Texas Still Reeling As Country, Companies And Traders Assess Damage From Winter Storm's Strike On Energy Grid


Bibhu Pattnaik
Sun, February 21, 2021, 



The U.S. is still coming to grips with what Bloomberg News described today as "one of the most remarkable weeks in power and gas market history."

A blast of cold weather triggered blackouts and disruptions to water systems throughout the week, after Texas experienced one of its coldest days on record on Monday.

Tens of millions of people have been affected by lack of power and water since. More than 4 million of Texas' 29 million people had no power at one point, and the water supplies of over 14.5 million people were affected as the extreme cold caused pipes to freeze and burst, according to Reuters.

Texas has a deregulated power market that is largely cut off from the rest of the country's. Warning signs came two days before Monday's events, when a sudden loss of power hit the grid. That, and a similar but smaller event in 2011, has drawn criticism against operators for failing to adequately prepare.

About 65,000 customers of ERCOT, the state's main grid operator, remained without power as of Saturday afternoon. State health officials have linked more than two dozen deaths to the power crisis. About half of the state is still experiencing water disruptions, Reuters reported Saturday.

The surge in electricity demand crippled the state's grid, forcing authorities to use rolling blackouts to prevent an uncontrolled blackout that might have taken weeks, or longer, to fix. This was the country’s biggest-ever forced blackout, according to Bloomberg. CBS News quoted the state's top power grid official as saying that the system was "seconds and minutes" away from leaving residents without power for months when the storm hit. The system was back to normal as of Friday, operators said.

President Joe Biden on Saturday approved a major disaster declaration for Texas. This will allow affected people to get federal funding for home repairs and low-cost loans. At least two dozen people have died as a result of the crisis.

Gas traders are pleading for cash as the prices for heating fuel went up to 300-fold due to increased demand and slashed production.

As Texas struggles to recover, customers in the state are facing unprecedented price hikes in their power bills as a result of the recent snow storm. Media reports tell of residential customers facing bills jumping into the thousands of dollars for the month of February, compared to the low hundreds for January. Power customers are being hit with huge bills if they had chosen a floating-rate contract, which is tied to wholesale contracts, the Financial Times reported. The wholesale power rate hit the maximum allowed $9,000 per megawatt hour for five days beginning last Sunday, according to the newspaper. That amounts to a rate of $9 a kilowatt-hour for a typical household that normally pays 12 cents per kilowatt-hour.

Reuters reports that pollution escalated as refineries burned and released gases to prevent damage to their equipment amid the power and gas outages. The flaring, as this protective measure is known, darkened the skies with smoke that was visible for miles in eastern Texas. Refineries belonging to Valero Energy Corporation (NYSE: VLO), Marathon Petroleum Corp (NYSE: MPC), Exxon Mobil Corporation (NYSE: XOM) and Motiva Enterprises were the top polluters, according to a Reuters review of preliminary data supplied to the Texas Commission on Environment Quality.

Dow Inc (NYSE: DOW) CEO Jim Fitterling called on Biden to use the crisis to advance the president's proposed $2 trillion push for infrastructure and green energy spending. "Don’t waste the crisis, you use this to drill in,” he said in an interview with the Financial Times. Dow had to shut down chemical plants in Texas during the storm, and the company expects investments in grids will boost growth in the years ahead, according to FT.

Atmos Energy Corporation (NYSE: ATO) is aiming to raise cash to fulfill a multi-billion-dollar committment to secure fuel, Bloomberg reported today. Atmos is one of the biggest independent suppliers of natural gas in the country and has 3 million customers in eight states. But it is not mainly a producer natural gas and as such had to hit the markets to secure more gas last week. The bill, due at the end of March, could be as high as $3.5 billion.

Photo courtesy the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Gary Anglebrandt contributed to this report.

Texas Crisis Exposes a Nation's Vulnerability to Climate Change

City of Richardson workers prepare to work on a water main pipe that burst due to extreme cold in a neighborhood Wednesday, Feb. 17, 2021, in Richardson, Texas. Water service providers in Tennessee, Oklahoma, Texas and other states hit hard by frigid winter storms and mounting power outages are asking residents to restrict usage as reports of water main breaks, low pressure and busted pipes emerge. (AP Photo/LM Otero)


Even as Texas struggled to restore electricity and water over the past week, signs of the risks posed by increasingly extreme weather to America’s aging infrastructure were cropping up across the country.

The week’s continent-spanning winter storms triggered blackouts in Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi and several other states. One-third of oil production in the nation was halted. Drinking-water systems in Ohio were knocked offline. Road networks nationwide were paralyzed, and vaccination efforts in 20 states were disrupted.

The crisis carries a profound warning. As climate change brings more frequent and intense storms, floods, heat waves, wildfires and other extreme events, it is placing growing stress on the foundations of the country’s economy: its network of roads and railways, drinking-water systems, power plants, electrical grids, industrial waste sites and even homes. Failures in just one sector can set off a domino effect of breakdowns in hard-to-predict ways

Much of this infrastructure was built decades ago, under the expectation that the environment around it would remain stable or at least fluctuate within predictable bounds. Now climate change is upending that assumption.

“We are colliding with a future of extremes,” said Alice Hill, who oversaw planning for climate risks on the National Security Council during the Obama administration. “We base all our choices about risk management on what’s occurred in the past, and that is no longer a safe guide.”

While it is not always possible to say precisely how global warming influenced any one particular storm, scientists said, an overall rise in extreme weather creates sweeping new risks.

Sewer systems are overflowing more often as powerful rainstorms exceed their design capacity. Coastal homes and highways are collapsing as intensified runoff erodes cliffs. Coal ash, the toxic residue produced by coal-burning plants, is spilling into rivers as floods overwhelm barriers meant to hold it back. Homes once beyond the reach of wildfires are burning in blazes they were never designed to withstand.

Problems like these often reflect an inclination of governments to spend as little money as possible, said Shalini Vajjhala, a former Obama administration official who now advises cities on meeting climate threats. She said it is hard to persuade taxpayers to spend extra money to guard against disasters that seem unlikely.

But climate change flips that logic, making inaction far costlier. “The argument I would make is, we can’t afford not to, because we’re absorbing the costs” later, Vajjhala said, after disasters strike. “We’re spending poorly.”

The Biden administration has talked extensively about climate change, particularly the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and create jobs in renewable energy. But it has spent less time discussing how to manage the growing effects of climate change, facing criticism from experts for not appointing more people who focus on climate resilience.

“I am extremely concerned by the lack of emergency management expertise reflected in Biden’s climate team,” said Samantha Montano, an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy who focuses on disaster policy. “There’s an urgency here that still is not being reflected.”

A White House spokesperson, Vedant Patel, said in a statement, “Building resilient and sustainable infrastructure that can withstand extreme weather and a changing climate will play an integral role in creating millions of good paying, union jobs” while cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

And while President Joe Biden has called for a major push to refurbish and upgrade the nation’s infrastructure, getting a closely divided Congress to spend hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars will be a major challenge.

Heightening the cost to society, disruptions can disproportionately affect lower-income households and other vulnerable groups, including older people or those with limited English.

“All these issues are converging,” said Robert Bullard, a professor at Texas Southern University who studies wealth and racial disparities related to the environment. “And there’s simply no place in this country that’s not going to have to deal with climate change.”

Many Forms of Water Crisis

In September, when a sudden storm dumped a record of more than 2 inches of water on Washington in less than 75 minutes, the result was not just widespread flooding but also raw sewage rushing into hundreds of homes.

Washington, like many other cities in the Northeast and Midwest, relies on what is called a combined sewer overflow system; if a downpour overwhelms storm drains along the street, they are built to overflow into the pipes that carry raw sewage. But if there is too much pressure, sewage can be pushed backward, into people’s homes — where the forces can send it erupting from toilets and shower drains.

This is what happened in Washington. The city’s system was built in the late 1800s. Now climate change is straining an already outdated design.

DC Water, the local utility, is spending billions of dollars so that the system can hold more sewage. “We’re sort of in uncharted territory,” said Vincent Morris, a utility spokesperson.

The challenge of managing and taming the nation’s water supplies — whether in streets and homes or in vast rivers and watersheds — is growing increasingly complex as storms intensify. Last May, rain-swollen flooding breached two dams in central Michigan, forcing thousands of residents to flee their homes and threatening a chemical complex and toxic waste cleanup site. Experts warned it was unlikely to be the last such failure.

Many of the country’s 90,000 dams were built decades ago and were already in dire need of repairs. Now climate change poses an additional threat, bringing heavier downpours to parts of the country and raising the odds that some dams could be overwhelmed by more water than they were designed to handle. One recent study found that most of California’s biggest dams were at increased risk of failure as global warming advances.

In recent years, dam safety officials have begun grappling with the dangers. Colorado, for instance, now requires dam builders to take into account the risk of increased atmospheric moisture driven by climate change as they plan for worst-case flooding scenarios.

But nationwide, there remains a backlog of thousands of older dams that still need to be rehabilitated or upgraded. The price tag could ultimately stretch to more than $70 billion.

“Whenever we study dam failures, we often find there was a lot of complacency beforehand,” said Bill McCormick, president of the Association of State Dam Safety Officials. But given that failures can have catastrophic consequences, “we really can’t afford to be complacent.”

Built for a Different Future

If the Texas blackouts exposed one state’s poor planning, they also provided a warning for the nation: Climate change threatens virtually every aspect of electricity grids that are not always designed to handle increasingly severe weather. The vulnerabilities show up in power lines, natural-gas plants, nuclear reactors and myriad other systems.

Higher storm surges can knock out coastal power infrastructure. Deeper droughts can reduce water supplies for hydroelectric dams. Severe heat waves can reduce the efficiency of fossil-fuel generators, transmission lines and even solar panels at precisely the moment that demand soars because everyone cranks up their air conditioners.

Climate hazards can also combine in new and unforeseen ways.

In California recently, Pacific Gas & Electric has had to shut off electricity to thousands of people during exceptionally dangerous fire seasons. The reason: Downed power lines can spark huge wildfires in dry vegetation. Then, during a record-hot August last year, several of the state’s natural-gas plants malfunctioned in the heat, just as demand was spiking, contributing to blackouts.

“We have to get better at understanding these compound impacts,” said Michael Craig, an expert in energy systems at the University of Michigan who recently led a study looking at how rising summer temperatures in Texas could strain the grid in unexpected ways. “It’s an incredibly complex problem to plan for.”

Some utilities are taking notice. After Superstorm Sandy in 2012 knocked out power for 8.7 million customers, utilities in New York and New Jersey invested billions in flood walls, submersible equipment and other technology to reduce the risk of failures. Last month, New York’s Con Edison said it would incorporate climate projections into its planning.

As freezing temperatures struck Texas, a glitch at one of two reactors at a South Texas nuclear plant, which serves 2 million homes, triggered a shutdown. The cause: Sensing lines connected to the plant’s water pumps had frozen, said Victor Dricks, a spokesperson for the federal Nuclear Regulatory Agency.

It is also common for extreme heat to disrupt nuclear power. The issue is that the water used to cool reactors can become too warm to use, forcing shutdowns.

Flooding is another risk.

After a tsunami led to several meltdowns at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power plant in 2011, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission told the 60 or so working nuclear plants in the United States, many decades old, to evaluate their flood risk to account for climate change; 90% showed at least one type of flood risk that exceeded what the plant was designed to handle.

The greatest risk came from heavy rain and snowfall exceeding the design parameters at 53 plants.

Scott Burnell, a Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesperson, said in a statement, “The NRC continues to conclude, based on the staff’s review of detailed analyses, that all U.S. nuclear power plants can appropriately deal with potential flooding events, including the effects of climate change, and remain safe.”

A Nation’s Arteries at Risk

The collapse of a portion of California’s Highway 1 into the Pacific Ocean after heavy rains last month was a reminder of the fragility of the nation’s roads.

Several climate-related risks appeared to have converged to heighten the danger. Rising seas and higher storm surges have intensified coastal erosion, while more extreme bouts of precipitation have increased the landslide risk.

Add to that the effects of devastating wildfires, which can damage the vegetation holding hillside soil in place, and “things that wouldn’t have slid without the wildfires start sliding,” said Jennifer Jacobs, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of New Hampshire. “I think we’re going to see more of that.”

The United States depends on highways, railroads and bridges as economic arteries for commerce, travel and simply getting to work. But many of the country’s most important links face mounting climate threats. More than 60,000 miles of roads and bridges in coastal floodplains are already vulnerable to extreme storms and hurricanes, government estimates show. And inland flooding could also threaten at least 2,500 bridges across the country by 2050, a federal climate report warned in 2018.

Sometimes even small changes can trigger catastrophic failures. Engineers modeling the collapse of bridges over Escambia Bay in Florida during Hurricane Ivan in 2004 found that the extra 3 inches of sea level rise since the bridge was built in 1968 very likely contributed to the collapse, because of the added height of the storm surge and force of the waves.

“A lot of our infrastructure systems have a tipping point. And when you hit the tipping point, that’s when a failure occurs,” Jacobs said. “And the tipping point could be an inch.”

Crucial rail networks are at risk, too. In 2017, Amtrak consultants found that along parts of the Northeast corridor, which runs from Boston to Washington and carries 12 million people a year, flooding and storm surge could erode the track bed, disable the signals and eventually put the tracks underwater.

And there is no easy fix. Elevating the tracks would require also raising bridges, electrical wires and lots of other infrastructure, and moving them would mean buying new land in a densely packed part of the country. So the report recommended flood barriers, costing $24 million per mile, that must be moved into place whenever floods threaten.

Toxic Sites, Deepening Peril

A series of explosions at a flood-damaged chemical plant outside Houston after Hurricane Harvey in 2017 highlighted a danger lurking in a world beset by increasingly extreme weather.

The blasts at the plant came after flooding knocked out the site’s electrical supply, shutting down refrigeration systems that kept volatile chemicals stable. Almost two dozen people, many of them emergency workers, were treated for exposure to the toxic fumes, and some 200 nearby residents were evacuated from their homes.

More than 2,500 facilities that handle toxic chemicals lie in federal flood-prone areas across the country, about 1,400 of them in areas at the highest risk of flooding, a New York Times analysis showed in 2018.

Leaks from toxic cleanup sites, left behind by past industry, pose another threat.

Almost two-thirds of some 1,500 Superfund cleanup sites across the country are in areas with an elevated risk of flooding, storm surge, wildfires or sea level rise, a government audit warned in 2019. Coal ash, a toxic substance produced by coal power plants that is often stored as sludge in special ponds, has been particularly exposed. After Hurricane Florence in 2018, for example, a dam breach at the site of a power plant in Wilmington, North Carolina, released the hazardous ash into a nearby river.

“We should be evaluating whether these facilities or sites actually have to be moved or resecured,” said Lisa Evans, senior counsel at Earthjustice, an environmental law organization. Places that “may have been OK in 1990,” she said, “may be a disaster waiting to happen in 2021.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2021 The New York Times Company

Texas power outage brings electrification-natural gas debate to a head

Professor on Texas power outages: 'We failed to take the steps we need to weatherize' at the end of January and  beginning of February, 2011,

Akiko Fujita
·Anchor/Reporter
Sun, February 21, 2021

In the aftermath of the winter storm that knocked out power to millions of homes in Texas, the finger pointing against renewable energy has been swift.

Research shows the dangers of fossil fuels, including natural gas, but the recent winter storm that led to crippling power outages across regions in Texas has put into question the use of renewable energy instead of natural gas.

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, Texas Congressman Dan Crenshaw (R-Houston) and Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller blamed solar and wind energy for the power outages in their state. Abbott said renewable energy “thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis,” while Crenshaw tweeted “This is what happens when you force the grid to rely in part on wind as a power source.” Meanwhile, Miller said, in a Facebook post: “We should never build another wind turbine in Texas. The experiment failed big time.”

The criticism ignores the dominance of fossil fuel use in Texas, the largest producer of crude oil and natural gas in the U.S. But, it points to a growing unease brewing within the natural gas industry, as the public turns a critical eye towards its carbon footprint, and local electrification initiatives gain momentum nationwide.

"This is the most difficult thing for Texas to admit as a huge natural gas state,” said Michael Webber, an energy resources and mechanical engineering Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “Our natural gas system is not delivering what we need. They're all having trouble but this is really a natural gas problem more than anything else right now."

Methane natural gas has long been touted as a transitional fuel, a cleaner alternative to coal-fired electricity. At the height of the fracking boom in 2014, then President Barack Obama praised methane as a “bridge fuel” that would power the economy to a cleaner, low-carbon future, “if extracted safely.”

But as cities across the country race to reach aggressive targets laid out in the Paris Climate agreement, there is increasing skepticism around natural gas usage. While gas utilities have reduced methane emissions by 73% since 1990, according to the American Gas Association (AGA), a trade organization representing more than 200 natural gas suppliers, experts say its continued use doesn’t cut output deep enough, to get the country to net-zero emissions by 2050.

“The climate implications are huge, whatever fossil fuel it is,” said Sandy Bahr, director of the Arizona Chapter of the Sierra Club, who has been waging a fight against the gas industry in the state, adding that natural gas may sound OK but it’s not.

Natural gas bans

The fight for full electrification in the U.S. has largely been at the local level so far. And the fault lines have formed predictably, along party politics. In California, more than 40 cities have adopted building codes that dramatically reduce their reliance on gas.

The city of San Jose, along with Berkeley has led the way. In 2019, San Jose became the largest in the country to ban natural gas in new construction. Since last year, the city has committed to zero net energy in 100% of new homes. Democratic Mayor Sam Liccardo said the goal is to make all homes all-electric by 2050.

“Buildings are critically important because we know that that is where an awful lot of emissions can be controlled relatively quickly, both through retrofits and through new construction,” he told Yahoo Finance. “By moving from gas to electric, not only are we improving the planet's health we're also improving our own health.”

Last month, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio called for an end to all fossil fuel connections in new construction by 2030. Denver aims to have all new homes electrified by 2024, while the Seattle City Council unanimously approved to update its energy codes, to ban most natural gas usage in some apartments and commercial buildings.

Zero-sum

AGA President and CEO Karen Harbert said 180 million Americans already rely on gas in their homes, and that transitioning to 100% renewable energy is not feasible or cost efficient. In fact, she said natural gas usage has contributed to a 73% cut in methane emissions since 1990.

“It's not a bridge fuel. It's not a bridge source of energy, and neither is our infrastructure,” she said. “And the amount of emissions further emissions that we can reduce, again, at your home is a very small part of the overall emissions picture of our country.”

Still, the industry has waged an aggressive campaign against efforts to phase out methane. When the Seattle City Council first drafted legislation to ban gas hookups in new buildings, Puget Sound Energy hired lobbying firm CBE Strategic, to “deploy a strong coalition of labor and business” to push back. In conservative states like Arizona, lawmakers have moved quickly to pass preemption laws that prevent gas bans from being debated, even though no such legislation has been introduced.

Arizona State House Representative Kristen Engel, a Democrat, said the preemption bill in her state was heavily funded by Southwest Gas, leading to the nickname “Southwest Gas Bill.”

“It really does seem to be the gas industry trying to get out ahead. They see what's happening in other parts of the country, maybe they hear or they think that the cities might follow suit,” Engel said. "And they're trying to get some action on the legislative level to just sort of cut that off at the pass."

Harbert said the AMA has never lobbied for state preemption bills, but supports the move to give customers an option, saying “you can't outright just tell people and mandate their energy choice.”

On social media, the AMA is framing the use of natural gas as a lifestyle choice, partnering with influencers to promote #cookwithgas to reach a younger demographic on platforms like Twitter and Instagram. Other hashtags have been used to promote the industry’s work with frontline workers and food pantries during the pandemic, Harbert said.

“We will continue to use those platforms to reach out to the types of stakeholders that depend on natural gas,” she said. “Everybody loves to cook, particularly now that we're at home. And so, that's just another channel to get out a message about what natural gas does for you as an individual or as a foodie.”

Webber, who is also the chief science and technology officer at ENGIE, one of the largest electric and gas utilities, said the fight between the fossil fuel industry and renewable energy advocates shouldn’t be framed in a zero-sum context, in part because that takes away from efforts to further regulate the gas industry — actions that can be taken immediately.

“Is it a bridge to a future without gas ...or is it part of the destination as well. We don't know the answer yet,” he said. “Are we going to keep gas and add carbon capture, or keep gas but replace the gas with bio-gas, or keep gas but replace the gas with hydrogen? Are we going to get rid of the gas entirely? This is an open question.”

A Giant Flaw in Texas Blackouts: It Cut Power to Gas Supplies

Rachel Adams-Heard, Javier Blas and Mark Chediak
Sat, February 20, 2021, 



(Bloomberg) -- When the Texas power grid was on the brink of collapse and its operator plunged thousands into darkness, it didn’t make an exception for the oil and gas field.

Power was, unsurprisingly, diverted to hospitals and nursing homes. Ercot, as the grid manager is known, was staving off utter catastrophe, its chief executive later said.

But leaving shale fields like the Permian Basin dark had an unintended consequence. Producers who depend on electricity to power their operations were left with no way to pump natural gas. And that gas was needed more than ever to generate electricity.

As one executive described: It was like a death spiral.

The result was a vicious cycle that serves as a painful lesson to any power grid operator and utility company dealing with rolling outages during extreme weather.

Several energy companies say that, while frozen infrastructure and equipment malfunctions caused gas volumes to plummet, a lack of power also had a profound impact on supply. It’s a phenomenon that highlights just how interconnected -- and interdependent -- Texas’s energy network is.

In the Permian, most drillers target more valuable crude, with gas typically considered an unwanted byproduct. That wasn’t the case over days of forced power outages as nearly every source of fuel faltered in the unprecedented cold that slammed Texas.
SO THEY FLARE OFF THE GAS CAUSING GLOBAL WARMING

Even with its explorers focusing on crude, the state is the country’s biggest gas producer, and the fuel makes up just over half of the sources of its power generation mix.

A crucial part of the natural gas system was knocked out by the power outages: compressor stations that help keep gas flowing through pipelines.

As Ercot started asking utilities to prompt big customers to reduce consumption Sunday evening, those stations went down and the pressure across multiple gas pipelines started to drop, ultimately tripping some utilities off line because of lack of fuel.

That, in turn, led some areas of the Eagle Ford shale and the Permian to simply turn off gas production completely.

The situation got much worse in the early hours of Monday as demand continued to climb. Ercot simply didn’t have the power, and millions of homes fell into darkness.

Ercot executives have said the utilities ultimately determine which circuits to turn off during a rotating outage. The grid operator didn’t have information on power being cut to gas compressor stations, a spokeswoman said in an email.

At its peak, nearly 40% of U.S. oil output was shuttered due to the extreme cold and associated blackouts. Three-quarters of the U.S. frack fleet was lost this week, leaving 41 crews working to blast water, sand and chemicals underground to release trapped oil and gas, Matt Johnson, chief executive officer at Primary Vision Inc., said Friday.

Already, companies including Marathon Oil Corp. and Devon Energy Corp. have begun using restored power from local grids or generators to restart output, according to people familiar with the matter.

It’s not yet clear how long it will take to restore all the lost oil and gas supply, but oil traders and executives have said they hope most of the production lost will return within days as temperatures rise and power becomes available.


©2021 Bloomberg L.P.

MORE WHOLESOME MARS PORN

'Something that we’ve never seen before': NASA's Mars rover Perseverance snaps a selfie, other 'stunning' photos


Rachael Joy, Florida Today
Sun, February 21, 2021,

After a seven-month, 300-million-mile journey to the Red Planet, NASA's Perseverance rover has sent back the first high-definition color pictures of Mars, including a selfie.

On Friday, NASA released a photo of the rover in mid-descent as it was suspended under the sky crane moments before it touched down on the Martian surface.

“This is something that we’ve never seen before. It was stunning. The team was awestruck. Just a feeling of victory that we were able to capture these,” said Aaron Stehura, one of the leads on the entry, landing and descent team.

Two more images taken with a 20-megapixel camera show a wide shot of the landscape and a close-up of the rover’s front right wheel with rocks nearby. These are the first color images from the surface of Mars.


This high-resolution still image is part of a video taken by several cameras as NASA's Perseverance rover touched down on Mars on Feb. 18, 2021. A camera aboard the descent stage captured this shot.

“Both images the team just went crazy for,” said Pauline Hwang, assistant strategic mission manager.


This is the first high-resolution, color image to be sent back by the Hazard Cameras on the underside of NASA's Perseverance Mars rover after its landing on Feb. 18, 2021.

Perseverance’s primary mission is to search for microbial signs of life and its landing spot in Jezero Crater was hand-picked for that goal. It’s an ancient river delta that is marked by steep cliffs, sand dunes and large boulders.

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Amazingly, Perseverance gently touched down in a safe, flat spot with only 1 degree of tilt.

“The back of the rover is actually looking toward the delta area and the front is actually looking downward,” Hwang explained.

“By the edge of the wheel is a rock and one of first things we noticed was that it has a lot of holes in it. There are a number of geological processes that can make holes in a rock like that," Perseverance Deputy Project scientist Katie Stack Morgan said. "One of the questions we’ll first ask is whether these rocks represent a volcanic or sedimentary origin. Both would be equally exciting to the team.”


This high-resolution image shows one of the six wheels aboard NASA's Perseverance Mars rover, which landed on Feb. 18, 2021. The image was taken by one of Perseverance's color Hazard Cameras

In spite of pulling off a picture-perfect landing, there’s no downtime for the persevering rover.

The team is putting Perseverance through its paces performing hardware check-outs to make sure all the systems are functioning.

In 10 days or less Perseverance could be ready for its first short drive to scope out the neighborhood.


The descent stage holding NASA’s Perseverance rover can be seen falling through the Martian atmosphere, its parachute trailing behind, in this image taken on Feb. 18, 2021, by the High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Over the weekend

The rover is decked out with 23 cameras and on Saturday the team was to do a full Martian photo shoot.

“We’re gonna do a panorama of the rover and we’re also going to do a full panorama of our landscape around us,” Hwang said.

They anticipated receiving those images by Monday.

Previous Mars missions have taken still photographs of descent but no landing had ever been filmed.

Six cameras were rolling high-definition video footage of the spacecraft during entry, landing and descent also known as the “seven minutes of terror” because pulling it off is a major challenge.

Related: Worm muscles, artificial retinas, space laptops: NASA Wallops launches rocket to ISS

If they were successful it will be the first video footage of a spacecraft landing on another planet.

NASA expects to record about 250,00 images at frame rates ranging from 12 to 75 images per second similar to cellphone footage.

The landing team is hopeful they will begin to see some video on Monday as well.

Perseverance is also equipped with two microphones to capture sound on the Red Planet for the first time. The team was hoping to get an indication over the weekend that they did get audio.

Next two months

Perseverance did not travel solo to Mars. A helicopter called Ingenuity hitched a ride tucked under the belly of the rover. Ingenuity will attempt powered flight for the first time on another planet.

The team says the earliest they could begin helicopter flights would be in approximately two months.

First they have need to do checkouts on the rover’s surface flight software. Once that’s done, Perseverance needs to drive to the next location to find a safe spot for Ingenuity to fly. They’re calling it the “helipad location” and they might find it sooner than they anticipated.

“Based on where we landed we’re already starting to look at that data. There might be some really good helipad location nearby,” Hwang said.

Once the location is determined, Perseverance will gently release the helicopter from underneath and drive away.

"That's a highly critical event first time on Mars so we're putting all hands on deck for that one and doing several practice sessions," Hwang said.

After Ingenuity takes flight, Perseverance will roam the Martian surface for the next two years taking core samples to be returned to Earth around 2031.

This article originally appeared on Florida Today: Mars rover Perseverance sends first color photos from planet surface

Former Trump official details "grave misstep" in COVID response

Emily Tillett

Sat, February 20, 2021, 

Former Trump deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger says that it was a "grave misstep" for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to wait until April 2020 to advise the American public to begin wearing masks as a means to protect against the deadly coronavirus pandemic. In an excerpt of an interview set to air on "Face the Nation" this Sunday, Pottinger told moderator Margaret Brennan that the "mask misstep cost us dearly."

"It was the one tool that was widely available, at least homemade, you know, cotton masks were widely available," Pottinger said. "It was the one effective, widely available tool that we had in the arsenal to deal with this...It was a grave misstep."

As the pandemic began its rapid spread across the United States in March of last year, key administration and COVID-19 task force officials publicly advised against wearing masks, a recommendation that was partially based on the fact that hospitals faced drastic shortages of personal protective equipment.

Pottinger turned to the government of Taiwan to secure a batch of masks that he distributed to White House medical staff and the national security team that reported to him. He said the remainder was donated to the national stockpile. The CDC did not issue formal guidance on mask wearing to the public until April.

In a previous interview with "Face the Nation" last March, then-Surgeon General Jerome Adams told the program that "masks do not work for the general public and preventing them from getting coronavirus." Doctors Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and then-CDC Director Robert Redfield were also giving similar guidance.

On February 27, while testifying before the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee, Redfield advised prioritizing masks for frontline health care workers and stated there was "no role for masks in the community." The following week, Fauci told a Senate committee that masks were unnecessary "because right now, there isn't anything going around right now in the community, certainly not coronavirus, that is calling for the broad use of masks."  

Adams appeared again on "Face the Nation" in July, this time donning a mask, and urged viewers to wear face coverings when they are in public.

The surgeon general said at the time that the shift in guidance to the American people was attributed to a better understanding of the coronavirus and how it spreads. Still, former President Trump himself rarely donned a mask and openly questioned their usefulness.

The CDC has since issued explicit mask guidance calling for  "universal mask wearing" in all activity outside of one's home, as well as revised guidelines unveiled last week that recommend wearing well-fitting face masks or two masks at a time in certain situations to improve the fit and filtration to help curb the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Pottinger rang early alarms inside the Trump administration regarding the virus' potential ferocity and impact on the U.S. He said the information that he was receiving from making personal calls to doctors on the ground in China provided more accurate information than what was being shared by the Chinese government with their CDC counterparts.

Pottinger also pointed to the collection and analysis of data related to the virus' spread in real time as a grave problem he says has yet to be rectified under the Biden administration. He said he is speaking out now in the hope of supporting new CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky's attempts to reform the CDC and to scale up such virus sequencing and surveillance in order to more quickly track its spread.

"...Where it's appearing, but also how its genetics are evolving so that we can stay ahead of it, ensure that that we don't get sucker punched by a new variant that could compromise the effectiveness of our vaccine." 

Pottinger, who started his time in the Trump White House back in 2017, resigned from his post at the National Security Council shortly after the January 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol carried out by Trump supporters, telling Brennan it "was the moment where I felt that it was appropriate for me to go."

GOING MY WAY BIG BOY?

Trump offered Kim Jong Un a ride home on Air Force One after their second summit, new series reveals

Sophia Ankel
Sun, February 21, 2021

Trump offered Kim Jong Un a ride home on Air Force One, a new BBC series has revealed.


The two had met for their second negotiations in Vietnam in 2019, which eventually broke down.


Trump said he could get Kim home in two hours, but the former declined the invitation.


Former President Donald Trump offered North Korean leader Kim Jong Un a ride home on Air Force One after the two met for a second time at a summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, in 2019, a new BBC documentary has revealed.

The three-part series, titled "Trump Takes On the World," discloses new details about how Trump and Kim negotiated North Korea's nuclear program, which eventually ended without a deal.

Trump, who had left the meeting abruptly, told the press at the time: "Sometimes you just have to walk."

But the former president didn't leave without making an unusual offer first.

"President Trump offered Kim a lift home on Air Force One," Matthew Pottinger, the top Asia expert on Trump's National Security Council, told the BBC.

"The president knew that Kim had arrived on a multi-day train ride through China into Hanoi and the president said: 'I can get you home in two hours if you want.' It was a gracious gesture," he added.

Kim declined the offer, according to Pottinger.


US President Donald Trump addresses supporters during a campaign rally at MBS International Airport in Freeland, Michigan on September 10, 2020. 

Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images

The BBC series also includes an interview with Trump's former national security advisor John Bolton, who was present at the summit.

Bolton said that as they drove to the meeting, Trump was confident that he could forge a deal once he was in the room with Kim.

"Trump obviously thought he had a new best friend in Kim Jong Un," Bolton, who has since fallen out with Trump, said, according to the Sunday Times. "Trump thought that US-North Korea relations were great because he and Kim were buddies. It's a very dangerous perception."

Kim and Trump ended up meeting for a third and last time in the Korean demilitarized zone three months later but there was no further progress.

The pair had a complicated relationship during Trump's four years as president.

Trump had called North Korea's leader a "Little Rocket Man" and made threats of "fire and fury" but later suggested they were very good friends, and even described him as "a very smart guy," according to the BBC.

"Trump Takes on the World," directed by Tim Stirzaker, will be broadcast on BBC2 on Wednesday.

Read the original article on Business Insider

THE (WO)MAN IN THE GLASS BOOTH

'Trump in heels' leads new breed of acolytes into war with the Republican Party

Rozina Sabur
Sat, February 20, 2021

Amanda Chase has garnered national attention

She has praised the rioters who stormed the Capitol, been pictured with purported QAnon conspiracy theorists, and labelled rape victims “naive and unprepared”.

Amanda Chase, 51, a Virginia senator who likes to call herself 'Trump in Heels', was recently required to sit in a plexiglass box after refusing to wear a face mask during sessions in the state legislature.

But despite being censured, her controversies have helped make her a national star among Trump supporters, boosting her chances in the race to become Virginia governor.


She is one of a slew of Trump acolytes now launching early campaigns in state-wide races across the country, promising to continue Mr Trump's legacy.

The new breed of Trumpists threaten to trigger a messy civil war ahead of the annual party conference this week.


Chase works from behind a plexiglass box after refusing to wear a mask - Ryan M. Kelly /AP

Ms Chase most notably said of the Capitol insurrection: "These were not rioters and looters, these were patriots who love their country and do not want to see our great republic turned into a socialist country”.

Virginia's Republican Party establishment has attempted to disown Ms Chase, but there is no doubt she enjoys widespread support among the party's voters.

In a poll released on Friday, Ms Chase was the runaway favourite to clinch the Republican nomination ahead of her three rivals.

According to Ms Chase, it is the support she has gained from pro-Trump, grassroots voters in Virginia that has made her the front-runner.

“That is my base support,” the 51-year-old said recently. “I’m most in line with President Trump number one because I’m a businessperson, I’m not a politician.”

Ms Chase may well be right. Polls show the former president enjoying a resurgence in support among Republican voters in the aftermath of his impeachment trial acquittal.

Acutely aware of the power he wields among the the base, Mr Trump has threatened to work to oust elected Republicans who voted to impeach him by backing primary challengers when they face re-election.

As well as Ms Chase in Virginia, there is Josh Mandel, who is running in next year's Ohio senate race and calls himself "Trump's number one ally" in the state.

Mr Trump's former press secretary, Sarah Sanders, is a candidate for Arkansas' governor's race. A number of Mr Trump's most ardent backers are also planning to run in Pennsylvania's senate race in 2022.


Ivanka Trump at a campaign event in Miami last year 

- Wilfredo Lee /AP

Members of Mr Trump's own family are also considered likely contenders in state-wide races. His daughter, Ivanka Trump, has repeatedly been tapped as a political star in the making and his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, is considered a likely contender to fill an open North Carolina senate seat.

Ms Trump, who has two children with the former president's second son, Eric, is a former personal trainer and TV producer and became a regular surrogate for the Trump campaign during the presidential election.

The 38-year-old played a lead role in courting suburban women voters and has been willing to echo her father-in-law's claims that the race was "ripe with fraud".

Ms Trump's senate bid may offer a crucial first test for the party's direction.


Lara Trump was a high-profile campaign surrogate for the Republican president - Steve Marcus /Las Vegas Sun

Some prominent Republicans, like senator Lindsey Graham, have offered a full-throttled endorsement of Ms Trump, calling her "the future of the Republican Party".

Mr Graham has argued that the party cannot win without the former president's brand of populist politics.

"I know Trump can be a handful, but he is the most dominant figure in the Republican Party," he said this week, adding: "We don't have a snowball's chance in hell of taking back the majority without Donald Trump. If you don't get that, you're just not looking."

But Mr Graham's view is not shared by all of the party establishment. Some senior figures feel that in the wake of losing the White House and both parts of Congress to Democratic control, it is time for the Republican Party to divest from Mr Trump.

The party is now split between those who believe they should capitalise on the "MAGA" movement by fielding populist, Trump-supporting candidates in the 2022 midterm elections and those who endorse traditional conservative contenders who may help win back the moderate voters who abandoned the party in 2020.

The topic of Mr Trump's future role in the party will take centre stage this week at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the annual jamboree for grassroots Republicanism.

The event has been relocated for the first time in almost 50 years to Florida, Mr Trump's new home state.

The conference's speaker list is littered with former Trump administration figures and Mr Trump himself is widely expected to attend.

Those who have broken with Mr Trump appear to be persona non grata. Nikki Haley, a former UN ambassador and likely 2024 presidential candidate, is among the notable omissions from the speaker schedule.

"There's no doubt that this is a very challenging time within the Republican Party," Olivia Troye, a former adviser to former vice president Mike Pence, told The Telegraph.

"Realistically, the Republican Party right now still is the Trump Party. There's no doubt that the acquittal has emboldened the more extreme movements of the GOP. Right now these extremes have become mainstream - that's the pattern we've seen but that's going to come at a cost."

Ms Troye, now a director of an anti-Trump group, said that while she believes populist, Trump-supporting candidates may win local races, it would cost the party dearly when it came to national elections.

"I've seen a lot of registered Republicans leave the party, they don't want to be associated with this type of movement, especially with what happened at the Capitol," she added.

"I don't think the majority of Americans are going to subscribe to a base which is full of conspiracy theorists and lies."

The black-footed ferret was believed extinct until 18 were discovered on a Wyoming ranch. 

Now scientists have cloned one 

using 33-year-old DNA.


Naina Bhardwaj
Sun, February 21, 2021


Elizabeth Ann, the first ever cloned US endangered species at 50 days old. USFWS National Black-footed Ferret Conservation Center


Elizabeth Ann was born using the frozen cells of a black-footed ferret called Willa that died in 1988.

She will be raised in the National Black-footed Ferret Conservation Center in Colorado.

The species was considered extinct until seven were found in 1981.

Scientists successfully cloned a black-footed ferret using DNA of a frozen relative that died in 1988 for the first time in US history.

Elizabeth Ann was born on 10 December and is a genetic copy of a ferret called Willa, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) announced in a statement this week.

Willa's cells, frozen during the 1980s when DNA technology was first developed, were used to create the newborn animal.

North America's only ferret species was considered extinct until 18 were found on a Wyoming ranch in 1981.

They were captured by the Wyoming Game and Fish Department and a breeding program to recover the population was established. Their numbers have now increased to 250 to 350 ferrets living in captivity and 300 spread across 29 reintroduction sites in the wild.

Scientists are now hoping to use cloning to create genetic diversity, making the animals less susceptible to disease and genetic abnormalities.

Ryan Phelan, Executive Director of biotechnology conservation company Revive & Restore, said: "It was a commitment to seeing this species survive that has led to the successful birth of Elizabeth Ann.

He also added in the statement: "To see her now thriving ushers in a new era for her species and for conservation-dependent species everywhere. She is a win for biodiversity and for genetic rescue."

Elizabeth Ann will not be released into the wild but instead raised in the National Black-footed Ferret Conservation Center in Colorado, where she was born, so that researchers can continue to study her.

A genomic study revealed Willa's DNA contained three times more unique variations than the living ferret population, meaning that if she successfully mates and reproduces, Elizabeth Ann could provide unique genetic diversity to the species, according to the USFWS.

The cloning of Elizabeth Ann resulted from a partnership between the USFWS, Revive & Restore, ViaGen Pets & Equine, San Diego Zoo Global, and the Association of Zoos aquariums.

Read the original article on Business Insider

Boy Scouts celebrate the first group of female Eagle Scouts


This Oct. 1, 2020 photo provided by Edmund Tunney shows his daughter, Isabella, center, with Bev Verweg, her scoutmaster, and Brian Reiners, the scoutmaster of the corresponding linked boy troop, in Edina, Minn. In February 2021, at age 16, Tunney will be one of nearly 1,000 girls and young women honored by the Boy Scouts in a virtual celebration of the inaugural class of female Eagle Scouts. It’s a major milestone, given the hallowed stature of a rank that has been attained over more than a century by astronauts, admirals, U.S. senators and other luminaries. (Edmund Tunney via AP)More

Growing up in Minneapolis, Isabella Tunney followed the progress of her older brother with admiration and occasional envy as he worked toward earning the Boy Scouts’ prestigious rank of Eagle Scout.

This weekend, at age 16, Tunney will be one of nearly 1,000 girls and young women honored by the Boy Scouts in a virtual celebration of the inaugural class of female Eagle Scouts. It’s a major milestone, given the hallowed stature of a rank that has been attained over more than a century by astronauts, admirals, U.S. senators and other luminaries.

Only in 2018 did the Boy Scouts start accepting girls as Cub Scouts; older girls were admitted into the flagship scouting program in 2019. Overall, more than 140,000 girls have joined.

Tunney, like many of the girls attaining Eagle rank, worked intensively to amass the needed merit badges within two years. A minimum of 21 badges are required to attain Eagle; Tunney earned all 137, in subjects ranging from welding to white-water rafting to coin collection.

“The quarantine helped a lot,” she said, referring to the lockdown ordered due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “I had a lot of time to spare.”

For her Eagle Scout public service project, she organized a drive to collect essentials for families being assisted by a homeless shelter.

Tunney is a junior at St. Paul Academy and Summit School in St. Paul, Minnesota, and she is interested in a career related to the STEM disciplines — science, technology, engineering and math.

As a child, she loved tagging along with her older brother, Eugene, but was sad when he and their father would go off on weekend camping trips with the Scouts.

“I was very envious of all those,” she said. “When the Boy Scouts opened up to girls, I was so excited to get the opportunity to participate myself.”

Like Tunney, new Eagle Scout Sydney Ireland also was drawn to the Boy Scouts due to participation of an older brother. She became an unofficial member of his New York City unit at age 4 and over the ensuing years was outspoken in urging the Boy Scouts to officially admit girls.

Ireland, 19, is now a sophomore at Amherst College, taking classes remotely from the Massachusetts island of Nantucket. She’s majoring in political science and psychology; law school and a career in politics could be on the horizon.

“Scouting has influenced my life in nearly every facet,” she said via email, crediting the leadership skills she learned in the Scouts for giving her the confidence to run for Amherst’s student Senate.

The Boy Scouts say about 6% of all scouts attain Eagle rank – roughly 2.5 million since the award’s creation in 1911, a year after the Boy Scouts of America was founded.

“This is a powerful moment for these young women, for all Eagle Scouts, and for our nation,” said Jenn Hancock, the BSA's national chair for programs. “People recognize Eagle Scouts as individuals of the highest caliber, and for the first time, that title isn’t limited by gender."

The celebration of the new Eagle Scouts comes at a challenging time for the Boy Scouts. Facing a wave of lawsuits, it filed for bankruptcy protection a year ago in a step toward creating a huge compensation fund for tens of thousands of men who were molested as youngsters decades ago by scoutmasters or other leaders.

The case has advanced slowly since then in a federal bankruptcy court in Delaware. The BSA is expected to unveil a plan soon explaining how the compensation fund will be financed in a way that enables the organization and its local councils to maintain their programs.

Many in the scouting community have retained their admiration for the BSA’s mission – among them is Megan Wright of Omaha. Starting about 10 years ago, she helped run a Boy Scout troop to which her son belonged, and more recently she has been scoutmaster for her daughter’s troop.

The daughter, 18-year-old Rebecca Wright, is among the new Eagle Scouts, having earned 102 merit badges. She now attends the University of Wisconsin-Madison and wants to be a genetics researcher.

“It’s been fantastic to see girls be able to participate in this program,” said Rebecca’s mom. “Just seeing the pride, the sense of accomplishment, knowing that they have achieved what so few others have.”