Court strikes Trump EPA rule for full-year 15% ethanol sales

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — A federal appeals court on Friday threw out a Trump-era Environmental Protection Agency rule change that allowed for the sale of a 15% ethanol gasoline blend in the summer months.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The decision deals a significant blow to the ethanol industry and corn farmers who grow the crop from which the fuel additive is made. They had anticipated increased ethanol demand through year-round sales of the higher blend.


Most gasoline sold in the U.S. today is blended with 10% ethanol. Corn farmers and ethanol refiners have pushed for the government to allow the widespread sale of a 15% ethanol blend.

The Trump administration made the change to fulfill a campaign promise to Midwest farmers. The EPA under President Donald Trump announced the change in May 2019, ending a summer ban on the E15 blend. Provisions of the Clean Air Act have prohibited the sale of certain fuels with a higher volatility from June 1 through Sept. 15 to limit smog. Congress has allowed 10% ethanol, and the EPA in its 2019 ruling revised the interpretation of the exemption to federal law to include the 15% ethanol blend.

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Ethanol supporters contend that using more of the corn-based renewable fuel is better for the environment and helps meet federal climate change goals.

Three judges on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia issued Friday's decision. They said it's clear from federal law that Congress balanced “wide-ranging economic, energy-security, and geopolitical implications” and that the wording of the law “reflects a compromise, not simply a desire to maximize ethanol production at all costs.” They concluded Congress did not intend to allow ethanol blends higher than 10% to be widely sold year-round. They said the EPA overstepped its authority.

The American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, the trade group for the petroleum industry that challenged the EPA decision, said the court simply followed government's interpretation of the law in effect for 30 years.

“There is no ambiguity in statute and the previous administration’s reinterpretation overstepped the will of Congress,” said AFPM President and CEO Chet Thompson.

The Iowa Corn Growers Association said it will continue to work with the Biden administration, Congress and state officials to maintain consumer access to E15 year-round.

"It does not make sense to reinstate barriers that could inhibit market access to a cleaner-burning fuel choice that combats climate change,” said Carl Jardon, a farmer from Randolph, Iowa, and president of the Iowa Corn Growers Association.

The decision is the second major court defeat for the ethanol industry in a week. On June 25, the U.S. Supreme Court said some petroleum refiners may exempt themselves from requirements to blend ethanol into the gasoline they produce, further cutting into the amount of ethanol blended into the national fuel supply.

Ethanol supporters could ask the full D.C. Circuit Court to review the decision of the three-judge panel. They also could ask Congress to change the law to allow for year around E15 sales.

The industry is hoping this year's sales will not be curtailed because by the time the court issues its mandate and the EPA is required to comply most of the summer season will have passed.

This is the third summer E15 sales have been allowed and there were indications sales were increasing. Sales jumped 24% in Iowa from 2019 to 2020, surpassing 60.5 million gallons in 2020, the Renewable Fuels Association reported. That increase was despite a 14% drop in the state's overall petroleum consumption from 2019 levels due to fewer people driving because of he coronavirus pandemic.

David Pitt, The Associated Press

NEW AGE AYN RANDI$M

Jeff Bezos believes multibillion-dollar failures are actually a good thing: 'If the size of your failures isn't growing, you're not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle'

insider@insider.com (Ben Gilbert)

© Alex Wong/Getty Images 

As Amazon's CEO, Jeff Bezos said he made big bets that sometimes ended as, "multibillion-dollar failures."

This view lines up with Bezos' approach to life: Failure is better than never having tried at all.

Bezos will step down as Amazon's CEO on Monday, July 5.

What's the point in making billions if you can't make a multibillion-dollar mistake every now and again?

According to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, those types of failures are actually critical to Amazon's success.

"Amazon will be experimenting at the right scale for a company of our size if we occasionally have multibillion-dollar failures," Bezos wrote in the company's 2019 letter to shareholders.

"If the size of your failures isn't growing, you're not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle," he said.

© Flickr/TechStage The Amazon Fire phone. Flickr/TechStage

He cited Amazon's infamous Fire phone as an example of a failure - but pointed out that work on the Fire phone assisted in the development of Amazon's Echo smart speakers and the Alexa digital assistant.


"While the Fire phone was a failure, we were able to take our learnings (as well as the developers) and accelerate our efforts building Echo and Alexa," Bezos said.

This philosophy - that it's better to have failed than to never have tried in the first place - is core to how Bezos looks at his own life.

"I knew that when I was 80, I was not going to regret having tried this," Bezos said in a 2001 interview with the Academy of Achievement. "I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed, I wouldn't regret that. But I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day."

© Amazon; Samantha Lee/Business Insider Amazon Dash buttons are no longer sold by Amazon. Amazon; Samantha Lee/Business Insider

In the case of Amazon, Bezos applies that same philosophy on a much larger scale.

"This kind of large-scale risk taking is part of the service we as a large company can provide to our customers and to society," he said. "We will work hard to make them good bets, but not all good bets will ultimately pay out."

Of course, this being a letter from the CEO of a publicly-traded company to its shareholders, Bezos has reassurance and tempering to offer as well.

As Bezos put it: "The good news for shareowners is that a single big winning bet can more than cover the cost of many losers."

Bezos will step down as Amazon's CEO on Monday, July 5. He's being replaced by Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy.

SEE 

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2021/07/the-bezos-theory-of-value-is-deeply.html

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CORPORATE GURU SAYS WORK FOREVER SUCKERS

Jeff Bezos says work-life balance is a 'debilitating phrase.' He wants Amazon workers to view their career and lives as a 'circle.'
insider@insider.com (Katie Canales,Zoë Bernard) 

© Provided by Business Insider Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Alex Wong/Getty Images
Amazon's Jeff Bezos said in 2018 that the term "work-life balance" is a "debilitating phrase."

A top piece of advice he offers to staff is not to view the two as a strict trade-off.
Instead, he sees his personal and professional pursuits as a "circle" rather than a balancing act.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos isn't a fan of the phrase "work-life balance."

At an April 2018 event hosted by Insider's parent company, Bezos said new Amazon employees shouldn't view work and life as a balancing act. Instead, Bezos said that it's more productive to view them as two integrated parts.

"It actually is a circle," Bezos said. "It's not a balance."

Bezos said his new hires should stop trying to find "balance" within their professional and personal lives since that implies a strict trade-off between the two. Instead, Bezos envisions a more holistic relationship between work and life outside the office.


"This work-life harmony thing is what I try to teach young employees and actually senior executives at Amazon too," Bezos said. "But especially the people coming in. I get asked about work-life balance all the time. And my view is, that's a debilitating phrase because it implies there's a strict trade-off."

Bezos said he doesn't compartmentalize his career and his personal lives.

"If I am happy at home, I come into the office with tremendous energy," Bezos said. "And if I am happy at work, I come home with tremendous energy."

The billionaire Amazon founder will have to adjust to a new kind of workflow starting July 5, when he steps down from his role as CEO of the e-commerce giant. He will be replaced by AWS CEO Andy Jassy and will direct his focus to other endeavors, like being catapulted into space for 11 minutes on July 20.

Historically, the world's richest man has taken a nontraditional approach to work: He has said he made time for breakfast every morning with his family, doesn't set his alarm before going to bed, schedules surprisingly few meetings, and set aside a few minutes every day to wash his own dishes.

Read - and watch - the full interview with Bezos here.

SEE 

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2021/07/the-bezos-theory-of-value-is-deeply.html

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Bezos, Gates back fake meat and dairy made from fungus as next big alt-protein

Chicago-based Nature's Fynd has meatless breakfast patties and hamburgers, dairy-free cream cheese and yogurt, and chicken-less nuggets scheduled to hit grocers' shelves later this year.

The alternative foods sector grew U.S. retail sales 27% in 2020, and bringing the total market value to $7 billion.

Nature's Fynd is building a 35,000-square-foot factory on the site of Chicago's former Union Stockyards, the epicenter of the 20th-century meatpacking industry.

© Provided by CNBC Unearthed by co-founder Mark Kozubal as a microbe from volcanic hot springs in Yellowstone National Park, Fy is the fermented, versatile, protein-rich source that Nature's Fynd and its CEO Thomas Jonas are hoping becomes the next big thing in alternative meat and dairy.

As consumers become increasingly comfortable eating faux-meat burgers that look, cook and taste like the real thing, a food-tech start-up backed by Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates is using fungus as the primary ingredient to create alt-meat foods.


Nature's Fynd, based in Chicago, has raised $158 million in funding from investors including Bezos, Gates, and Al Gore. The company's meatless breakfast patties and hamburgers, dairy-free cream cheese and yogurt, and chicken-less nuggets are scheduled to hit grocers' shelves later this year.

The alternative foods sector skyrocketed in 2020, growing U.S. retail sales 27%, and bringing the total market value to $7 billion, according to the Plant-Based Foods Association (PBFA), a trade group comprising more than 200 member companies. Meanwhile, shipments of alt-protein products from food service distributors to commercial restaurants rose 60% year-over-year in April, according to research firm NPD Group.

The ascendant industry is headlined by Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, whose alt-meat burgers, chicken and sausage products have disrupted the $733 billion U.S. food manufacturing industry. That has prompted Tyson Foods, Purdue, Hormel, Cargill and other traditional meat producers to launch their own products in the category.

and restaurant closures. A recent report from J.P. Morgan claims that Dunkin' has dropped its breakfast sandwich using a Beyond sausage patty from most restaurants, though that has not been confirmed by either company (Dunkin' and Beyond Meat did return calls by press time.) Still, plant-based and cultured foods are projected to take a 60% market share of global meat sales by 2040, according to consulting firm AT Kearney.

Having lost 1% of its overall market to-date probably doesn't rattle meat producers much, but looking at the declining costs of alt-meat should raise their eyebrows. In mid-June, Beyond Meat was selling for $6.40 per pound, bringing it closer to the price of traditional beef, making some progress on a long-term goal of Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown to reach cost parity with traditional meat. Beef patties were then selling for $5.26 per pound, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Impossible Foods has cut its restaurant prices twice in the past year, and in February, the company slashed retail prices by 20%, lowering the price of two quarter-pound patties to $5.49.

Nature's Fynd was co-founded in 2012 — initially as Sustainable Bioproducts — by Thomas Jonas and Mark Kozubal, now chief executive and chief science officers, respectively. A few years earlier, Kozubal had unearthed a microbe, Fusarium strain flavolapis, from volcanic hot springs in Yellowstone National Park. He led an R&D team that formulated the microbe into what the company calls Fy, the fermented, versatile, protein-rich source for Nature's Fynd's products.

Fermentation has been used in making bread, beer, wine, cheese and other products for millennia, and is now emerging as a key alt-protein platform with major potential to align science with entrepreneurship, policy and investment, according to the Good Food Institute. Even so, Nature's Fynd has some catching up to do. U.K.-based Quorn, founded in 1985, has been offering its fungus-based meatless products in the U.S. since 2002. It was acquired by Philippine food maker Monde Nissin for about $830 million in 2015, according to Reuters. And the field of other potential competitors is growing.

Much as cows, chickens and pigs were domesticated centuries ago as protein sources, "now is the time for this second domestication," Jonas said in a recent interview. "The farming of this microbe is an efficient way of producing protein that is just as good."

Bringing the evolution full circle, Nature's Fynd is building a 35,000-square-foot factory on the site of Chicago's former Union Stockyards, the epicenter of the 20th-century meatpacking industry.
The climate-conscious food consumer

Beyond fungus, Nature's Fynd also is representative of the food sustainability movement, whose mission is to reduce the carbon footprint of global food systems, which generate 34% of greenhouse emissions linked to climate change.

"The challenge for this and future generations is to learn to do more with less," Jonas said. "Because with eight billion people, the Earth is not getting any bigger, its resources are dwindling and climate change is making it even more difficult to find land to grow crops to feed animals. The math just doesn't work. So, the whole goal of our new protein system is to increase the efficiency of the complete protein chain."

Consumer acceptance, of course, is paramount to Nature's Fynd business model. In February, the company launched a limited, direct-to-consumer sampling of its patties and cream cheese exclusively online. Chief marketing officer Karuna Rawal said the formal product rollout will focus first on retailers, with food service partnerships to follow. "It's important that we start with retail and be able to tell our story to the consumer in a way we can control the narrative," she said.

In that vein, Nature's Fynd packaging is emblazoned with a "Fy" badge, a la "Intel Inside," to create brand recognition and loyalty.

© Provided by CNBC With $158 million in funding from Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Al Gore and other investors, Nature's Fynd meatless breakfast patties and hamburgers, dairy-free cream cheese and yogurt, and nuggets, minus chicken, are scheduled to hit grocers' shelves later this year.

Not surprisingly, the greatest appeal for alt-meat products is among younger consumers.

"Gen Zers and millennials are the largest purchasers in the plant-based space," said Sabina Vyas, director of strategic initiatives and communications at the PBFA. "As their purchasing power builds, [food] companies are going to have to adapt accordingly."

Sixty-three percent of U.S. consumers between ages 24 and 39 believe their nutritional needs can be fully met with a plant-based diet, according to research from One Poll.

"I don't know anyone over 40 who is saying, 'I should eat more meat,'" Jonas said.

Chris Rivest, a senior climate-tech investor at Breakthrough Energy Ventures, established in 2016 by Gates and a coalition of private investors concerned about the impacts of climate change, said food is a commodity, with purchases based on taste, nutrition and cost.

He is a fan of the fungus, saying he was "blown away" by products he taste-tested (Gates was similarly impressed during a "60 Minutes" segment) and its nutritional value.

The company says the veg­an pro­tein includes all 20 amino acids, includ­ing the 9 essen­tial amino acids, and good lev­els of fiber, vit­a­mins and min­er­als, with no cho­les­terol or trans fats. It says Fy has one-tenth the fat of ground beef and 50% more pro­tein than tofu; twice as much pro­tein as raw peas.

Rivest also thinks the business can compete on cost. "We think the Nature's Fynd model can undercut costs of traditional protein sources," he said. "That's what really sold us on this opportunity."

Like many start-ups, scale is going to be critical for Nature's Fynd's success.

"We expect to have a lot of demand versus our [manufacturing] capacity, so we have to move fast and raise additional capital to move forward," Jonas said. "We're competing against the meat industry, which has been working on its supply chain for 300 years, so we have big catching up to do."

Enchantingly Strange 'Fairy Lanterns' Discovered Growing in a Malaysian Rainforest
Tessa Koumoundouros 29 mins ago

Within the depths of a Malaysian rainforest's shadows an astonishingly plant, lacking sunlight-eating leaves, bizarrely blooms. This small, otherworldly growth, belonging to a group of rare flowering plants known as fairy lanterns (Thismia), has just been scientifically described for the first time.

© University of Oxford The rare and unique fairy lantern.

They're tiny plants, too deep within the forest to receive sunlight, and often emerge beneath the leaf litter, so they don't bother with photosynthesizing and have lost the ability to do so. They have no chlorophyll; instead, they siphon food through their roots from the fungal network shared by other rainforest plants.

These incredible mycorrhizal fungal networks connect large plant communities together via their roots, allowing plants to communicate with each other using electric signals and even send resources to each other. In turn, the fungi receive sustenance from the plants.


a close up of food: (Siti-Munirah, et al Phytokeys, 2021)
1/1 SLIDES © Provided by ScienceAlert


Plants that do this, like fairy lanterns, are thought to have evolved from one of the plant parts of the mycorrhizal fungal partnership. They've cheated the system, however, and turned fully parasitic on the fungi network. This form of food acquisition is called myco-heterotrophy.

"The new species, which we name Thismia sitimeriamiae, is distinct from all other Thismia species known to science," taxonomist Mat Yunoh Siti-Munirah, from the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and colleagues wrote in their paper.


At only 2.2 centimeters (0.86 inches) tall, the greenish-brown plant was found in a primary rainforest of the Malaysian State of Terengganu, by photographer Nikong Dome in 2019, who lives alongside Indigenous communities in the area.

A delightful orangey-yellow, like a warm glowing light, T sitimeriamiae's flower is uniquely shaped – a delicate cone with an umbrella-like structure on top, as if it's providing some sort of shelter.



a close up of food: (Siti-Munirah, et al Phytokeys, 2021)
1/1 SLIDES © Provided by ScienceAlert
(Siti-Munirah, et al Phytokeys, 2021)(Siti-Munirah, et al Phytokeys, 2021)


While some species of fairy lanterns have been caught cavorting with fungus gnats, what pollinates T. sitimeriamiae is a curious mystery.

"The extraordinary architecture of the flower raises interesting questions about how it is pollinated," said botanist Chris Thorogood from Oxford University.


Siti-Munirah and colleagues have recommended the strangely flowering plant be classified as Critically Endangered due to its extreme rarity. Its home state has been deforested at an alarmingly rapid rate for logging and palm oil.

"Given the rarity and inaccessibility of the vast majority of species of Thismia (many of which have been found only once), [conservation in their original environment] seems to be the only realistic approach," the team wrote.

Only four individuals of T. sitimeriamiae have ever been seen. Wild boar activity has disturbed one of two of its only known locations. Sadly, it may already be extinct, as all attempts to relocate it so far have failed. But researchers are unlikely to give up on this unique flavor of life, just yet.

The plant has been described in PhytoKeys.

GRAVE ROBBERS RETURN LOOT

Costa Rica archaeologists in awe as Brooklyn Museum returns 1,305 artifacts

By Alvaro Murillo

© Reuters/STRINGER A detail of a pre-Columbian pot, repatriated from the Brooklyn Museum in New York, U.S., is pictured at the facilities of the Costa Rica's National Museum, in Pavas

SAN JOSE (Reuters) - An unfinished tombstone, a large ceramic vase painted with beeswax, human representations and ancient tools to process corn are artifacts of a collection of 1,305 pieces that have been returned to Costa Rica.

© Reuters/STRINGER An archaeologist holds a pre-Columbian ceramic urn, which was repatriated from the Brooklyn Museum in New York, U.S., during its classification at the facilities of the Costa Rica's National Museum, in Pavas

It is the second time the Brooklyn Museum in New York City has returned pieces, some older than 2,000 years, to the central American country.

Tycoon Minor Keith brought the artifacts, looted during the construction of a railway, to the United States in the 19th or early 20th century, along with shipments of bananas.

© Reuters/STRINGER Pre-Columbian statues and pots, repatriated from the Brooklyn Museum in New York, U.S., are displayed for its classification by archaeologists at the facilities of the Costa Rica's National Museum, in Pavas

Archaeologists in Costa Rica have been in awe since the artifacts arrived at the end of last year.

"The tombstone is a piece we have only seen as illustrations in study books here," Daniela Meneses, a researcher at the National Museum of Costa Rica, said at a viewing for the media. "It's amazing to see that piece now. It's very emotional."

It is believed to have been part of a tomb of an important person from a now-extinct civilization.

At almost half a meter high, one of the largest pieces in the shipment is a vase, presumably used to store seeds or water; it is adorned with human figures and peculiar geometric lines, painted with beeswax.

There are still more artifacts from Costa Rica in Brooklyn and in other museums in the United States.

But archaeologist Javier Fallas of the state museum highlighted the return as an extraordinary gesture: "We don't know why they did it, but it's something very good and atypical in the world."© Reuters/STRINGER Pre-Columbian statues, repatriated from the Brooklyn Museum in New York, U.S., are displayed for its classification by archaeologists at the facilities of the Costa Rica's National Museum, in Pavas

Seven years ago, four sites in the southern part of the country were recognized as World Heritage by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)

.

© Reuters/STRINGER Pre-Columbian stone statues, repatriated from the Brooklyn Museum in New York, U.S., are displayed for its classification by archaeologists at the facilities of the Costa Rica's National Museum, in Pavas

(Reporting by Alvaro Munrillo; Writing by Stefanie Eschenbacher; Editing by William Mallard)

© Reuters/STRINGER Pre-Columbian artifacts repatriated from the Brooklyn Museum in New York, U.S., are displayed for its classification by archaeologists at the facilities of the Costa Rica's National Museum, in Pavas

OLDE FASHIONED CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

Class-action lawsuit accuses Amazon of 'exploiting consumers in their most vulnerable hour' through price gouging during the pandemic
ydzhanova@businessinsider.com (Yelena Dzhanova) 

The COVID-19 pandemic stands to boost multiple parts of Amazon's business, from e-commerce to advertising, Benstein analyst Mark Shmulik wrote. 

REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon/File Photo

A lawsuit filed in California says Amazon hiked up prices by as much as 1,000% during the pandemic.

"Some of the unlawful increases were on sales of products supplied by third parties, sales which Amazon controls and reaps huge profits from," the lawsuit says.

Consumers tried to buy food and supplies from Amazon while adhering to stay-at-home orders, the lawsuit says.

A lawsuit accuses Amazon of "exploiting consumers in their most vulnerable hour" by hiking up prices on medical items, cleaning products, canned food and other necessary supplies during the coronavirus pandemic.


The class-action lawsuit has now expanded to potentially include all Amazon shoppers across the US who purchased such products, the law firm Hagens Berman said on Friday.

The lawsuit says American consumers turned to Amazon and other online retailers at the height of the coronavirus pandemic in the spring of 2020, when stay-at-home orders and the threat of the disease made it difficult to purchase much-needed food and supplies.

"In this environment-consistent with the directions of government and public health officials-consumers have understandably turned to online purchasing, and Amazon in particular, to fulfill their essential needs," the lawsuit says. "Without venturing into public and risking exposure to themselves and others, with just a few clicks Americans can purchase consumer goods from Amazon that will be delivered to their homes."

Amazon did not immediately reply to a request for comment from Insider asking about the lawsuit.

The lawsuit alleges the e-commerce giant significantly hiked up prices of various goods. The cost of face masks, for example, jumped 500%, the lawsuit alleges, from $20 to $120. Disinfectant cost went up by 100%, the lawsuit says, while the cost of an ordinary staple pantry item like black beans went up by 672%. Among other items whose costs drastically went up on Amazon were pain relievers, flour, and cold remedies, according to the lawsuit.

The complaint, first filed in April 2020 in California's Northern District Court, says some items went up by as much as 1,000%.

"Some of the unlawful increases were on sales of products supplied by third parties, sales which Amazon controls and reaps huge profits from," the lawsuit says.

Though there is no federal law explicitly making price-gouging illegal, many states have outlawed the practice during an emergency, like a natural disaster or pandemic.

"Amazon is the functional seller of these products and is responsible when price-gouged sales violate the law. But in addition, Amazon has inflated prices on its own inventory of products, which Amazon supplies and sells directly to consumers," according to the complaint.

Amazon in May said Congress should pass a federal law against price gouging to make one clear standard and definition.

Hagens Berman put out a call on its website asking people who've purchased from online retailers during the COVID-19 pandemic to describe their experience.

"Unfair price gouging may have caused you to pay more," the call says, directing consumers to fill out a form "to find out your consumer rights to potential compensation."

In March of last year, Amazon said it removed almost 4,000 individual sellers for price gouging during the pandemic.

But months into the pandemic, sellers continued to charge up to 14 times more than other retailers for regular household products like soap and hand sanitizer.
Read the original article on Business Insider

New 'Freedom Riders' march to D.C. in last leg of voting rights journey

WASHINGTON — On a grassy plot of the National Mall, in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol, thousands of voting rights supporters arrived on buses, on foot and even on horseback.

© Provided by NBC News

The “we the people” at last week's rally on Washington, D.C., statehood and voting rights comprised a coalition of races, genders, generations and geography. From students to clergy to members of Congress, about 2,500 people descended upon the nation’s capital to defend what the late congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis described as “the precious, almost sacred” right to vote. Folded into that sentiment was the demand that the residents of Washington, D.C., must also be recognized as full citizens through statehood.

District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser championed the call for statehood, while others decried voter suppression and a wave of legislation that followed the 2020 election. Lawmakers in 48 states have collectively introduced at least 389 bills that would curb or restrict voting. Days later, the Supreme Court would uphold Arizona's new restrictions on voter access. Democrats charge that the mostly Republican-led measures will disproportionately impact Black voters, young voters and communities of color.

“We, the engines of democracy, refuse to be silent,” said Judith Browne Dianis, executive director of the Advancement Project, a national racial justice group, to the crowd. “Together we will make our voices heard. We are not going back.”

Waving protest signs and clad in identical red T-shirts were 1,500 mostly Black and Latino workers with the hospitality union UNITE HERE. They traveled by bus from 21 states across the country for the rally. The group marched in chanting, “We are Freedom Riders!” and “No justice! No peace!”

© Alex Wong Image: Local voting rights activists join a Rally for D.C. Statehood, the last stop of Black Voters Matter Freedom Ride for Voting Rights bus tour, at the National Mall June 26, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Alex Wong / Getty Images)

“Voting is fundamental to working people’s power,” said UNITE HERE International President D. Taylor. “People’s lives and futures are at stake. No one should ever underestimate the determination of the people.”

Even as protesters urged bold action around making Washington, D.C., the 51st state and stronger protections needed at the ballot box, parts of the event unfolded with the vibe of a summer festival. Some attendees sat sprawled under the shade of wide leafy trees, while others tried to stay cool under rows of white tents that billowed like sails. There was folk music and spoken word, and the district’s homegrown go-go music blared funky beats from speakers.

The demonstration under a scorching midday sun was organized by Black Voters Matter, an advocacy and policy organization, and some 50 local and national civil rights, voting empowerment and social justice groups.

The weekend action wrapped up BVM’s “Freedom Ride for Voting Rights,” which paid homage to the 60-year anniversary of the original Freedom Rides of 1961 while providing education and outreach around 21st century voting rights.

Kicking off on the new federal holiday Juneteenth, the nine-city tour aimed to increase support for federal voting rights legislation, build Black voting power and advocate for statehood for Washington, D.C., with a population of nearly 700,000 residents. Traveling aboard their signature fleet of coaches nicknamed the “Blackest buses in America,” the new Freedom Riders officially began in Mississippi, then motored through Southern states including Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas.

BVM co-founders LaTosha Brown and Cliff Albright met with concerned residents, officials and partners to discuss issues impacting their communities. Their fight for voting justice and progress comes at an opportune time as policymakers, advocates, activists and fellow keepers of democracy converge around this critical issue.

June brought major events on this front. There was a Senate hearing on Washington, D.C., statehood and a failed Senate procedural vote on the For the People Act to expand voting rights that drew no Republican support. This month also marked eight years since the 2013 landmark Supreme Court ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted portions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

“That decision ushered in a new era of Jim Crow as states rushed to exploit the ruling and attack Black voting rights,” Brown said. “And with dozens of statehouses considering even more restrictions on ballot access, our communities continue to feel the impact today.”

Video: 'Everyone deserves the right to vote': Freedom Riders travel from south to D.C for voting rights bill (MSNBC)

The Department of Justice announced earlier this month that it filed a lawsuit against the state of Georgia, its secretary of state and the state’s election board over a new law critics say restricts access to voting; Gov. Brian Kemp signed the measure in March.

“The right of all eligible citizens to vote is the central pillar of our democracy, the right from which all other rights ultimately flow,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a news conference on Friday. “This lawsuit is the first step of many we are taking to ensure that all eligible voters can cast a vote, that all lawful votes are counted and that every voter has access to accurate information.”

Black Voters Matter national rally in support of DC statehood, in Washington 

(Elizabeth Frantz / Reuters)

The DOJ complaint contends that several provisions of Senate Bill 202 were adopted to purposefully curb voting rights based on race. The lawsuit “alleges that the cumulative and discriminatory effect of these laws—particularly on Black voters—was known to lawmakers and that lawmakers adopted the law despite this,” according to a statement by the DOJ.

The suit challenges several provisions, including one that bans government entities from distributing unsolicited absentee ballot applications and another regarding the imposition of fines on civic organizations, churches and advocacy groups that distribute follow-up absentee ballot applications.

It also challenges deadlines to request absentee ballots; requirements related to state identification; limits on drop boxes for absentee ballots; barring churches and civic groups from providing food or water to people waiting in long lines to vote and more. The lawsuit asks the court to prohibit Georgia from enforcing these requirements.

Kristen Clarke, the first Black woman to serve as assistant attorney general for the department’s Civil Rights Division, vowed in her remarks at DOJ headquarters that the department will use “all the tools it has available to ensure that each eligible citizen can register, cast a ballot and have that ballot counted free from racial discrimination.”

“Laws adopted with a racially motivated purpose, like Georgia Senate Bill 202, simply have no place in democracy today,” she said.

The BVM team agreed.

“More than three months after we joined partners to file our own lawsuit against the state of Georgia for its voter suppression bill, it's encouraging to see the Department of Justice and the Biden-Harris administration stand with the people,” Albright said. “With this historic announcement, the federal government is taking an important step toward defending the rights of Black voters. … This move will hopefully set a new precedent and send a strong message to state legislatures.”

Brown added, “We’ve always known that these voter restriction bills were unconstitutional at their core.” The DOJ lawsuit is, Brown said, “not only an affirmation of the work we do each and every day to protect voting rights; it’s a stern warning to other states. Any state or local governments pursuing voter suppression legislation must be prepared to defend Jim Crow in court, because we simply will not let this go.”

While Black men and, later, women were granted the right to vote through constitutional amendments, barriers such as literacy tests, intimidation and violence heavily restricted Black Americans from access to the polls for decades.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, outlawed discriminatory practices adopted by many Southern states. Today, as voting access is in jeopardy, BVM leaders said their "Freedom Ride for Voting Rights" tour was timely and impactful. Meeting former Freedom Riders who participated in the desegregation protests of the early 1960s, and a host of people representing different ages and races, also served as an act of unity and love.

Still, the organizers pledged additional activism until victory is won.

“We are urging the Biden-Harris administration and members of Congress to continue to stand up for voters and protect our voting power through the passage of the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act,” Albright said.

“We need to dismantle all barriers that prevent free and fair access to the ballot box,” Brown added. “The fight continues.”

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A hotter future is already here — and Canada is not ready

Aaron Wherry

© THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck A motorist watches from a pullout on the Trans-Canada Highway as a wildfire burns on the side of a mountain in Lytton, B.C., Thursday, July 1, 2021.

Two weeks ago, the Canadian Institute for Climate Choices released a report on the public health impacts of climate change and the need for action to adapt to a new reality of extreme threats.

"Climate change," Ian Culbert, executive director of the Canadian Public Health Association, wrote in the report's introduction, "is an escalating public health emergency, and we need to start treating it that way."

The historic and deadly heat wave in British Columbia made those words frighteningly real — even before it triggered a forest fire that destroyed most of the village of Lytton, British Columbia.

"We are now committed to a certain degree of warming in the world because of the emissions of the past," Ryan Ness, the adaptation research director for the institute and co-author of the report, said in an interview on Friday.

"So while, in the longer term, it's absolutely critical to reduce greenhouse gases as much as possible, as fast as possible, to keep things from getting even worse, there is a certain amount of climate change that we can no longer avoid. And the only way to really deal with that is to prepare, to adapt and to become more resilient to this change in climate."

That means countering the increased risk of floods and forest fires. It also means accounting for how climate change will threaten Canadians' health.
A hotter, more dangerous world

Adaptation will require much greater action from governments — and learning some of the lessons of the other public health crisis we've spent the past year and a half fighting.

The institute's report estimates that increased economic, social and health care costs related to several of the effects of climate change — ground-level ozone (smog), soaring heat and the spread of Lyme disease — will amount to billions of dollars by mid-century, even in a "low-emission" scenario. Damages and costs will only increase if emissions are not reduced.

But because some costs are difficult to project, researchers didn't model all potential impacts — on mental health, for instance, or the effects of poor air quality due to wildfires, or weather-related threats to health care facilities.

This summer in Canada may be remembered for its record-breaking and deadly heat. But it follows a similarly fatal wave in Montreal in 2018. And the future promises only more heat.

The report notes that, between 1971 and 2000, Ontario and Manitoba saw approximately 50 days each year in which temperatures were high enough to cause heat-related deaths. By the 2050s, the Institute estimates, that annual total will be 1.5 times higher.

That additional heat will put more people in hospitals. Looking specifically at coronary heart disease, stroke, hypertensive disease and diabetes, the report estimates a 21 per cent increase in the rate of heat-related hospitalizations under a low-emissions scenario.

And more people will die: the report estimates that, by mid-century, heat will account for an additional 200 to 425 deaths in Canada per year.

The Institute did find that two measures to retrofit buildings would reduce the death toll. "If shading technologies were installed on 25 per cent of homes in Canada by the 2050s, there would be an average of 21 fewer deaths per year," the report says. "If 50 per cent of all residential, commercial, and institutional buildings had green roofs installed by the 2050s, an average of 46 deaths would be avoided annually."

But while green roofs and shading might reduce the impact of generally higher temperatures, such things won't necessarily be enough to protect people from extreme events.

"When it comes to these extreme heat emergencies, the response systems really need to be in place to be able to identify the people who are going to be most affected by this and to get them the care that they need, whether it's cooling centres, whether it's medical attention, whether it's a place to get off the streets," Ness said.

"And in the longer term, it's going to be important to address the underlying root causes of what makes some people more vulnerable than others. Because it's not really the average person who's likely to die from a heat wave event. It's somebody who is living on the street, somebody who has pre-existing health conditions because they aren't able to access the health care that they need, or seniors who don't have the supports they need to to help them out in these situations."
What the pandemic should have taught us

The province's coroner has said that many of the 300 people who died suddenly in the recent heat wave in B.C. were seniors living in homes with poor ventilation.

That's a disturbing echo of what happened in this country during the current pandemic. When COVID-19 arrived, it was seniors living in inadequate long-term care facilities who suffered most.

Throughout the pandemic, it was often low-income and racialized Canadians who saw higher rates of infection and were made to accept the greatest amount of risk as "essential workers." The Climate Choices report makes clear that climate change has the potential to exacerbate existing inequities.

Those vulnerabilities need to be accounted for in responding to climate change — but reducing or eliminating those disparities in general would also create a society that is better prepared to withstand the stress a changing climate will inflict.

"Addressing vulnerability and giving people the resources and the best chance possible to achieve good health before these things happen is incredibly important," Ness said.

And while the focus now may be on heat, Ness notes that worsening air quality could pose problems that "dwarf" the impact of higher temperatures.

The federal Liberal government has committed to developing a National Adaptation Strategy — though a recent report from the International Institute for Sustainable Development noted that Canada is behind some European countries in such planning.

The federal government also has committed billions of dollars in funding to disaster mitigation, improving infrastructure and public reporting (including the recently released "National Issues Report" on climate change's impacts on Canada). But the Institute for Climate Choices found that only three per cent of climate adaptation funding announced in recent budgets was specifically targeted to public health.

Though adaptation might be coming to the fore now — a new coalition of insurance companies and environmental organizations has come together to push for federal action — it has generally run second in the public discussion around climate change, perhaps with some justification. Mitigating future climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions is far preferable to merely learning to live with its effects.

But the world is long past the point when some amount of dangerous climate change could be avoided. And we no longer need to look to the future to imagine what that change could look and feel like. The climate crisis is here.

BULLSHIT

Namibia teenagers barred from Olympic 400 over testosterone

CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — Two 18-year-old runners from Namibia were barred Friday from running in the 400 meters at the Olympics because of high natural testosterone levels, becoming the latest female athletes to be affected by the same contentious regulations that have sidelined Caster Semenya.

Christine Mboma and Beatrice Masilingi, who burst into Olympic medal reckoning with some blisteringly fast times this year, were subjected to “medical assessments” by track governing body World Athletics at their training camp in Italy, the Namibia Olympic committee said.

They were withdrawn from the 400 meters by the Namibian team after the tests revealed high natural testosterone which meant they wouldn't be allowed to run in the 400 in Tokyo.

The pair can still run in the 200 meters, where they've also qualified, because track's testosterone rules only apply to distances between 400 meters and one mile.

In a separate statement, the Namibian track federation said the two teenagers would still go to the Olympics and “will focus their full attention on the 200m event." It said the runners were “disappointed" but “they remain in high spirits.”

Their exclusion from the 400 sparked angry reactions and criticism of the rules from numerous political parties in Namibia.

Before this year, both athletes were relative unknowns.

Mboma ran 48.54 seconds to win a 400 race in Poland on Wednesday, which was an under-20 world record and the seventh-fastest time ever recorded by a woman in the 400. It was also the fastest time in the world this year ahead of all the event's big names, and the fastest time in the world since 2019.

Masilingi's 49.53 seconds at a low-level meet in Zambia in April stands as the third fastest time of 2021 behind Mboma and Shaunae Miller-Uibo, the current Olympic champion.

Those eye-catching times spurred World Athletics to order the testosterone tests.

“It is important to understand that both our athletes were not aware of this condition,” the Namibia Olympic committee said.

The Namibian Olympic body said it was in close contact with World Athletics' medical officer Stephane Bermon, one of the architects of the testosterone rules, “with regards to the way forward in the interest of our two sprinters.”

The situation is reminiscent of the highly controversial sex verification tests conducted on a teenage Semenya when she broke onto the international scene at the 2009 world championships in Berlin.

World Athletics' latest testosterone regulations have been fiercely debated since they were introduced in 2018.

They have resulted in Semenya, the two-time Olympic champion, being unable to run in her favorite event and defend her title in Tokyo. She has launched legal appeals in various courts, calling the rules unfair and discriminatory, but has lost two of those appeals and is waiting for a third to be heard.

The rules have also affected two other high-profile African athletes, Francine Niyonsaba of Burundi and Margaret Wambui of Kenya, who won silver and bronze behind Semenya at the 2016 Olympics, where the testosterone issue became a dominant story.

Niyonsaba and Wambui have both also been barred from the 800, although Niyonsaba has qualified for the Olympics in the 5,000 meters and says she will run in Tokyo.

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More AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/olympic-games and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports

Gerald Imray, The Associated Press