BACKGROUNDER

Haiti president Jovenel Moïse assassinated by ‘armed commando group’

Arrests made after prime minister says attackers posed as members of the US Drug Enforcement Agency

Haiti’s president, Jovenel Moïse. The assassination is likely to plunge the Caribbean nation into further turmoil. Photograph: Andrés Martínez Casares/Reuters

Peter Beaumont, Tom Phillips and Julian Borger

THE GUARDIAN

Thu 8 Jul 2021 

The president of Haiti, Jovenel Moïse, has been assassinated in his home by a group of armed men who also seriously injured his wife, according to a statement and comments made by the country’s interim prime minister.

Speaking on a local radio station, Claude Joseph confirmed that Moïse, 53, had been killed, saying the attack was carried out by an “armed commando group” that included foreigners.

In a televised national address later on Wednesday, Joseph declared a state of emergency across the country, and made a call for calm. “The situation is under control,” he said.

Late on Wednesday Haiti’s communications secretary said police had arrested the “presumed assassins”. Frantz Exantus did not provide further details about the killing or say how many suspects had been arrested. The police chief later said officers were fighting with the group and that four had been shot dead and another two arrested.

According to the Haitian ambassador to Washington, Bocchit Edmond, Moïse’s killers claimed to be members of the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) as they entered his guarded residence.

“This was a well-orchestrated commando attack,” Edmond told the Guardian. “They presented themselves as DEA agents, telling people they had come as part of a DEA operation.”

In videos circulating on social media, a man with an American accent is heard saying in English over a megaphone: “DEA operation. Everybody stand down. DEA operation. Everybody back up, stand down.”

Residents reported hearing gunshots and seeing men dressed in black running through the neighbourhood.

“It could be foreign mercenaries, because the video footage showed them speaking in Spanish,” Edmond said. “It was something carried out by professionals, by killers … But since the investigation has been just been opened, we prefer to wait on legal authorities to have a better assessment of the situation. We don’t know for sure, with real certainty, who’s behind this.

“This is an act of barbarity. It’s an attack on our democracy,” he said.

Edmond said he had asked the White House on Wednesday morning for US help in identifying and capturing the killers.

“We need a lot more information,” Joe Biden said later at the White House, calling the killing “very worrisome”.

In a written statement, the US president offered condolences and assistance. “We condemn this heinous act, and I am sending my sincere wishes for First Lady Moïse’s recovery,” the statement said. “The United States offers condolences to the people of Haiti, and we stand ready to assist as we continue to work for a safe and secure Haiti.”

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The attack took place at Moïse’s house in the Pelerin 5 district of Pétionville, a wealthy area with sometimes substantial and leafy villas in the hills above the capital, Port-au-Prince, with a reputation for being safe. It is an area critics of Moïse said he was loth to leave.

Military vehicles block the entrance to the neighbourhood where Jovenel Moïse lived. Photograph: Joseph Odelyn/AP

“Around one o’clock in the morning, during the night of Tuesday 6 to Wednesday 7 July 2021, a group of unidentified individuals, including some speaking Spanish, attacked the private residence of the president and fatally injured the head of state,” Joseph said in a statement quoted in the media.

Edmond said that Moïse’s three children were safe but his wife, Martine, was seriously wounded in the attack and was being taken to a hospital in Miami on Wednesday.

The attack happened barely 24 hours after Moïse had named a new prime minister, Ariel Henry, to take charge as head of the government and prepare the country for presidential elections in the next two months.

Moïse, a former entrepreneur, was the anointed political successor of the former president Michel Martelly. The assassination is likely to plunge the impoverished Caribbean nation into further turmoil after several years marked by political unrest and violence.

The US embassy said it would be closed on Wednesday owing to the “ongoing security situation”. “We’re still gathering information,” the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said on MSNBC. “We’re still assessing right now.”

“It’s a horrific crime,” Psaki added in an interview with CNN. “We stand ready and stand by them to provide any assistance that’s needed.”

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Boris Johnson, the UK prime minister, said: “I am shocked and saddened at the death of President Moïse. Our condolences are with his family and the people of Haiti. This is an abhorrent act and I call for calm at this time.”

As details of the assassination emerged, the Colombian president, Iván Duque, called on the Organisation of American States to send an urgent mission to “protect the democratic order in Haiti”.

Moïse’s time in office was marked by an increase in political instability, allegations of corruption and a long-running dispute about when his period in office should end. He had been ruling by decree for more than a year after the country failed to hold legislative elections and he wanted to push through controversial constitutional changes.

There have been intermittent periods of protests and street violence and a rise in gang violence, some of it tied to political parties.

Killers lurk in the shadows as Haiti chaos takes a sinister turn

Read more

Haiti’s opposition claims Moïse should have stepped down on 7 February to coincide with the fifth anniversary of 2015 elections that were cancelled and then re-run a year later because of allegations of fraud. They allege that because Moïse failed to hold legislative elections in 2019, he violated the country’s 1987 constitution. His supporters rejected that argument, saying he only took power in 2017 after winning the re-run. In February the US said it supported Moïse’s position that he had the right to govern until February 2022.

Instability has been exacerbated by the Petrocaribe scandal, a controversy that arose from a scheme to buy discounted oil from Venezuela on cheap credit. The idea was to free up funds for social schemes, but the money was pocketed by politicians.

Earlier this year amid allegations by Moïse of a coup attempt that planned to “murder him” and fresh protests, he moved to protect his position, ordering the arrest of 23 people including a supreme court judge and a senior police official, while declaring he was “not a dictator”.

Opponents had also accused Moïse’s government of fuelling political violence by providing gangs with guns and money to intimidate his adversaries.

The Caribbean country – the world’s first black republic after its revolution against French rule – has a history marked by poverty, authoritarian rule, political instability and external interference including a long US occupation. It has struggled to rebuild since a devastating earthquake in 2010 and Hurricane Matthew in 2016.

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Turkmenistan: Some Maternity Wards in Secretly Offer Abandoned Babies For Illegal Adoption

July 8, 2021
By RFE RL


(RFE/RL) — Some maternity wards in Turkmenistan secretly offer abandoned babies for illegal adoption to prospective parents willing to pay a bribe to skip the normal bureaucracy and long wait that goes with the process, several sources tell RFE/RL.

The illegal deal often involves employees from registry offices who provide the new parents with false birth certificates that show them as the biological parents, the sources claim.

People with knowledge of the deals blame rampant corruption in the agencies involved in the legal adoption process for pushing some parents to a “cheaper and faster” option.

RFE/RL spoke to a married couple who admitted illegally adopting a baby in 2020 after paying about $4,300 in bribes. The couple, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they initially tried for three years to adopt a child legally, but without success.

Like many other countries, Turkmenistan requires prospective parents to provide documents from various agencies to ensure their suitability to adopt a child. The couple said they diligently assembled the necessary documents and submitted them, but each official involved in the process demanded bribes and deliberately delayed the process, the husband said.

Then, in the autumn of 2020, a Registry Office worker suggested another option: to adopt a newborn from a maternity ward and “experience all the joys of raising a child from the very beginning.”

“She gave me the name of a doctor at the maternity hospital who would help me to get a baby and said it wouldn’t cost a lot,” the man said. “I knew that such a practice existed, but I didn’t know anyone who could help me.”

The couple decided to approach the maternity hospital doctor, who found them an infant allegedly abandoned by his mother. Soon thereafter they became parents to a newborn baby boy through an illegal adoption.

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The employee at the Registry Office helped them obtain a birth certificate. In all of the documents the couple are registered as the biological parents of the child.

The process cost the family about 15,000 manats or nearly $4,300 at the official exchange rate. It’s a significant amount of money in the country, but the couple say they were happy to pay.

The new parents say they don’t see “anything wrong” in the way they got their son, who “is being raised in a loving family.”

“After all, the child was abandoned — he could have ended up in an orphanage,” the wife said. “The day we brought him home was the happiest day of our lives. Of course, we’d prefer everything was done legally.”

The couple blame corrupt officials for leaving them “with no other choice” in the matter.

‘Illegal Trafficking’

RFE/RL has asked Turkmen government officials for comment several times since interviewing the couple in June. There has thus far been no response.

Officials in the secretive, authoritarian Central Asian country usually refuse to speak to the independent media. But speaking on condition of anonymity, an official at a regional health department confirmed to RFE/RL that illegal adoptions at maternity wards do indeed take place. The official condemned the practice as “child trafficking.”

“It’s illegal trafficking in babies, no more and no less,” the official said. “The price of the child in this unlawful trade can rise to several thousand manats.”

Like the adoptive parents, the official said the “very complex adoption process and rampant bribery in the system” were the main reason some “desperate prospective parents” chose the illegal option.

“In the legal process, they have to go through dozens of government agencies and pay bribes to each of them. They usually wait for years before the documents are approved,” the official said. “Also, orphanages in Turkmenistan usually offer older children for adoption, while many parents [prefer] infants.”

One married couple in the eastern Farap district told RFE/RL that they had to provide documents and letters from 40 different agencies to support their adoption application. Yet three years later there was still no decision on their bid.

Meanwhile, wealthier applicants in Farap received a child for legal adoption within four months after applying because they paid up to 50,000 manats (about $14,300) in bribes, they said.

“We don’t have such money to pay,” the couple lamented.

Written by Farangis Najibullah based on reporting by RFE/RL’s Turkmen Service

RFE RL

RFE/RL journalists report the news in 21 countries where a free press is banned by the government or not fully established

Ancient Islamic Tombs Cluster Like Galaxies


Landscape views of scatters of qubbas around the Jebel Maman.

CREDIT: Stefano Costanzo (CC-BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

July 8, 2021 
By Eurasia Review

Sudanese Islamic burial sites are distributed according to large-scale environmental factors and small-scale social factors, creating a galaxy-like distribution pattern, according to a study published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Stefano Costanzo of the University of Naples “L’Orientale” in Italy and colleagues.

The Kassala region of eastern Sudan is home to a vast array of funerary monuments, from the Islamic tombs of modern Beja people to ancient burial mounds thousands of years old. Archaeologists don’t expect these monuments are randomly placed; their distribution is likely influenced by geological and social factors. Unraveling the patterns of the funerary landscape can provide insight into ancient cultural practices of the people who built them.

In this study, Costanzo and colleagues collected a dataset of over 10,000 funerary monuments in the region, distributed over 4000 km2, identified by field work and remote sensing using satellite imagery. They then analyzed the arrangement of these sites using a Neyman-Scott Cluster model, originally developed to study spatial patterns of stars and galaxies. This model revealed that, just like stars cluster around centers of high gravity, burials in Kassala cluster in the hundreds around central “parent” points which likely represent older tombs of importance.

The authors hypothesize that the larger scale distribution of tombs is determined by the environment, with “high-gravity” areas centering on regions with favorable landscapes and available building materials. Smaller scale distribution seems to be a social phenomenon, with tombs commonly built nearby older structures, possibly including recent family burials or more ancient burials of traditional importance. This is the first time this cosmological approach has been applied to archaeology, representing a fresh tool for answering questions about the origins of archaeological sites.

The authors add: “An international team of archaeologists discovered the environmental and societal drivers underlying the creation of the monumental funerary landscape of Eastern Sudan with a novel application of advanced geospatial analysis.”

Secret To Weathering Climate Change Lies At Our Feet

Drought-stricken farmland in New Mexico. 

CREDIT: Richard Wellenberger/iStock/Getty Images 

July 8, 2021
By Eurasia Review

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently discovered that the ability of agricultural grasses to withstand drought is directly related to the health of the microbial community living on their stems, leaves and seeds.

“Microbes do an enormous amount for the grasses that drive the world’s agriculture,” says Emily Bechtold, a graduate student in UMass Amherst’s microbiology department and lead author of the paper recently published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology. “They protect from pathogens, provide the grass with nutrients such as nitrogen, supply hormones to bolster the plant’s health and growth, protect from UV radiation and help the grass manage drought.” Yet, the increased severity and longevity of climate-change-driven drought conditions across the world is sapping the ability of the microbiome to thrive.

Since 60% of all agriculture is grass-related – think of the cows, sheep and other grass-munching livestock that provide meat, milk, cheese, leather, wool and other staples – the bacteria living on grass touches every aspect of our lives, from what we eat for breakfast to food security, economics and international development.

The new research, which is the first of its kind, focuses on two different types of grasses: those that make up the majority of grasslands in temperate zones and those that predominate in tropical regions. “The goal of this research,” says Klaus Nüsslein, professor of microbiology at UMass Amherst, and the paper’s senior author, “is to be able to manage the interactions between plants and the bacteria they host in order to support a truly sustainable agriculture.” Until now, however, it was largely unknown how grass and its microbiome supported one another, and what effects drought might have on the bacterial communities.

The researchers, whose work was supported by the Lotta M. Crabtree Foundation and the National Science Foundation, grew their temperate and tropical grasses in two different greenhouses. Each greenhouse’s climate was controlled to mimic natural climactic conditions. Once the grasses reached maturity, the researchers further divided each group into three sub-groups. The first, the control group, maintained optimum climactic conditions. A second sub-group had its climate altered to mimic mild drought conditions, while the third was subjected to severe drought conditions. Over the course of a month, the researchers counted, gathered, and sequenced the DNA of the bacteria across all the groups of grasses and compared the results.

What they found was that when the bacteria showed signs of drought-induced stress, so did the plants. As expected, the tropical grasses were better able to withstand drought than the temperate grasses, but there were significant shifts in the microbiomes of all the grasses under severe drought conditions. Not only were there fewer total bacteria, but the microbial communities became less diverse, and so less resilient to environmental stress. In some cases, there was an increase in the count of bacteria that can prove harmful to grass.

However, there is hope. A few potentially beneficial bacteria were shown to thrive under mild drought conditions. More research needs to be done, but, says Bechtold, their research indicates that plans to actively support and biofertilize with these beneficial bacteria could be the key to weathering the drought conditions that will only become more widespread in the era of global warming.

 

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Canada indigenous community signs agreement with government to reclaim child welfare jurisdiction

Lubaina Baloch | U. Calgary Law School, CA

JULY 8, 2021 04:15:52 AM

The Cowessess First Nation became the first Canadian Indigenous community on Tuesday to sign an agreement with the Canadian and Saskatchewan governments under Canada’s landmark Bill C-92 passed in 2019. The subsequent legislation empowered Indigenous communities to reclaim jurisdiction based on their own history, culture and laws. The jurisdiction is recognized as federal law and is prioritized over provincial and family services laws. Notably, Cowessess First Nation announced the discovery of an estimated 751 unmarked graves near a former residential school in Saskatchewan earlier this month.

A ceremony and signing celebration took place at the Cowessess First Nation Powwow Grounds, where the First Nation team finalized the agreement with the governments. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe travelled to the Saskatchewan community to announce the agreement with Chief Cadmus Delorme.

Before the agreement signing, Chief Delorme explained the state of affairs of children in care, stating that jurisdiction over such children has been removed from the First Nation since 1951, such that non-Indigenous laws governed the final decision-making and judicial decision-making processes. However, a positive step was taken under Bill C-92 in March 2020, when the Cowessess First Nation passed legislation intended to give Indigenous communities greater control over child welfare in their communities while reducing the number of Indigenous children in foster care. He added that the responsibility for children in care is:

Part of the long-term goal of controlling our own plan to self-government based on our Inherent Rights and Treaty relationship. The coordination agreement is a transition plan to assure the transfer of jurisdiction is professional and at the pace of Cowessess First Nation. The fiscal agreement confirms the investment the Government of Canada and Government of Saskatchewan takes in supporting the Cowessess First Nation.

The current Canadian system has been criticized for several shortcomings, such as not meeting the cultural needs of Indigenous children and their consistent overrepresentation in the care system. In 2016, federal data found that over 52.2 percent of children under age 15 in foster care were Indigenous, despite only representing 7.7 percent of the child population.

To help the Cowessess community establish its independent child and family services system, Ottawa will contribute $38.7 million over the next two years. Other Indigenous groups have also shown intentions to control their child and family services regimes.

Furthermore, Trudeau has indicated that the Canadian government is working with other First Nation communities to establish similar agreements. In addition to bringing changes to the child welfare programs, such agreements will possibly transfer control in other areas such as education, health care and business.

Former Military Commissions Prosecutor Calls For Closure Of Guantánamo – OpEd


This is a guard tower at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Credit: US Navy

July 8, 2021

By Andy Worthington

Since Joe Biden was inaugurated as president in January, there has been a considerable outpouring of high-level demands for the closure of the shameful and disgraceful prison at Guantánamo Bay, which marked the 19th anniversary of its opening just before Biden’s inauguration, as the fatigue of the Trump years, when the White House was occupied by a president with no interest in addressing the horrors of Guantánamo, came to an end.

In January, seven former prisoners (all authors) had a letter published in the New York Review of Books calling for the prison’s closure, followed in February by a letter from 111 human rights organizations, including Close Guantánamo. Most significantly, in April, 24 Democratic Senators, including Dick Durbin, Patrick Leahy and Dianne Feinstein, followed up with their own demand for the prison’s closure, including detailed explanations of how that is possible.

There have also been op-eds by former Bill Clinton advisor Anthony Lake and Close Guantánamo co-founder Tom Wilner, by Lee Wolosky, the former Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure, by retired Rear Admirals Donald J. Guter and John Hutson, by former CIA analyst Gail Helt, by Valerie Lucznikowska of September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, and by the attorney Benjamin R. Farley, who represents one of the men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, as part of the DoD’s Military Commissions Defense Organization.

Last week, Omar Ashmawy, a former prosecutor in the military commissions, set up after 9/11 specifically to prosecute a handful of the nearly 800 men held without charge or trial at Guantánamo over the last 19 years, made his own contribution via an op-ed in the Washington Post, which I’m cross-posting below.

Ashmawy’s op-ed begins with a shocking insight into quite how long Guantánamo has been open, and how elusive justice has been. He was, he explains, “one of the prosecutors for the only two litigated U.S. military tribunals since Nuremberg” — the trials 13 years ago, in 2008, of Salim Hamdan, a driver for Osama bin Laden, who was released five months later, and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, who made promotional videos for al-Qaeda, and was given a life sentence after refusing to mount a defense.

Prior to these trials, one prisoner (David Hicks) negotiated a plea deal, and since then five other cases have proceeded to trial (of Ibrahim al-Qosi, Omar Khadr, Noor Uthman Muhammed, Ahmed al-Darbi and Majid Khan), and have also involved plea deals. However, the last of these was nearly ten years ago, and many of them have been overturned on appeal, on the basis that, as Ashmawy explains, they involved “charging ex-post facto crimes such as ‘material support for terrorism’ that didn’t exist before 9/11, in violation of the U.S. Constitution.”

Ashmawy describes how “drag[ging] the judicial process out for this long — up to nearly 20 years — is absurd and un-American,” and also explains that, during his service, from 2007 to 2009, his entire experience of the commissions confirmed only that it was an irreparably broken system. He calls on President Biden to end this long betrayal of justice by prosecuting those charged with crimes to face federal court trials on the US mainland, and to bring the very existence of the prison at Guantánamo Bay to an end by releasing everyone else.

As he states, “Guantánamo was designed to bypass the Constitution and the U.S. criminal justice system. It failed because that idea is contrary to American principles.” As he also explains, “If we can bring home our troops from Afghanistan by September 2021, we can close Guantánamo by then as well. We must.”

I was one of the prosecutors for the only two litigated U.S. military tribunals since Nuremberg. These were the trials of Salim Ahmed Hamdan and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, who were among those detained at Guantánamo Bay Naval Baseafter the attacks of 9/11. While it’s been 12 yearssince I served in Guantánamo, and the number of detainees has dropped dramatically,the realities that must be faced for trials to proceed haven’t changed. Military tribunals are sometimes a necessary consequence of war, but to drag the judicial process out for this long —up to nearly 20 years — is absurd and un-American. It’s an abandonment of our commitment to rule of law and what we consider to be fair jurisprudence.

My entire experience at Guantánamo was a rude awakening. I believed in the system after the first failed effort at prosecuting alleged terrorists was repaired in the Supreme Court case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, where the court acknowledged the unconstitutionality of the process. I thought our pursuit of justicecould be fair and impartial, and an example to the world. I was wrong. Everything I saw and experienced while serving in that assignment convinced me of that. Nothing I’ve observed since has changed my mind.

For years, leaders across the political, legal and humanitarian spectrum have called for the prison at Guantánamo to be closed.Thus far, the Biden administration has paid only lip service to that idea, except for clearing the potential release of three detainees who are still in custody.Without a comprehensive plan for trying the others — or, themore politically difficult alternative,releasing many of them without trial — closing the facility is impossible. Practically, this would meancoming to terms with the crimes the United States has committed: torture, extraordinary rendition and indefinite, illegal confinement — all of which are antithetical to our concepts of justice and international norms. Can you imagine the outrage if an American were snatched off the streets of Cancún, Mexico, accused of crimes, tortured until they confessed and held formore than 10 yearswithout trial? It would be an act of war.

Except for U.S. v. Hamdan and the case against Bahlul, we have been unable to successfully litigate a tribunal since Sept. 11, 2001. Two decades of failed efforts speak for itself — no tribunal held in Guantánamo after nearly20 years of unlawful confinement could come to a conclusion that the legal or humanitarian community will accept. The recent ruling in U.S. v. Nashiri — saying a jury can’t hear evidence derived from torture, but the same evidence can be introduced to bring an accused person to trial — is too little too late; it’s a Band-Aid that only accentuates the failures of the process.

As an American, a former military officer and an attorney, I am disgusted by what I witnessed during the George W. Bush presidency and continued to observe over the next two administrations. A short list includes the lack of transparency; the fiscally irresponsiblecost of maintaining the prison; the intelligence community’s continued lack of cooperation; the palpable anti-Arab, anti-Muslim sentiment; and charging ex-post facto crimes such as “material support for terrorism” that didn’t exist before 9/11, in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

Legally, the answer is as simple as it is politically difficult. Of the original approximately 780 original detainees, 40 remain —almost all of whom have been detained for 15 years or more — and only seven are facing a military trial. Some prominent voices are calling for the immediate release of the 28 prisoners who have yet to be charged with any crime. That should be done, but it does not go far enough. We should bring the individuals who can be tried to the United States for prosecution in federal courts. Release the rest. Yes, there will be recidivism, but we must address that on the battlefield, not by continuing to abandon our judicial standardsof right and wrong.

To those who fear bringing committed terrorists to prisons on U.S. territory: They are already here. To those who think civilian federal courts can’t handle crimes of international terror: They already have — almost 1,000 cases of international terrorism have been prosecuted by the Justice Department since 9/11, with an 84 percent record of conviction.

Guantánamo was designed to bypass the Constitution and the U.S. criminal justice system. It failed because that idea is contrary to American principles. Putting it more bluntly: When it comes to our foreign enemies, we must kill them or arrest and try them for their crimes. Anything else is a setup for failure. If this administration is committed to ending the forever wars of 9/11, it cannot do so without closing one of the last vestiges of them. If we can bring home our troops from Afghanistan by September 2021, we can close Guantánamo by then as well. We must.

Omar Ashmawy, staff director and chief counsel for the Office of Congressional Ethics, is a retired Air Force major who served as a war crimes prosecutor from 2007 to 2009.

I wrote the above article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner

 Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to his RSS feed (he can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see his definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, and, if you appreciate his work, feel free to make a donation.

Understanding Switchgrass: An Important Bioenergy Crop

 

Taking soil cores in a prairie plot. CREDIT: K.Stepnitz, Michigan State University

 July 8, 2021  Eurasia Review  

By Eurasia Review

Bioenergy crops are an alternative energy source that, unlike fossil fuels, could positively impact the environment by reducing greenhouse gases, soil erosion, and carbon dioxide levels. They can be produced even more sustainably if they are grown on poor quality land unsuitable for food. To make up for the poor land quality, these crops can rely on soil microbes like bacteria and fungi to help them access nutrients and water and store more carbon.

Switchgrass, a native prairie species, is championed as a promising bioenergy crop due to its ability to grow across many climates. It is also known to associate with beneficial microbes. To better understand the relationship between switchgrass and soil microbes, researchers at Michigan State University and Washington State University examined soil microbial communities and root traits among 12 switchgrass cultivars that had been planted in the same plot over nine years.

“This common garden design allowed us to determine how each cultivar affects their soil microbiome while controlling for difference in soil type and climate,” explained Tayler Ulbrich, one of the researchers involved in the study. And unlike most studies that look at young switchgrass roots, their focus on a wide range of different cultivars and on mature switchgrass gave them a more representative understanding of the plant’s long-life span and dense root systems.

“We learned that, even within one region, there is not one standard switchgrass microbiome but that each cultivar harbored a unique community of soil bacteria and fungi. We also found evidence that root characteristics, like length and diameter, differed among the cultivars and may influence the structure of these microbiomes.”

Their study emphasizes the need to identify how plant traits affect soil microbiomes and their function. Ulbrich acknowledges that studying root traits is a tedious task, especially on plants growing in nature, but it is important to research because root systems are crucial for resource uptake and healthy soils as well as the plant’s ability to communicate with other plants and microbes.

Producing profitable and sustainable bioenergy crops will require crops that can tolerate stressful growing conditions, such as poor soil nutrients or drought, with fewer inputs. Understanding that switchgrass cultivars differ in their abilities to tolerate these conditions and that microbiomes may play a role, future research should investigate cultivar-specific differences in microbiomes and use this information to select and breed cultivars with optimal microbiome-mediated traits such as high nitrogen-fixation or carbon-sequestration.

Heatwave in US and Canada ‘impossible’ without climate change

‘This study is telling us climate change is killing people’

Via AP news wire


The deadly heat wave that roasted the Pacific Northwest and western Canada was virtually impossible without human-caused climate change that added a few extra degrees to the record-smashing temperatures, a new quick scientific analysis found.

An international team of 27 scientists calculated that climate change increased chances of the extreme heat occurring by at least 150 times, but likely much more.


The study, not yet peer reviewed, said that before the industrial era, the region's late June triple-digit heat was the type that would not have happened in human civilization. And even in today’s warming world, it said, the heat was a once-in-a-millennium event.

But that once-in-a-millennium event would likely occur every five to 10 years once the world warms another 1.4 degrees (0.8 degrees Celsius), said Wednesday's study from World Weather Attribution. That much warming could be 40 or 50 years away if carbon pollution continues at its current pace, one study author said.

This type of extreme heat “would go from essentially virtually impossible to relatively commonplace,” said study co-author Gabriel Vecchi, a Princeton University climate scientist. “That is a huge change.”

The study also found that in the Pacific Northwest and Canada climate change was responsible for about 3.6 degrees (2 degrees Celsius) of the heat shock. Those few degrees make a big difference in human health, said study co-author Kristie Ebi, a professor at the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington.


“This study is telling us climate change is killing people,” said Ebi, who endured the blistering heat in Seattle. She said it will be many months before a death toll can be calculated from June's blast of heat but it’s likely to be hundreds or thousands. “Heat is the No. 1 weather-related killer of Americans.”

In Oregon alone, the state medical examiner on Wednesday reported 116 deaths related to the heat wave.

The team of scientists used a well-established and credible method to search for climate change's role in extreme weather, according to the National Academy of Sciences. They logged observations of what happened and fed them into 21 computer models and ran numerous simulations. They then simulated a world without greenhouse gases from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas. The difference between the two scenarios is the climate change portion.

“Without climate change this event would not have happened," said study senior author Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford.

What made the Northwest heat wave so remarkable is how much hotter it was than old records and what climate models had predicted. Scientists say this hints that some kind of larger climate shift could be in play — and in places that they didn't expect.

“Everybody is really worried about the implications of this event," said study co-author Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, a Dutch climate scientist. “This is something that nobody saw coming, that nobody thought possible. And we feel that we do not understand heat waves as well as we thought we did. The big question for many people is: Could this also happen in a lot of places?”

The World Weather Attribution team does these quick analyses, which later get published in peer-reviewed journals. In the past, they have found similar large climate change effects in many heat waves, including ones in Europe and Siberia. But sometimes the team finds climate change wasn’t a factor, as they did in a Brazilian drought and a heat wave in India.

Six outside scientists said the quick study made sense and probably underestimated the extent of climate change’s role in the heat wave.

That’s because climate models used in the simulations usually underestimate how climate change alters the jet stream that parks “heat domes” over regions and causes some heat waves, said Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann

The models also underestimate how dry soil worsens heat because there is less water to evaporate, which feeds a vicious cycle of drought, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and the Nature Conservancy.

The study hit home for University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver, who wasn't part of the research team.

“Victoria, which is known for its mild climate, felt more like Death Valley last week," Weaver said. "I’ve been in a lot of hot places in the world, and this was the worst I’ve ever been in.

“But you ain’t seen nothing yet," he added. “It’s going to get a lot worse.”

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Read more stories on climate issues by The Associated Press at https://www.apnews.com/Climate

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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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A New Study Shows Why Fracking Has to Stop


The damage caused by methane emissions is even worse than we thought. Will other states now follow California’s lead?

JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES
Governor Gavin Newsom

California Governor Gavin Newsom said last Friday his state will stop issuing new permits for fracking in 2024. The embattled governor—likely facing a recall election this fall—also directed the California Air Resource Board to study pathways to phasing out oil production by 2045. The announcement makes California the world’s largest oil and gas producer to commit to this kind of phaseout.

It’s a remarkable move, championed for decades by the state’s muscular climate and environmental justice groups. And yet many of those same groups argue the ban Newsom has announced doesn’t go far or fast enough to limit warming and the local health impacts of extraction. And a forthcoming U.N. study reviewed by The New York Times seems to agree with them.

The Times’ Hiroko Tabuchi reported Saturday that the study on methane emissions—slated to be published next month by the U.N. Environment Program and Climate and Clean Air Coalition—finds that “unless there is significant deployment of unproven technologies capable of pulling greenhouse gases out of the air—expanding the use of natural gas is incompatible with keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.”
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While shorter-lived in the atmosphere, methane is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.

When burned, natural gas is about half as carbon-intensive as coal. It packs a much bigger punch, though, in terms of methane, emissions of which are now ubiquitous across gas supply chains. While shorter-lived in the atmosphere, methane is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. That means building more gas infrastructure, as politicians on both sides of the aisle have championed as a replacement for coal, could spike emissions overall, inking contracts that would lock in continued methane emissions for decades to come, driving temperatures ever higher.

Phasing out methane emissions is admittedly a large task. Gas is a by-product of oil production, and without infrastructure to use or transport the by-product, it gets burned off into the atmosphere at alarming rates through what’s known as “flaring.” Where storage and transportation infrastructure does exist, it leaks frequently. Domestic methane gas production has increased by 90 percent since 2005, spurred on by the Wall Street–aided expansion of hydraulic natural gas fracturing. Atmospheric methane levels and U.S. liquefied natural gas exports both reached record highs last month. Throughout the shale boom, methane emissions have been loosely regulated, and—experts contend—grossly underreported. That was even more true after the Trump administration peeled back already minimal restrictions on them. If Democrats win an upcoming vote to undo that change, methane regulations would be Biden’s first successful reinstatement of climate rules rolled back by the previous administration.

Global warming isn’t the only problem with gas production, though. Pollution carries huge risks, as well. Climate and environmental justice groups have campaigned for a rule that would bar drilling operations near schools, playgrounds, hospitals, and other sensitive areas where it can drive increased rates of asthma, cancer, and other health impacts. One 2016 study, for example, found that people under 24 living within a half-mile of Colorado gas fields “were at higher risk of respiratory, neurological, and other health impacts and had a higher lifetime risk for cancer than those who lived at farther distances.” The U.N. report reviewed by the Times found that methane restrictions could prevent 250,000 premature deaths and more than 750,000 asthma-related hospital visits each year after 2030. Harvard researchers recently found that fossil fuels were responsible for eight million deaths worldwide in 2018.

Newsom’s announcement came after a more ambitious bill to ban fracking and establish such a setback rule was defeated by a bipartisan committee vote in the California legislature, without the governor’s support. “We have been asking for setbacks for years, and every day that we allow the inherently dangerous practice of neighborhood drilling is an assault on our lungs, and it is an assault on justice,” Cesar Aguirre of the Central California Environmental Justice Network said in a statement emailed to reporters on Friday. “The first step of this directive and plan should be to create minimum 2,500-foot health and safety setbacks to protect frontline communities—that’s what the environmental justice community deserves.”

While recent news from Sacramento falls well short of what’s needed, Newsom has—under pressure—picked up a tool that the Biden administration has so far left on the table: policy to phase out fossil fuels directly. To date, the White House’s approach has mainly emphasized the investment and jobs opportunity that tackling the climate crisis could create, via industrial policy to scale up domestic clean energy production and manufacturing for low-carbon technologies like electric cars. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm has echoed these ideas, while largely picking up fossil fuel industry talking points that posit no contradiction between capping warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius and an indefinite future for oil and gas development.

“There is a future for fossil fuels, and let me tell you why. The Department of Energy and other entities [are] doing research on how to control carbon, carbon dioxide management,” she told KDKA Pittsburgh’s Jon Delano earlier this month, adding that fracking “can be done safely” so long as the right technology is in place. In recent months, the oil and gas industry has similarly cast methane as an eminently solvable problem, even supporting direct regulations to constrain it alongside privately managed reforms through the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative. Any talk of a transition is vaguely defined and far off in the future.

Last year’s Production Gap report, meanwhile, released by the U.N. Environment Program, the Stockholm Environmental Institute, and several other groups, found that fossil fuel production would need to decrease by 6 percent each year between 2020 and 2030 to keep warming below 1.5 degrees, the same goal the Biden administration has frequently repeated. Currently, the world is now on track to produce more than double the amount of fossil fuels needed to meet that goal.

Some kind of limit on fossil fuel production needs to make its way to mainstream national political debate, and fast. Insofar as Newsom’s proposal speeds that process, it’s good news. The weakness and lateness of the proposal say a lot about just how effectively fossil fuel companies have sidelined this debate so far.

APRIL 27,2021
Kate Aronoff @KateAronoff
Kate Aronoff is a staff writer at The New Republic.

USDA

The Farming Lobby’s Cunning Plan to Fight Climate Change—and Regulation
The American Farm Bureau Federation has recast itself as a climate warrior, pushing for private offset markets relying on the fraught science of soil sequestration.

FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

TNR
Charlie Mitchell /April 2, 2021

In 1980, the American Farm Bureau Federation, currently the largest agricultural lobbying group and third-largest insurance company in the country, called for the Environmental Protection Agency to be abolished. They’ve sued it regularly ever since. The Farm Bureau lobbied against the Kyoto Protocol, the Clean Power Plan, the Waters of the United States rule, and cap and trade like they were existential threats. Their policy book and local chapters barely concede the existence of anthropogenic warming.

Now, the group is busy portraying itself as an environment and climate advocate. Two weeks after the November election, the Farm Bureau joined the Environmental Defense Fund and others in a new Food and Agriculture Climate Alliance, releasing a slate of “climate policy recommendations.” At the top, “Provide voluntary, incentive-based tools and additional technical assistance for farmers, ranchers and foresters to maximize the sequestration of carbon and the reduction of other greenhouse gas emissions, and increase climate resilience.”

In the past few months, the potential payoff from the Farm Bureau’s new strategy has become clear. Facing an administration eager to rack up climate wins, the Farm Bureau has thrown its weight behind an emerging policy: private markets for carbon offsets, grounded in fraught soil sequestration claims that are quickly being incorporated into corporate “net-zero” pledges.

The agricultural carbon sequestration idea has taken root in the Biden administration. On Monday, Politico reported that the administration now plans to roll out a million-dollar bank plan to help pay farmers to capture carbon sometime this year. But it also reported a telling detail–the Farm Bureau isn’t satisfied with the proposal yet. It wants guarantees that farmers will get paid for soil sequestration without anything else in agricultural business-as-usual changing.

The farm lobby’s climate pivot began in June 2019, in a secret meeting in a sweaty Maryland barn. One hundred groups, Politico’s Helena Bottemiller Evich later reported, were there, including that “longtime, powerful foe of federal action on climate,” the American Farm Bureau Federation. Evich reported that during the secret summit, “the group coalesced around big ideas like the need to pay farmers to use their land to draw down carbon from the atmosphere.”

A video by the U.S. Farmers & Ranchers lobby, posted to YouTube a few months later, tugged at the heartstrings. “They’re superheroes,” says a woman pictured behind a motel desk, watching a fabricated news report about farmers’ incredible power to sequester greenhouse gases and fight climate change. A crestfallen farmer, who has just put up his farm for sale and is headed for the city with his wife and daughter, overhears her and is inspired to return to his farm, despite the economic pressures, to help save the world. “Let’s go home,” he tells his wife, bursting into their motel room.

Like much conservative messaging, the farm lobby starts with a victimization tale and follows with a redemption story that transforms the fallen patriarch into a hero, putting farmers “in the driver’s seat,” “at the table” as “leaders” of “the solution,” the foot soldiers in the great climate battle. These are the threads that make the cloth of Big Ag’s climate flag-waving, along with a quote from George Washington calling farming the “most noble employment of man.”

It’s a powerful narrative—but it’s also false. While small-scale farmers (especially those of color) undoubtedly have it tough, American agriculture—increasingly consolidated and overwhelmingly white at the managerial level—is virtually exempt from fair labor standards, clean air or water regulations, and property taxes. The government shells out tens of billions per year to keep the richest farmers in business.

Regulation—at least a modicum of accountability—is the only way to begin reducing emissions through agriculture.

Farm Bureau talking points say agriculture is only a small part of the climate problem and that it’s getting more efficient, but farming’s most pollutive elements (factory farms) are expanding and emissions are climbing, with CO2 emissions having increased by over 16 percent and methane by over 14 percent since 1990. So-called solutions like turning manure into energy or feeding cows seaweed to reduce their burps mostly aren’t as effective or simple as they sound, and runaway depletion of topsoil and groundwater is carrying farmland headlong into overlapping crises. Regulation—at least a modicum of accountability—is the only way to begin reducing emissions through agriculture.

But thanks to this savvy post-election political pivot by the farm lobby, regulation doesn’t seem to be on the table.

The “carbon bank” the Biden administration is proposing, under the aegis of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who also helmed the USDA under Obama, would pay farms directly for the carbon their plants take from the air and root into the soil, with the government taking a leading role in providing verification. It’s actually not a bad idea. “A USDA carbon bank would provide a guaranteed price for producers while guaranteeing the environmental integrity of carbon conservation practices,” read a transition white paper by then-incoming USDA leadership.

If Farm Bureau was committed to farmers and emissions reduction, they’d presumably support this policy wholeheartedly. But they’re already backing away from the proposal. “I’ll admit to you, I’m not totally comfortable yet,” Politico reported President Zippy Duvall saying in a House Agriculture committee meeting on climate change. The Farm Bureau office told me by email that the organization still supports the policy, “provided a few conditions are met.”

The first is that the carbon bank “mitigate potential market impacts.” So they’re on board, so long as farming-as-usual doesn’t change. While they didn’t specify what these impacts on the market might be, it’s certainly possible that if the government pays a decent price for carbon and sets the environmental standards high, farmers might choose to plant for carbon in lieu of commodity crops, and this would cut into the sales of agrochemicals and raise livestock feeding prices for the agribusiness giants Farm Bureau represents. They’re also eager that the system not be “overly complicated or burdensome” and want the bank to “establish a floor price for carbon sequestration.”

If the government becomes a big soil carbon buyer, it could also cut into agriculture’s contribution to private offset markets, which Farm Bureau supports fully. But far from guaranteeing environmental integrity, these private markets are already drawing widespread suspicion. Even Bloomberg’s editorial board, citing the difficulty and impermanence of soil carbon drawdown, warned: “The danger is that a carbon-credit system might instead mainly enable airlines, investment funds, energy firms, agribusinesses and other companies to excuse their own greenhouse-gas emissions by purchasing inexpensive and largely meaningless offsets.” These net-zero plans—which hinge on offsets that only select parties like farm and forest owners can supply—are a new and dangerous delay tactic tantamount to denial in the long term, because they don’t actually result in reduced emissions.

A few weeks after Vilsack touted the carbon bank in his Senate confirmation hearing, the FACA unified to issue a sharp warning: “You cannot do climate on the backs of the American farmer,” said one member in a forum convened by USDA. It’s a remarkable response to a policy that is proposing to give farmers money. But it’s consistent with another condition of Farm Bureau’s support, that it not come at any expense of the billions that USDA already distributes to subsidize insurance, inflate the emissions-heavy meat industry, or compensate for trade wars, the pandemic, and anything else that might come up. The sum in 2019 exceeded the total cost of the 2008 auto industry bailout. This is the bottom line in agricultural lobbying: American government should send more money to farmers—just as long as taxpayers don’t ask them to change the fundamentals of a business that is itself a giant emissions and environmental problem.

“USDA believes they have the legal authority” for the carbon bank, Farm Bureau director of congressional affairs Andrew Walmsley told Politico. “I don’t know if they have the political authority. That’s important.” Coming from a lobbying arm with a history of throwing its weight around and suing government agencies, it’s hard not to read that as a threat. Climate advocates lost control of the narrative, though, the second they welcomed Farm Bureau as a good-faith actor. Until they learn that lesson—and a louder chorus demands accountability in agricultural spending—U.S. agricultural policy and U.S. agriculture itself will continue to hurt the climate, not help it.

Charlie Mitchell @Charli3Mitchell
Charlie Mitchell is a journalist based in Chicago.