It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
As the saying goes, an apple a day keeps the doctor away. But what's the key to growing a quality apple?
Apple trees need access to important nutrients, which come from the soil. However, soil is quite different from orchard to orchard.
Gregory Peck studies how sustainable orchard practices can improve the availability of nutrients. The research was recently shared in Soil Science Society of America Journal, a publication of the Soil Science Society of America.
Farmers are becoming more aware of the environmental impacts of different orchard management practices.
"Apple growers are interested in developing more sustainable nutrient management plans," explains Peck. "They are asking for more information to improve the soil health on their farms."
A healthy soil depends on many factors. One of those factors is the microbial community living in the soil. The community is made up of bacteria, nematodes, and fungi. Some of these microbes convert nutrients in the soil into forms that apple trees can use.
In the soil, microbes and plant roots interact in beneficial partnerships. Plants, like apple trees, release fluids from their roots into the soil. These fluids serve as a food source for the microbial community. In return, the microbes can help the apple trees.
"Bacteria serve many functions in an apple orchard soil," says Peck. "They recycle nutrients, promote plant growth, and even alter plant metabolisms."
In this study, the team applied composts - such as chicken litter and yard waste - to apple orchards.
Researchers found that adding compost increased the number of soil bacteria associated with recycling nutrients. The compost provides additional food for the bacteria to help them thrive.
This larger microbial community means more nutrients are available to the apple trees.
By applying compost, farmers could reduce the amount of fertilizer needed to provide nutrients for apple trees. This could help their pocketbooks and the environment.
Some fertilizers come from non-renewable sources. Adding in compost to a farm's nutrient management plan reduces the dependence on those sources. It also provides a sustainable use for materials otherwise considered to be waste.
On a practical level, this research shows that farmers can successfully integrate compost with quicker release fertilizer sources.
"Although sustainable apple production is not defined by a single practice, we think this research contributes to the long-term goal of increasing farm sustainability," says Peck.
In the future, the team hopes to replicate this study in different regions with different soil characteristics. They would also like to take a deeper look into the roles of fungi in the microbial community of orchard soils.
"We can produce great apples, and apple orchard farmers can supply a huge population with delicious, nutritious food," Peck adds.
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Gregory Peck is a researcher at Cornell University. This work was supported by Cornell University - College of Agriculture and Life Science, the Virginia Agricultural Council, the Virginia Apple Research Program, the Virginia Agricultural Experiment Station, and Virginia Tech - Department of Horticulture.
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The research team used pots to ensure uniformity in the soil prior to planting the trees and adding the fertilizer treatments.
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Greg Peck
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Researchers air-dried harvested apple roots. The roots were further dried in an oven to measure biomass.
CREDIT
Greg Peck
Mining precious rare-earth elements from coal fly ash with a reusable ionic liquid
Rare-earth elements are in many everyday products, such as smart phones, LED lights and batteries. However, only a few locations have large enough deposits worth mining, resulting in global supply chain tensions. So, there's a push toward recycling them from non-traditional sources, such as waste from burning coal -- fly ash. Now, researchers in ACS' Environmental Science & Technology report a simple method for recovering these elements from coal fly ash using an ionic liquid.
While rare-earth elements aren't as scarce as their name implies, major reserves are either in politically sensitive locations, or they are widely dispersed, which makes mining them challenging. So, to ensure their supply, some people have turned to processing other enriched resources. For instance, the ash byproduct from coal-fired power plants has similar elemental concentrations to raw ores. Yet, current methods to extract these precious materials from coal fly ash are hazardous and require several purification steps to get a usable product. A potential solution could be ionic liquids, which are considered to be environmentally benign and are reusable. One in particular, betainium bis(trifluoromethylsulfonyl)imide or [Hbet][Tf2N], selectively dissolves rare-earth oxides over other metal oxides. This ionic liquid also uniquely dissolves into water when heated and then separates into two phases when cooled. So, Ching-Hua Huang, Laura Stoy and colleagues at Georgia Tech wanted to see if it would efficiently and preferentially pull the desired elements out of coal fly ash and whether it could be effectively cleaned, creating a process that is safe and generates little waste.
The researchers pretreated coal fly with an alkaline solution and dried it. Then, they heated ash suspended in water with [Hbet][Tf2N], creating a single phase. When cooled, the solutions separated. The ionic liquid extracted more than 77% of the rare-earth elements from fresh material, and it extracted an even higher percentage (97%) from weathered ash that had spent years in a storage pond. Finally, rare-earth elements were stripped from the ionic liquid with dilute acid. The researchers found that adding betaine during the leaching step increased the amounts of rare-earth elements extracted. The team tested the ionic liquid's reusability by rinsing it with cold water to remove excess acid, finding no change in its extraction efficiency through three leaching-cleaning cycles. The researchers say that this low-waste approach produces a solution rich in rare-earth elements, with limited impurities, and could be used to recycle precious materials from the abundance of coal fly ash held in storage ponds.
The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. ACS' mission is to advance the broader chemistry enterprise and its practitioners for the benefit of Earth and all its people. The Society is a global leader in promoting excellence in science education and providing access to chemistry-related information and research through its multiple research solutions, peer-reviewed journals, scientific conferences, eBooks and weekly news periodical Chemical & Engineering News. ACS journals are among the most cited, most trusted and most read within the scientific literature; however, ACS itself does not conduct chemical research. As a leader in scientific information solutions, its CAS division partners with global innovators to accelerate breakthroughs by curating, connecting and analyzing the world's scientific knowledge. ACS' main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.
Rising greenhouse gases pose continued threat to Arctic ozone layer
New study shows climate change is increasing ozone depletion over the Arctic
There is a race going on high in the atmosphere above the Arctic, and the ozone layer that protects Earth from damaging ultraviolet (UV) radiation will lose the race if greenhouse gas emissions aren't reduced quickly enough.
A new study from an international team of scientists, including University of Maryland Professor Ross Salawitch, shows that extremely low winter temperatures high in the atmosphere over the arctic are becoming more frequent and more extreme because of climate patterns associated with global warming. The study also shows that those extreme low temperatures are causing reactions among chemicals humans pumped into the air decades ago, leading to greater ozone losses.
The new findings call into question the commonly held assumption that ozone loss would grind to a halt in just a few decades following the 2010 global ban on the production of ozone depleting chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and halons.
The study--which was jointly conducted by UMD, the Alfred Wegener Institute's Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, and the Finnish Meteorological Institute--was published in the journal Nature Communications on June 23, 2021.
"We're in a kind of race between the slow and steady decline in CFCs, which take 50 to 100 years to go away, and climate change, which is causing polar vortex temperature extremes to become colder at a rapid pace," said Ross Salawitch, who is a professor in the UMD Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science, the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center. "The increasingly cold temperatures create conditions that promote ozone depletion by CFCs. So, even though these compounds are slowly going away, Arctic ozone depletion is on the rise as the climate changes."
New data from the study showed the lowest Arctic polar vortex temperatures and the highest ozone losses on record in 2020, beating the previous records set nine years ago in 2011.
The polar vortex is a relatively self-contained, low-pressure system that forms in the stratosphere--at an altitude of about 12 to 50 kilometers (7.5 to 31 miles)--over the Arctic every autumn and stays for varying durations throughout the winter to spring. The pattern of warm and cold winter temperatures in the polar vortex is very irregular, so not every winter is extremely cold.
But the trend toward more frequent and more extreme low temperatures in the polar vortex concerns the researchers, because those conditions promote the formation of clouds, and that promotes ozone loss in the polar stratosphere.
Most of the chlorine and a significant amount of the bromine in the stratosphere comes from the breakdown of CFCs, halons and other ozone-depleting substances. Normally within the Arctic polar vortex the chlorine is non-reactive, but clouds provide the right conditions for the chlorine to change form and react with bromine and sunlight to destroy ozone.
Despite drastic reduction of the industrial production of CFCs and halons since the Montreal Protocol in 1987 and the global ban that followed in 2010, these long-lasting compounds are still abundant in the atmosphere. According to the World Meteorological Organization, atmospheric chlorine and bromine produced by humans is not expected to fall below 50% of their highest levels until the end of this century.
To determine what this situation means for the future, the researchers projected ozone loss out to the year 2100 based on the long-term temperature trend in the polar vortex and the expected decline in chlorine and bromine compounds. They based their predictions on the output from 53 top climate models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
"All but one of the climate models we looked at show that exceptionally cold winters in the polar vortex will get colder over time," Salawitch said. "And the more greenhouse gas emissions there are, the steeper the trend, which means greater ozone depletion."
Combining these projections with analyses of meteorological data from the past 56 years, the researchers confirmed that the Arctic is already experiencing a significant trend toward lower stratospheric temperatures and associated increases in ozone losses. What's more, their observations reveal that these trends are occurring at rate consistent with the fastest climate models.
"We have been saying that a train is coming for a number of years now," said Salawitch, pointing to research papers he published in 2004 and 2006 that showed extreme winters in the Arctic were becoming colder. "We've now seen the train whizzing by with record ozone loss in 2011 and now in 2020. So, this paper is really a wake-up call that something is happening in the atmosphere that's really important for ozone, and it looks like greenhouse gases are driving it."
Salawitch and his colleagues do not yet fully understand how increasing greenhouse gas emissions and the associated changes to global climate are causing the extreme cold winters in the stratospheric layer of the polar vortex. But some of the underlying mechanisms are understood. Global warming occurs in part because greenhouse gases trap heat closer to Earth's surface, which allows cooling of the upper layers in the stratosphere, where the ozone layer is located. Warming at the surface causes changes to prevailing wind patterns, and the researchers suggest that these changes also produce lower temperatures in the polar vortex.
The researchers also note that recent years have seen a rapid increase in methane, a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, in the lower atmosphere. As this gas travels to the stratosphere, it increases humidity, which also leads to conditions that promote ozone-destroying chemical reactions in the Arctic.
Because ozone filters much of the sun's potentially harmful UV radiation, a depleted ozone layer over the Arctic can result in more UV radiation reaching the surface of the Earth over Europe, North America and Asia when the polar vortex dips south.
But there is hope for avoiding future ozone depletion, according to the researchers. Their study shows that substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions over the coming decades could lead to a steady decline in conditions that favor large ozone loss in the Arctic stratosphere.
The research paper, Climate change favours large seasonal loss of Arctic ozone, Peter von der Gathen, Rigel Kivi, Ingo Wohltmann, Ross J. Salawitch, Markus Rex, was published in the journal Nature Communications on June 23, 2021.
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This work was supported by NASA's Atmospheric Composition and Modeling Program (Award No. 80NSSC19K0983) and the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) expedition. The content of this article does not necessarily reflect the views of these organizations.
Media Relations Contact: Kimbra Cutlip, 301-405-9463, kcutlip@umd.edu
University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences 2300 Symons Hall College Park, Md. 20742 http://www.cmns.umd.edu @UMDscience
About the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences
The College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland educates more than 9,000 future scientific leaders in its undergraduate and graduate programs each year. The college's 10 departments and more than a dozen interdisciplinary research centers foster scientific discovery with annual sponsored research funding exceeding $200 million.
Geckos might lose their tails, but not their dinner
Ability to capture prey unaffected by defensive tail detachment
VIDEO: VIDEO DEPICTS THE AWKWARD MOTION OF A GECKO CAPTURING PREY POST TAIL LOSS. view more
CREDIT: MARINA VOLLIN/UCR
A new UC Riverside study finds geckos are fierce hunters whether or not their tails are attached to their bodies.
Geckos and other lizards can distract predators by quickly dropping their tails. The tail vertebrae are perforated, making it easier to disconnect them without any formation of scar tissue or loss of blood. Though this ability can keep lizards from being eaten, the maneuver is performed at a cost.
"Other studies have documented the negative effects of tail loss on lizards' ability to run, jump, mate, and reproduce," said UCR biologist Marina Vollin, lead author of the study. "However, few have examined their ability to capture food when they lose their tails, which is critical for regenerating the tail and for overall survival."
To help fill this gap in understanding, Vollin and Tim Higham, an associate professor in UCR's Department of Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology, observed intact and newly tailless geckos on the hunt. Their work is published in a recent Integrative and Comparative Biology journal article.
The researchers found that geckos successfully captured crickets about 77% of the time both before and after losing tails -- a surprising retention of accuracy since tails appear to help stabilize gecko body positions during and after a strike.
"The geckos were much slower without tails, and their attack strikes much more awkward," Vollin said.
Western banded geckos, native to the southwestern U.S. and Mexico, are one of the few reptiles that help control scorpion populations.
In this study, the geckos were observed hunting crickets in artificial enclosures. Vollin and Higham are planning future studies in which they hope to observe geckos hunting in the wild and feeding on other small insects.
"It is very possible that geckos suffer a loss in feeding performance and success following autotomy in nature given the complexity of the habitat and more room for the prey to escape," Higham said.
They'll also study whether geckos are able to fully regain their agility once their tails have regenerated, which can take up to a month.
"It's important to get a sense of how they operate in nature, where additional elements could affect whether they have more difficulty capturing prey," Vollin said.
Understanding how lizards like the Western banded gecko are able to survive carries a significance beyond the lizards themselves. Though they eat a variety of small insects, they also serve as a key food source for birds, snakes, and other predatory mammals.
"I've heard them referred to as 'nature's popcorn,' because other animals can eat a bunch of them at once, they're abundant, and easy to acquire," Vollin said. "They're a big part of the base of the food chain."
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Western banded gecko, native to the southwestern US and Mexico.
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Marina Vollin/UCR
Bird migration takes plants in wrong direction to cope with climate change
Migratory birds carry most seeds in the wrong direction to help plants cope with climate change, new research shows.
The study, published in Nature, reveals that the vast majority of plants from European woodlands are dispersed by birds migrating to warmer latitudes in the south, while far fewer are dispersed by birds migrating north.
As a consequence of global warming, the optimal climatic conditions of species are moving towards cooler latitudes, forcing the redistribution of life on Earth.
Mobility allows many animals to reach new areas with a suitable climate.
However, movement of plant species depends on the dispersal of their seeds at long distances.
The new study, by 18 researchers from 13 European institutions, says the trend for southwards dispersal by migratory birds is counterproductive if plants are to adapt to climate change.
"Contemporary climate change is so fast that many plants require dispersal distances far beyond those that normally take place locally," said lead author Juan Pedro González-Varo, of the University of Cádiz.
"This is where migratory birds can play a major role, as they are capable of dispersing seeds over tens of kilometres.
"With this research, we wanted to know the potential of plant species to be dispersed by migratory birds towards future favourable areas."
The research focussed on bird species that consume fruits and disperse the seeds.
Researchers incorporated information on the fruiting period of plants and migratory patterns of birds, in order to identify the potential for long-distance seed dispersal towards cooler or warmer latitudes.
They examined 13 woodlands across Europe, including a total of 949 interactions between 46 bird and 81 plant species.
Only 35% of the plants from these woodland communities are dispersed by birds that migrate northwards in spring.
In contrast, 86% of plants are dispersed by birds migrating to warmer areas in autumn (the figures do not add up to 100% because some plants' seeds are carried both north in spring and south in autumn).
Dr Benno Simmons, of the University of Exeter, said: "Under climate change, species redistribute themselves to track suitable climate conditions.
"As plants cannot move themselves, they require species like birds to disperse their seeds to new areas.
"We wanted to know how well migratory birds might be able to do this.
"We found that northward dispersal to cooler areas is done by only a small number of migratory bird species, some of which are under hunting pressure.
"Our study emphasises the importance of these species for helping European plant communities experiencing climate change."
González-Varo added: "For a plant species to be dispersed by birds migrating north, it must bear fruit between February and April.
"Plants with fruits in this period have a very long fruiting period, as occurs in junipers, or a very late fruiting period, as occurs in ivy."
Although all migratory birds in Europe migrate in the same direction (north in spring and south in autumn), the study shows that the birds with the greatest potential to disperse European plants to cooler latitudes are Palearctic species - birds that winter in central and southern Europe or North Africa.
These species are robins, blackcaps, blackbirds and various species of thrushes, which are in general very common and abundant on the European continent.
"Although these are common species, the potential for seed dispersal to the north lies with only a handful of species, some of them heavily hunted in the Mediterranean Basin, both legally and illegally," said González-Varo.
"We believe that our study gives added value to these species, since they would be responsible helping European plant communities respond to climate change."
The findings have major implications for the future composition of European woodlands, as many species could fail to move fast enough to keep up with changing conditions.
The paper is entitled: "Limited potential for bird migration to disperse plants to cooler latitudes."
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A juvenile blackbird (Turdus merula) eating Mediterranean buckthorn fruits (Rhamnus alaternus). Resident, breeding or non-migrating birds typically disperse seeds at short distances, mostly within 1km from source plants, which is insufficient for plants to keep pace with current climate change.
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Juan P. González-Varo
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A blackcap eating dogwood fruits. Dogwoods have a short fruiting period in autumn, when blackcaps migrate southwards. Thus, migratory blackcaps have the potential to disperse dogwood seeds at long distances, not to cooler, but to warmer latitudes.
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Luis Ojembarrena
New UN report calls for urgent help for world's oceans
Life in our oceans will continue to be destroyed without a coordinated global approach
A new United Nations report calls for an urgent change in the way the world's oceans are managed.
The report from the International Resource Panel, hosted by the UN Environment Programme, raises concerns that if changes are not made quickly, the consequences will be dire.
The Governing Coastal Resources Report was launched today at an event addressed by Ambassador Peter Thomson, UN Secretary-General's Special Envoy for the Ocean. It outlines the effect land-based human activities have on the marine environment.
Put into context - 80 per cent of marine and coastal pollution originates on land, but there are very few, if any, truly effective governance mechanisms that manage land-ocean interactions. The report provides policy makers with options to help reduce the effect of land-based activities on coastal resources and support a transition to a sustainable ocean-based economy.
"The report draws together an evidence base that demonstrates beyond question the need for enhanced governance coordination between terrestrial activities and marine resources," said Izabella Teixeira and Janez Potočnik, Co-Chairs of the International Resource Panel.
Lead author of the report - Steve Fletcher, Professor of Ocean Policy and Economy and Director of the Sustainability and the Environment research theme at the University of Portsmouth, said: "There is no doubt that the future of our oceans are at risk, and so is the critical role they play in supporting life on Earth and human wellbeing, as well as regulating the climate. This is a global issue in which isolated interventions will have minimal impact. Systemic change is the key to success by bringing together countries, governments, business and communities to take collective action."
Professor Fletcher, who is also Director of the University's Revolution Plastics initiative, added: "We've got to stop looking at the problem in a fragmented way - land-based activities in one country may contribute to degradation of coastal resources in another region. This should now be a global priority where the most impactful land-based activities are prioritised for urgent action and so generating the most benefit most quickly."
The report sends five key messages to world policy makers:
Living coastal resources are most threatened by land-based activities. Agriculture, ports and harbours and aquaculture are particularly impactful activities.
All parts of the blue economy are vulnerable to changes in coastal resources arising from land-based activities, particularly fishing, aquaculture and tourism.
Existing land-sea governance approaches cannot cope with the impacts on coastal resources created by land-based activities.
Land-sea governance urgently needs to be strengthened to protect coastal resources from the impacts of land-based activities and to support the transition to a sustainable blue economy.
Tackling the impacts of land-based activities on coastal resources is a global priority.
The report also provides policy makers with five options for strengthening existing land-sea governance structures:
Ecosystem-based management should be a guiding principle of coastal resource governance as it provides a holistic approach to the consideration of all influences on coastal resources.
Existing area-based management tools, with enhancement and adaptation, should be used to counteract the impacts of land-based activities on coastal resources.
Improved coordinating mechanisms are needed to overcome fragmented governance between sectors and between terrestrial and marine governance arrangements.
Implementation-focused capacity development programmes should be formulated and disseminated to target land-sea governance practitioners.
Filling evidence gaps, particularly related to the impacts of land-based activities on abiotic coastal resources, should be prioritised and their implications for effective governance determined.
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East Antarctic summer cooling trends caused by tropical rainfall clusters
A new study identifies key linkages between rainfall occurring in the tropics and climate trends in Antarctica
Our planet is warming due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions; but the warming differs from region to region, and it can also vary seasonally. Over the last four decades scientists have observed a persistent austral summer cooling on the eastern side of Antarctica. This puzzling feature has received world-wide attention, because it is not far away from one of the well-known global warming hotspots - the Antarctic Peninsula.
A new study published in the journal Science Advances by a team of scientists from the IBS Center for Climate Physics at Pusan National University in South Korea, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, Ewha Womans University, and National Taiwan University, uncovers a new mechanism that can explain the regional warming/cooling patchwork over Antarctica. At the heart of the mechanism are clusters of rainfall events in the western tropical Pacific, which release massive amounts of heat into the atmosphere by condensation of water vapor. Warm air rises over the organized rainfall clusters and sinks farther away. This pressure difference creates winds which are further influenced by the effect of earth's rotation. The interplay of these factors generates a large-scale atmospheric pressure wave which travels from west to east along the equator with a speed of about several hundred kilometers per day and which drags along with it the initial rainfall clusters. This propagating atmospheric wave is known as the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO), named after Roland Madden and Paul Julian, who discovered this phenomenon in 1971. The characteristic atmospheric pressure, convection and wind anomalies, which fluctuate on timescales of 20-70 days, can extend into the extratropics, reaching even Antarctica.
The international research team arrived at their conclusions by analyzing observational datasets and specially designed supercomputer climate model simulations. "Our analysis provides clear evidence that tropical weather systems associated with the Madden-Julian Oscillation can directly impact surface temperatures over East Antarctica." says Prof. Pang-Chi Hsu from Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, who co-led the study.
More specifically, as the MJO rainfall clusters move into the western Pacific towards the location of the Solomon Islands, the corresponding global atmospheric wave tends to cool East Antarctica three to eleven days later (Image, right panel). In contrast, when the MJO-related rainfall occurs in the Indian Ocean, East Antarctic shows a pronounced warming (Image, left panel).
"During recent decades, MJO rainfall and pressure changes preferably occurred over the western tropical Pacific but decreased over the Indian Ocean. This situation has favored cooling of East Antarctica during austral summer.", says Prof. June-Yi Lee from the IBS Center for Climate Physics and Pusan National University, and co-leader of the study.
The research team estimated that up to 20% to 40% of the observed summer cooling trend in East Antarctica from 1979 to 2014 can be attributed to the long-term changes in the character and longitudinal core location of the MJO. Other contributing factors include the ozone hole and the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation - a slowly varying weaker companion of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. The new Science Advances study highlights that climate change even in remote regions such as Antarctica, can be linked to processes that happen nearly 10,000 km away.
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FIRE HIM CRTC chairman under fire over one-on-one meetings with big telecom lobbyists
Anja Karadeglija
Meetings that Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission chairman Ian Scott had with lobbyists from big telecom companies – including a one-on-one at an Ottawa pub with the now-CEO of Bell – are further reasons to overturn a recent CRTC decision and fire Scott, a small internet provider told the Liberal government.
TekSavvy has filed a petition to the federal cabinet asking it to reverse the CRTC’s May decision not to lower internet wholesale rates. Critics have said that surprise ruling, in which the CRTC reversed a 2019 decision that lowered rates, will lead to higher internet service prices for Canadians.
MPs on the House of Commons industry committee also weighed in on the decision in a report released this week, saying they were “very frustrated with the CRTC’s decision to cancel the new wholesale rates.”
“The committee questions this change of direction by the CRTC,” it said.
TekSavvy announced Thursday it has filed additional evidence, based on lobbying records, that Scott held “numerous ex parte meetings with litigants with open CRTC files, apparently unaccompanied.”
“In particular, Mr. Scott held at least 11 reported solo meetings with Bell, Rogers or Shaw during the course of the CRTC’s open and active file,” TekSavvy said in a press release.
“Remarkably, at least one of Mr. Scott’s ex parte meetings took place in a social setting, alone, with the CEO of one of the primary litigants in the open file. Mr. Scott met one-on-one with Mirko Bibic, then chief operating officer of Bell (and now CEO) at D’Arcy McGee’s, an Ottawa bar on December 19, 2019.”
The company pointed out the meeting with Bibic was held a week after the CRTC began the review of its 2019 decision to lower the rates. That review application was part of an effort by the country’s biggest telecom companies to fight the lower rates through every avenue available to them, including the courts and an appeal to cabinet.
Four years ago the Liberal government fired CRTC commissioner Raj Shoan for reasons including meetings with stakeholders who had open files in front of the commission. Shoan later argued in court documents that such meetings are commonplace, and that given some companies file more than a dozen CRTC applications a year, they’d never have a chance to meet with the commission if that rule was followed.
The meetings between Scott and the large telecoms were first reported by the Toronto Star earlier this month. A former CRTC chairman told the Star that when he was at the commission, his practice was to include a third party in meetings with lobbyists, while a former vice-chair said the recommended practice was to have such meetings in the office and have a third party present.
Asked whether the CRTC has any policies about meeting with lobbyists, spokesperson Patricia Valladao said that prior to accepting such meetings, “it is always established by parties that matters that are in front of the commission are not to be discussed.”
“To better understand the Canadian communications industry, CRTC staff and commissioners routinely meet with stakeholders, including consumer groups. These meetings must comply with the reporting obligations set out in the Lobbying Act,” Valladao said in an email.
A Bell spokesperson said Scott’s meeting with Bibic “in the public establishment, a busy and popular meeting place in Ottawa for government officials, public servants and news media,” was registered in the federal lobby registry, with broadcasting as the topic of discussion.
“Meetings between Bell representatives and government officials cover a range of topics including broadcasting and telecom policy, infrastructure development and technology issues. These meetings occur regularly and are registered in the federal lobby registry as required,” the spokesperson said.
In its report on the affordability of telecommunications services released this week, the House industry committee said that during its study, independent ISPs “repeatedly stressed the importance of implementing” the lower wholesale rates “to provide affordable services to their customers and thereby put downward pressure on the price of services offered” by incumbent telecom companies.
It said the decision not to lower rates, alongside a separate CRTC ruling on wireless wholesale access, doesn’t meet “Canadians’ expectations of affordability in the telecommunications sector.”
“They certainly do not advance this objective as much as they should, and the Committee believes that the CRTC should do more to address affordability,” it said.
The committee added the “federal government should intervene to encourage the CRTC to put in place decisions that promote specific objectives, including affordability and accessibility.”
Among 16 recommendations, the committee said the CRTC should set standards for what makes an affordable rate.
“While prices have gone down in recent years, they are still too high for much of the population. The Committee is aware that some people have to choose between buying food and paying their bills for telecommunications services,” the report outlined.
The committee also took aim at the process that has seen the implementation of new CRTC rates drag for years.
It said the government should “issue a directive to encourage the CRTC to revise its process for implementing and appealing new rates so that incumbent telecommunications service providers stop using the appeals process as a delay tactic.”