitely something we thought about quite a bit, because it was more inevitable than it was an anomaly.”

Then there’s the stress of planning.

Clark says that during the days she was on fire alert, she’d have to take their dog to work, pack a bag and leave it in the car in case she got stuck.

Last year, the couple decided to explore other places to live and picked Michigan, where Smith grew up.

Smith says he feels the weather in Cedar Springs, about 20 minutes north of Grand Rapids, has changed over the years.

“The winter weather is off a little bit here from what it was with my childhood,” he says. “It’s milder and not as much snow.”

For Clark, a native Californian, it’s been a big change. Knowing she’s getting a lot more house for her money eased the strain.

“It’s definitely a weather adjustment, but it’s nice,” she says. “It’s a lot of space, and we’re close to town and it’s an easy drive.”

You can leave, but can you escape?

For the Warrens, the Portland family, natural disasters seem unavoidable.

Oregon is dealing with water shortages and the nation’s largest wildfire, which has claimed 410,731 acres.

“It is terrifying to read,” Warren says. “Because again, that’s why we left, and now I feel like you can leave, but that doesn’t mean you’re solving the problem.”

Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy is the housing and economy reporter for USA TODAY.

4 Steps to Creating Your Own Edible Garden

Architectural Digest

4 Steps to Creating Your Own Edible Garden

David Nash August 2, 2021

It’s never a bad idea to cultivate some new interests—like growing your own year-round edible garden. Naturally, having a space to garden is key and—believe it or not—most of us have some usable real estate, whether it’s a full backyard, a small side yard, a patio, a balcony, or a window box. There are a few things to keep in mind when planning your edible garden, so we consulted award-winning landscape designer and urban farmer Christian Douglas, who’s spent over two decades creating extraordinary and productive outdoor spaces.

Through his two companies—The Backyard Farm Co. and his eponymous firm Christian Douglas Design—Douglas combines his passions for classic design and sustainable agriculture. “There’s pretty much always an edible component in everything we do,” he says. “We didn’t see a pandemic coming, for sure. But in some ways, we’ve been preparing for this a really long time by empowering self-reliance—and growing food is one way to do that.”

The San Francisco Bay Area–based designer and his team, including landscape architect Christian Macke and farming experts Christiana Paoletti and Amy Rice-Jones, help clients all over the world through a variety of virtual programs that serve to educate them about growing and harvesting food. “Based on a site assessment and soil samples, we guide them where to establish the garden (if they don’t already have one set up) and make a crop plan for the season,” Douglas says. “We tell them where to plant, when to plant, what to plant, and do regular check-ins every two weeks by FaceTime to provide feedback, tips, and advice from afar.”

Closer to home, where his clients include Tyler Florence—for whom he’s spent several years designing and maintaining a three-terraced kitchen garden, among other projects, at the chef’s Northern California property—Douglas prefers keeping his hands dirty with projects following roughly the same process.

Douglas and his team designed, planted, and maintain this three-terraced kitchen garden at chef Tyler Florence’s Northern California home.

Step 1: Assessing the light and the site

“We need to know there’s ideally between six and eight hours of sunlight—particularly for things like tomatoes and peppers. We look at the amount of sunlight to determine what can grow,” he explains. “Then, of course, we look at how much space you have–there are ways of growing horizontally and vertically to maximize space, particularly if you have a small area for your garden.”

For small spaces, Douglas suggests a couple of options, including growing your garden in plant pots that can be ordered online from places like Wayfair, Houzz, or your local nurseries (which also deliver). “We like to consider the style of the house when choosing the right pots for our clients. You can pick from terra-cotta, ceramic, wood, or even fabric pots—which are a quick way to get set up. These are planters that ship folded up, and you simply unfold them, fill them with soil, and start growing.”

If you have a bit more space, you can go bigger with galvanized troughs that have a “farmhouse” aesthetic or steel planters that are more modern. “You can also go for classic lumber planter boxes,” he offers. “While it’s likely you’ll need to order the others, you can have the materials for lumber planters delivered from your local hardware store. We’re big on supporting our local retailers, and during shelter-in-place most hardware stores and nurseries are staying open. You can pick up (they’ll even load your car for you) or they’ll deliver.”

Big galvanized metal troughs offer ample space for growing your vegetables.

Step 2: Knowing when to plant

“This question is very bioregional; everything is based on your last frost date. A lot of summer crops will perish if you get a hard frost on them when they’re small. If you’re unsure when your last frost is, you can go online to your regional master gardener program—it’s a great place to get a lot of local knowledge, particularly if you’re unsure of your bioregion.” The same principle applies for pulling up and replanting. “In California we can grow all year long, but in general planting for the next season depends on your first frost date. As soon as you start getting frost, it’s time to take everything out.” Douglas points out there are actually two planting seasons—the warm season and the cool season—and this dictates what you can plant successfully.

Though we don't all have room for a magnificent edible backyard like this one designed by Douglas, it's nice to think we could get our own blueberries, strawberries, or peppers growing.

Step 3: Deciding what to plant

“Some things you can grow with seeds, and others with vegetable starts,” Douglas says. “For seed planting, by next week you could be growing warm season crops like leafy greens—these are all your salad greens like arugula—as well as basil, cilantro, radishes, and carrots, which will start to yield in about 30 days. With vegetable starts (which you’d buy from a nursery ready to plug right into the ground) you’d go with heavy hitters like tomatoes, summer squash, Asian greens, and even shishito peppers. These give you a really great return on your investment and grow quickly so you can keep harvesting throughout the summer.”

Your cold season crops should go into the ground by late September. These are things like cauliflower, brussels sprouts, broccoli, romanesco, kale, and potatoes that will generally start producing in about 60 days. If you’re on the East Coast, you’ll eventually be under snow, but you can grow a bit indoors—all the Italian herbs, basil, and cilantro are a few options.

Herb planters line the steps of this deck—a perfect solution for growing food in a small space close to the kitchen.

Step 4: Maintaining your new crops

“After planting, you’ll want to water thoroughly so the soil is saturated, checking with your trowel or finger to see that the soil is moist a few inches deep. Following this you’ll water once a day–preferably in the morning–taking special care to ensure seeded areas don’t dry out until they’ve safely germinated and sprouted,” instructs Douglas. “As long as your soil is damp and the plants don’t look wilted, you’re watering enough. Remember that you’re growing healthy soil with living microbes and worms, which need a moisture to survive.” To get the best harvest possible, Douglas says you’ll want to feed your plants periodically. There are two ways to do this: You can add nutrients to the soil for the plants to take up in their roots, or you can dilute nutrients in water for them to absorb through their leaves. For either option, Douglas’s favorite brand is E.B. Stone Organics.

Notes on sourcing

Douglas is a fan of several organic seed companies based in the Midwest and on the East Coast, including High Mowing Seeds and Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. “Locally, in Marin County, we love Fairfax Lumber & Hardware—they have the soil, compost, seeds, vegetable starts, fertilizers, and really everything you need to get started. The San Francisco Bay Area has so many great places, including a number of Sloat Garden Centers, Green Jeans Garden Supply in Mill Valley, and The Living Seed Company in Point Reyes Station—they’re all still stocked and have great heirloom seeds.”

Other metropolitan areas may not have as many accessible garden centers, but Douglas contends it’s not impossible to source your starts. “It might be a little different if you’re living in downtown Manhattan, but all you have to do is go up the Hudson and there’s the Hudson Valley Seed Company. Wherever you are, there are all these small retailers crying out for business.”

“We want to redefine how we perceive the landscape by turning it into a resource we can use to feed our families and still maintain a space for entertaining,” remarks Douglas. “We want to prioritize food in our landscapes and shared spaces—if nothing else this may inspire people to think differently about their spaces—particularly with what’s happening in the world today.”

Column: Here’s why the GOP smears everything it doesn’t like as ‘socialism’

Los Angeles Times

Column: Here’s why the GOP smears everything it doesn’t like as ‘socialism’

Michael Hiltzik August 2, 2021

WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 14: Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) speaks during a news conference after the GOP Conference Chair election on Capitol Hill on Friday, May 14, 2021 in Washington, DC. House Republicans formally selected Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) Friday to replace Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY). (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times) — Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) exults upon her election as House GOP conference chair in May, replacing Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who went against Republican orthodoxy in the 2020 election. (Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times)

There are two things one can be sure of when politicians denigrate government programs as “socialist.” One is that they don’t know anything about “socialism.” The other is that they don’t know anything about the programs they’re trying to smear.

So here comes Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), the third-ranking member of the House Republican leadership, with an especially absurd example of the genre.

Marking the birthdays of Medicare and Medicaid, which were enacted on July 30, 1965, she took to Twitter to celebrate “the critical role these programs have played to protect the healthcare of millions of families.” Then she pivoted to add, “To safeguard our future, we must reject Socialist healthcare schemes.”

The cry of socialism has been patented by the powerful interests that desire to put a damper on progressive legislation….for over a quarter century.

Al Smith, Democratic candidate for President, in 1928

Stefanik’s remark was particularly incoherent in part because of the history of Republican opinion on Medicare and Medicaid: Almost universally, they derided the programs as “socialism.”

The Medicare and Medicaid bill placed before Congress by President Lyndon Johnson was “not only socialism — it is brazen socialism,” declared Sen. Carl Curtis (R-Neb.).

During his 1964 presidential campaign against Johnson, Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) asked: “Having given our pensioners their medical care in kind, why not food baskets, why not public housing accommodations, why not vacation resorts, why not a ration of cigarettes for those who smoke and of beer for those who drink?”

Ronald Reagan, functioning in 1961 as a mouthpiece for the American Medical Assn., reviled a precursor bill to the Medicaid/Medicare legislation as “simply an excuse to bring about what [Democrats] wanted all the time, socialized medicine.”

Reagan’s AMA patrons were only sticking to a successful script — their cry of “socialized medicine” had helped them defeat an effort by Harry Truman to enact a public healthcare plan in 1945. (The AMA also derided Truman and his aides as “followers of the Moscow party line.”)

More recently, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced that the GOP strategy in the 2020 election would be to present itself as “the firewall that saves the country from socialism.”

Did it work? This was the election that turned McConnell from Senate majority leader to Senate minority leader.

Stefanik, who has been making a name for herself on Capitol Hill as someone who will say anything if she thinks it will bring her advancement, wasn’t clear in her tweet what she meant by “Socialist healthcare schemes.”

Perhaps she meant the public option, a government-sponsored program to compete with private insurance. The public option was rejected during the debate preceding enactment of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, though it has lately gained new attention. But Stefanik didn’t need to be that specific; her goal was to place the term “socialism” out there.

Stefanik was using the term as a shibboleth — a code word directed at her political base, much as her GOP colleagues have used “vaccine passport” to demonize vaccination requirements designed to protect public health, or “Faucism” to undermine vaccination, or “critical race theory” to manipulate education standards.

Stefanik didn’t expect to be heard by the public at large, and certainly not by Democrats. She was merely sending a signal to her peeps that she was one of them.

The effectiveness of shibboleths doesn’t depend on an understanding of a particular term’s meaning — in fact, any such understanding would work against its effectiveness as a partisan dog whistle. It’s useful to recall that one of the rallying cries against the enactment of the ACA was “keep your government hands off my Medicare.”

Nevertheless, before looking at the technique’s long, discreditable history, we should be reminded that true socialism is defined as a belief that the means of production should be publicly, not privately, owned. That encompasses manufacturing plants and their machines and tools. Such conditions imply an economy in which output and the use of labor are publicly directed and social benefits evenly distributed.

Any functioning economy, then, comprises purely capitalist elements as well as those that might be labeled socialist. But the programs denigrated as socialist by the American right tend to place private enterprise at their center.

That includes the ACA, which dictates that all Americans must carry a form of health insurance and subsidizes their purchase by the working and middle class, but relies on private insurers to provide the coverage. In Medicaid and Medicare, the government sets the prices for procedures and services, but leaves it up to doctors and hospitals to decide whether to join.

The American system also recognizes that market capitalism, for all its virtues, has its flaws — chiefly that all participants don’t enter the marketplace with equivalent power. That’s why we have a safety net of social insurance programs aimed at ensuring that nobody is left entirely out of the market — the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid and Medicare, food stamps and child tax credits, free COVID-19 testing and vaccinations, to name a few.

As I’ve reported before, the branding of progressive programs, especially those proposed by Democrats, as “socialist” is not a new stratagem. The “socialism” smear has long since become so common that it’s easy — almost too easy — to ridicule.

The best example dates back to January 1936 and a gala dinner sponsored by the American Liberty League, a splinter group of wealthy business leaders and old-guard Democrats opposing Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Its star was former New York Gov. Al Smith, who had run for president on the Democratic ticket in 1928 as a progressive leader and then thrown in his lot with the party’s Wall Street wing.

No one was ever quite sure what motivated Smith’s apostasy, whether personal resentment of his former ally FDR or the financial blandishments of his new friends. FDR had a withering opinion of the Liberty League, describing it as “an organization that only advocates two or three out of the Ten Commandments…. [They] say you shall love God and then forget your neighbor.”

At the league gala, Smith told his audience, “Make a test for yourself. Just get the platform of the Democratic Party and get the platform of the Socialist Party and lay them down on your dining-room table, side by side…. After you have done that, make your mind up to pick up the platform that more nearly squares with the record, and you will have your hand on the Socialist platform.”

A thunderstruck FDR remarked to his Labor Secretary, Frances Perkins: “Practically all the things we’ve done in the federal government are like things Al Smith did as governor of New York. They’re things he would have done if he had been president of the United States. What in the world is the matter?”

But he also had an ace up his sleeve — a speech Smith had delivered during the 1928 campaign in which he ridiculed the same charge of “socialism” from Republicans that he now leveled against Roosevelt.

“The cry of socialism,” Smith declared, “has been patented by the powerful interests that desire to put a damper on progressive legislation. Is that cry of socialism anything new? Not to a man of my experience. I have heard it raised by reactionary elements and the Republican Party … for over a quarter-century.”

Nearly a century later, the GOP is still at it. The cry of “socialism” is still used to put a damper on progressive legislation, whether it’s requiring the wealthy to pay their fair share of taxes instead of enjoying the lowest tax rates in 50 years, or looking for further means to ensure universal healthcare. It’s been a tried-and-true method for decades, but as Stefanik’s inept version shows, it’s getting a little threadbare.

New Signs Indicate a Major Ocean Current Is on The Edge of Collapse Right Now

Science Alert – Environment

New Signs Indicate a Major Ocean Current Is on The Edge of Collapse Right Now

Mike Mcrae August 6, 2021

(Science Photo Library – NASA Earth Observatory/Getty Images)

If Earth had a pulse, it might be The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) – a swirl of ocean currents that carries tropical heat north towards polar waters.

Over the past century this global heartbeat has eased, slowing to a speed not seen in more than a millennium. New research based on a range of indices has now bolstered views that the weakening isn’t a trivial one, and critical transition is imminent.

The study conducted by climate scientist Niklas Boers from Freie Universität Berlin in Germany is just the latest to point out how the AMOC appears to be inching towards a major tipping point.

His research, recently published in Nature Climate Change, affirms the AMOC can remain relatively stable in two, distinct states.

One is the robust form we’ve become accustomed to over much of modern history, driven by significant amounts of warm water from the tropics evaporating on its journey north and becoming increasingly dense as its temperature drops and salinity increases.

This process not only shuffles heat energy throughout the ocean and atmosphere, it keeps the mix of minerals and organic compounds that fertilize ocean waters moving freely.

The other is a far weaker system with sluggish waters taking their time distributing warm, nutrient-rich water around the Atlantic.

Though studies on the AMOC were rare prior to recent decades, there have been signs that the enormous conveyor belt isn’t what it used to be.

Given the complexities of climate models, the exact reason for the apparent shift is unknown, leaving room to debate the exact prognosis and implications. But evidence is mounting that increasing run-off from melting ice is messing with the salinity and temperature in a way that effectively puts the brakes on the whole system.

According to some models, the AMOC might tolerate a degree of slowdown, remaining relatively stable even as the poles melt and possibly even returning to its former glory with little trouble.

But not everybody agrees. As Boers writes in his study, there’s good reason to suspect the network of currents might not only collapse into a weak form that’s stubbornly stable, but are right on the verge of doing so.

“The results presented here hence show that the recently discovered AMOC decline during the last decades is not just a fluctuation related to low-frequency climate variability or a linear response to increasing temperatures,” Boers writes.

“Rather, the presented findings suggest that this decline may be associated with an almost complete loss of stability of the AMOC over the course of the last century, and that the AMOC could be close to a critical transition to its weak circulation mode.”

The consequences of a drastic and sustained weakening of the currents aren’t fully understood. By some measures it might cool the planet, potentially even counteracting the worst of global warming.

But before you get too excited, this isn’t necessarily the good news you’d imagine. Huge shifts in the distribution of energy and nutrients in the Atlantic’s currents would have profound consequences on weather systems and ecology across Europe and the Americas, with massive economic effects on everything from agriculture to tourism.

What the Amazon might gain in rainfall, for example, Europe might lose in productivity.

While Boer is confident his modelling indicates the AMOC is on the cusp of tipping, there’s no easy way to predict timing of geological events. Even a sudden switch could take years to occur, if not decades.

The only thing that is clear is how our actions risk dragging us closer to the inevitable.

“So the only thing to do is keep emissions as low as possible,” Boer told Damian Carrington from The Guardian.

“The likelihood of this extremely high-impact event happening increases with every gram of CO₂ that we put into the atmosphere.”

This research was published in Nature Climate Change.

Oil producers used Facebook to counter President Biden’s clean energy message, a study shows.

The New York Times

Daily Business Briefing

Oil producers used Facebook to counter President Biden’s clean energy message, a study shows.

Hiroko Tabuchi August 5, 2021

An Exxon Mobile oil refinery in Channahon, Ill. The oil giant was one of the largest users of paid ads promoting fossil fuels on Facebook’s U.S. platforms in 2020. — Credit…Tannen Maury/EPA, via Shutterstock.

Soon after Joseph R. Biden Jr., then a presidential candidate, released his $2 trillion climate plan last year that promised to escalate the use of clean energy in the United States, the world’s major oil and gas dialed up their presence on Facebook.

Overnight on Facebook’s U.S. platforms, 25 of the biggest oil and gas producers, industry lobby groups and advocacy organizations unleashed a surge in ads promoting fossil fuels, according to ad spending data analyzed by InfluenceMap, a London-based watchdog that tracks corporate influence on climate policy.

By the following week, collective ad spend by the companies like Exxon Mobil — as well as powerful lobby groups like the American Petroleum Institute — had risen more than 1,000 percent, from a seven-day rolling average of about $6,700 a day to more than $86,000 a day, according to the data, based on disclosures by Facebook and tallied by InfluenceMap. For the whole of 2020, some 25,147 ads logged more than 431 million views, bringing Facebook almost $10 million in advertising revenue on those ads.

“Do you support America’s pipelines? We all depend on this critical infrastructure for affordable energy supplies!” said an ad run by Exxon starting on July 15, 2020, the day after Mr. Biden’s climate announcement. “Natural gas is already clean, affordable and efficient — and it’s getting better every day,” said an ad by the American Petroleum Institute starting on July 20.

Credit…via Facebook

Of the 25 companies and groups, Exxon and API were the largest users of paid ads on Facebook’s U.S. platforms in 2020, accounting for 62 percent of the total ads analyzed by InfluenceMap. The analysis found that ads were shown to more men than women overall, though there were some variations: posts that focused on fossil fuels as part of the climate solution were shown to more women, while those that argued oil and gas were a pragmatic choice economically were shown to more men.

Recent research has highlighted that though natural gas is a cleaner-burning fuel than coal or oil, releasing less greenhouse gases that are the driver of global warming, there are heavy emissions associated with producing the gas. Scientists, environmentalists and, increasingly, regulators have called out the portrayal of gas as a low-carbon fuel as misleading.

In a statement, Facebook pointed out that similar ads run on many platforms, including television, and that the social networking platform offered transparency by making its ad data available. (Many large traditional news organizations, including The New York Times, also accept oil-company advertising.) Facebook’s advertising policies also ban ads containing misleading information, and require those on social or political issues to be clearly labeled.

“We reject ads when one of our independent fact-checking partners rates them as false or misleading and take action against pages, groups, accounts, and websites that repeatedly share content rated as false,” Facebook said.

An Exxon spokesman, Todd M, Spitler, said the oil producer believed “that sound public policy is achieved when a variety of informed voices participate in the political process. For these reasons, Exxon Mobil exercises its right to support and participate in policy discussions.” An API spokeswoman, Megan Bloomgren, said that the lobby group’s social media spending was “a fraction of the robust investments our companies are making every day into breakthrough technological research to shape a lower carbon future.”

Geoffrey Supran, a Harvard University researcher who has examined the fossil fuel industry’s climate messaging, said aspects of InfluenceMap’s findings were consistent with his research. InfluenceMap identified several different types of messaging in the Facebook ads — including presenting oil and gas as part of the solution on climate change — that had become part of the industry’s playbook, he said.

An Exxon Mobil ad that appeared on Facebook. “Exxon Mobil exercises its right to support and participate in policy discussions,” a spokesman said.

Credit…via Facebook

“What our research has shown is that over the past decade or so, the industry has gradually shifted from outright disinformation about climate science to more subtle and insidious messaging,” he said. But those messages “work to muddy the waters to the same end — which is to stop action on climate change,” he said. “Media and communication platforms need to stop being used — they need to stop being pawns of fossil fuel propaganda and to protect the public.”

The analysis comes as a big part of Mr. Biden’s climate vision, his $1 trillion infrastructure package, moves forward in Congress, with substantial investments aimed at addressing climate change. But it is far from the broader package that Mr. Biden had sought, and has also angered climate advocates for extending a lifeline to fossil fuels by allocating some funds to natural gas infrastructure.

Facebook temporarily suspended new political ads ahead of the U.S. presidential elections in November to reduce misinformation and interference. The social networking site has since lifted that ban, and most of the groups tracked by InfluenceMap continue to run ads.

“While this research focused on 2020,” said Faye Holder, who authored the InfluenceMap report, “the reality is the oil and gas sector is continuing to use Facebook as a key tool.”

Hiroko Tabuchi is an investigative reporter on the climate desk. She was part of the Times team that received the 2013 Pulitzer for explanatory reporting.

Fracking in Pennsylvania used toxic ‘forever chemicals’ as Pa. officials maintain willful ignorance

The Philadelphia Inquirer – Opinion

Fracking in Pennsylvania used toxic ‘forever chemicals’ as Pa. officials maintain willful ignorance | Editorial

The Editorial Board August 5, 2021

The Inquirer’s editorial board identified the use of PFAS in eight fracking wells. Only the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection can shed light on the full scope.

The drill platform at the Cabot Oil & Gas Corp Flower drill site, outside of Dimock. Pa. An analysis by The Inquirer's editorial board of 280 chemicals used in fracking found that all but 48 had been assigned a safety warning. — The drill platform at the Cabot Oil & Gas Corp Flower drill site, outside of Dimock. Pa. An analysis by The Inquirer’s editorial board of 280 chemicals used in fracking found that all but 48 had been assigned a safety warning. MICHAEL BRYANT / Staff Photographer

When Physicians for Social Responsibility published a bombshell report last month about the use of toxic, so-called forever chemicals in fracking, many questions remained for Pennsylvania and the health risks for our state.

Through Freedom of Information Act requests, the health professionals’ environmental advocacy group found that in 2011, the Environmental Protection Agency authorized the use of a group of chemicals known as PFAS in fracking. That’s despite warnings from agency scientists that these chemicals pose health hazards — including the risk of cancer, liver problems, immune disorders, and adverse effects on fetuses and breastfeeding babies. The physicians group identified the use of the chemicals in at least 1,200 wells in six states, not including Pennsylvania.

An analysis of public data by this editorial board identified the use of one of these “forever chemicals” in at least eight Pennsylvania fracking wells between 2012 and 2014. Our findings should raise concerns for all Pennsylvanians.

What we found

Since 2012, Pennsylvania law and the Department of Environmental Protection require well operators to disclose chemicals used in the fracking process to the FracFocus database.

Using information from the database, we matched 280 chemicals to the PubChem library of the National Center for Biotechnology Information; the library includes safety information about each substance, including health and environmental warnings. A chemical can be assigned multiple warnings, and many are. This board identified 28 chemicals with an “acute toxicity” warning — the most serious safety label — and 106 with a health warning, an environmental warning, or both. Of the 280 chemicals on the list, 48 had no warning.

The “forever chemical” identified by the board is polytetrafluoroethylene, commonly known as Teflon — which PubChem reports is “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen.” According to David Andrews, a chemist and senior scientist at the Environmental Working Group, while polytetrafluoroethylene is a relatively stable compound and direct exposure is of low concern, “the real issue” is it “often has contaminants and byproducts in it.”

The compound could break down into fragments that, according to Andrews, are “incredibly persistent” and “known to cause toxic effects.” BiologistMaricel V. Maffini adds that this persistence “increases the likelihood of exposure and toxicity.”

State environmental officials have been testing water for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, but not with fracking in mind when targeting water sources. Instead, the state tested water sources within half a mile of military bases, fire training sites, landfills, and manufacturing facilities because they are known sources of contamination.

Four of the wells in which polytetrafluoroethylene has been used are in Washington County, where state officials did not test a single water source.

Steps needed

Now that the use of these chemicals in fracking is known, the commonwealth should test water near wells and waste ponds where “forever chemicals” were used.

Asked to comment on polytetrafluoroethylene being identified in at least eight wells, a Department of Environmental Protection spokesperson replied by email that the agency “is dedicated to ensuring that Pennsylvanians have safe drinking water, and in cases of water supply contamination, the supply must be replaced with water that meets or exceeds safe drinking water standards. Further, DEP understands that PFAS, an emerging environmental issue, is a serious concern that we are working to address.”

PFAS is an abbreviation for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, chemicals that were developed to prevent staining and corrosion; they are often contained in nonstick cookware and food packaging.

Other hazardous materials mayhave been used in Pennsylvania fracking. State officials maintain a list of about 430 chemicals protected from disclosure as trade secrets and say they can identify each. Asked whether the state would audit the list for “forever chemicals” — not disclosing the name of the substance or other details — a spokesperson wrote that such review is “possible” but time-consuming as “staff will need to review approximately 90 individual paper submissions” to identify the chemicals.

Compared with Pennsylvania’s important efforts to test water for those substances, reviewing 90 paper submissions for critical information about potential risk seems a minor cost.

Why it matters

The use of a chemical in fracking doesn’t necessarily mean that chemical reached water sources. But fracking waste water has spilled, and c hemicals from fracking fluids have previously been found in Pennsylvania’s water.

Even if fracking fluids pollute water, the potential harm to people or the environment depends on the quantity of chemicals and their interaction with water. But the mere existence of a chemical in fracking fluid creates the risk of a harmful spill. Between Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s report chastising state environmental officials for failing to regulate fracking, and industry’s rejection of the notion that fracking could contaminate water, Pennsylvanians can’t have much confidence that if something goes wrong it will be addressed promptly, thoroughly, and transparently.

There are tangible reasons to be concerned. A cluster of rare cancer in children prompted Gov. Tom Wolf to award $2.5 million toward studying the relationship of fracking and health. While waiting for the results — expected by the end of 2022 — a sensible step is for the Department of Environmental Protection to review the trade secret records to verify the extent to which toxic substances were injected into the commonwealth’s soil.

The only way to gain a full picture of those substances in Pennsylvania, and to prevent resulting harm, is for state environmental officials to answer: Are there “forever chemicals” on the list of substances used in fracking and registered as a trade secret? If more of those chemicals were used, and that information sat with environmental officials without disclosure or proper review, that would be a miscarriage of justice — and a violation of Pennsylvanians’ constitutional right to “pure water.”

Published

Aug. 5, 2021

The Inquirer Editorial Board

This opinion was written by a group of journalists who work separately from the newsroom to debate matters of public interest.

Scientists fear a critical Atlantic Ocean system might collapse, triggering ‘extreme cold’ and sea level rise

The Week

Scientists fear a critical Atlantic Ocean system might collapse, triggering ‘extreme cold’ and sea level rise

Brigid Kennedy, Contributing Writer August 5, 2021

Scientists are worried the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a “critical aquatic conveyer belt” that drives currents in the Atlantic Ocean, is at risk of near-complete collapse due to climate change, The Washington Post reports.

A shutdown of the crucial circulation system could “bring extreme cold to Europe and parts of North America, raise sea levels along the U.S. East Coast, and disrupt seasonal monsoons that provide water to much of the world,” the Post reports. The effects, in short, would be devastating.

“The mere possibility that the AMOC tipping point is close should be enough for us to take countermeasures,” warns Levke Caesar, a climate physicist at Maynooth University.

Scientists previously believed the AMOC would in fact weaken this century, but didn’t imagine total collapse within the next 300 years except in absolute worst-case warming scenarios. Now, according to a new study, that critical threshold “is most likely much closer than we would have expected,” said Niklas Boers, the study’s author and a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. Any exact date, however, is still unknown.

It would take years of monitoring and data collection to officially confirm the AMOC slowdown, but there is a degree of “jeopardy” associated with waiting for that proof, scientists say. Besides, possible consequences, like a “cold blob” in the ocean south of Greenland, are already being felt.

Frighteningly, if the system does devastatingly shut down, the switch off would be irreversible in human lifetimes. “It’s one of those events that should not happen, and we should try all that we can to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible,” said Boers. “This is a system we don’t want to mess with.”