Analysis-White House weighs inflation vs. farmers in new biofuel mandates



Mon, May 16, 2022
By Jarrett Renshaw and Stephanie Kelly

(Reuters) - The White House is expected to announce in coming weeks the amount of biofuels like corn-based ethanol that U.S. refiners must blend into their fuel this year, a decision that will force it to weigh taming consumer inflation against supporting the nation's farmers.

How the administration balances the competing priorities could play a role in November's midterm elections, as high consumer prices pose a political threat to President Joe Biden's Democratic party and Farm Belt voters remain a crucial constituency.

The White House National Economic Council, led by Brian Deese, is pouring over numbers to gauge whether lowering blending mandates for ethanol and renewable diesel will help blunt rising food and fuel prices, according to two sources familiar with the process.

Cutting mandates for ethanol and advanced biofuels like biodiesel could theoretically cut food costs by reducing demand for corn, soy and other staple crops that have become more scarce since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Trimming the mandates could also potentially take pressure off pump prices by reducing blending compliance costs for some oil refiners.

But doing so would anger farmers and the biofuels industry that insist the annual blending mandates are critical to supporting their livelihoods.

White House officials are meeting with lobbying groups representing oil and consumer goods giants, including the Food Manufacturing Coalition, American Bakers Association, American Petroleum Institute and Renewable Fuels Association, as they weigh the possible changes.

"I have never in the history of the program seen such a confluence of issues potentially impacting the outcome. If there was a perfect storm, this is it," said Michael McAdams, president of the Advanced Biofuels Association.

The Environmental Protection Agency sent its proposal on biofuel volume mandates for the years 2020 through 2022 to the White House for final review in late April. The proposal would retroactively lower the mandate for 2020 and 2021 but to boost it back up again for 2022, three sources told Reuters. The EPA declined to comment.

ETHANOL AND HIGH GAS PRICES

The U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard, enacted in 2005, requires refiners to blend biofuels like ethanol into the fuel pool or buy credits from refiners who do. The program has been an economic boon for states like Iowa and Nebraska, but smaller refiners who have not invested in blending facilities say the cost of buying credits threatens their plants.

U.S. credits tied to ethanol are trading at over $1.60 each, the highest since August, while biomass-based credits are over $1.80 each, near the highest since June. The ethanol credits, which traded as low as 8 cents apiece in early 2020, have remained at historically higher levels since last year.

Economists say some portion of the cost of the credits is passed on to consumers, resulting in higher pump prices. Some refiners and their union backers are encouraging the White House to lower the ethanol mandate below 15 billion gallons in 2022 to drive the credit costs down.

Without the cost of compliance credits, however, adding ethanol to the nation's fuel pool can actually reduce pump prices, by expanding the overall volume of available fuel using a substance cheaper than straight gasoline.

The White House earlier this year tapped into that dynamic by announcing it was lifting a ban on summer sales of higher ethanol blends of gasoline, called E15.

FOOD VS FUEL

Corn-based ethanol accounts for the overwhelming majority of blending under the RFS. In 2022, the EPA proposal would require refiners to blend 15 billion gallons of ethanol and 5.77 billion gallons of advanced biofuels.

In recent years, while ethanol demand has remained stagnant, demand for advanced biofuels like renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel has surged as states like California and Oregon adopt their own renewable fuel mandates. That has swollen demand for oilseeds like soybeans and canola that serve as biofuel feedstocks and compete with other food crops for finite planting area.

The edible oils are used in everything from cakes, chocolate and frying fats to cosmetics, soap and cleaning products.

Robb MacKie, president of the American Bakers Association, which includes companies like Kroger Co and Tasty Baking Company, first raised concerns about supply and prices for these products with the EPA last year, asking that blending levels be rolled back to 2020 levels.

Then Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February made the problem worse.

Russia and Ukraine account for nearly a third of global wheat and barley production, and two-thirds of the world's exports of sunflower oil used for cooking. Also, Indonesia recently banned exports of palm oil, cutting off more than half of the global supply.

Soybean futures have risen over 20% so far this year to more than $16 per bushel, while corn futures have gained about 30% to over $7.90 a bushel.

"In light of what we are experiencing, the alarm bells are ringing," MacKie said.

(Reporting By Jarrett Renshaw and Stephanie Kelly; Editing by Heather Timmons, Richard Valdmanis and Marguerita Choy)

SEE LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for BIOFUEL 

Western Architecture is Making India's Heatwaves Worse

Ciara Nugent
Mon, May 16, 2022, 

[India RF: Residences]
Arched windows, reflecting on floor surface, likely at old palace in Jaipur, India. 

The design helps keep heat out. 

Credit - Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images

Benny Kuriakose remembers when his father built the first house in his village in the southern Indian state of Kerala with a concrete roof. It was 1968, and the family was proud to use the material, he says, which was becoming a “status symbol” among villagers: the new home resembled the modern buildings cropping up in Indian cities, which in turn resembled those in images of Western cities.

But inside, the house was sweltering. The solid concrete absorbed heat throughout the day and radiated it inside at night. Meanwhile, neighboring thatch-roofed houses stayed cool: the air trapped between gaps in the thatch was a poor conductor of heat.

The Kuriakoses’ experience was an early taste of a phenomenon that, over the next few decades, spread across most of India’s big cities. As a more standardized international approach to building design emerged, many Indian architects abandoned the vernacular traditions that had been developed over thousands of years to cope with the weather extremes of different regions. The earthen walls and shady verandas of the humid south, and the thick insulating walls and intricate window shades of the hot dry northwest, were swapped for a boxy modern style. Today, buildings in downtown Bangalore often look like those in Ahmedabad, in the north, or Chennai, in the east—or those in Cincinnati, Ohio, or Manchester, England.

“In most cities, people have blindly followed the Western model,” says Kuriakose, an architect now based in Chennai. “There was no attempt to look at the local climate. There was no attempt to look at the materials which are available.”

A version of this story first appeared in the Climate is Everything newsletter. To sign up, click here.

In the climate change era, that uniformity is looking like a mistake. Large parts of India have been stifled by a spring heatwave since April, with temperatures lingering close to 110°F for weeks in some places, and topping 120°F in Delhi this week, making it dangerous to go to work or school—all weeks before the official start of summer. Spiking energy demand for cooling has helped trigger daily blackouts in cities, and what AC units are running are belching hot air into streets, worsening the urban heat island effect. As such heatwaves become increasingly common and long-lasting, experts say India’s modern building stock will make it harder for Indians to adapt.

Environmentalists are calling for a fundamental rethink of how India builds its cities. There are some positive signs. A growing number of sustainability-minded architects are reviving vernacular approaches. And in February the Indian government pledged to revise urban planning guidelines and investments to train planners to better design cities. Progress is slow, though, says Aromar Revi, director of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), a research-focused university. “We need to essentially affect the entire fabric of our cities, from planning to land use, to building, to transportation systems,” he says. “We are only at the start of that conversation.”

Western-style skyscrapers in Kolkata, India, April 3, 2022.

Indranil Aditya/NurPhoto—Getty Images

How traditional architecture lost ground in Indian cities

The architecture of Indian cities began to change rapidly in the 1990s, when the country transitioned to a market-based economy. As construction boomed, Western or globalized styles became the norm. The shift was partly aesthetic; developers favored the glassy skyscrapers and straight lines deemed prestigious in the U.S. or Europe, and young architects brought home ideas they learned while studying abroad. Economic considerations also played a role. As land became more expensive in cities, there was pressure to expand floorspace by eliminating thick walls and courtyards. And it was faster and easier to throw up tall structures using steel and concrete, rather than use traditional earth blocks which are suited to lower-rise structures.

The consequence of that cookie-cutter approach was to make buildings less resilient to India’s high temperatures. The impact of that once seemed minimal. It could easily be offset by electric fans and air conditioning, and the energy costs of cooling were not developers’ problems once they sold their buildings. “Where a home [built in the vernacular style] needs around 20 to 40 kilowatt hours per meter squared of energy for cooling, today some commercial places need 15 times that,” says Yatin Pandya, an architect based in Ahmedabad. When AC units are turned on to help people sleep at night, they release heat into the streets, which can increase the local temperature by around 2°F according to U.S.-based studies. During the day, depending on their orientation, glassy facades can reflect sunlight onto footpaths. “You’re creating [problems] in every direction.”

The shift away from climate-specific architecture hasn’t only affected offices and luxury flats, whose owners can afford to cool them. To maximize urban space and budgets, a massive government housing program launched in 2015 has relied largely on concrete frames and flat roofs, which absorb more heat throughout the day than sloped roofs. “We’re building hot houses. In certain parts of the year, they will require cooling to be habitable,” says Chandra Bhushan, a Delhi-based environmental policy expert. He estimates that roughly 90% of the buildings under construction today are in a modern style that pays little attention to a region’s climate—locking in increased heat risk for decades to come.

Even small artisanal construction crews, which are responsible for the majority of homes in India, have leaned into more modern, standardized styles, says Revi, the IIHS director. These teams rarely have a trained architect or designer. “So they build what they see,” he says. “They might build traditional elements into their village houses, but when they come to the city, they’re driven by the imperatives of the city, the imaginaries of the city. And there the international style is the aspiration.”

Similar shifts have happened in developing countries all over the world, with cities from the Middle East to Latin America taking on the “copy and paste texture of globalized architecture,” says Sandra Piesik, a Netherlands-based architect and author of Habitat: Vernacular Architecture for a Changing Planet. As the global construction industry embraced concrete and steel, local materials, designs, and technologies became displaced—with lasting consequences. “Some of these traditional methods didn’t undergo the technological revolution that they needed,” to make them more durable and easier to use on a massive urban scale, Piesek says. “We focused instead on [perfecting] the use of concrete and steel.”
A climate comeback for vernacular architecture

A movement to revive more regionally-specific styles of architecture—and combine them with modern technologies—is well underway in India. Over the last decade, thousands of architects, particularly in the experimental township Auroville on the east coast of Tamil Nadu state, have promoted the use of earth walls and roofs; earth absorbs heat and humidity, and it can now be used to build larger and more complex structures thanks to the development of more stable compressed blocks. In the dry hot northern city of Ahmedabad, which has suffered some of the country’s deadliest heatwaves in recent decades, Pandya’s firm Footprints E.A.R.T.H., uses careful orientation and overhanging roofs and walls to shade its buildings from heat, and central courtyards for ventilation.

“We are course-correcting now,” says Bangalore-based architect Chitra Vishwanath, who built her own home and hundreds of other buildings using earth. Larger universities are teaching students to build in a climate-specific way, she says, while nonprofits and artisanal construction firms are running workshops teaching this approach to architects and small-scale builders. “Younger architects who are graduating today are extremely sensitive to climate,” Vishwanath adds. “I would say in another 5, 10 years westernized style buildings won’t be built so much.”

Wider adoption of climate-sensitive architecture would greatly reduce the energy needed to cool buildings, Vishwanath says. That could be crucial for India in the coming years. While only around 8% of Indians had air conditioning in their homes in 2018, as more people enter the middle class and can afford to buy their first unit, that figure is expected to climb to 40% by 2038, according to the government’s 2019 National Cooling Plan. Health experts say AC can no longer be considered a “luxury” in India’s increasingly brutal climate, and that expanding use for low-income households is essential to both saving lives and supporting India’s economic development. But it will come at a high cost in terms of India’s greenhouse gas emissions—unless cleaner cooling technologies can be developed and rolled out rapidly.

Increasing the use of traditional materials in India’s sprawling construction sector would also make a dent in the country’s emissions. Vernacular architecture tends to use more natural, locally-sourced substances like earth or timber, rather than concrete and steel, which are created through carbon-intensive industrial processes and transported from thousands of miles away. A 2020 paper published by Indian researchers in the International Journal of Architecture found that the production of vernacular materials required between 0.11 MJ and 18 MJ of energy per kilo, compared to 2.6 MJ to 360 MJ per kilo for modern materials.

It wouldn’t be feasible to replace all the modern materials used in India’s buildings with vernacular counterparts. Though technological advances are making it possible to build larger, multi-storey buildings with earth, it wouldn’t work in a skyscraper. And some traditional features, like sloping roofs and detailed window shades are too expensive for many people to consider when building their homes. Perhaps most importantly: in cities, the high cost of land makes it extremely difficult to find space for verandas and courtyards.

Given those challenges, Kuriakose says the future of Indian architecture won’t be simply reverting to how things were fifty years ago, before his grandfather installed their concrete roof. The way forward is to channel the locally-rooted problem solving strategies of traditional architects. His firm, for example, has found ways to build traditional sloped roofs, which allow water runoff during monsoon seasons and prevent heat absorption, while incorporating concrete in some elements to make them cheaper. “We are trying to use the knowledge system which has been passed on from generation to generation over the centuries,” he says. “Not to blindly follow how villagers used to do things.”

Pandya, the Ahmedabad architect, puts it another way. “Sustainability is not a formula—what works in Europe might not work here,” he says. “Like a doctor, you have to understand the patient, the symptoms, the conditions—before you arrive at the cure.“

Poor workers bear the brunt of India's heatwave

Labourers work at a construction site on a hot summer day, in Noida

Sun, May 15, 2022, 7:20 PM·3 min read
By Sunil Kataria

NOIDA, India (Reuters) -For construction worker Yogendra Tundre, life at a building site on the outskirts of the Indian capital New Delhi is hard enough. This year, record high temperatures are making it unbearable.

As India grapples with an unprecedented heatwave, the country's vast majority of poor workers, who generally work outdoors, are vulnerable to the scorching temperatures.

"There is too much heat and if we won't work, what will we eat? For a few days, we work and then we sit idle for a few days because of tiredness and heat," Tundre said.

High temperatures in the New Delhi area, which soared above 120 Fahrenheit (49 Celsius) in some regions on Sunday, have often caused Tundre, and his wife Lata, who works at the same construction site, to fall sick. That in turn means they lose income.

"Because of heat, sometimes I don't go to work. I take days off ... many times, fall sick from dehydration and then require glucose bottles (intravenous fluids)," Lata said while standing outside their house, a temporary shanty with a tin roof.

Scientists have linked the early onset of an intense summer to climate change, and say more than a billion people in India and neighbouring Pakistan are in some way at risk from the extreme heat.

India suffered its hottest March in more than 100 years and parts of the country experienced their highest temperatures on record in April.

Many places, including New Delhi, saw the temperature gauge top 40 Celsius. More than two dozen people have died of suspected heat strokes since late March, and power demand has hit multi-year highs.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has called on state governments to draw up measures to mitigate the impact of the extreme heat.

Temperatures in and around New Delhi are likely to be lower over the next three days, but the India Meteorological Department (IMD) has forecast a heatwave again on Friday.

Tundre and Lata live with their two young children in a slum near the construction site in Noida, a satellite city of New Delhi. They moved from their home state of Chhattisgarh in central India to seek work and higher wages around the capital.

On the construction site, labourers scale up walls, lay concrete and carry heavy loads, using ragged scarves around their heads as protection against the sun.

But even when the couple finish their day's work, they have little respite as their home is hot, having absorbed the heat of the sun all day long.

Avikal Somvanshi, an urban environment researcher from India's Centre for Science and Environment, said federal government data showed that heat stress was the most-common cause of death, after lightning, from forces of nature in the last 20 years.

"Most of these deaths occur in men aged 30-45. These are working class, blue-collar men who have no option but to be working in the scorching heat," Somvanshi said.

There are no laws in India that prevent outdoor activity when temperatures breach a certain level, unlike in some Middle Eastern countries, Somvanshi said.

(Reporting by Sunil Kataria in New Delhi; writing by Shilpa Jamkhandikar; editing by Neil Fullick, Bradley Perrett and Lisa Shumaker)

MSNBC hosts blame Tucker Carlson and Fox News for elevating 'racist conspiracy theory' following Buffalo mass shooting

Stephen Proctor

Tue, May 17, 2022, 

On The ReidOut Monday, MSNBC’s Joy Reid joined the chorus of people calling out Fox News, specifically opinion host Tucker Carlson, following a mass shooting in a Black area of Buffalo, New York, over the weekend that left 10 people dead. In a lengthy screed, the alleged shooter repeatedly cited the “great replacement theory,” a racist conspiracy that claims that white people in the U.S. are being replaced by people of color. Congressional Republicans and right-wing pundits regularly go on Fox and claim that Democrats are purposely bringing people of color into the country, changing the demographic makeup for political gain, and no one has pushed this line of thought more than Carlson. So much so that former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke, has praised Carlson for pushing the conspiracy.

“No singular voice in right-wing media has done more to elevate this racist conspiracy theory than Tucker,” Reid said, “who even with a new head writer spends night after primetime night injecting the rot from the dregs of the Internet directly into the veins of Republican voters.”

Reid referenced Carlson’s new head writer because the old one resigned after racist and sexist online activity came to light. She went on to play a mashup of clips in which Carlson pushes the conspiracy before adding, “The reality is, Tucker’s not some deep thinker. He’s clearly just channeling the gross stuff his viewers could easily find online, then feeding it to Republican voters and Republican politicians as infotainment. And that feedback loop has terrifying reach.”

They will stop the moment Rupert Murdoch tells them to stop.Lawrence O'Donnell

Reid then highlighted an excerpt from the alleged shooter’s manifesto, in which, he used very similar language to what Carlson has used in the past regarding diversity.

“In his racist manifesto, which reads like a bad term paper by the way,” Reid said, “the Buffalo shooter asked, ‘Why is diversity said to be our greatest strength? Does anyone bother to ask why?’ Okay, remember that now? Now listen to this from a 2018 Tucker Carlson segment. Just asking questions.” She then played a clip of Carlson saying, “How precisely is diversity our strength? Since you’ve made this our new national motto, please be specific as you explain it.”

On The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell later in the night, O’Donnell took it a step further and put the blame squarely on Fox founder Rupert Murdoch.

“They will stop the moment Rupert Murdoch tells them to stop. It’s as simple as that,” O’Donnell said. “Every minute spent talking about the TV hosts on Fox, is a minute that hides the true villain of the piece. Rupert Murdoch is the billionaire puppeteer. In 1995, when Rupert Murdoch was planning to create a cable news channel, he had never heard of any of the people who are now his most prominent hosts. But Rupert Murdoch knew what he wanted Fox to do from day one, and Fox has always done and said exactly what Rupert Murdoch wants.”

The “replacement theory” conspiracy has been cited in multiple mass shootings in recent years, leading O’Donnell to levy a hefty accusation at Murdoch.

“White supremacists, mass murderers in this country who take encouragement from Fox want to, among other things, stop immigration to this country, as does Fox,” O’Donnell said, “a company owned and operated by an immigrant who has done more damage to this country in the 21st century than any immigrant in the world has done to any other country in the 21st century.”

The ReidOut airs weeknights at 7 p.m. on MSNBC.

The Last Word With Lawrence O'Donnell airs weeknights at 10 p.m. on MSNBC.

Tucker Carlson After Mass Shooter Targets Black People: ‘All Lives Matter’
BLAMING 'MENTAL ILLNESS' NOT GUNS
William Vaillancourt
Mon, May 16, 2022

Fox News

Two days after a white supremacist in Buffalo shot and killed 10 people and wounded three, most of whom were Black, Fox News host Tucker Carlson declared that “All lives matter.”

In his Monday night monologue, Carlson dared not mention the Great Replacement Theory, though he has spoken about it several times before—and the Buffalo shooter’s screed indicates he was inspired by it. (The conspiracy theory asserts that liberal politicians are trying to replace white Americans with immigrants because they’re more likely to vote for them.) Instead, Carlson used the tragedy to complain about what he called the “ruthlessness and dishonesty of our political leadership” and how those in power want to silence people like himself.

Payton Gendron, who was taking into custody after the shooting, “was the heir to Donald Trump, they told us. And for that reason, it follows logically, we must suspend the First Amendment. That’s hardly an exaggeration of what they are saying,” Carlson said, exaggerating as usual.

“What is hate speech? Speech that our leaders hate,” Carlson said earnestly after playing a clip of commentators pointing out the limits of First Amendment rights. “Because one mentally ill teenager murdered strangers, you cannot be allowed to express your political views out loud. That is what they are telling you. That is what they wanted to tell you for a long time, but Saturday’s massacre gives the pretext and justification.”

Carlson acknowledged that the suspect’s motivations were “definitely racist,” but rather than explore the issue, the Fox host essentially suggested that Americans should stop talking about race so much. As an example, Carlson cited how after the Rwandan genocide in the 1990s, that country’s government did not include ethnic classifications its 2003 constitution.

The result, Carlson said: “There have been no more genocides in Rwanda.”

“That could easily be the path forward for this country too,” Carlson claimed. “There is only one answer to rising racial tension, and that is to de-escalate and do what we have done and what we’ve tried to do for hundreds of years, which is work toward color-blind meritocracy and treat people as human beings created by God rather than as faceless members of interest groups that might benefit some political party,” Carlson said.

“We have a moral duty to do this,” he continued, “because all people have equal moral value, no matter what they look like. All lives matter, period.” Then, for good measure, Carlson referenced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous quotation about the content of one’s character.

President Joe Biden, on the other hand, is engaging in “race politics,” Carlson said.

Carlson quoted from a Politico report stating that Biden doesn’t recognize the GOP, which he now sees as “an existential threat to the nation’s democracy.” Carlson then told viewers, “This threat that Biden is referring to is you.” When Biden visits Buffalo on Tuesday, Carlson predicted, he “is likely to use racial wounds in order to make his point.” Doing so would be so bad, Carlson claimed, that actually “there is no behavior worse.”

“Race politics always makes us hate each other, and always in a very predictable way,” he said. “How could you be surprised when [identity politics] leads to white identity politics? You could not be surprised. You did it and it was always going to happen. And then what happens next? Nothing good. Race politics is a sin. Race politics always leads to violence and death.”

Video of Tucker Carlson promoting ‘Great Replacement’ theory surfaces again



Graig Graziosi
Mon, May 16, 2022

A white supremacist mass shooter in Buffalo killed 10 people and wounded another three — 11 of whom were Black — and left behind a manifesto that clearly indicated he had been inspired to commit his crime by the "Great Replacement Theory”.

The accused Buffalo shooter's manifesto echoes ideas that are becoming fairly standard in conservative ideology, thanks in no small part to Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

Mr Carlson, who helms the most-watched political opinion programme in the country, has frequently pushed the Great Replacement Theory during his shows. A compilation of him touting the ideas recently went viral on social media.

Adherents to the Great Replacement Theory believe that there is a concentrated effort by liberals to replace white Americans as the dominant cultural force in the country by importing people of colour and immigrants, who Mr Carlson says are "obedient" and will vote for Democrats.


"So I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term 'replacement', if you suggest the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the third world," Mr Carlson said. "But they become hysterical because that's that's what's happening actually. Let's just say it. That's true."

The Independent has reached out to Mr Carlson for comment.

Despite the fact that immigrants and people of colour do not vote in monolithic blocks, some conservatives have accepted the conspiracy theory as true, and it has fuelled some of the worst modern mass shootings.

Both the 2019 mosque shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, and a 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh were motivated in part by complaints that white people were being replaced.

Mr Carlson said that "demographic change is key to the Democratic party's political ambitions" in another segment.

"In other words you're being replaced and there's nothing you can do about it so shut up!" he said before letting out a maniacal laugh.

In another episode he was less veiled in this feelings on the issue, claiming that "our country is being invaded by the rest of the world”.

"I'm going to state unequivocally the country is being stolen from American citizens as we watch." he said in another segment.

Last September he even used the name of the theory, saying the "policy is called the 'Great Replacement,'" which he said was the "replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from faraway countries."

By "legacy Americans," he means white.

Those are only a sample of the times Mr Carlson has pushed the ideology; a New York Times report found 400 instances of the pundit suggesting that Democrats are trying to force a demographic change to improve their election chances.

The Buffalo shooting should make the GOP change its 'Great Replacement Theory' rhetoric

BUT OF COURSE IT WON'T

Ben Jealous
Mon, May 16, 2022

The mass shooting in Buffalo has drawn attention to the deeply pernicious "Great Replacement Theory," a theory boosted by the Far Right and its allies at Fox News and some conservative media.

Tragically, the GOP, the party of Lincoln, is making the same mistakes the old Democratic Party did after the Civil War. They are becoming a party whose modern legacy is being defined by violent white supremacists. If we are ever going to stop this sort of home-grown white supremacist terrorism, it is going to take all of our leaders doing everything they can.

It is time for national Republicans to go to Buffalo and reflect on the racist mass killing there, as well as the lives of great Republicans Frederick Douglass and Jack Kemp, who were both connected to that area.

Douglass was born into slavery and became one of the greatest anti-slavery crusaders. He gave important abolitionist speeches in Buffalo and lived in nearby Rochester, where a statue of him has been repeatedly vandalized in recent years.


Kemp was a former quarterback for the Buffalo Bills who ran for president as a Republican and a card-carrying member of the NAACP.

Columnist Rex Huppke: Delaware HBCU team’s bus searched in Georgia. They didn't find any critical race theory.

The young man charged with Saturday's killings was allegedly inspired by racist and anti-Semitic theories about powerful forces scheming to replace white people in this country with Black people and immigrants.

Jack Kemp on Aug. 10, 1996, in Russell, Kan., as Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole introduces him as his running mate.

A deadly theory on race

The Great Replacement Theory is deadly. It has inspired previous mass murderers who killed Jewish people in Pittsburgh, Latinos in El Paso, and Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand. It radicalizes lost young men who prowl toxic corners of the internet.

And it is poisoning the minds of millions of Americans who now hear it being promoted by irresponsible elected officials and cable television personalities.

Ethical challenges: The Fox News texts about Jan. 6 are a low moment for journalists

The fear at the root of the Great Replacement Theory is a very old one. In the 19th Century, Douglass recognized and directly addressed the fears that white Americans would be unable to survive or sustain their dominance if the country granted full equality to Black people or welcomed immigrants from China.

This is an undated photo shows abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

Douglass understood that these sentiments struck at the heart of the American ideal. In an 1869 speech called “Our Composite Nation,” he called out those who saw racial and religious differences as a weakness rather than a national strength. He said that fears “that the Caucasian race may not be able to hold their own against that vast incoming population, does not seem entitled to much respect.” Regarding immigrants, the Black Republican said, “we shall be stronger if we receive them as friends and give them a reason for loving our country and our institutions.”

Columnist Connie Schultz: How potholders got me thinking about racism, my father and the whitewashing of US history

Douglass called on Americans to expand their vision of what America could be and to welcome the full equality of everyone who could strengthen the young country that had just been through the devastating Civil War.

A crowd gathers as police investigate after a shooting at a supermarket on Saturday, May 14, 2022, in Buffalo, N.Y.

“Our geographical position, our relation to the outside world, our fundamental principles of Government, world embracing in their scope and character, our vast resources, requiring all manner of labor to develop them, and our already existing composite population, all conspire to one grand end, and that is to make us the most perfect national illustration of the unity and dignity of the human family that the world has ever seen,” he said.
What we need to hear today

Americans today urgently need to hear that kind of vision from our elected officials – not small-minded pandering to fear and bigotry.

I want to be clear that a vision of an America strengthened by diversity and renewed by immigrants does not have to divide us along partisan lines as it does too often today. Although the Republican Party is on the verge – some of my friends would say long past that point – of becoming a white supremacist party, there is still time for reflection and change.

Columnist Suzette Hackney: Finding my family's history in Brunswick, Georgia, where Ahmaud Arbery was murdered

If Republican leaders visit upstate New York, they should reflect on Douglass’s vision of a country whose growth and strength are nourished by a confident embrace of diversity. And they could reflect on the words of Kemp, who when asked to explain the seeming distance between his approach to race and that of his colleagues, responded, “I can’t help but care about the rights of the people I used to shower with.”

This latest brutality gives those with media platforms and political power a responsibility to reckon with the twin evils of mass violence and racial, ethnic and religious hatred. We are all capable of growth and clarity and courage. And we desperately need all of them from our nation’s leaders.

Ben Jealous is president of People For the American Way and a professor of the practice at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a former national president of the NAACP. A New York Times best-selling author, his next book "Never Forget Our People Were Always Free" will be published by Harper Collins in December 2022. Follow him on Twitter: @BenJealous.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Buffalo shooting puts spotlight on GOP and Great Replacement Theory

High-Ranking Republican Pushes ‘Great Replacement’ Rhetoric Two Days After White Supremacist Mass Shooting

Ryan Bort
Mon, May 16, 2022,

Rep. Elise Stefanik - Credit: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty Images

Elise Stefanik is the third-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives. She is a member of the party’s leadership, in other words, elevated last year by Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. She’s also one of a growing contingent of conservatives who have brushed up against the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, a white supremacist tenet holding that white people are being replaced by people of color and, politically speaking, that Democrats are deliberately trying to flood the U.S. with immigrants in order to gain an electoral advantage. The mass shooting in Buffalo on Saturday was inspired by the great replacement, but that didn’t keep Stefanik from continuing to push the idea that Democrats are trying to replace white people with people of color.

“Democrats desperately want wide open borders and mass amnesty for illegals allowing them to vote,” she wrote on Monday morning. “Like the vast majority of Americans, Republicans want to secure our borders and protect election integrity.”

Stefanik and others may frame this not so much as a racial issue, but one of Democrats replacing America-loving Republicans with foreigners more willing to support the “radical left’s” policies. The subtext, however, is clear. It’s about white people being replaced by non-white people, an idea which was popularized recently by Renaud Camus, a French writer who described African immigrants invading European nations in order to do away with the white race. White nationalists, including the ones who chanted “Jews will not replace us!” in Charlottesville during Trump’s first year in office.

Stefanik is no stranger to this kind of rhetoric, though a slightly (and cynically) sanitized version of it. Her campaign committee claimed in an ad released last September that Democrats want to enact a “PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION,” and that their plan is to “grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.” She’s since regularly criticized Biden for allowing an “invasion” at the U.S.-Mexico border while advocating for the completion of Trump’s border wall. Standard fare.

The great replacement’s emergence among the Republican Party’s mainstream has not coincidentally coincided with Trump’s emergence as the party’s god-king. It’s also as it has been pushed by name by Tucker Carlson, who may be the most influential figure in conservative politics next to Trump. “In political terms, this policy is called the ‘great replacement,’ the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from faraway countries,” the Fox News host said last September in criticizing President Biden for not doing more to keep desperate Haitian migrants from entering the United States. “This is the language of eugenics,” Carlson added of Biden’s rhetoric around the issue.

Carlson has also repeatedly pushed the idea that Americans should take action in response to the “great replacement,” as Media Matters pointed out on Monday. Payton Gendron, the teenage white supremacist who killed 10 people after opening fire in a supermarket in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, on Saturday, did just that. The “great replacement” conspiracy was rampant throughout his 180-page manifesto.

Stefanik isn’t the only politician or aspiring politician who pushed the political version of the great replacement theory in the wake of Saturday’s shooting. Blake Masters, a far-right candidate for Senate in Arizona posted a video of himself railing against Biden’s border policy hours after the shooting took place. “The Democrats want open borders so they can bring in and amnesty **tens of millions** of illegal aliens — that’s their electoral strategy,” he wrote. “Not on my watch.”


J.D. Vance, the Republican who rode Trump’s endorsement to victory in last month’s Senate primary in Ohio, has also pushed the conspiracy theory. So too have members of Congress like Rep. Scott Perry. McCarthy and other establishment Republicans may not be willing to push it as explicitly, but they too have recognized that the party has molded itself around white supremacy in an effort to court Trump’s base, as evinced by their frequent trips to the border and strained effort to make immigration the central issue of the midterms. Stefanik is also fully aware of this, and she doesn’t seem to feel any need to show any restraint regarding white supremacist theory — mass shootings be damned.

First look at our galaxy's black hole released just as society collapses into itself


Andrew Paul
Thu, May 12, 2022, 

No, not this. The actual image is a lot less...obvious.

We’ve seen a lot of marketing gimmicks in our time covering all things pop culture, but we gotta say—you’re wild for this one, NASA. Presumably to get everyone even more hyped for society’s looming self-immolation, astronomers have just released humanity’s first ever glimpse at the incomprehensible terror that is the supermassive black hole around which the entirety of our Milky Way galaxy orbits. Get hyped, y’all!

Hot damn! Just look at that thing... well, not so much “look” at it, since the black hole dubbed Sagittarius A* isn’t technically visible to our pathetic human eyes, seeing as how not even light itself escapes the celestial phenomenon’s cruel grip. But look at its low-res effects on the universe around it!

“Light escaping from the hot gas swirling around the black hole appears to us as the bright ring,” professor of astrophysics Feryal Özel told NBC News this morning, going on to explain,“Light that is too close to the black hole—close enough to be swallowed by it—eventually crosses its horizon and leaves behind just the dark void in the center.” A bit on the nose, Prof. Özel, but you’ll get no argument from us.

According to researchers’ estimates, Sagittarius A* is located approximately 27,000 lightyears away from Earth, and is about 4 million times more massive than our own Sun. The news was first revealed earlier today in a special edition of The Astrophysical Journal Letters, and is actually only the second actual image of a black hole ever taken.

What’s more, this is apparently the first visual confirmation that it is indeed a black hole that lies in the center of our galaxy. Although this theory has been widely accepted for some time, the new image provides incontrovertible evidence to support it. Great job, everyone involved. We’ll do our best to enjoy this before life imitates the art you provided us today.

Send Great Job, Internet tips to gji@theonion.com

BAN HYPERSONIC WMD
U.S. Air Force says it successfully tested hypersonic weapon

A B-52H Stratofortress assigned to the 419th Flight Test Squadron was used over the weekend to launch a hypersonic weapon off the coast of Southern California. 

File Photo by Giancarlo Casem/Air Force

May 17 (UPI) -- The U.S. Air Force said it has successfully conducted a test of a hypersonic weapon over the weekend amid a growing race with China and Russia to develop such military technology.

The military branch announced Monday that a B-52H Stratofortress aircraft successfully released a AGM-1831 Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon that achieved speeds five times greater than the speed of sound.

The test was conducted Saturday off the coast of Southern California, it said.

"This was a major accomplishment by the ARRW team for the weapons enterprise and our Air Force," Brig. Gen. Heath Collins, Air Force program executive officer for weapons, said in a statement. "The team's tenacity, expertise and commitment were key in overcoming the past year's challenges to get us to the recent success."

"We are ready to build on what we've learned and continue moving hypersonics forward," he said.

Hypersonic weapons are those that travel at speeds of at least March 5, which is five times faster than the send of sound, and are considerably faster than traditional missiles, making them difficult to intercept.

The test was held more than a month after the administration of President Joe Biden entered a partnership with Australia and Britain to accelerate development of the advanced hypersonic capabilities, and nearly two months after the United States accused Russia of using one of these missiles in its war against Ukraine.

The United States has been seeking to develop hypersonic weapons since the early 2000s but funding has been relatively restrained though both the Department of Defense and Congress have shown growing interest in the weaponry due to advances by Russia and China, according to a report from the Congressional Research service produced early this month.

The Pentagon budget ask for fiscal year 2023 included $4.7 billion for hypersonic weaponry, an increase from $3.8 billion a year prior.

The Air Force said the weapon launched over the weekend is designed to enable the U.S. to "hold fixed, high-value, time-sensitive targets at risk" and that it will expand precision-strike capabilities.

"Our highly skilled team made history on this first air-launched hypersonic weapon," said Lt. Col. Michael Jungquist, commander of the 419th Flight Test Squadron that conducted the weekend test. "We're doing everything we can to get this game-changing weapon to the warfighter as soon as possible."

NASA to announce fate of tremor-detecting InSight Mars lander


1/5

NASA's InSight Mars Lander, which acquired this image in November 2018, has had its mission extended until the end of the year, but dust storms have left some portion of its solar panels covered and scientists are concerned it can't generate enough power to keep going. 

Photo by NASA/UPI | License Photo

ORLANDO, Fla., May 17 (UPI) -- Despite being ravaged by dust storms and struggling to stay powered, NASA's InSight Mars lander has managed to keep making scientific findings -- including its recent detection of a powerful Marsquake.

The quake, measured by the lander on May 4, was the most intense detected so far by InSight and shook the red planet for more than 9 hours.

The craft has met most goals from its two-year mission -- a mission extended through the end of this year -- but NASA officials say they are concerned if it can keep going because of dust accumulation on its solar panels.

NASA on Tuesday will offer an update on InSight's power situation -- whether it is generating enough power to continue its mission -- and whether anything can be done to improve it, in addition to the lander's overall long-term fate.

After landing on Mars in 2018, InSight was tasked with probing the planet's interior to learn more about how it works.

While Earthquakes are caused by plate tectonics -- when the plates that make up Earth's crust shift and collide -- Mars doesn't have a crust made up of plates, so planet's tremblers are caused by slightly different phenomena.

"On Mars, quakes are caused by the contraction of the crust due to cooling and vertical motions from thermal uplift or sinking," Bruce Banerdt, principal investigator for the InSight mission and a principal scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told UPI.

Meaning that, like baking a cake or muffins, the top of the planet's crust expands and contracts as the middle heats up -- or cooks, in the case of food -- and it expands upwards, pushing against the top. This upward expansion causes cracks in the top of a cake, and has a similar effect on the planetary crust of Mars.

InSight has detected more than 1,300 Marsquakes, and scientists think underlying magma reserves on the planet cause the quakes, even though volcanoes aren't actively erupting on the planet's surface.

Previous Marsquakes were deeper below the planet's crust, and only detected with InSight's suite of instruments, but the May 4 quake could have been felt if a person were standing on the surface, scientists said.

Registering as a magnitude 5, Banerdt said that while it's weak in comparison to many quakes felt on Earth, it reached an intensity for which scientists have been looking.

"This quake is sure to provide us with a view inside the planet we've never seen before," he said.

The finding is a win for the ailing lander, which in January sat through a massive dust storm that covered its solar panels, making it more difficult for to charge up its batteries.

Another similar massive dust storm ended the Opportunity rover's extended mission in 2018, after the rover could no longer power itself up.

To help extend its life expectancy, the team put InSight into safe mode for a few months.

Eventually the craft was able to return to full power and is proving its worth by detecting this latest monster quake. Dust continues to accumulate on the lander's solar panels, however, and unless there's a way to shake it off, eventually it will succumb to the elements, NASA has said.

Engineers predict that could happen sometime this year, possibly before the end of its current mission.

Scientists find evidence of water in Mars rock, but no signs of life


Swedish scientists analyzed this Martian meteorite that was found on Earth and concluded that it had only very limited interaction with liquid water.

 Photo courtesy Josefin Martell/Lund University/UPI

May 16 (UPI) -- Swedish scientists say a study of a meteorite from Mars indicates that it had only very limited exposure to liquid water -- an indication that it's unlikely life was present on the Red Planet in recent times.

Scientists at Lund University in Sweden agree that widespread presence of water would have been a prerequisite for life on Mars, but advanced scans of a 1.3-billion-year-old Martian meteorite revealed only trace contact with hydrogen, the key element in water.

The results of their study were published last week in the academic journal Science Advances.

While samples of Martian rocks are being collected by NASA's Perseverance rover and are expected to be available by 2030, scientists got a jump on the process with a Martian "Nakhlite" meteorite -- rock ejected from the Red Planet by a meteorite impact hundreds of millions of years ago.

The chunk is known as the Miller Range 03346 nakhlite, a 1.6-pound rock that scientists discovered in Antarctica's Miller Range in 2003.

Josefin Martell, geology doctoral student at Lund University, said the goal of studying the meteorite was answering whether there was ever a "major hydrothermal system" on Mars.

NASA's Perseverance Mars rover is seen on the surface of the Red Planet on February 24. The rover, among other things, is collecting rock samples from the surface for analysis. 

File Photo by NASA/UPI

"Since water is central to the question of whether life ever existed on Mars, we wanted to investigate how much of the meteorite reacted with water when it was still part of the Mars bedrock," Martell said in a statement.

Researchers used neutron and X-ray tomography to study meteorite -- neutron tomography was used because neutrons are very sensitive to hydrogen -- and found that only a fairly small part of it seems to have reacted with liquid water.

Thus, they reasoned, it probably wasn't a large hydrothermal system that produced the reaction, but rather "small accumulations of underground ice" that melted when the meteorite impacted the planet about 630 million years ago.

Scientists said the findings "have direct implications for the habitability of the Martian subsurface in the Nakhlite source region, where any habitable environments were localized and very short-lived, reducing the chance of life's emergence or survival on Mars" during its most recent historical period.

"Of course, that doesn't mean that life couldn't have existed in other places on Mars, or that there couldn't have been life at other times," Martell noted.

Dispatches from Mars: Perseverance rover sends images

NASA's Perseverance Mars rover, using its Mastcam-Z camera system, captured this view of the Martian sunset on November 9, 2021, the 257th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Martian sunsets typically stand out for their distinctive blue color as fine dust in the atmosphere permits blue light to penetrate the atmosphere more efficiently than colors with longer wavelengths. But this sunset looks different: Less dust in the atmosphere resulted in a more muted color than average. The color has been calibrated and white-balanced to remove camera artifacts. Photo courtesy of NASA | License Photo