Climate change may be behind the massive craters forming in Siberia

The massive crater appeared violently and explosively in the Siberian tundra last year -- a powerful blowout of methane gas throwing ice and rock hundreds of feet away and leaving a gaping circular scar in the empty and eerie landscape.

© From Igor Bogoyavlensky/Skoltech

It was the 17th hole to appear in the remote Yamal and Gyda peninsulas in the Russian Arctic since the first was spotted in 2013, mystifying scientists. The craters are thought to be linked to climate change. Drone photography, 3D modeling and artificial intelligence are helping to reveal their secrets.

"The new crater is uniquely well preserved, as surface water hadn't yet accumulated in the crater when we surveyed it, which allowed us to study a 'fresh' crater, untouched by degradation," said Evgeny Chuvilin, lead research scientist at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology's Center for Hydrocarbon Recovery in Moscow.

It was also the first time researchers have been able to fly a drone deep into a crater -- reaching 10 to 15 meters below ground, allowing them to capture the shape of the underground cavity where methane had built up.

Chuvilin was part of a team of Russian scientists who visited the crater in August 2020. Their findings were published in the journal Geosciences last week.

Climate change

The drone took around 80 images, allowing the researchers to build a 3D model of the crater, which is 30 meters deep -- imagine three buses end to end.

Study author Igor Bogoyavlensky, of the Oil and Gas Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, served as the drone pilot and said he had to lie down on the edge of the 10-story deep crater and dangle his arms over the edge to control the drone.

"Three times we got close to losing it, but succeeded in getting the data for the 3D model," he said.

The model, which showed unusual grottoes or caverns in the lower part of the crater, largely confirmed what scientists had hypothesized: Methane gas builds in a cavity in the ice, causing a mound to appear at ground level. The mound grows in size before blowing out ice and other debris in an explosion and leaving behind the massive crater.

What's still unclear is the source of the methane. It could come from deep layers within the Earth or closer to the surface -- or a combination of the two.

Permafrost is a huge natural reservoir of methane, a potent greenhouse gas much more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat and warming the planet. Warmer summers -- the Arctic is warming two times faster than the global average -- have weakened the permafrost layer, which acts as a cap, making it easier for gas to escape. Some experts estimate that soils in the permafrost region hold twice as much carbon as the atmosphere does, making the region extremely important in the fight against climate change.

"Climate change, of course, has an impact on the probability of gas blowout craters appearing in the Arctic permafrost," Chuvilin said.

With the use of satellite imagery, the researchers were also able to pinpoint when the crater formed. They believe the mound would have exploded at some point between May 15 and June 9, 2020. The crater was first spotted during a helicopter flight on July 16, 2020.

The timing was not random, according to Chuvilin. "This is the time of the year when there's a lot of solar energy influx, which causes the snow to melt and the upper layers of the ground to heat up, and that causes changes in their properties and behavior."

While these craters have appeared in a very sparsely populated region, they do pose risks to Indigenous people and to oil and gas infrastructure. The holes are usually found by accident during helicopter flights or by reindeer herders.

Mapping and predicting crater blowouts

While 17 craters have been documented so far, it's not known how many there are in total or when the next one could blow out.

Scientists don't yet have good tools for detecting and mapping the gas emission craters, although a team at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts is trying to change that.

To log changes in the Arctic landscape, and perhaps ultimately predict where the next blowout crater might occur, the researchers have devised an algorithm to quantify changes to features such as the height of mounds and the expansion or shrinking of lakes on the Yamal and Gyda peninsulas.

The scientists' model correctly predicted all seven craters that had been reported by scientists by 2017 and revealed the formation of three new ones.

The researchers also found that the craters are just one unsettling sign that the northernmost reaches of our planet are undergoing radical changes.

Some 5% of the 327,000 square kilometers the team surveyed saw abrupt changes in landscape between 1984 and 2017. These changes included ground collapses, the formation of new lakes and disappearance of others, plus the erosion of river bends, according to the research, which published in the Geosciences journal in January.

"These craters represent a ... process that was previously unknown to scientists," said Sue Natali, Arctic program director at the Woodwell Climate Research Center and coauthor of the study, in a statement.

"The craters and other abrupt changes occurring across the Arctic landscape are indicative of a rapidly warming and thawing Arctic, which can have severe consequences for Arctic residents and globally."

© From Dr. Evgeny Chuvilin/Skoltech Massive craters have been appearing in parts of the Russian Arctic. This one appeared between May 15 and June 9, 2020.

© From Dr. Evgeny Chuvilin/Skoltech The crater is 30 meters deep. 

Scientists made a 3D model of it by using images taken by a drone.

Russian scientists seek ancient viruses in body of frozen 4,500-year-old Siberian horse
Shari Kulha 

The remains of a 4,500-year-old horse, found in melted Siberian permafrost in 2009, is undergoing analysis in a Russian lab researching ancient viruses.

© Provided by National Post Scientists in Russia remove samples from a horse that had been frozen in permafrost.

A former centre for the development of biological weapons in Soviet times, the Vektor laboratory is one of only two facilities in the world to store the smallpox virus, and has developed the EpiVacCorona vaccine, which is scheduled to begin mass production later this month.

But in collaboration with the University of Yakutsk, the lab in the Novosibirsk region is now searching for paleoviruses in prehistoric animals, including mammoths, elk, dogs, partridges, rodents and hares, furthering study into virus evolution.

The chief of the university’s Mammoth Museum lab, Maxim Cheprasov, said in a press release that the recovered animals had already been the subject of bacterial studies. “We are conducting studies on paleoviruses for the first time.”

Finding prehistoric animals in permafrost is happening more often as climate change warms the Arctic at a faster pace than the rest of the world, thawing the ground in some areas that have stored ancient viruses for millennia.

In Siberia’s region of Yakutia, melting permafrost was likely to yield up even more treasures , The Guardian reported in 2016, with the number of reported prehistoric finds rising “severalfold” in the previous decade as warm and wet weather contributed to the thaw. A pair of frozen three-month-old puppies found in 2011 drew global interest to scientific and cultural secrets to be gleaned from such animals.

In Russia, indigenous peoples have rights to hunt for ancient remains on ancestral lands. They now search for mammoth tusks to sell direct to China , where the ivory — now in demand, given trade bans on elephant ivory — is fashioned into jewellery, trinkets, knives and other decorations, the Guardian says.

Woolly mammoth ivory up to 30,000 years old and preserved in the permafrost in the Yakutia region makes up 80 per cent of Russia’s trade in a largely unregulated market worth more than US$50 million a year, Russian officials told the Guardian. If any paleoviruses still exist in the animals and are able to revive themselves, any number of unknown diseases could be released.

In other parts of the world, scientists are studying glacial microbes . Two ice core samples from 50 metres deep in the Guliya ice cap on the Tibetan Plateau were collected in 1992 and 2015, and analysis revealed 33 groups of virus genuses. Of these, 28 were previously unknown to science. According to the study, melting glaciers are releasing microbes and viruses that have been trapped for tens to hundreds of thousands of years.

Chantal Abergel, a researcher in environmental virology at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, led a team that revived a 30,000-year-old giant virus from permafrost, showing that it could still infect its target, a single-celled amoeba.

The world's oldest DNA has been discovered, scientists announced in a new study published Wednesday.

  

© Beth Zaiken/CPG An artist's conception of ancient steppe mammoths, which preceded the woolly mammoth. The DNA was obtained from a tooth of a steppe mammoth.

The DNA, which is more than 1 million years old, was recovered from two specimens of steppe mammoth, a predecessor to the more well-known woolly mammoth. The oldest previously sequenced DNA had dated from 780,000 to 560,000 years ago, the study said

"This DNA is incredibly old. The samples are a thousand times older than Viking remains, and even predate the existence of humans and Neanderthals," study lead author Love Dalén, a professor of evolutionary genetics at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm, said in a news release.

The DNA came from the molars of mammoth specimens from the Early and Middle Pleistocene subepochs from northeast Siberia. The teeth had been buried for more than 1 million years in the Siberian permafrost.

The coronavirus vaccine wasn't the only amazing discovery: A look at all the ways science thrived in 2020

Extracting the DNA from the samples was "challenging," the scientists said, adding that only minute amounts of DNA remained in the samples and that the DNA was degraded into very small fragments. 

The mammoth specimens were first uncovered in the 1970s, and since then they have been stored in Moscow's Russian Academy of Sciences. 

The mammoth was not actually a woolly mammoth: About 1 million years ago there were no woolly mammoths; they had not yet evolved. This was the time of their predecessor, the ancient steppe mammoth, a species from Europe that scientists believe predated both woolly mammoths and Columbian mammoths, a North American species. 

The DNA is helping to sort out the genetic history of mammoths and how they migrated and evolved around the world, scientists said. In addition, the study provides new insights into when and how fast mammoths adapted to cold climates. 

The new results also open the door for future studies on other species, researchers say. About 1 million years ago, many animal species expanded across the globe, according to the study. This was also a time period of major changes in climate and sea levels, as well as the last time Earth’s magnetic poles changed places.

Because of that, the researchers believe genetic analyses on this time scale have great potential to explore a wide range of scientific questions.

“One of the big questions now is how far back in time we can go," said Anders Götherström, a professor in molecular archaeology and joint research leader at the Centre for Palaeogenetics. 

"We haven’t reached the limit yet," Götherström said. "An educated guess would be that we could recover DNA that is 2 million years old, and possibly go even as far back as 2.6 million. Before that, there was no permafrost where ancient DNA could have been preserved."

The study was published in the peer-reviewed British journal Nature. 

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: World's oldest DNA discovered in 1.2-million-year-old mammoth teeth

In a mammoth's molar, scientists get a glimpse of evolution in action
Tom Metcalfe 

Some of the secrets of evolution could be found in the molar teeth of three mammoths that roamed northeastern Siberia — two of them more than a million years ago.

© Provided by NBC News

A research team on Wednesday published a study in the journal Nature detailing the successful collection of DNA from fossilized mammoths, making it by far the oldest genetic material ever studied.

And its age is only part of its importance. Scientists said they can compare the DNA samples to reveal how the genetics of an earlier species changed as it evolved into a later species, also known as speciation.

“This is the first time that anyone has ever sampled before and after a speciation event, to trace the genomic changes that happen during speciation,” said Love Dalén, a professor in evolutionary genetics at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm and an author of the study.

The oldest “ancient DNA” previously recovered was from the remains of a Siberian horse about half as old as the mammoths.

The study describes research on the fossils of three mammoths unearthed in the 1970s by Russian paleontologists. They’ve since been kept in archaeological collections, and the new study used DNA extracted from their molar teeth, Dalén said.

© Love Dalén A tusk from a woolly mammoth discovered in a creek bed on Siberia's Wrangel Island in 2017. (Love Dalén)

One crucial factor in the work was that the fossils were surrounded by permafrost – a layer of subsoil in polar regions that stays frozen throughout the year. DNA degrades rapidly when it is exposed to liquid water, and so the frozen soil was pivotal to recovering such ancient genetic material, he said.

The researchers have dubbed the oldest mammoth fossil “Krestovka,” and say the age of the permafrost layer where it was found suggests it is about 1.65 million years old.

Another fossil,“Adycha,” dates from about 1.34 million years ago, while the third,“Chukochya,” dates from about 870,000 years ago. The three names come from rivers in Siberia.

The genetics of all three mammoths, revealed in the sequences of millions of genes produced from their ancient DNA, show there were two distinct lineages of what are called “steppe mammoths” (Mammathus trogontherii) in Siberia about a million years ago, although only one lineage was known about, Dalén said.

Adycha and Chukochya came from the line that gave rise about 700,000 years ago to the woolly mammoth species (Mammathus primigenius), but Krestovka belonged to the previously unrecognized lineage.

Examinations of its genetic material suggested that the Krestovka lineage diverged from other mammoths 1.78 million to 2.66 million years ago, and that it was ancestral to the first mammoths to colonize North America, he said.

© Love Dalén A woolly mammoth tusk emerging from permafrost on Wrangel Island in northeastern Siberia. (Love Dalén)

Some scientists claimed in the 1990s that they had recovered genetic material from fossilized dinosaur eggs dated to more than 140 million years ago, but those studies used a method of DNA analysis called PCR – polymerase chain reaction – which has been found inadequate, Dalén said.

The latest study used a more accurate method called “shotgun sequencing,” which reproduces distinctive damage in parts of the DNA genome that shows it is authentically ancient, he said.

The recovery of such ancient DNA raises the possibility it could be used to “resurrect” extinct mammoths, perhaps by modifying the genetics of an elephant fetus – elephants and mammoths shared a common ancient ancestor about 6 million years ago.

But Dalén said he is skeptical that such an idea could work, because comparatively little of the entire genome of extinct mammoths can be recovered in ancient DNA samples.

The prospects for using ancient DNA techniques for studying human evolution may be slightly better.

Paleontologists have found numerous fossils of our ancestral species, some dating back millions of years, but only in warm regions where their DNA is not preserved by permafrost, Dalén said.

However, there remains a possibility that fossils of ancestral human species might someday be found frozen in the permafrost of the far north, and these techniques could be used on them, he said

.

Alfred Roca, a geneticist and professor of animal sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said the study means biologists can now use ancient DNA to study genetic changes as extinct species diverged from each other: “You don’t have to infer things, you don’t have to use some sort of deductive method; you can actually see the DNA.”

Roca, who researches the genetics of modern elephants, was not involved in the latest study but reviewed it for Nature.

He said one future step might be to use the new ancient DNA techniques on the fossils of other animals preserved in the permafrost, especially small rodents such as pikas, voles and lemmings.

“Genomics has been pushed into deep time by the giants of the Ice Age — the wee mammals that surrounded them might soon also have their day,” Roca wrote.

Texas blackouts explained: 

Arctic weather shut down power plants as demand for heat surged, and the state's grid is on its own

TEXAS; THE STATE OF PRIVATIZATION

AND LOW TAXES

bjones@businessinsider.com (Benji Jones)

 Service trucks lining up after a snowstorm in Fort Worth, Texas. Winter Storm Uri has brought historic cold weather and power outages to the state this week. Ron Jenkins/Getty Images

Half a million Texans were still without power Thursday morning as arctic weather pummeled the state.

The cold weather caused energy sources to go offline just as demand for electricity went up.

Climate change could make events like these more frequent, experts say.

Almost half a million Texans are still without power Thursday as arctic weather continues to pummel the state. The blackout, which affected a few million residents at its peak, is among the largest in US history.

"We know millions of people are suffering," Bill Magness, the president of Texas' electric-grid manager, ERCOT, said in a statement Wednesday. "We have no other priority than getting them electricity."

ERCOT said it made "significant progress" Wednesday night, but outages are expected to continue through the week. About 490,000 customers are without power as of Thursday morning, according to an outage tracking site.

Misinformation spread online on Tuesday as some conservative groups and lawmakers falsely blamed the blackouts on frozen wind turbines that quit generating power. In reality, thermal energy sources that went offline, such as natural-gas plants, contributed more to the problem.

But the drop in the energy supply is just part of the reason so many people in Texas lost power this week. Here's what you need to know.

A man walking in a neighborhood without electricity in Pflugerville, Texas. Bronte Wittpenn/Austin American-Statesman/USA Today Network via Reuters

The simple reason that millions lost power: A gap between supply and demand

A major winter storm that hit Texas over the long weekend caused two important things to happen: Sources of electricity, like natural-gas plants, went offline, and demand for the energy they produce went up as people across the state turned on heaters to stay warm.

That caused a massive shortfall in energy.

The organization that manages most of Texas' grid, known as ERCOT, or the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, responded by cutting power to millions of homes in chunks, to limit the time any one household was dark. These so-called rolling blackouts are similar to what happened in California last year, also during extreme weather.

On Thursday morning, 40 gigawatts of electricity were offline in ERCOT's territory, down from 46 gigawatts Wednesday. This is one of the largest shortfalls in energy supply in modern US history, Patrick Milligan, a manager and power expert at the consulting firm ICF, told Insider.
Most of the supply that went offline was coal and natural gas, not wind

About 60% of the energy sources offline in Texas on Wednesday and Thursday were thermal - that is, power plants that run on coal, natural gas, or nuclear energy - while the rest was from solar and wind farms, ERCOT said.

Cold weather is the obvious culprit: All different kinds of power plants in Texas, not just wind turbines, have trouble operating in arctic weather as their instruments freeze. In fact, earlier this week, wind farms were overperforming forecasts, said Rebecca Miller, a research manager at Wood Mackenzie who tracks output across the state.

It can be more difficult to pump natural gas out of the ground or transport it to power plants in freezing conditions. What's more, utilities have prioritized sending natural gas to homes for heating instead of to power plants, Miller said

.

© Nick Oxford/Reuters Wind turbines in Loraine, Texas. 

There are less obvious drivers behind the Texas blackouts

The US is made up of three major electric grids, and one of them overlaps almost entirely with Texas.

In other words, Texas essentially has its own grid.

That can exacerbate a situation like this by making it harder for Texas to draw power from other regions that aren't under the same weather-related stress, said Emily Grubert, an assistant professor of environmental engineering at Georgia Tech who studies large infrastructure.

"The entire grid of Texas is subjected to this emergency condition at once," Grubert said. "That's a lot of pressure to be putting on a grid that doesn't have access to other areas that aren't under those conditions."

But other issues were at play, such as a lack of preparedness - on the sides of both supply and demand.

Homeowners weren't told to do much to conserve energy, Miller said. Meanwhile, power plants weren't properly weatherized.

Take wind turbines: They have no problem operating in much colder states than Texas. Minnesota and Iowa, for example, have large wind farms, but they don't suffer blackouts when temperatures plunge to single digits.

"Wind can operate perfectly in cold weather," Milligan said.

Like natural-gas and coal-fired power plants, wind turbines can be weatherized to withstand tough winter conditions. But weatherization costs money, and turbines in Texas generally aren't equipped for cold weather.

"Why would you have a snowplow in Austin? That kind of same thinking applies to the power plants," Grubert said.
It didn't have to get this bad

This isn't the first time Texas has been hit by an arctic burst. In 2011, around the Super Bowl, cold weather swept through the state, plunging millions of people into darkness.

That's left many people wondering: Why didn't energy producers and regulators do more to prepare for this cold spell?

That summer, a federal report recommended things like weatherization to prevent supply from going offline in the future, the Houston Chronicle reported.

But a lot of that advice wasn't followed, Milligan said, partly because it wasn't enforceable and there was no mechanism in place to pay for it. Weatherization is expensive, he said.

Plus, Texas' energy market is deregulated, and suppliers there try to produce energy as cheaply as possible, Milligan added.

"The generators are not really incentivized to undertake these kinds of [weatherization] investments," Milligan said.

It would have been hard to completely prevent these blackouts, experts told Insider; this kind of weather really is unusual for Texas. But they said the effects would not have been so devastating if companies had done more to prepare.

© David J. Phillip/AP A car driving on snow- and sleet-covered roads in Spring, Texas. David J. Phillip/AP

More blackouts are coming if we don't do more to prepare

The irony of blaming wind turbines for the power outages in Texas is that extreme weather events are made worse by climate change, which is fueled by burning coal and natural gas. In theory, wind and solar farms offset emissions spewed into the atmosphere, lessening the impact of climate change.

"Can you expect more extremes? Yes," Grubert said. "In terms of what that means for the grid, that's a question that we as a society will have to grapple with."

It's important not only to prevent outages outright but to ensure that we have ways to keep people safe when the grid goes down, she said.

"Even if the energy system had stayed up, there would have been a lot of people in trouble during this event," she said, such as those who may not have access to heat.

The importance of managing demand, such as through measures that make buildings more energy-efficient, also can't be overstated, she said.

Power lines in Fort Worth. Ron Jenkins/Getty Images

When power will be restored and what happens next

The outages are likely to continue through the week as a second winter storm brings freezing rain and sleet to the state.

"We are anticipating another cold front this evening which could increase the demand," Dan Woodfin, the senior director of system operations at ERCOT, said in a statement on Wednesday morning. "The ability to restore more power is contingent on more generation coming back online."

Gov. Greg Abbott has called the blackout event "unacceptable" and said he would add the reform of ERCOT as an emergency item for the 2021 legislative session.

"The Electric Reliability Council of Texas has been anything but reliable over the past 48 hours," Abbott said.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has also launched a task force to investigate the outages in Texas and elsewhere in the US.
Read the original article on Business Insider

Federal law on municipal gun bans could take precedence over Alberta bill, expert says
Michelle Bellefontaine 

© Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press A restricted gun licence holder carries an AR-15 at his home in Langley, B.C., on May 1, 2020. The federal government introduced new gun control legislation Tuesday that would allow municipalities to ban handguns. It may take…

New gun control legislation proposed by the federal government would likely take precedence over a private member's bill that aims to prevent Alberta municipalities from passing municipal gun bans, according to a constitutional law expert.

The federal government introduced Bill C-21 on Tuesday. The proposed legislation would give municipalities the power to ban handguns by passing bylaws on their storage and transportation.

Michaela Glasgo, the UCP MLA for Brooks-Medicine Hat, introduced Bill 211 the Municipal Government (Firearms) Amendment Act on Dec. 8.

MORMON AND DUTCH REFORM CHURCH REACTIONARIES

The existence of the two bills dealing with a similar issue raises a question about which would take precedence.

"Our system of constitutional law says that in those cases of conflict, the federal law will prevail," Eric Adams, a professor at the University of Alberta's Faculty of Law, said in an interview with CBC News on Tuesday.

Adams said the division of powers between the federal and provincial governments is set in the constitution. Usually the province has power over municipalities. But on the issue of firearms, he said the question is complicated.

"Is that valid for a province to deny the ability of the municipality to do that thing that the federal government or the Parliament of Canada specifically authorizes?" he asked.

"I can't think of a scenario that I'd seen that play out in terms of cases in the Supreme Court or other levels. So I do think we've got ourselves a reasonably novel federalism Rubik's Cube."

EVERY TIME ALBERTA REACTIONARIES CHALLENGE THE FEDS IN COURT THEY LOSE
Alberta Justice Minister Kaycee Madu thinks the law is on Alberta's side.

In a written statement issued late Tuesday afternoon, he challenged the constitutionality of the federal bill, which also introduced a buy-back program for prohibited weapons and increased penaities for gun smuggling and trafficking.

"The constitution is clear that municipalities fall under the jurisdiction of the provinces," Madu said.

"In fact, municipalities in Alberta are a creation of the provincial government. The federal bill has just been introduced, but should it pass, Alberta would vigilantly defend its jurisdiction."

Madu said passage of Glasgo's bill would be expedited by the Alberta legislature.

 
City-by-city approach panned by mayors

The federal legislation is aimed at larger cities that grapple with gun violence, but the mayors of Alberta's two largest cities were opposed to the measure.

Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi and Edmonton Mayor Don Iveson said their preference was for a consistent regional or national approach on firearms as opposed to city-by-city prohibitions.

"It's not the direction we would go in to pursue a city-specific ban when the issue of the flow of these weapons and their ties to particularly drugs and organized crime is much more than a municipality-by-municipality issue," Iveson said in a news conference Tuesday.

"I prefer one law for the country," Nenshi told reporters on Tuesday. "Even though I generally like municipalities to have more powers, I've never been in favour of this approach."

Nenshi said the recommendations of the city's public safety task force could determine whether Calgary city council was interested in municipal firearm restrictions.

In his statement, Madu said municipal gun bylaws would be be "futile" and easily ignored by criminals.

"A patchwork approach of policy varying by invisible municipal boundaries would create obvious confusion in enforcement, and the federal government clearly knows that," he said.
Alberta bill could be signal to UCP base

Adams, from the University of Alberta, said Glasgo's bill may just be a signal to the UCP base.

"Is this just another piece of a narrative that allows the UCP and their members to say we fight Ottawa at every turn? Maybe it's simply that," he said.

"And so whether or not it is ultimately effective or is upheld as constitutional or not is maybe not the most important part of that political side of why they may be interested in the existence of this prohibition."

Glasgo's bill was introduced for first reading on Dec. 8, the last day of the fall sitting. Private member's bills are reviewed by the Standing Committee on Private Bills and Private Members' Public Bills before they return to the legislature for additional debate.

The UCP majority on both the committee and in the Alberta legislature means the bill will likely become law.

The legislature resumes on Feb. 25.

A cloud of dust blows over the beach as a crowd watches an implosion of the former 

Trump Plaza Casino 

© Joe Lamberti, USA TODAY Network

Wednesday, Feb. 17, 2021 in Atlantic City, N.J.

GOING GOING GONE 

Billionaires’ Favorite Climate Solution Is a Dangerous Distraction

Brian Kahn 

An Elon Musk tweet can do everything from moving the stock market to convincing people to invest in a joke cryptocurrency. So when the richest man on Earth tweeted in late January about kicking $100 million to whoever could come up with the best technology to capture carbon from the air, the world took notice

.

© Photo: FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP (Getty Images)

The cryptic tweet was followed by details that the billionaire donated $100 million to XPRIZE for a carbon capture competition that will last four years. It’s a neoliberal meets techno-optimist wet dream. Here is the world’s richest man teaming up with a group founded by a futurist and with board members including Larry Page and James Cameron, all in the service of creating technology that doesn’t exist anywhere near scale to address a problem our broken political system hasn’t been able to solve.

The prize is part of a growing movement by the billionaire class to make carbon dioxide removal, known as CDR in science and policy circles, a reality. But the narrative fit for a sci-fi movie obscures the fact that CDR comes with real issues as does the fact that a few incredibly wealthy (largely) men and industries are trying to define the scope of climate solutions. The more the hype cycles builds, the more we risk ignoring the solutions sitting in front of us, setting up future generations for needless suffering.

Musk is hardly the only billionaire interested in sucking carbon from the sky. In his new book, Bill Gates writes about it extensively and said in a recent Atlantic interview cutting the cost of new no-carbon technology is better than investing in implement the no-carbon solutions we already have. He notes in the intro of his book that he won’t be naming any specific companies working on it, though, because he’s already invested in a few via his $2 billion Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund. The Climate Pledge Fund, Jeff Bezos’ $2 billion venture capital endeavor, is also pouring money into carbon capture and removal companies. Startup accelerator Y Combinator put out an RFP in late 2018 for companies in the early stages of hoovering carbon up.

“Is the amount of buzz proportional?” Jonathan Foley, the executive director of Project Drawdown, a group focused on climate solutions already in existence, said. “Absolutely not. We have to stop worshipping high tech and tech bros.”

The concept of carbon removal is deceptively simple. We have spent every minute since the Industrial Revolution started treating the atmosphere like a toxic waste dump for greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide. The accumulation has led to radical shifts in the climate, pushing it to the edges of what has allowed civilization to thrive. Removing the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and stashing it underground or making stuff from it is a form of remediation to make up for decades of waste mismanagement.

“Do you know how hard it is to remove CO2 from the air using the machine? It’s really, really hard. It’s a lot easier just not to put it in there.”

It’s one of those solutions we will likely need to turn to to help deal with pesky sources of emissions like air travel for which there is no easy fix. But focusing on it as the solution is completely out of touch with reality.

“There’s no viable path to stopping climate change that doesn’t begin with stopping emissions as quickly as we can,” Foley said. “Do you know how hard it is to remove CO2 from the air using the machine? It’s really, really hard. It’s a lot easier just not to put it in there.”

It’s not just tech billionaires investing massive sums of money into it. Major oil companies are plunging billions into research to preserve the status quo that they’ve benefitted from. By promising they’re investing in a far off solution, oil companies are essentially trying to buy license to pollute more now. A ton of carbon emitted today will do real damage to the climate and society for decades to come that the all the R&D into carbon removal will do nothing to abate. There’s also a very real risk that CDR never comes to fruition, that it’s essentially a waiting for Godot scenario that ends in climate ruin. It also will do nothing to deal with the other dangerous greenhouse gases ranging from methane to HFCs.

“As long as we’re giving out trophies for effort, we’re going to get people showing up to practice who haven’t been doing their homework,” Olufemi Taiwo, a philosopher at Georgetown who has written extensively on CDR, said. “We need to start making demands that are focused on results.”

In that regard, Musk’s prize is good at least. It will require the winners to prove they’ve created a solution that can suck up a ton of carbon dioxide per day, is scalable to remove 10 billion tons per year by 2050, and store it for at least 100 years. But while Taiwo noted tons of carbon is a key metric, “if it’s the only result that we’re interested in, then we could see lots of authoritarian, anti-Indigenous, anti-low income strategies employed to get those results.” That’s because removing carbon will inevitably come with societal costs and impacts.

One form of carbon removal is relying on so-called natural solutions like planting trees or tending to forests. Marc Benioff, another billionaire, has advocated for planting 1 trillion trees to address climate change. But that strategy can obscure what trees get planted, where, and how. Foisting tree planting programs on developing countries can reduce access to cropland or result in dispossessing Indigenous groups of their land. Or it can lead to mono crop plantations of trees that are essentially toothpicks of carbon rather than intact ecosystems that provide other services.

Or consider machines that suck up carbon. Right now, there are only a few test sites around the world that do it because it’s expensive and energy-intensive. None work at the scale needed; Climeworks and Carbfix, two of the few companies doing CDR in the wild, inked a deal last year to build a plant that remove up to 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year.

Let’s say, though, that costs come down thanks to Musk’s prize and Gates’ and Bezos’ investments, and the world starts deploying carbon removal plants. If the past is any indication, those plants are unlikely to be sited in the Hamptons, instead appearing in fenceline communities in Houston or strewn across the Global South. If CDR becomes so widespread that it allows oil and gas companies to continue to exist, then communities living in the shadows of refineries and pipelines will still have to deal with the other toxic air and noise pollution that comes with living there.

“Imagine a world where we have a bunch of power plants in poor neighborhoods, but then we have these magic machines and other places in the world to suck out the CO2 so rich people can still go skiing and enjoy their mansions on the ocean or something. You took care of one problem, but you perpetuated another one.”

“If we just perpetuate that system one day longer. Of course, it’s a massive injustice,” Foley said. “Imagine a world where we have a bunch of power plants in poor neighborhoods, but then we have these magic machines and other places in the world to suck out the CO2 so rich people can still go skiing and enjoy their mansions on the ocean or something. You took care of one problem, but you perpetuated another one.”

Alex Guerrero, a philosopher at Rutgers, said all the focus on CDR could be “crowding out other directions or ideas” to deal with climate change in our popular discourse. Rich white guys giving out prizes for science and investing venture capital in CDR also subverts democratic input on the one of the most consequential issues humanity has faced and cements rising inequality.

“A lot of efforts at international aid have undermined local democratic institutions,” Guerrero said. “One worry is that this is the next version.”

They may not have the sci-fi draw of carbon-sucking machines, but the real climate solutions at our disposal right now are our best shot at saving ourselves. Project Drawdown, Foley’s group, has identified 76 avenues to address the climate crisis at the scale needed. We don’t need an XPRIZE for them, either, since they already exist. They include things like installing more wind power, reducing food waste, restoring wetlands, and improving women’s access to education. Many, if implemented properly, have the power to improve people’s lives in other ways as well, whether its giving communities more control over their energy system or reducing energy bills. They would also cut our reliance on fossil fuels, reducing the need to rely more heavily on CDR in the first place.

“In the ideal world, we’d focus on the important here and now things,” Foley said. “Let’s get the low hanging fruit today, then the next fruit and the next fruit. And while we’re at it, maybe somebody in the corner should be investing in a ladder to get the last fruit on the top of the tree when we picked all the others.”

That last fruit is the hard-to-decarbonize sectors like aviation or steel, and that’s where CDR could come in most handy. But there, there’s a better approach than letting rich guys drive the bus. Foley noted that the Trump administration kicked $200 million into CDR research over its last 18 months, one of the only climate-forward things it did. The National Academies of Science also recently put out a research plan for approaching CDR, and Taiwo said that could be a good place to start putting the money so that it’s publicly accountable R&D.

But letting the U.S. alone drive the bus is hardly better than the rich guys at the wheel. The U.S. is the largest historical emitter, has vested interests in continuing fossil fuel production, and has been at absolute best a mixed bag when it comes international climate diplomacy. Taiwo said the country along with the EU and growing emitters like China have an outsize moral obligation to fund R&D in climate solutions and their deployment, but that doesn’t mean it should set the terms of engagement on how to do so.

“Based historically on what the relevant levels of emissions were and what the relevant political relationships were between, say, the former colonizers of the world and formerly colonized countries should inform how we decide to divvy up benefits and burdens in different places,” he said.

Guerrero has argued for a “lottocracy” approach to governance, where random citizens are put in charge. It’s an intriguing option to think about in the context of CDR and whether a representational global citizens’ assembly come up with an equitable R&D and deployment plan. While that may seem like a radical idea, is it any more radical than, say, letting a handful of people who have a net worth greater than most countries decide the course of humanity?

Biden faces 1st test with Egypt over human rights, weapon sales


President Joe Biden's administration expressed concern about the Egyptian government's human rights record Tuesday, especially after family members of a U.S. citizen and human rights activist were detained. But hours later, the State Department announced the sale of nearly $200 million of weapons to Cairo -- the first substantial arms transfer to the Middle East in Biden's young term.

© Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images,FILE

The case has become a test of how Biden will approach the government of President Abdel Fattah el Sisi, the former military commander who seized power in 2014 and ousted Egypt's elected Islamist government.

Egypt has long been a key U.S. partner in the region and the recipient of substantial U.S. military assistance. But Sisi's increasingly authoritarian rule has provoked vocal criticism from human rights advocates, some U.S. lawmakers and Egyptians, who at times have taken to the streets to protest despite Sisi's brutal crackdowns on dissent.MORE: US-based Egyptian activist says brother 'kidnapped' by government in Cairo

Three cousins of American-Egyptian activist Mohamed Soltan, a former political prisoner who was detained by Sisi's government, were arrested Sunday in what the U.S.-based activist's group said was a "reprisal for his human rights advocacy." Two have since been released, Soltan told ABC News on Thursday.

In total, the homes of six of Soltan's relatives were raided, according to his group, the Freedom Initiative.

© The Washington Post via Getty Images Mohamed Soltan, 32, a U.S. citizen who became a prominent Egyptian political prisoner, at his home on Sunday, May 31, 2020, in Fairfax, Va.

"The arrests are part of an intensified campaign of transnational repression by the Egyptian military regime designed to silence critics outside Egypt," the group said Tuesday.

Other relatives of Soltan were arrested last year in apparent retaliation to Soltan's lawsuit against former Egyptian Prime Minister Hazem El-Beblawi in a U.S. court, in which the Soltan accused the former prime minister of having him tortured while he was a political prisoner in Egypt.

MORE: As Biden reviews US-Saudi relations, pressure rises to remake ties over Khashoggi killing, Yemen war

They were released in November, shortly after Biden's election win.

Egypt's State Information Service did not immediately respond to questions seeking comment, but the country has regularly denied holding any political prisoners.

The families of other human rights activists have also been reportedly targeted. In 2019, Egyptian police arrested the brother of Wael Ghonim, one of the most prominent leaders of the 2011 revolution that toppled longtime U.S.-backed strongman Hosni Mubarak.

Soltan was arrested during Sisi's crackdown after the former defense minister toppled Islamist President Mohamed Morsi in 2013. Soltan spent nearly two years in prison -- during which time he went on hunger strike and claims he was tortured -- before he was forced to give up his Egyptian citizenship in exchange for his release in 2015.

The Biden administration said Sunday that it was looking into the latest arrests and raised the cases with Egypt.

MORE: Hunger-striking American citizen released from Egyptian prison

"We won't tolerate assaults or threats by foreign governments against American citizens or their family members. Such behavior is against our values, it's against our interests, and it very much undermines our bilateral partnerships around the world," State Department spokesperson Ned Price said Wednesday

 

Just one day prior, however, the State Department announced it had approved the $197 million sale of naval surface-to-air missiles to Egypt's military, saying the sale "will support the foreign policy and national security of the United States by helping to improve the security of a Major Non-NATO Ally country that continues to be an important strategic partner in the Middle East."

Asked what message the sale sends Cairo, Price said it's "a routine replenishment of defensive weapons that in no way prevents us from continuing to uphold our focus on democracy and human rights."

"This is an unfortunate misstep by the Biden administration. Spokesman Price's comments about this being a 'routine replenishment' is called into question by the sale notification, which explicitly states that it will 'significantly enhance' Egypt's capabilities," Todd Ruffner, the advocacy director of Freedom Initiative group, which Soltan heads, told ABC News.

"While the timing is terrible, the substance of the announcement has also given the rights community serious pause about whether this administration is serious about making human rights a priority. At a time when the Egyptian government is escalating reprisals against rights advocates and their families, the United States must demand better from its apparent allies," Ruffner added.

Egypt has been one of the highest recipients of U.S. military aid for decades, receiving over $84 billon in foreign aid since 1946, according to the congressional research service. In his final budget, former President Trump requested $1.4 billion for Egypt, the vast majority of which was military aid.

MORE: Egypt's wave of censorship takes aim at street music

Trump was accused of pulling U.S. punches amid Egyptian demonstrations against Sisi, but Trump remained largely silent on the issue, and once reportedly praised Sisi as his "favorite dictator." Amid their warm personal relationship, Sisi's government grew more oppressive at home, while supporting Trump's anti-Iran and counterterror campaigns.

Former President Barack Obama also at times looked the other way in favor of stability after the Arab Spring in 2011, Mubarak's ouster, and the tumultuous years that ensued. His administration declined to label Sisi's power-grab a coup, although it froze military and economic aid to Sisi's government for two years.

"This is about protecting my rights and freedoms, so I do everything in my power. I will work around the clock and turn every stone to have those rights protected," Soltan told ABC News.

Editor's Note: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the number of Soltan's cousins taken away by plainclothes officers.

Biden to announce US will donate $4 billion for COVID-19 vaccines for poor countries

"This pandemic is not going to end unless we end it globally," 

President Joe Biden plans to announce on Friday that the United States will contribute $2 billion to a U.N.-backed program seeking to distribute COVID-19 vaccine doses to people in the poorest countries in the world, according to senior Biden administration officials.

Congress had already allocated the money in December for the U.S. Agency for International Development to provide to Gavi, an international vaccine distribution alliance. Congress provided a total of $4 billion and the officials said that the U.S. would give the rest to Gavi over the course of this year and 2022.

The move, which the White House said Biden intends to announce during a virtual meeting of the Group of Seven leaders, comes as the United States grapples with not yet having enough doses to vaccinate its own population, although the situation in poorer nations is far worse.

© Guillermo Legaria/Getty Images A health worker holds a dose during a vaccination drill before the arrival of the COVID-19 vaccine at Patio Bonito Tintal hospital on Jan. 26, 2021, in Bogota, Colombia.

To date, 10 countries have administered 75% of all COVID-19 vaccines, while more than 130 countries have not yet received a single dose, the United Nations said Wednesday.MORE: How COVID-19 vaccinations are going, on a global scale

Many countries are unable to compete with wealthier ones like the U.S. to purchase the limited amounts of vaccine doses available from manufacturers. In conjunction with the World Health Organization and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations foundation, Gavi runs a worldwide vaccination initiative called COVAX that aims to address that disparity by more equitably distributing doses

.

© Rahmat Gul/AP, FILE Afghan health ministry workers unload boxes of the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine donated by the Indian government to Afghanistan, at the customs area of the Hamid Karzai International Airport, in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Even though then-President Donald Trump signed into law a December bill that allocated the $4 billion to Gavi, he had previously refused to back COVAX and his administration also moved to cut ties with the World Health Organization.

Biden has dramatically reversed that approach, keeping the U.S. in the WHO and making battling the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide a national security priority.

But bringing the global outbreak to an end has proved complicated with limited availability of vaccine doses.

The United States has so far purchased 600 million vaccine doses, but it does not intend to give any of them to other countries until -- as Biden directed in a Jan. 21 memorandum -- "there is sufficient supply in the United States."

© AFP via Getty Images A nurse gets ready to make injections of Russian made Covid-19 vaccine Sputnik-V at a vaccination center in Banja Luka, on Feb. 12, 2021.

A senior administration official said Thursday that "this pledge to COVAX does not impact the vaccination program in the United States at all."

"While we're not able to share vaccine doses at this time while we're focused on American vaccinations and getting shots into arms," the official said, "we're working hard to support COVAX, strengthen global vaccination around the world and determining the timeline for when we will have a sufficient supply in the United States and be able to donate surplus vaccines."

MORE: Biden's 1st 100 days live updates: Harris calls pandemic 'perfect storm for women'

China and Russia, meanwhile, have donated doses of their homegrown COVID-19 vaccines to partners and developing countries as a form of "vaccine diplomacy." The United States has not yet followed suit.

The administration officials argued that vaccinating people abroad protected the health of Americans domestically.

© Rahat Dar/EPA via Shutterstock Women hold placards to demand fair distribution of vaccines to developing countries during a protest in Lahore, Pakistan, Jan. 29, 2021.

"Decreasing the burden of disease decreases the risk to everyone in the world, including Americans," the official said. "It also decreases the risk of variants occurring, like those that we're seeing now. So it's critically important to surge vaccination globally, while we're, of course, prioritizing vaccinations here at home."

The official said the first $2 billion tranche would be donated "within days to weeks" and "ideally by the end of this month." Of the additional $2 billion, the U.S. plans to contribute the first $500 million of it "rather quickly" to "spur some of those initial doses to be out there," but it intends to at least initially hold back the rest to encourage other countries to make pledges of their own, the official said.

"This pandemic is not going to end unless we end it globally," the official added.

ABC News' Conor Finnegan contributed reporting.

THIRD WORLD USA

Animals freeze to death in Texas sanctuary

By Maria Morava and Scottie Andrew, CNN 

The Texas deep freeze is causing casualties among humans and animals alike.

© Eric Gay/AP A capuchin monkey is seen at Primarily Primates, Inc. in 2010 in San Antonio, Texas.

After rolling power outages plunged much of the state into darkness early this week, animals at the San Antonio Primarily Primates sanctuary froze to death in the winter weather.

Among the casualties were a chimpanzee, many monkeys, some lemurs and countless birds.

"I never, ever thought my office would turn into a morgue, but it has," Brooke Chavez, executive director of Primarily Primates, told the San Antonio Express-News.

Chavez said she won't know how many animals have died until the storm subsides -- and forecasts have predicted more winter weather through Friday.

The sanctuary must decide which animals it can save

After the power went out early Monday, Chavez and her team of 12 sprang to action.

They began gathering generators, space heaters, propane tanks and blankets to keep their 400 animals warm, the San Antonio Express-News reported.

But as temperatures plummeted further, the plan moved from preservation to evacuation.

"I've never faced a decision like this," Chavez told the newspaper. "Having to decide who we can save, depending on the predictability of which animals we can catch."

Video: Winter storms hammer Texas leaving millions without power (CNN)

It was while mobilizing for transport that the team began to find dead animals.

"Someone asked me how many animals have died. I don't know yet," Chavez said. "I know we lost lots of monkeys, lemurs and tropical birds."

Still, many of the sanctuary's residents were evacuated.

Some went to the San Antonio Zoo and a sanctuary near the Oklahoma border. Others went to the homes of volunteers.

Chimpanzees remain at the sanctuary -- 33 of them -- after proving difficult to transport, according to the Express-News.

Primarily Primates continues to ask for donations on its Facebook page.

The freeze, and the tragedies, continue

Texas' deep freeze is not over.

The electric grid for most of the state has ordered more power cuts to maintain the grid, and Austin Energy has notified its customers of outages through Wednesday -- possibly even longer.

The storm sweeping Texas is dangerous not only for its cold temperatures, but for the length of the cold without reprieve.

Continuous freezing temperatures don't allow houses and buildings to warm up naturally, and without power, Texans are forced to improvise for warmth.

Many have turned to heating sources like stoves, generators, and even their cars -- causing carbon monoxide poisonings to spike, CNN affiliate KTRK-TV reported.

Tragedies continue and death tolls rise as the state braces for more extreme weather.

More than 3 million Texans remained without power on Wednesday.