SuperBIT: A low-cost, balloon-borne telescope to rival Hubble

by Royal Astronomical Society

SuperBIT's final preparations for launch from Timmins Stratospheric Balloon Base Canada, in September 2019. Credit: Steven Benton, Princeton University

Durham, Toronto and Princeton Universities have teamed up with NASA and the Canadian Space Agency to build a new kind of astronomical telescope. SuperBIT flies above 99.5% of the Earth's atmosphere, carried by a helium balloon the size of a football stadium. The telescope will make its operational debut next April and when deployed should obtain high-resolution images rivaling those of the Hubble Space Telescope. Mohamed Shaaban, a Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto, will describe SuperBIT in his talk today (Wednesday 21 July) at the online RAS National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2021).

Light from a distant galaxy can travel for billions of years to reach our telescopes. In the final fraction of a second, the light has to pass through the Earth's swirling, turbulent atmosphere. Our view of the universe becomes blurred. Observatories on the ground are built at high altitude sites to overcome some of this, but until now only placing a telescope in space escapes the effect of the atmosphere.

The Superpressure Balloon-borne Imaging Telescope (or SuperBIT) has a 0.5 meter diameter mirror and is carried to 40km altitude by a helium balloon with a volume of 532,000 cubic meters, about the size of a football stadium.

Its final test flight in 2019 demonstrated extraordinary pointing stability, with variation of less than one thirty-six thousandth of a degree for more than an hour. This should enable a telescope to obtain images as sharp as those from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Nobody has done this before, not only because it is exceedingly difficult, but also because balloons could stay aloft for only a few nights: too short for an ambitious experiment. However, NASA recently developed 'superpressure' balloons able to contain helium for months. SuperBIT is scheduled to launch on the next long duration balloon, from Wanaka, New Zealand, in April. Carried by seasonally stable winds, it will circumnavigate the Earth several times—imaging the sky all night, then using solar panels to recharge its batteries during the day.

A SuperBIT optical and ultraviolet composite image of the 'Pillars of Creation', trunks of gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula, 7,000 light years away in the direction of the constellation of Serpens. Credit: SuperBIT team, from Romualdez et al. (2018) SPIE 10702.

With a budget for construction and operation for the first telescope of US$5 million (£3.62 million), SuperBIT cost almost 1000 times less than a similar satellite. Not only are balloons cheaper than rocket fuel, but the ability to return the payload to Earth and relaunch it means that its design has been tweaked and improved over several test flights. Satellites must work first time, so typically have (phenomenally expensive) redundancy, and decade-old technology that had to be space-qualified by the previous mission. Modern digital cameras improve every year—so the development team bought the cutting-edge camera for SuperBIT's latest test flight a few weeks before launch. This space telescope will continue to be upgradable, or have new instruments on every future flight.

In the longer term, the Hubble Space Telescope will not be repaired again when it inevitably fails. For 20 years after that, ESA/NASA missions will enable imaging only at infrared wavelengths (like the James Webb Space Telescope due to launch this autumn), or a single optical band (like the Euclid observatory due to launch next year).

By then SuperBIT will be the only facility in the world capable of high-resolution multicolour optical and ultraviolet observations. The team already has funding to design an upgrade from SuperBIT's 0.5 meter aperture telescope to 1.5 meters (the maximum carrying capacity of the balloon is a telescope with a mirror about 2 meters across). Boosting light gathering power tenfold, combined with its wider angle lens and more megapixels, will make this larger instrument even better than Hubble. The cheap cost even makes it possible to have a fleet of space telescopes offering time to astronomers around the world.

"New balloon technology makes visiting space cheap, easy, and environmentally friendly," said Shaaban. "SuperBIT can be continually reconfigured and upgraded, but its first mission will watch the largest particle accelerators in the Universe: collisions between clusters of galaxies."

The SuperBIT balloon in flight, above NASA's Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility, Texas, in June 2016. Credit: Richard Massey / Durham University.

The science goal for the 2022 flight is to measure the properties of dark matter particles. Although dark matter is invisible, astronomers map the way it bends rays of light, a technique known as gravitational lensing. SuperBIT will test whether dark matter slows down during collisions. No particle colliders on Earth can accelerate dark matter, but this is a key signature predicted by theories that might explain recent observations of weirdly behaving muons.

"Cavemen could smash rocks together, to see what they're made of," added Prof. Richard Massey of Durham University. "SuperBIT is looking for the crunch of dark matter. It's the same experiment, you just need a space telescope to see it."

Hubble Space Telescope fixed after month of no science

---

More information: Details about SuperBIT: sites.physics.utoronto.ca/bit

Provided by Royal Astronomical Society 

Undersea Volcano Discovered Near Christmas Island That Looks Like the Eye of Sauron

TOPICS:OceanographyThe ConversationVolcano

By TIM O'HARA, MUSEUMS VICTORIA JULY 23, 2021

A 3D map of the caldera known as the 'Eye of Sauron'. (Image credit: 3D imagery courtesy of CSIRO/MNF, GSM)

Looking like the Eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, an ancient undersea volcano was slowly revealed by multibeam sonar 3,100 meters below our vessel, 280 kilometers southeast of Christmas Island. This was on day 12 of our voyage of exploration to Australia’s Indian Ocean Territories, aboard CSIRO’s dedicated ocean research vessel, the RV Investigator.

Previously unknown and unimagined, this volcano emerged from our screens as a giant oval-shaped depression called a caldera, 6.2km by 4.8km across. It is surrounded by a 300m-high rim (resembling Sauron’s eyelids), and has a 300 m high cone-shaped peak at its center (the “pupil”).

Sonar image of the ‘Eye of Sauron’ volcano and nearby seamounts on the sea bed south-west of Christmas Island. Credit: Phil Vandenbossche & Nelson Kuna/CSIRO

A caldera is formed when a volcano collapses. The molten magma at the base of the volcano shifts upwards, leaving empty chambers. The thin solid crust on the surface of the dome then collapses, creating a large crater-like structure. Often, a small new peak then begins to form in the center as the volcano continues spewing magma.

One well-known caldera is the one at Krakatoa in Indonesia, which exploded in 1883, killing tens of thousands of people and leaving only bits of the mountain rim visible above the waves. By 1927, a small volcano, Anak Krakatoa (“child of Krakatoa”), had grown in its center.

In contrast, we may not even be aware of volcanic eruptions when they happen deep under the ocean. One of the few tell-tale signs is the presence of rafts of light pumice stone floating on the sea surface after being blown out of a submarine volcano. Eventually, this pumice stone becomes waterlogged and sinks to the ocean floor.

Our volcanic “eye” was not alone. Further mapping to the south revealed a smaller sea mountain covered in numerous volcanic cones, and further still to the south was a larger, flat-topped seamount. Following our Lord of the Rings theme, we have nicknamed them Barad-dûr (“Dark Fortress”) and Ered Lithui (“Ash Mountains”), respectively.

The voyage of the RV Investigator around Christmas Island. Credit: Tim O’Hara/Museums Victoria

Although author J.R.R. Tolkein’s knowledge of mountain geology wasn’t perfect, our names are wonderfully appropriate given the jagged nature of the first and the pumice-covered surface of the second.

The Eye of Sauron, Barad-dûr, and Ered Lithui are part of the Karma cluster of seamounts that have been previously estimated by geologists to be more than 100 million years old, and which formed next to an ancient sea ridge from a time when Australia was situated much further south, near Antarctica. The flat summit of Ered Lithui was formed by wave erosion when the seamount protruded above the sea surface, before the heavy seamount slowly sank back down into the soft ocean seafloor. The summit of Ered Lithui is now 2.6km below sea level.

But here is the geological conundrum. Our caldera looks surprisingly fresh for a structure that should be more than 100 million years old. Ered Lithui has almost 100m of sand and mud layers draped over its summit, formed by sinking dead organisms over millions of years. This sedimentation rate would have partially smothered the caldera. Instead it is possible that volcanoes have continued to sprout or new ones formed long after the original foundation. Our restless Earth is never still.

The large deep-sea predatory seastar Zoroaster. Credit: Rob French/Museums Victoria

But life adapts to these geological changes, and Ered Lithui is now covered in seafloor animals. Brittle-stars, sea-stars, crabs, and worms burrow into or skate over the sandy surface. Erect black corals, fan-corals, sea-whips, sponges, and barnacles grow on exposed rocks. Gelatinous cusk-eels prowl around rock gullies and boulders. Batfish lie in wait for unsuspecting prey.

Small batfish patrol the seamount summits. Credit: Rob French/Museums Victoria

Our mission is to map the seafloor and survey sea life from these ancient and secluded seascapes. The Australian government recently announced plans to create two massive marine parks across the regions. Our expedition will supply scientific data that will help Parks Australia to manage these areas into the future.

Elasipod sea cucumbers feed on organic detritus on deep sandy seafloors. Credit: Rob French/Museums Victoria

Scientists from museums, universities, CSIRO and Bush Blitz around Australia are participating in the voyage. We are close to completing part one of our journey to the Christmas Island region. Part two of our journey to the Cocos (Keeling) Island region will be scheduled in the next year or so.

No doubt many animals that we find here will be new to science and our first records of their existence will be from this region. We expect many more surprising discoveries.

Written by Tim O’Hara, Senior Curator of Marine Invertebrates, Museums Victoria.

Originally published on The Conversation.

Frito-Lay Kansas worker strike ends after 20 days

By Sara O'Brien, CNN Business
Sat July 24, 2021

(CNN)After a nearly three-week strike, hundreds of Frito-Lay employees in Topeka, Kansas have ratified a revised contract Saturday addressing what union leaders had previously described as a diminished quality of life stemming from work conditions, including long hours, forced overtime, and stagnating wages.

The contract will provide workers with a guaranteed day off each work week, and eliminates so-called "suicide shifts" (or "squeeze shifts" as the company calls it) where workers put in eight-hour days plus four hours of overtime before returning for their next shift, according to a Frito-Lay statement provided to CNN Business.

The news of the agreement was first reported Saturday by The New York Times.

Frito-Lay, owned by PepsiCo, said the union representing the workers will have additional opportunities for input on staffing and overtime. The revised contract also "offers 4% wage increases to employees in all job classifications over the two-year contract," according to the company's statement.

The workers belong to Local 218 of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union. In a statement Saturday, Anthony Shelton, the union's international president, said the workers "have shown the world that union working people can stand up against the largest food companies in the world and claim victory for themselves, their families and their communities."

Ron Sadler, employee at Frito-Lay for 32 years, puts his fist up as drivers honk their horns to show support for the union strike Tuesday afternoon, July 20. "I'm way too old to be dealing with this," Sadler said.

The 20-day strike marked the first at the plant in its decades of operation.

Earlier this month, Shelton said that "workers do not have enough time to see their family, do chores around the house, run errands, or even get a healthy night's sleep."

Frito-Lay had previously called the union's claims about long hours "grossly exaggerated."

"At all times we have negotiated in good faith with union representatives to address the most pressing concerns raised regarding hours of work and overtime," said Frito-Lay in the statement. "We believe our approach to resolving this strikes demonstrates how we listen to our employees, and when concerns are raised, they are taken seriously and addressed."

CNN's Harmeet Kaur contributed to this report.

Union accepts Frito Lay contract offer, ending strike

This sits outside a Frito-Lay facility in Topeka, Kansas where hundreds of workers are walking picket lines demanding an end to mandatory overtime and 84-hour weeks induced by an increased appetite for snack food during the pandemic.(BCTGM UNION via CBS News)

By Joseph Hennessy
Published: Jul. 24, 2021

TOPEKA, Kan. (WIBW) - The union has voted to accept Frito Lay’s newest contract offer ending the 20-day strike.

According to union leaders, the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers Local 218 members have voted in favor of Frito Lay’s contract offer after weeks of striking across the street from the plant.

We are told the accepted terms have one guaranteed day off and there is a pay increase for the workers.

Union Steward for BCTGM Mark McCarter confirmed the strike is over.

He said Everyone will return to work Monday and the vote tally has not been released. The vote approval occurred overnight, the picket line is being taken down now.

“We are pleased the BCTGM Local 218 members from Frito-Lay’s Topeka site ratified the revised contract offer and we look forward to welcoming all of our employees back to work next week. 

 At all times we have negotiated in good faith with union representatives to address the most pressing concerns raised regarding hours of work and overtime. 

While Frito-Lay believed its fully recommended July 1 offer addressed those concerns appropriately, the new offer from Frito-Lay provides a guaranteed day off during each workweek, eliminates “squeeze shifts,” creates additional opportunities for the union to have input into staffing and overtime and offers 4% wage increases to employees in all job classifications over the two-year contract,” said Frito-Lay. 

“For more than 85 years, Frito-Lay has provided well-paying jobs and benefits to thousands of Americans and made countless contributions to the communities where our teams work and live. 

Today, we are proud to employ more than 66,000 people and are committed to providing a safe and fair workplace for everyone.

 We believe our approach to resolving this strikes demonstrates how we listen to our employees, and when concerns are raised, they are taken seriously and addressed. Looking ahead, we look forward to continuing to build on what we have accomplished together based on mutual trust and respect.”

That is all we can confirm at this time. This is a developing story.

Copyright 2021 WIBW. All rights reserved.

Why hundreds of U.S. Frito-Lay workers have been striking

Harmeet Kaur

CNNDigital
Published Friday, July 23, 2021 


Ron Sadler, a Frito-Lay employee for 32 years, raises a fist as drivers show support for the union strike on July 20. (Evert Nelson/USA Today Network via CNN)

Workers at the Frito-Lay plant in Topeka, Kansas, say it used to be one of the best jobs in town -- a place of shared meals, group outings and community.

In recent years, though, employees and union members say the facility where Doritos, Cheetos and Tostitos are made has become another toxic work environment.

Hundreds of Frito-Lay workers at the Topeka facility are in week three of a strike over what union leaders describe as long hours, forced overtime, stagnating wages and a diminished quality of life. It's the first strike at the plant in its decades of operation.

Members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers Local 218 union have called on the snack food company to provide better working conditions and pay. Among their grievances are so-called "suicide shifts," in which employees work a full eight-hour day plus four hours of overtime with little turnaround time before the next shift.

"Workers do not have enough time to see their family, do chores around the house, run errands, or even get a healthy night's sleep," the union's international president Anthony Shelton said in a July 12 statement. "This strike is about working people having a voice in their futures and taking a stand for their families."

Frito-Lay, which is owned by PepsiCo, said in a statement that the claims about long hours were "grossly exaggerated." It also pointed to a contract offer it made prior to the strike that would cap overtime limits at 60 hours and end what it referred to as "squeeze shifts."

Corrina Christensen, communications director for the main Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers union told CNN on Thursday that negotiations had concluded and that it would not comment further until after a vote by members. Frito-Lay did not address specific requests for comment by CNN, instead pointing to public statements released this week.

WORKERS FEEL THEY'RE BEING 'PUSHED TO THE EDGE'

As the nation continues to recover from the pandemic, PepsiCo recently reported quarterly earnings that surpassed Wall Street estimates -- Frito-Lay North America saw its organic revenue grow by 6%.

Workers at the Topeka plant, however, feel burned out.

Union leaders said in a podcast interview last week that they had asked management for years to address staffing shortages that resulted in forced overtime and long shifts, but that the issues were not adequately addressed.

"Before we walked out on the strike, they were 100 employees short already, which is where a lot of the overtime comes in," said Paul Klemme, chief steward of Local 218.

Mark McCarter, a Frito-Lay employee and union representative who has been working at the Topeka facility for more than three decades, told VICE that he makes $20.50 an hour despite his long career with the company and hasn't received a proper raise in 10 years.

"I think people are pushed to the edge," he told the outlet. "COVID created some of this. During COVID, managers got to work from home. People see that and realize they have other options. Everyone's hiring and raising their pay because no one wants to work for $8 an hour anymore."

Cherie Renfro, another worker at the facility, criticized Frito-Lay for giving bonuses instead of raises and accused the company of lowering wages for new employees. She also said workers did not receive hazard pay or other recognition for the risks they took throughout the pandemic.

"You have no problem paying for the drug tests, background checks, orientation and training for 350-plus employees that you hired and lost this past year," Renfro wrote in the Topeka Capital-Journal. "But you have a problem giving decent living wages to keep loyal employees, already trained, already here."

More than 800 workers are affected by the strike.

WHERE THINGS STAND

Union membership voted down a July 1 offer made by Frito-Lay before going on strike.

Negotiations resumed this week, and on Thursday, the two sides concluded their talks.


Frito-Lay said in a statement that the new offer "will better address employee concerns around guaranteed days off and create additional opportunities for the union to have input into staffing and overtime," adding that it would include across-the-board wage increases.

Christensen, the spokesperson for the main union, said members are currently voting on the contract and that results are expected late Friday.

Why are Frito-Lays workers working ‘suicide shifts’ on the job?

Workers are now entering their third week on strike to demand better conditions

Lay’s potato chips. Photograph: Stewart Goldstein/Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy Stock Photo

Indigo Olivier

Fri 23 Jul 2021 

THE GUARDIAN

Since 5 July, hundreds of striking workers at a Frito-Lay plant in Topeka, Kansas, have drawn attention to the Dickensian conditions workers have been subjected to in order to produce some of the biggest brand name chips in the United States, including Fritos, Cheetos, Doritos, Lay’s, Ruffles, Funyuns and Tostitos.

Workers have publicly aired a list of grievances ranging from stagnant wages, high turnover rates and a lack of hazard pay during the pandemic to 84-hour workweeks, warehouses in triple-digit heat with no air conditioning, months on end without a day off, and so-called “suicide shifts” where workers are only off the clock for eight hours before having to come back in.

As one Frito-Lay worker wrote in an op-ed for the Topeka Capital-Journal, “This storm has been brewing for years.” The worker describes “iron-fisted management” that has forced employees to continue working through the smoke and fumes of a fire, the loss of a father, a “deep freeze” cold front, years of inflation with cost-of-living increases as low as 20 cents, and the on-the-job death of a co-worker.

In an interview with Vice, Mark McCarter, a 59-year-old palletizer and union steward who has been working at the facility since he was 19, described one instance a few years ago where a co-worker died on the line and the company had his body moved to the side without stopping production. “It seems like I go to one funeral a year for someone who’s had a heart attack at work or someone who went home to their barn and shot themselves in the head or hung themselves,” said McCarter.

Workers are now entering their third week on strike without pay as a last resort and have asked consumers to stop buying Frito-Lay products until an agreement with the company is reached. “We would rather nobody buy any Frito-Lay products, Fritos, Doritos, Tostitos, Funyuns, Cheetos, all those, while we’re on strike,” McCarter told Vice

“We make all of those in Topeka, Kansas.”

While these shocking conditions (more fitting for an Upton Sinclair novel than the facility of a Fortune 500 company) have been given a human face by the workers organizing against them, they point to an imbalance of power that transcends Frito-Lay.

The movement for an eight-hour workday in the US has been waged by workers since the late 1800s. And wasn’t legally guaranteed until 1938. In the decades that followed, all major federal legislation for workplace health and safety was won through the concerted efforts of organized labor and organized labor alone.

In a country where labor history is all but forgotten, it is all too easy for people to understand the modern workplace as the result of a progressive advancement in thinking over what people consider acceptable terms of employment in a developed nation. But Frito-Lay and the countless other workers that have organized against low wages and poor working conditions under the pandemic have debunked this narrative, revealing a constant tug of war between workers and the boss.

Frito-Lay is a subsidiary of Pepsico, a multinational conglomerate that owns Pepsi, Starbucks, Aquafina, Mountain Dew, Tropicana, Gatorade, Aunt Jemima and a number of other brand-name products we see on supermarket shelves across the country. The company’s tens of billions of dollars in yearly revenue across 23 brands is the outcome of decades of unchecked corporate consolidation hiding behind the appearance of consumer choice through clever marketing tactics and an absence of organized opposition.

If Covid-19 has taught us anything it is that the conditions we work under will be pushed as far as a company can take them while still maximizing its bottom line. That is until workers reach a breaking point.

When bargaining with the ​​Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers Local 218, the union representing Frito-Lay workers, a company negotiator said the quiet part out loud.

“Your negotiator told us that it isn’t that Frito-Lay can’t afford to give us raises, it’s that he is there to protect the stockholder investments,” said Cheri Renfro in an open letter to her employer. “Your threats and bully tactics only fuel our fire. You have pushed us into a corner and we came out swinging. And now you’re ‘shocked’?”


Indigo Olivier is an investigative reporting fellow at In These Times magazine

'Inexplicably frozen': Judge quashes Ottawa's Coalspur order as it failed to consult with Ermineskin Cree Nation

Comes just weeks after a federal policy statement on thermal coal all but sent Coalspur's Vista expansion up in smoke

Author of the article: Kelsey Rolfe
Publishing date: Jul 23, 2021 • 

Environment and Climate Change Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said in June the federal government could not prevent thermal coal miners from bringing projects forward, but “the bar (for approval) would be exceedingly high.” PHOTO BY SHANNON STAPLETON/REUTERS FILES

Coalspur Mines Ltd.’s controversial Vista mine expansion project is no longer subject to the federal impact assessment process, a federal judge ruled this week.

The Federal Court ruling quashed a June 2020 designation order from Environment and Climate Change Minister Jonathan Wilkinson that subjected both Vista’s proposed open-pit expansion and underground test mine to review by the federal impact assessment agency.

It found the minister had failed to consult the Ermineskin Cree Nation, which has an impact benefit agreement with Coalspur, and instead only consulted Indigenous communities who sought the designation order before issuing his decision.

“Not only was there no consultation at all, but I find Ermineskin was inexplicably frozen out of this very one-sided process,” wrote Judge Henry Brown in his decision.

The decision comes just weeks after Wilkinson issued a federal policy statement on thermal coal, saying any new or expanded projects would cause “unacceptable environmental impacts,” at the time all but sending Vista’s expansion up in smoke.t

Wilkinson told the Financial Post in June the federal government could not prevent thermal coal miners from bringing projects forward, but “the bar (for approval) would be exceedingly high.”

In an emailed statement to the Financial Post, Wilkinson said his office was reviewing the decision to “determine its implications and identify next steps.”

“The continued mining and use of thermal coal for energy production in Canada and around the world runs counter to what is needed to effectively combat climate change.”

He said he would “continue to consider” the thermal coal policy in deciding whether to designate future thermal coal projects under the federal impact assessment act.

Wilkinson had initially declined to designate the Vista expansion under the impact assessment act in December 2019, saying the Alberta Energy Regulator could cover the areas of federal concern in its environmental assessment, but reversed course after mounting pressure from Indigenous people and environmental groups.

Environment and Climate Change Minister Jonathan Wilkinson.

 PHOTO BY JIM WELLS/POSTMEDIA

His decision last June said Vista “may result in adverse effects of greater magnitude to those previously considered.”

The proposed two-part expansion would nearly double Vista’s production capacity, from roughly 6.5 million tonnes per year of thermal coal to between 10 and 15 million tonnes.

Coalspur has been plagued by challenges this year, filing for Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act protection in late April, roughly four months after a permitting issue with the AER forced it to put Vista on care and maintenance and lay off roughly 300 workers. The temporary mine shutdown coincided with a multi-million dollar hedge obligation to a Singaporean commodity trading firm.

Operations resumed at Vista during the first week of May, after the company secured a US$26-million interim lending facility to recall about 250 employees and restart the mine while it works through restructuring.

Both Coalspur and the Ermineskin Cree Nation sought judicial review of the minister’s order in two separate court filings. The Ermineskin argued Wilkinson had failed to consult the Nation before putting Vista through the impact assessment process. The decision would impact its Aboriginal and treaty rights, the Ermineskin argued, by lessening, delaying or eliminating its economic interest in the expansion.

Wilkinson argued he had no duty to consult the Nation, and disputed that the loss of any economic, social and community benefits laid out in the impact benefit agreement were an infringement on Aboriginal and treaty rights.

Brown disagreed, writing that the Crown’s duty to consult clearly extends to Indigenous communities’ economic rights and benefits.

Wilkinson said in an email the government’s commitment to working with Indigenous peoples to advance reconciliation and respect Indigenous rights, culture and knowledge was “why we delivered on our promise to put in place better rules for major projects that support reconciliation, while restoring public trust, protecting the environment and ensuring good projects get built.””

Financial Post

MORE ON THIS TOPIC

Coalspur: The canary in Canada’s thermal coal mines as Ottawa sets high bar for new projects

Canada will not approve any new thermal coal mining projects or expand existing mines

Coal-fired power plants feel the heat of Alberta’s new carbon tax rules

Enmax and City of Calgary announce $5M fund for solar installations at community halls

Social Sharing

• Facebook

• Twitter

• Email

• Reddit

• LinkedIn

City to decide which community halls receive installations in a matter of weeks

CBC News · Posted: Jul 23, 2021 

The first phase of the community hall installations are expected to be completed by the end of 2021. (Susan Montoya Bryan/The Associated Press)

The city is teaming up with Enmax to launch a $5-million fund for solar-energy installations at designated community halls across Calgary.

The fund is a one-time contribution that will be used to provide solar equipment and hire people to install it, the power company said Friday in a release. 

The City of Calgary, which owns Enmax, will manage the program and select the community halls that will receive the installations. Those decisions are expected in a matter of weeks.

Enmax vice-president Corry Poole told CBC News the project is a way to work with the city toward a lower-carbon future as the energy landscape evolves.

"The great thing about community halls and community centres is they're used by Calgarians," Poole said. "And [this] really allows them to help lower energy costs overall."

• Amazon unveils plan for major solar power project in southern Alberta

• Albertans are hot for solar right now, even with the pandemic pinch

Ward 14 Coun. Peter Demong said in Friday's release that the project will help communities become more sustainable, and Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi said it's cost-saving benefits could prompt others to adopt solar installations, themselves.

"This is a great project that will help community associations free up operating funds to serve our neighbourhoods, and serve as an example to similar-sized facilities of the benefits of solar," Nenshi said.

The first phase of the installations are expected to be completed by the end of 2021.

With files from Rick Donkers

Buildings are a bigger contributor to climate change than cars — these start-ups are trying to help

PUBLISHED SAT, JUL 24 2021

Katie Brigham@KATIE_BRIGHAM

This June was the hottest in American history. The 116-degree heat melted power cables in Portland, Oregon, and smashed previous temperature records. Seattle recorded an all-time high of 108 degrees, as did the Canadian province of British Columbia, at a whopping 121 degrees.

As the world warms, more people are installing air conditioning. Global energy demand for cooling has more than tripled since 1990 and could more than double between now and 2040 without stricter efficiency standards.


But air conditioning itself is a major contributor to global warming. Altogether, building operations that include heating, cooling and lighting account for 28% of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions. That’s more than the entire global transportation sector.

But SkyCool, Gradient and a number of other companies are working on the problem. They’re trying to apply new technologies to the traditionally inflexible heating and cooling industry, finance the upfront costs, communicate the value to property owners and make sure it’s all done equitably.

How Air Conditioning Is Warming The World

Jul 24, 2021

CNBC

Summer 2021 is shaping up to be one of the hottest in history, as the effects of climate change are becoming ever clearer. Naturally, that’s led to an increase in global demand for air conditioning, which itself is a major contributor to global warming. It’s a vicious cycle, but there are a number of companies working to make heating and cooling more energy efficient, and get buildings off of fossil fuels for good.

Tough times ahead for survivors of Hong Kong’s industrial past

Jul 23, 2021

South China Morning Post

Once central to Hong Kong’s identity, local manufacturing is now increasingly seen as a sunset industry for the city. In its heyday, manufacturing comprised 31 per cent of Hong Kong’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) but today it represents only around 1 per cent of GDP. Only six of nearly two dozen government-subsidised industrial buildings that used to house mini factories are left. And by mid-2022, only two will remain as the Hong Kong Housing Authority converts most industrial spaces into subsidised flats. For the tenants of these factory estates, the government’s plan to close some of the last subsidised industrial spaces may deal the final blow to a dying industry.

OF COURSE TRUMP HAS SCAMMED MILLIONS FROM HIS NOT-VERY-BRIGHT SUPPORTERS

The ex-president has reportedly been using his political PAC as a slush fund for personal expenses.

President Donald Trump during a rally in Dalton, Georgia on January 4, 2021

.BY MANDEL NGAN/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

One of the more ironic aspects of Donald Trump’s improbable election win in 2016 was that many of his supporters declared they were voting for him because unlike career politicians, he actually told the truth. In reality, of course, he lied about everything all the time. Whether it was a big lie like the one about how Mexico was going to pay for his wall; a weird lie like the one about having been named Michigan’s “Man of the Year”; an insane lie like the one about windmills causing cancer; a sad, pathetic lie like the one about his inauguration crowd being bigger than Barack Obama’s; or a truly WTF lie like the one about the Boy Scouts of America calling to tell him his crazy speech in front of thousands of children was the best one they’d ever heard, the man spent his entire time in office lying through his caps, to the tune of 30,573 lies in four years. (Or 7,643 lies a year, or 21 lies a day.)

Obviously Trump hasn’t stopped lying since he left Washington, with the biggest lie being that he won the 2020 election, but at the same time, his supporters continue not to care. So while it might tick off a normal person to learn that money they’d donated to a (supposedly) important cause had actually gone to funding personal expenses for a guy who never misses a chance to tell everyone how rich he is, we’re pretty sure the ex-president’s followers will not be bothered.

Per The Washington Post:

Former president Donald Trump’s political PAC raised about $75 million in the first half of this year as he trumpeted the false notion that the 2020 election was stolen from him, but the group has not devoted funds to help finance the ongoing ballot review in Arizona or to push for similar endeavors in other states, according to people familiar with the finances.

Instead, the Save America leadership PAC—which has few limits on how it can spend its money—has paid for some of the former president’s travel, legal costs, and staff, along with other expenses, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the group’s inner workings. The PAC has held on to much of its cash.

An extremely charitable, naive way to read this would be to say that Trump is all talk about trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election but actually isn’t putting any real effort into it at all. But of course that’s not what’s going on here. Trump desperately wants to find evidence to support the baseless lie that a second term was stolen from him, but he just wants someone else to pay for it.


Even as he assiduously tracks attempts by his allies to cast doubt on the integrity of last year’s election, Trump has been uninterested in personally bankrolling the efforts, relying on other entities and supporters to fund the endeavors...The tactic allows Trump to build up a war chest to use in the 2022 midterms on behalf of candidates he favors—and to stockpile cash for another potential White House run, an unprecedented maneuver for a former president.

In the meantime, the monthslong audit of Maricopa County’s ballots in Arizona—which is expected to cost millions—is being paid for primarily by nonprofit entities that do not disclose their donors and private individuals such as former Overstock chief executive Patrick Byrne. A lawsuit seeking a similar audit in Fulton County, Georgia, has been financed by small donations, according to the group that brought the claim. A spokeswoman for Trump did not answer questions on whether the group is considering putting money into the ballot review efforts. The group will have to publicly disclose its fundraising and spending for the first half of the year by July 31.

Since leaving office, Trump has repeatedly pushed for various states to overturn the election results, sending out a blizzard of statements with unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud. He has consulted with state officials in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, and has described state ballot reviews as the key to prove he won the 2020 election. And his political group has repeatedly urged donors to give by claiming that Trump is working to protect their vote—fundraising pitches that his advisers say remain the most lucrative. “We need you to join the fight to SECURE OUR ELECTIONS!” reads one Facebook ad.... The former president has repeatedly made false claims of irregularities in the Arizona vote, asserting in a statement this month that it amounted “to hundreds of thousands of votes or, many times what is necessary for us to have won.”

The Save America PAC “is probably the most lucrative thing he’s had in terms of cash flow since the Plaza casino in Atlantic City,” Tim O’Brien, a Trump biographer, told the Post. “This is just as lucrative. He has recognized because of what happened after the election—he can make money as a candidate.”


Of course this isn’t the first time Trump has scammed supporters out of money. In April, New York Times reporter Shane Goldmacher revealed that the Trump campaign had ripped off supporters for tens of millions of dollars through a scheme in which when they donated money, the default option authorized the campaign to transfer the pledged amount from people’s bank accounts not once but every single week. Later the campaign introduced a second prechecked box that doubled a person’s contribution and was thus known internally as a “money bomb.” (In order for people to have noticed this, they would have had to wade through “lines of text in bold and capital letters that overwhelmed the opt-out language.”) And the scheme continued after Trump lost the election, with his campaign reportedly “continu[ing] the weekly withdrawals through prechecked boxes all the way through December 14.” Those withdrawals, the Times noted, occurred “as [Trump] raised tens of millions of dollars for his new political action committee, Save America.”

BY BESS LEVIN

JULY 23, 2021

White is not a colour – white is an ideology

The word ‘white’, in the context of talking about racism, is not a signifier for skin colour. In this vital context, ‘white’ is an ideology.


Hamid Dabashi
Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
23 Jul 2021

Opponents of Critical Race Theory protest outside of the Loudoun County School Board headquarters, in Ashburn, Virginia, US June 22, 2021. [Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters]

The rising public conversations about race and racism in the United States have once again confused millions of well-meaning Americans into believing that if they look like what is now socially codified as “a white person” then they must feel guilty about the racist history of their country. This is a false guilt. Looking at any person and judging the content of their character based on the complexion of their skin is blatant racism, predicated on a false and illogical premise. It is only white supremacists who benefit from the confusion of the term “white” as a colour of skin designation with “white” as an ideology of racial supremacy.

A reactionary propagandist named Christopher Rufo is now identified as the chief agent provocateur mobilising racist Americans against a figment of their own imagination they call “Critical Race Theory” by way of conflating racism with the designated colour of a person’s skin. The objective is to frighten people to think that if the colour of their skin is coded as “white” in this country, then they are the targets of their so-called “coloured” compatriots’ demands for racial justice.

But the word “white” in the context of talking about racism is not a signifier for skin colour. In this vital context, “white” is an ideology. You are only “white” in this sense if you think you are entitled to certain privileges that must be denied to others whom you in the same breath call “Black”, “brown”, “red”, “yellow”, etc.

Racism is a construct

“There is no such thing as race, none” – this is how master novelist late Toni Morrison broke it down very simply in a famous interview. “It’s the human race, scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct, and it has benefits, money can be made off of it, people who don’t like themselves can feel better because of it … so it has a social function. But race can only be defined as a human being.”

Precisely in that sense, the word “white” is a signifier of that racism, its ideological register, its coded symbol. That is all. No human being at birth is “white”, “Black”, “brown”, “red”, “yellow” or any other colour. They are all eventually coded with these colours to divide and rule them better. East Asians are called “yellow”, West Asians and Latinx “brown”, Native Americans “red”, Africans “Black”, all of them set against the fictive centrality of the Caucasian “white”, which Europeans have racialised and reserved for themselves and gave to their settler colonial extensions in North America or Australia as a signifier of superiority. The historical origin of all such racist designations come to full “scientific” blooming during the period Europeans call – without the slightest sense of irony – their “Enlightenment”.

Racism is the colour codification of the relation of power and abuse, precisely as sexism is the gendered codification of the selfsame social malaise. Racism is a byproduct of the colonial conquest of the world for economic exploitations that needed a cultural alibi and ideological justification. If you think you are superior to other human beings because you are “white”, or you come from a superior civilisation because you are “white” then you are a racist – namely, you assume you come from a fictitious race that is superior to other races, whom you therefore feel entitled to abuse and exploit.

This is how the British ruled India, the French Algeria, the Belgians Congo, etc. When Germans slaughtered tens of thousands of Africans in Namibia between 1904 and 1908, that was predicated on their sense of racial superiority. When they brought that genocide home and perpetrated it on Jews a couple of decades later, that was based on a sense of racial superiority.

In yet another interview, Toni Morrison was asked, if she would ever change and write books that “incorporate white lives into them substantially”. She looked at her interlocutor with a look of not contempt but pity. “You can’t understand how powerfully racist that question is,” she said, “because you could never ask a white author when they are going to write about white people.”

Morrison is here turning the racist question thrown at her against itself. The question is asked from the presumed epicentre of a position of power so assured of itself that is unconscious of itself. Morrison unveils that centre, makes it conscious of itself, and exposes it for the sham that it is.

No races before racism

Such encounters abound in the ideas of Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and others, where the ideological foregrounding of the very supposition of being “white” is questioned and exposed. But it is in her novel A Marcy (2008) that Morrison went back to a point in American history when there was no American history, namely a time of fluidity in the continental social life before the racial codification of power surfaces in a manner that would be sustained for the rest of American history.

Set in the late 17th century, A Marcy maps out the continental domain where the Portuguese, the Spanish, the British, and all other Europeans had come to overrun the natives and begin importing African slaves, before slavery and the coded colour “Black” had become intertwined. In the book, the gathering destinies of Jacob Vaark, an Anglo-Dutch trader, his wife Rebekka, slave girl Florens, Native American farm worker Lina, and a free African blacksmith whom Florens loves, details a whole different America before the rise of racism as the defining moment of American history.

Similarly, though through critical thinking rather than creative writing, in The History of White People (2010), Nell Irvin Painter details the prolonged and twisted history of how the very idea of “white people” has gone through successive changes throughout history and how the European “Enlightenment” period is chiefly responsible for the invention of racial categories.

During this so-called “Age of Reason”, scholars like Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) began dividing people by measuring their skulls. As Painter puts it in a recent follow-up essay:

“At the two extremities Blumenbach placed the skulls he considered ugly, the African and the Asian. Next to the African was the Tahitian. Next to the Asian was the Native American,” Painter explained in a recent follow-up essay. “In the middle was Blumenbach’s ‘most beautiful skull’ — of a young Georgian woman who had been a sex slave in Moscow, where she died of venereal disease. Her beautiful skull became the basis for the name given to white people; a native of the South Caucasus [between the Black and Caspian Seas], she inspired the label ‘Caucasian’.”

Predicated on this illustrious past, being “white” is today an ideological conviction people acquire as they ignore such histories and are indoctrinated not just into racism but even more basically into racialised thinking. Being “white” is not a biological predicate by virtue of which one is condemned to hatred and bigotry. No one is. Being “white” is an ideological conviction by virtue of which you are convinced you are a superior human being.

The overcoming of the disease of racism is to begin with the undoing of the social construction of races that is the premise of racism. Given its long and murderous history of racial hatred, which was fully on display during the four years of the Trump presidency, the US has a very long road ahead before this simple fact is fully perceived and understood. There are powerful interests, institutionalised in the Republican Party in particular, vested in sustaining the bloody history of racism in this country.

To overcome that we must realise “white” is an ideology, a false racialised consciousness that is used by those in power to divide people to rule them better. It is the rich and the powerful who are the beneficiaries of this false consciousness. It is the poor and the powerless who are divided into white and Black and yellow and red. The rich and the powerful use these fictitious racial categories to get people to despise each other and thus conceal the real battlefront – the one between classes. Race is the colour codification of that relation of power, not that relation of power itself. What has a poor person branded as “white” in common with a rich manipulator of such racist ideologies? Nothing but the delusion that he or she belongs to a superior race while they share identical economic hardship with equally disenfranchised people they have been told to hate as Black, brown, yellow, or red?

If you are not racist you are not “white”, no matter what you have been assigned as in that colour codification of power. In the same vein, if you do not feel a victim of the very same colour codification then you are not Black, brown, yellow, red, or any other colour thus designated by the same code. You are a human being. WEB Du Bois’s assumption that “the problem of the Twentieth century is the problem of the colour-line” is only valid if we remain confined within that colour codification of power. “The colour-line” would not be a problem if we understand, dismantle, and overcome it. On that day, MLK is waiting for us: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

The metaphor of a “rainbow” usually used to bring these colours harmoniously together is a flawed liberal metaphor. Far superior is Rumi’s metaphor where in a story in Masnavi he says colours are like shades of clouds covering the bright shining light of the moon. We do not need the false colouring of our troubled imagination. We need the polishing sparkle of our peaceful souls.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.



Hamid Dabashi received a dual PhD in Sociology of Culture and Islamic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. He wrote his dissertation on Max Weber's theory of charismatic authority with Philip Rieff (1922-2006), the most distinguished Freudian cultural critic of his time. Professor Dabashi has taught and delivered lectures in many North American, European, Arab, and Iranian universities. Professor Dabashi has written twenty-five books, edited four, and contributed chapters to many more. He is also the author of over 100 essays, articles and book reviews on subjects ranging from Iranian Studies, medieval and modern Islam, and comparative literature to world cinema and the philosophy of art (trans-aesthetics). His books and articles have been translated into numerous languages, including Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Danish, Russian, Hebrew, Italian, Arabic, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Polish, Turkish, Urdu and Catalan. His books include Authority in Islam [1989]; Theology of Discontent [1993]; Truth and Narrative [1999]; Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, Future [2001]; Staging a Revolution: The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic of Iran [2000]; Masters and Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema [2007]; Iran: A People Interrupted [2007]; and an edited volume, Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema[2006]. His most recent work includes Shi’ism: A Religion of Protest (2011), The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism (2012), Corpus Anarchicum: Political Protest, Suicidal Violence, and the Making of the Posthuman Body (2012), The World of Persian Literary Humanism (2012) and Being A Muslim in the World (2013).