Coral reefs have lost half their ability to support human communities, study finds


A Canadian-led team of scientists has concluded that tropical coral reefs that feed millions around the world have lost about half their ability to support human communities since 1950.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

"I don't think any of us expected the declines to be as big as we found," said Tyler Eddy of Memorial University, lead author of the paper published Friday in the journal One Earth.

The paper is the first to tote up the cumulative effects of threats faced by tropical coral reefs from overfishing to pollution to climate change, the authors say.

"This is the first study that puts it all together," Eddy said.

It combines data from myriad sources.

Just the figures on reef extent drew on 14,705 surveys from 3,582 reefs in 87 countries. The conclusions on biodiversity were made from a database with more than a billion records on 100,000 species from plankton to mammals.

"We had to spend a lot of time standardizing the data," said co-author William Cheung of the University of British Columbia. "That was a big part of the analysis."

The findings are sobering.

Globally, reefs cover about half the sea floor they did in 1950. Catches of reef-associated fish peaked in 2002 at about 2.2 million tonnes and have declined about 10 per cent since then.

That's despite increased fishing efforts. The paper finds that what it calls "catch per unit effort" has declined about 60 per cent.

Imagine a fisherman with one hook casting it for an hour, Cheung said.

"Fifty years ago, they would have caught 10 fish. With 60 per cent decline, it means the fisherman would have caught five or fewer fish with the same amount of effort."

That's a powerful clue as to what's happening under the surface, said Eddy.

"That's an indication of how much fish is available to catch."

Finally, reefs around the world have lost almost two-thirds of their biodiversity. That not only affects the reefs but the other oceanic ecosystems they are connected to.

"It's an important part of the global system," Cheung said.

The study reports that coral reef fisheries are worth about $7.6 billion worldwide. It says about 6 million people — a high number of them Indigenous groups from small island states — depend on them.

But that's not the only cost.

Reefs protect shorelines from heavy storms by breaking and weakening waves produced by hurricanes, Eddy said. Destructive storms are expected to increase as the globe heats up.

Reefs also nurture tourism as well as the cultures of many coastal peoples.

"Our results highlight the sensitivity of coral reef ecosystems ... as well as the high dependence on them by human communities," the study concludes.

The threats include pollution from agricultural runoff, ocean acidification from greenhouse gases and damaging fishing practices such as trawling, as well as climate change.

Canada may not have any tropical coral reefs. But that doesn't mean the country isn't affected by their decline.

"Canadians are implicated in terms of our contribution to climate change," Eddy said. "This is really a global responsibility."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 18, 2021.

— Follow Bob Weber on Twitter at @row1960

Bob Weber, The Canadian Press

Damaged coral reefs cause decline in fisheries, risks for coastal communities

Fish catches along the world's coral reefs peaked nearly two decades ago
and have been diminishing since, according to a new study. 

Photo by Tyler Eddy

Sept. 17 (UPI) -- The degradation of the world's coral reefs is causing a sharp decline in fisheries and putting coastal communities in peril, a new study has found.

Fish catches along the world's coral reefs peaked nearly two decades ago and have been diminishing since, according to a study published in the journal One Earth on Friday.

The catch per unit effort, a measurement of biomass, is 60% lower than in the 1950s, researchers found.

During that time frame, the global coverage of living corals and the biodiversity of species dependent on the underwater structure have declined by similar levels.

That meant a decrease in the capacity of coral reefs to provide food and livelihoods, sequester carbon and serve as a buffer against extreme climate events.

"The reduced capacity of coral reefs to provide ecosystem services undermines the well-being of millions of people with historical and continuing relationships with coral reef ecosystems," reads the study.

The future of human coastal communities that depend on coral reefs is in doubt, the study concluded. Indonesia, the Caribbean and the South Pacific are already seeing impacts to subsistence and commercial fisheries as well as tourism.

For the study, researchers conducted a global data analysis that covered coral reef trends and associated ecosystems that included living coral cover, biodiversity and changes in food webs, as well as fisheries and seafood consumption by indigenous peoples.

The study concluded that climate change, overfishing and pollution have put the world's coral reefs in jeopardy.

"Coral reefs are known to be important habitats for biodiversity and are particularly sensitive to climate change, as marine heat waves can cause bleaching events," Tyler Eddy, a research scientist at the Fisheries & Marine Institute at Memorial University of Newfoundland, said in a statemen

"Coral reefs provide important ecosystem services to humans, through fisheries, economic opportunities and protection from storms," said Eddy, who started the research when he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia's Institute for the Oceans & Fisheries.

Those impacts have come despite the marine-protection efforts, since they may lack enforcement and don't address the broader issue of climate change, the study said.

A study released last year similarly found that marine preserves have limited protective abilities when faced with rising global temperatures and coral bleaching.

Addressing the problem will require a globally coordinated effort in addition to local marine management, the new study found.

It also said that current efforts such as the Paris climate accords must additionally address direct causes of diminished coral reef capacity.

New Democrats put Tory-held Edmonton riding, with low vote turnout, in their sights


OTTAWA — A young two-spirit Métis leader hopes he can deliver one of the biggest upsets of the election campaign, if he can persuade apathetic voters to head to the polls Monday.

 

© Provided by The Canadian Press

NDP candidate Blake Desjarlais has started a dynamic voter turnout drive to persuade thousands of Edmonton residents to register.

The Edmonton Griesbach seat, where the NDP came second in the 2019 federal election, has now become a top target for Leader Jagmeet Singh. If elected, the 27-year-old Desjarlais would be Alberta’s only Indigenous MP.

The incumbent Conservative, Kerry Diotte, won the seat in the last election with 51 per cent of the vote.

Diotte has served as the Tories’ deputy critic for national revenue and public procurement, and says on his campaign website that a Tory government would support Alberta's interests and future prosperity.

Also running in the riding are Habiba Mohamud for the Liberals, Heather Lau for the Greens and Thomas Matty for the People’s Party of Canada.

To win in Edmonton Griesbach, the NDP will also have to persuade Liberal supporters to vote tactically, and mobilize apathetic and undecided voters.

Desjarlais said inspiring "the very large non-voting population" to go to the polls has been "the bread and butter of the campaign." He is confident of boosting voter turnout by 10 per cent.

In the last election, only 47,000 of the 83,000 registered voters in the riding turned up on polling day, Elections Canada figures show.

"We have one of the largest voter apathy constituencies in all of Canada (and) … one of the lowest voter turnouts in the country," Desjarlais said. "My challenge has been making people feel that the federal government can work for them."

Desjarlais has been running drives to get voters to register for mail-in ballots, with information campaigns on when and where to vote.

"We think that if we get above 60 per cent, we will have served the community well — regardless of if I win," he said.

Desjarlais, who grew up in a Métis settlement north of Edmonton, said the riding has one of the largest urban Indigenous populations in Canada.

Ten per cent of voters are Indigenous and he has been holding get-out-the-vote events, with dancers and musicians, where he can "talk to them about their opportunity to vote and how important it is to have Indigenous representation in Parliament," he said.

Desjarlais said he sees huge commonality of interest between many groups, including Indigenous people and immigrants, who make up the riding. Access to health care and housing are big issues for all, he added.

"(These are) people who work over 12 hours a day, single-parent families and multi-ethnic families," he said. "There are a tremendous number of people who would vote New Democrat who just don’t vote because of life."

Desjarlais, whose parents grew up in homes where Cree was the first language, was brought up by his aunt. His birth mother, who was brought up in foster care in multiple homes, was forced to give him up as a newborn after struggling with addiction.

He said his aunt fought the government to keep him in the family when he was a baby and brought him up in one of Canada’s few Métis settlements.

The activist said he was wary of politicians, but he was persuaded to join the NDP due to the party's approach to Indigenous issues while he was negotiating with the federal government as a Métis leader.

The decision by the Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau to throw Jody Wilson-Raybould, an Indigenous former cabinet minister, out of the caucus over the SNC-Lavalin affair turned him off of the party.

He said Indigenous people need more representation in Ottawa because they are "people who value life above greed, and life above profit."

During the election campaign elders and chiefs, who came out to support Desjarlais, sang the "Honour Song," which is reserved for esteemed Indigenous leaders.

“One of proudest moments in my life was to have the 'Honour Song.' My ancestors, my relatives, hundreds of people were there."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 18, 2021.

Marie Woolf, The Canadian Press

Iceland's volcanic eruption the longest in half a century

AFP

It will be six months on Sunday that the volcanic eruption currently mesmerising spectators near Reykjavik first began, making it the longest Iceland has witnessed in more than 50 years

© Jeremie RICHARD The first lava began spewing out of a fissure close to Mount Fagradalsfjall on the evening of March 19 on the Reykjanes peninsula to the south west of Reykjavik

The first lava began spewing out of a fissure close to Mount Fagradalsfjall on the evening of March 19 on the Reykjanes peninsula to the southwest of Reykjavik.

And the ensuing spectacle -- ranging from just a slow trickle of lava at times to more dramatic geyser-like spurts of rocks and stones at others -- has become a major tourist attraction, drawing 300,000 visitors so far, according to the Iceland Tourist Board.

© Jeremie RICHARD Iceland's sixth volcanic eruption in 20 years has already lasted longer than the preceding one in Holuhraun, in the centre-east of the island

Iceland's sixth volcanic eruption in 20 years is already longer than the preceding one in Holuhraun, in the centre-east of the island, which lasted from the end of August 2014 until the end of February 2015.

© Jeremie RICHARD The eruption has become a major tourist attraction, drawing 300,000 visitors so far, according to the Iceland Tourist Board

"Six months is a reasonably long eruption," volcanologist Thorvaldur Thordarson told AFP.

The lava field that has formed this time has been christened "Fagradalshraun" -- which can be translated as "beautiful valley of lava" -- and takes its name from nearby Mount Fagradalsfjall.

Almost 143 million cubic metres of lava have been spewed out so far.

But that is actually comparatively small, representing just under a tenth of the volume of the Holuhraun eruption, which spewed out the biggest basalt lava flow in Iceland in 230 years.

The latest eruption is "special in the sense that it has kept a relatively steady outflow, so it's been going quite strong," said Halldor Geirsson, a geophysicist at the Institute of Earth Science.

"The usual behaviour that we know from volcanoes in Iceland is that they start really active and pour out lava, and then the outflow sort of decreases over time until it stops," he said.

Iceland's longest-ever eruption took place more than 50 years ago -- on Surtsey island just off the southern coast -- and lasted nearly four years, from November 1963 until June 1967.

- No end in sight -

After subsiding for nine days, the lava reappeared at Fagradalshraun in early September, occasionally spurting red-hot from the crater and accompanied by a powerful plume of smoke.

It also accumulated in fiery tunnels beneath the solidified surface, forming pockets that eventually gave way and unfurled like a wave onto the shore.

The real number of visitors trekking to the rough hills to view the spectacle is probably even higher than the estimated 300,000, as the first counter installed on the paths leading to the site was only set up five days after the eruption.

In the first month, 10 fissures opened up, forming seven small craters, of which only two are still visible.

Only one crater is still active, measuring 334 metres (1,100 feet), according to the Institute of Earth Science, just a few dozen metres short of the highest peak in the surrounding area.

Nevertheless, the volcano is showing no sign of fading anytime soon.

"There seems to be still enough magma from whatever reservoir the eruption is tapping. So it could go on for a long time," said Geirsson.

str-hdy/po/spm/pbr

The companies polluting the planet have spent millions to make you think carpooling and recycling will save us

mmcfalljohnsen@insider.com (Morgan McFall-Johnsen) 

© Marianne Ayala/Insider Marianne Ayala/Insider

Plastics companies spent millions to kickstart recycling programs, and it helped them avoid bans.

Decades later, fossil-fuel interests spend millions to promote carpooling and reducing energy use.

Activists and researchers say this individual-action narrative distracts from the biggest polluters.

Ben Franta is trying to collect every climate-related ad the oil and gas industry has ever produced.

Franta, who is pursuing a law degree and PhD at Stanford, is among a small cohort of researchers who track fossil-fuel industry propaganda. These historians, social scientists, and activists have documented the extent to which major oil companies knew their products were changing the climate as early as the 1960s, and how they poured tens of millions of dollars into sowing doubt about the science through the 1990s.

"Not to get too tin-hat-y, but once you start to see these ads over and over again, you see the common elements arise," Franta told Insider.

So it was clear to him that around the year 2000, fossil-fuel companies changed marketing tactics. After decades of denial, they pivoted to blaming the climate crisis on you and me.

Franta pointed to a 2007 Chevron ad campaign called "Will you join us?" Each poster featured a person's face and a pledge - promises like, "I will leave the car at home more" and "I will finally get a programmable thermostat." In small print, Chevron describes its own initiatives to be energy-efficient.

On the campaign's now-defunct website, users could even make pledges like carpooling to work a few days per week, and a calculator would tell them how many DVDs they could watch with the energy saved.

"The framing is: 'No, we the companies are the good ones. We're working on the problem and we want you, the consumer, to join us in our positive efforts,'" Franta said.

This approach - telling people to solve a crisis by changing their own habits - is a tried and true corporate tactic, pioneered by the tobacco and plastics industries. Now, fossil-fuel giants like Chevron, BP, and ExxonMobil have spent millions to convince the public that consumer choices and lifestyle changes will solve the problem.

"It's almost become natural, when people think about the climate crisis, to think of individual action," Denali Nalamalapu, a communications specialist for the climate organization 350.org, told Insider. "Which is super convenient for fossil-fuel corporations."

But at this point, personal lifestyle changes will not turn the climate crisis around. A report from the International Energy Agency, which lays out a path to a net-zero-emissions energy system by 2050, estimates that individual behavioral changes would only account for about 4% of the necessary reductions.

To have even a 50% chance of stopping the world's temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, according to a study published this month, 90% of coal and 60% of oil and gas reserves must stay in the ground.

A blame campaign: litterbugs and recyclers

© Mike Segar/Reuters Garbage sits in sorting bins during a concert at Giants Stadium in New Jersey, July 7, 2007. Mike Segar/Reuters

In 1971, TVs across the US blasted a heart-wrenching PSA. In it, an actor in ambiguous American-Indian garb, his hair in two long braids, climbs into a canoe and paddles across a river full of discarded newspapers. He passes an industrial barge. Smokestacks puff in the background. He pulls his canoe onto a garbage-strewn shoreline and climbs to a busy highway. A passing motorist chucks a bag of fast food at his moccasined feet.

"People start pollution. People can stop it," a narrator says as the actor looks into the camera, a tear rolling down his cheek.

This "Crying Indian PSA," as it's now known, came from a nonprofit called Keep America Beautiful - a group funded by companies like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Dixie Cups. It debuted at a time when single-use packaging lined streets, beaches, and parks, and environmental activists had begun to rail against plastic pollution.

"That was an intentional, well-funded effort to convince us all that the responsibility for pollution was on us, on individuals, on litterbugs, rather than the companies that were flooding the world with single-use packaging," John Hocevar, a marine biologist who leads Greenpeace's oceans campaigns, told Insider.

The tobacco industry did something similar in the 1950s, hiring PR firms to create campaigns blaming smoking-related illness on smokers. But the plastics industry took the strategy further.

As local governments considered banning single-use plastics, a council of plastic-producing companies - including Chevron, Exxon, Dow, and DuPont - spent millions to implement recycling programs across the US. Their own scientists, however, had told them that recycling wouldn't work on a large scale, according to an investigation by PBS and NPR.

"Making recycling work was a way to keep their products in the marketplace," Ron Liesemer, a former Du Pont manager who led the effort, told PBS and NPR. "It improves the image of the material."

A resident wheels a recycling container to the curb for pickup in San Francisco, November 4, 2009. Robert Galbraith/Reuters

By 2015, the quantity of plastic produced each year had increased 10-fold from 1971. Less than 10% of that material has ever been recycled. Each square kilometer of ocean contains an average of about 13,000 pieces of plastic.

Microplastics - fragments smaller than a fingernail that never fully break down - have been found in the Mariana Trench and at the top of Mount Everest. The average American ingests about 50,000 microplastic particles each year and inhales about the same amount.

 A boy in the Philippines collects plastic material near a polluted coastline to sell.

 Cheryl Ravelo/Reuters

Plastic production is expected to double by 2040 and triple by 2050, according to the World Economic Forum.

"Just about everybody understands that we need to do something about plastic," Hocevar said. "The challenge is that many companies - well, most companies - and many politicians are still thinking in this personal-responsibility frame and putting the emphasis on individual consumers. And so that really keeps the conversation focused on solutions that can't solve the problem."

Fossil-fuel companies recycled the plastics tactic

Exxon was on the council that led the charge for recycling, and it soon started promoting personal-responsibility solutions to another crisis: global warming.

"Be smart about electricity use," suggested a 2007 ad from the company (now ExxonMobil). "Heat and cool your home efficiently." "Improve your gas mileage."

Science historian Naomi Oreskes has studied ExxonMobil's climate communications for years.

"They talk about energy demand, they talk about need, they talk about use, and they use the term 'consumers.' And this is basically a way of shifting responsibility away from the producers - that is to say them, ExxonMobil - and onto the consumer," Oreskes told Insider.

In a recent study, Oreskes analyzed 180 ExxonMobil documents discussing climate change from 1977 to 2014. The set includes internal communications, peer-reviewed publications, and "advertorials" - ads that looked like editorials and ran in The New York Times.

Internal documents mentioned carbon dioxide more than 1,000 times. Terms that appeared most included "atmosphere" and "fossil fuel." Advertorials, by contrast, relied on the terms "energy efficient," "demand," and "need."

Debris is scattered across Canal Street in New Orleans on August 29, 2005, as Hurricane Katrina made landfall. James Nielsen/AFP via Getty Images

BP (formerly called British Petroleum) took a similar approach. In 2004, it created the first "carbon footprint calculator," a way to pin greenhouse-gas emissions to people's daily activities.

"The carbon footprint calculator then took off as an idea and as a concept, and really distracted us from looking at the industry itself," Janet Redman, the director of Greenpeace USA's climate campaign, told Insider.

Nalamalapu said she calculated her carbon footprint as one of her first climate-change lessons in elementary school. So did I. By 2010, the popularity of the phrase "carbon footprint" had increased by about 1,600% from 2006.

Cal Fire firefighters battle the Dixie Fire in Plumas County, California, July 23, 2021. 

AP Photo/Noah Berger

Climate scientist Peter Kalmus told ProPublica about how much he took this idea to heart. To reduce his carbon footprint, Kalmus has raised chickens in his yard, converted an old car to biodiesel, and built an outdoor toilet to compost his family's poop. He's had nightmares about plane rides.

"It feels like the plane is flying on ground-up babies to me," Kalmus told ProPublica.
BP, Chevron, and ExxonMobil say they're changing

In statements to Insider, spokespeople for Chevron, BP, and ExxonMobil pointed to their companies' efforts to reduce emissions.

 Residents wade through flood waters from Tropical Storm Harvey in Houston, Texas, August 28, 2017. Jonathan Bachman/Reuters

"Chevron is investing more than $3 billion from now to 2028 to advance the energy transition," Chevron spokesperson Sean Comey said. "Chevron believes the world's demand for oil and gas should be supplied by the most efficient, least carbon-intensive producers."

Comey also said the company is working to reduce emissions from its oil and gas extraction and is exceeding the goals it set for itself for 2023. He said that although "too much plastic waste ends up in landfills, oceans, and rivers," plastics "are essential to modern life and help improve the quality of life for millions of people around the world."

BP declined to comment on the company's carbon-footprint calculator, but pointed to its net-zero goals and a recent acquisition of solar-energy projects, which it aims to more than double by 2025.

"BP believes we have an important role to play in addressing climate change," spokesperson Joshua Hicks said. "That's why we launched a new ambition last year to become a net-zero company by 2050 or sooner, and to help the world get there too. In line with that ambition, we've set targets for drastically reducing our emissions and increasing our low-carbon investments, and we're actively advocating for policies that support net zero."

The sun sets behind a crude oil pump jack on a drill pad in Loving County, Texas, November 24, 2019. Angus Mordant/Reuters

ExxonMobil, meanwhile, said it "is working to reduce company emissions and helping customers reduce their emissions while working on new lower-emission technologies and advocating for effective policies."

The company alleges that Oreskes has a conflict of interest, pointing to her expert testimony in a climate-related lawsuit last year.

"This research is clearly part of a litigation strategy against ExxonMobil and other energy companies," a statement shared by spokesperson Casey Norton said.

Oreskes said she has offered expertise "in a number of capacities to groups and organizations involved in fighting climate change," and does not see any conflict of interest.

BP still advertises its calculator today. One of its subsidiaries backs an app that tracks your carbon footprint in real time, Grist reported. BP also made its biggest acquisition in 20 years in 2018: $10.5 billion of west Texas oil fields.

"They don't want a price on carbon, they don't want incentives for renewable energy, they don't want to block new fossil-fuel infrastructure," atmospheric scientist Michael Mann told Insider. "So they say: 'No, it's just about you being a better person, you being more responsible in your day to day activities.'"

A Chevron lawyer even said as much in federal court, according to Grist: In 2018, the company argued that it's not oil production causing climate change, "it's the way people are living their lives."

A million-dollar distraction

Smoke rises from the chimneys of a power plant in Shanghai in December 2009. Reuters/Aly Song

The ads Oreskes and Franta have collected show how much money fossil-fuel interests have poured into influencing the narrative on climate change. The American Petroleum Institute, a fossil-fuel trade association, spent $663 million on PR and advertising between 2008 and 2017, according to a report from the Climate Investigations Center.

The results, Redman said, can be insidious.

"It's easy to see that rhetoric, that it's about individual responsibility, and feel paralyzed and not take the kinds of political action that we need," she said.

The stakes are only getting higher, according to the latest report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. For every half-degree of warming, the frequency and intensity of heat waves and droughts increase. Even in the best-case climate scenario, sea levels will rise nearly a foot over the next 80 years.

Still, if you've dedicated time and energy to recycling or biking to work - don't despair. These choices, if lots of people make them, can make a difference. Nalamalapu takes reusable bags to the grocery store. Mann drives a hybrid car and doesn't eat meat. Oreskes has solar panels on her roof.

"We do all have personal responsibility. The question is: How do we balance that personal responsibility with the larger structural and political questions at stake? And what is the role of the fossil-fuel industry?" Oreskes said.

"Riding our bikes is important. And turning off the lights, not cranking the AC with a window open, all that stuff is really important, for sure," Redman said. "But it pales in comparison to political activity to change the rules about how our energy system is structured, who the actors are, who benefits, who pays."

Aylin Woodward contributed reporting.

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Tim Cook tries to quell unrest at Apple during a company-wide meeting, but only answers two questions from activist employees

insider@insider.com (Isobel Asher Hamilton) 

© Provided by Business Insider Apple CEO Tim Cook. Apple

Apple CEO Tim Cook held an all-company meeting on Friday, The New York Times reported.

The company has faced growing unrest from employees criticising the company's work culture.

One activist employee expressed disappointment that Cook only answered two questions from staff.

Tim Cook tried to quell growing employee concerns at an all-company meeting on Friday, The New York Times reported.

The Times obtained a recording of the meeting. It also spoke to activist employees who said they were disappointed because Cook only answered two questions out of several that they had wanted to ask the CEO.

The questions Cook answered related to pay equity and Apple's approach to the Texas law preventing people from getting abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.

After Cook received the question about pay equity, Apple's head of HR, Deirdre O'Brien, said the company regularly looks for gaps in its compensation practices.

"When we find any gaps at all, which sometimes we do, we close them," O'Brien said, per The Times.

Cook was asked how the company is protecting employees from Texas' new abortion law. In response, he said the company is investigating whether it can help mount legal challenges against the law.

He also said that the company's medical insurance will cover employees in Texas if they need to travel outside the state to obtain an abortion.

One activist employee, Janneke Parrish, told The Times that when discussing the meeting on the company's internal Slack message board, some employees said they were impressed by Cook's answers, but she was underwhelmed.

Parrish said she had submitted a question asking what specific steps Apple had taken to close pay gaps and achieve parity for women and people of color in getting promotions. The question was not answered, however.

Apple did not immediately reply to Insider when contacted for comment. In a statement to The Times, it said: "We are and have always been deeply committed to creating and maintaining a positive and inclusive workplace."

"We take all concerns seriously and we thoroughly investigate whenever a concern is raised and, out of respect for the privacy of any individuals involved, we do not discuss specific employee matters," it added.

Although Apple has historically had a reputation for secrecy, recently more employees have spoken out publicly about the company. In August, 15 employees built a website to allow colleagues to share experiences of harassment and discrimination at the company.

Earlier this month, Apple fired engineer Ashley Gjøvik who'd spoken publicly on Twitter about allegations of harassment at the company.

Gjøvik wrote in an article for Insider that she was accused of refusing to comply with a request from the company's "Employee Relations Threat Assessment & Workplace Violence" team.

She said she agreed to comply with the request but only in writing, as she had filed a complaint to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and an investigation was ongoing.

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From an $18 hourly wage to the 'new factory town,' Amazon is taking the lead on lifting up America's working class

bwinck@businessinsider.com (Ben Winck) 

© Getty Amazon warehouse in Brieselang, Germany. Getty

Amazon's rapid expansion means they have a chance to create a better economy for working-class Americans.

It plans to add 125,000 more US jobs, and to open 100 new facilities in September alone.

The firm's huge hiring plans, higher wages, and new hubs have the scale that could change the economy for countless Americans.

While the US continues to grapple with COVID, Amazon is busy molding the post-pandemic economy. Early signs and historical precedent suggest it could improve work for millions of Americans.

Amazon employed 950,000 US workers as of late June, or one in every 153 American workers. It plans to add more than 125,000 more payrolls, as well as open more than 100 more facilities in September alone. More significantly, it plans to pay people more and to create jobs in areas where they are sorely needed.

Amazon's leadership on wages recalls that of Henry Ford's action to lift his minimum wage in 1914, as Insider's Hillary Hoffower and Allana Akhtar previously reported. It's a goal shared by the Biden administration, which has repeatedly stressed it wants to build the economy "from the bottom up and middle out."

Amazon is his unlikely partner in this effort.
Setting the new wage floor

While the federal minimum wage remains $7.25 an hour, the retail titan is setting its own, higher minimum.

The company set a $15 minimum wage in 2018, and it quickly prompted other employers to either match this rate or lose workers.

One Miami chef told The Washington Post that higher pay in Amazon warehouses made hiring in a strenuous kitchen more difficult. Larger businesses including Levi's and Under Armour have said Amazon's rates forced them to rethink their own wages. It is borne out in academic studies. Amazon's hike raised average hourly wages by 4.7% at nearby employers, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and Brandeis University.

That bounce is set to repeat itself, with Amazon's latest hiring boom touting an average starting wage of $18. While Democrats failed earlier this year to lift the minimum wage for the first time in 20 years, Amazon's expansion is shifting the de-facto floor above the party's $15 target.

"I don't think people appreciate the extent to which Amazon puts a wage floor in a community," Tum Duy, chief economist at SGH Macro Advisors, wrote in a Tuesday tweet. "It's the first thing employers think about when a new Amazon facility arrives in town."

Building the next-generation 'factory town'

By dramatically expanding its footprint, Amazon could form a new kind of "factory town" that would further lift the country's working class, as Conor Sen, an economics columnist at Bloomberg, wrote Thursday. "Maybe these highway warehouse communities with jobs that pay increasingly respectable wages are what the future of the working class looks like."

The phrase "factory town" recalls those that dot Michigan, connected to automotive giants Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler, which molded the state in the early 1900s as their factories became economic hubs and birthed new cities. Where the industrial titans brought jobs, workers and other businesses followed. Amazon's huge warehouse plans offer a 21st-century parallel.

Data shows Amazon hubs already powering stronger economic growth. In Amazon's top 10 metro areas, job creation averaged -0.4% in the three years before the company's entry, CNBC reported in 2018, citing Morgan Stanley research. In the three years after its first facilities opened, local job growth averaged 1.9%.

Some cities saw even larger jumps. In the Phoenix area, job creation rose to 2.5% from -6.3%. The Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario region of California saw growth of -0.8% surge by 8.5% after Amazon opened several warehouses and sorting facilities.

The booms also extended beyond Amazon's own employees. The cities' transportation, warehousing, and utilities sectors - the last of which includes no Amazon hires - saw job growth outperform by 3.6%, according to Morgan Stanley.

To be sure, Amazon jobs aren't without their well-publicized downsides. Stories of overworked employees, harsh conditions, and safety concerns abound. The company has also been accused of quashing a unionization effort.

Amazon has said it aims to improve its working conditions, but by sheer force and scale it is putting its thumb on the scale of the blue-collar economy.

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Nike and Amazon among brands advertising on Covid conspiracy sites

Rob Davies and Jasper Jackson 

Dozens of the world’s biggest brands, including Nike, Amazon, Ted Baker and Asos, have been advertising on websites that spread Covid-19 misinformation and conspiracy theories, it has emerged. The companies, as well as an NHS service, are among a string of household names whose ads appear to have helped fund websites that host false and outlandish claims, for example that powerful people secretly engineered the pandemic, or that vaccines have caused thousands of deaths.

Analysis of nearly 60 sites, performed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and shared with the Observer, found that ads were placed through the “opaque” digital advertising market, which is forecast to be worth more than $455bn (£387bn) this year.

Digital advertising is delivered through a complex networks of tech companies, including Google, that match online data about people with available advertising space and then sell access to web users as they browse.

Experts said the design of this digital advertising architecture means that major brands, and their customers, may have been unwittingly funding Covid-19 misinformation.

Dr Augustine Fou, an independent ad fraud researcher and former employee of advertising agency Omnicom, said the system of bidding on ads means these sites get mixed in with other, more benign ones.

“Because they now have a source of funding, they can not only survive but also proliferate,” he said. “And that’s why we’re seeing this huge problem. Because of the lack of transparency … the companies and organisations buying the ads could be unaware that their marketing is appearing on – and potentially funding – these sources of misinformation.

Ads for Amazon services were found on more than 30 sites that carried fake news ranging from Covid conspiracy theories involving Bill Gates to claims that mRNA vaccines are “toxic”.

An NHS diabetes website was promoted alongside articles by a well-known anti-vaccine activist and the false claim that you cannot catch a virus.

“We know the ad ecosystem is incredibly opaque,” says Raegan MacDonald from Mozilla, which makes the Firefox internet browser. “It’s almost like we’re not supposed to look under the hood. Because if you do, you find this mess.”

© Provided by The Guardian Ads for Nike, Honda, US pharmacy chain Walgreens and eBay were among those recorded on misinformation-spreading sites Photograph: Acorn 1/Alamy

MacDonald warns that the system is being “weaponised” and potentially putting public health at risk. “What I really hope is that this will be a sort of last straw for the brands,” she said.

The bureau examined sites that host misinformation and also carry ads, using a combination of manual checking by researchers in the US and UK and automated systems that “crawl” sites to record what happens when someone visits them.

The pages were identified with help from the Global Disinformation Index, with ad analysis provided by Rocky Moss, the co-founder and chief executive of ad quality platform Deepsee.io, and Braedon Vickers, who has built a search platform called Well-Known.

Many of the companies that arrange digital advertising are little known outside the industry, which is dominated by Google. Analysis by Moss using Deepsee’s crawlers – which simulate a person visiting web pages – found ads delivered by Google for almost 30 big brands, each appearing on two or more misinformation websites.

The most common were for Amazon Pharmacy, , the drugstore run by the online retail giant, which itself has become a major player in digital advertising. Ads for Amazon Pharmacy, which is not available in the UK, accounted for more than 1% of 42,000 recorded by the “crawlers” and were found on more than 30 of the misinformation sites.

Google didn’t address the presence of ads it delivered on sites identified by the bureau, but said it took appropriate action against breaches of policies on misinformation, including cutting off publishers’ ability to make money from specific pages, or their entire sites, following repeated breaches.

“Protecting consumers and the credible businesses operating on our platforms is a priority for us,” a Google spokesperson told the bureau.

After Amazon Pharmacy, the next most-featured advertisers were computer manufacturer Lenovo, which appeared on 11 sites, and US bank Discover. Lenovo said: “Like many companies today, Lenovo uses the Google AdSense platform to serve digital adverts to consumers across the internet. With any kind of digital advertising, we give clear guidance to our media partners and agencies on what is acceptable for our brand. Lenovo does not approve the placement of ads placed on Covid-19 misinformation websites and does not condone the content it appeared next to, and we’ll will work with our media partners to review our existing protection systems.”

Ads for Nike, Honda, US pharmacy chain Walgreens and eBay were also among those recorded on multiple misinformation-spreading sites. British fashion firms Ted Baker and Asos, and the auction house Sotheby’s also appeared on multiple sites.

Xyla Health & Wellbeing, which runs the NHS diabetes prevention programme, said it had acted to stop its messages appearing on the sites.

The US Department of Veterans Affairs was promoted on two sites, one of which wrongly described mRNA vaccines as “the genetic modification injection” and claimed they made people more likely to catch Covid. The other site repeated the false claim that the coronavirus is no more dangerous than the flu.A spokesperson for American Honda said: “We are currently working to determine how our advertising may have appeared on the websites in question. We would never support Covid misinformation or knowingly allow our advertising on such websites. Honda strongly encourages our associates to become fully vaccinated and has conducted free vaccine clinics at our operations to make that possible.”

A spokesperson for Ted Baker said: “The location of these adverts is driven by the Google Display Network. We can confirm that we have worked with Google to resolve this issue and that our adverts will not appear on these specific sites in the future.”

Asos is understood to have added the misinformation sites to its banned list. A spokesperson said: “Like most other brands, we regularly review the websites that our ads appear on and have stringent requirements and processes in place to ensure that those websites align with our values, and those of our customers.“The available tools, however, will not always flag some smaller or newer sites. Where this happens, whenever an issue is brought to our attention, we take immediate action to ensure our ads are removed as we have done in this case.”

Related: Facebook ‘still too slow to act on groups profiting from Covid conspiracy theories’

The other companies either declined to comment or did not respond to a request for comment.

Advertising experts said companies should work harder to monitor where their ads appear and could not simply claim ignorance.

Fou, the independent ad fraud researcher, said companies buying adverts online should not trust the agencies that buy ad space for them and should instead conduct regular investigations.

“All these middlemen, they’re intermediaries ... so any dollar that flows through their platforms, they make more money,” Fou says. “They don’t have an incentive to cut down […] on the brand safety issues. In fact, they have every incentive to let it through.”

He said the scale of the online ad market means that even a tiny fraction of the total spending amounts to “significant money for the bad guys”.

Gun manufacturers quietly target young boys using social media
Jon Skolnik, Salon
September 18, 2021

Toddler with gun [Shutterstock.com]

When Nikolas Cruz, a then-19-year-old from Parkland, Florida, stormed the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018 with a semi-automatic rifle, gunning down fourteen students and three staff in roughly six minutes, those unfamiliar with Cruz's personal history felt like the tragedy came out of nowhere. Cruz, like so many mass shooters, had exhibited all of the signs of someone to watch out for long before. Prosecutors found that Cruz had a well-documented affinity for guns and violence. He started playing violent video games as a middle school student, and sought to be a U.S. Army ranger, allegedly telling a family friend that he "wanted to join the military to kill people." Cruz was described by friends and family as being a highly impulsive teen prone to emotional outbursts often ending in violence. He was also known as an avid user of social media – particularly Instagram – which for years provided him a platform to boast about his gun collection as well as his proclivity for animal cruelty.

In February of 2017, just three days after withdrawing from Stoneman Douglas High, Cruz purchased a Smith & Wesson M&P 15 – an AR-15 style semi-automatic assault rifle that bears similarities the the military's M-16. Somehow, he'd passed a background check that included a mental health component, despite being referenced in at least 45 calls to law enforcement spanning back to 2008. A year later, shortly after the FBI was anonymously warned about his potential to carry out an act of mass violence, Cruz brought his rifle to Stoneman Douglas High and executed the deadliest high school shooting in U.S. history.

Gun reform advocates have worked to understand why an adolescent like Cruz – who had a long history of behavioral issues – was able to legally obtain such a lethal weapon. Companies like Smith & Wesson market their firearms to young men – a demographic that represents a disproportionate amount of mass shooters. So Everytown for Gun Safety and Brady – arguably the two foremost gun control groups in America – renewed their request for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate the marketing practices of Smith & Wesson. Their plea, which stems from a complaint jointly filed to the FTC last year, airs out a litany of ways in which the gun giant allegedly attempts to connect with younger audiences, often pushing the envelope of consumer protection law or at times even flouting it altogether.

"It doesn't take a marketing expert to understand what they're trying to appeal to," Kris Brown, President of Brady, said of Smith & Wesson's marketing practices in an interview with Salon. "They're trying to market the gun as a totem – a substitute for masculinity to teenagers."

One of the ways that Smith & Wesson imbues its firearms with a sense of machismo, Brown said, is by creating a sense that its products are in some way affiliated with the U.S. military and law enforcement. Indeed, the company has regularly used such imagery on its website and Instagram, sporting pictures of camo-clad military soldiers as well as police officers serving in the line of duty. Smith & Wesson even offers its own line of firearms called "M&P" specifically devoted to military and police use. (As it so happens, an M&P gun was also used in the Parkland shooting.)


But by and large, the company sells its products to regular consumers, who have no military or police affiliation. In fact, according to a Freedom of Information Act request issued by Everytown and Brady, Smith & Wesson has secured just one small contract with the military over the last decade – a 250-unit supply of revolvers sent to Thailand back in 2012.

Despite this, Smith & Wesson has repeatedly emphasized the need to impart a "halo effect" around its products by associating them with military and law enforcement. In fact, Smith & Wesson went so far as to cite the effect as one of its key "growth drivers," per an investor presentation from 2012, and continued to do so in subsequent presentations. Asked about the effect during a 2016 earnings call with investors, the company's CEO said: "It certainly gives your product a lot of credibility if it is used, adopted and well-regarded by that professional community because the consumer does pay attention to that."

Apart from its potential to mislead buyers, the company's halo effect is especially concerning because it's "attractive to a certain subset of young men who are fixated on law enforcement and military," Alla Lefkowitz, Director of Affirmative Litigation at Everytown and a signatory of the group's complaint, said in an interview.

"You find examples of that in someone like the Parkland [school] shooter, someone like the Kenosha [unrest] shooter, someone like the Poway [synagogue] shooter," told Salon. And when it comes to consumer protection law, she said, "we see that as a real problem…because it doesn't appear to be true that Smith & Wesson's M&P line assault rifles are used by the military."

The gun lobby's alleged effort to foist guns onto young men and adolescents is not a novel phenomenon. For decades, gun manufacturers have sought to sustainably capture the interest of younger buyers, using new methods of marketing and merchandising to give their products a more youthful appeal.

The Violence Policy Center (VPC) detailed this strategy in a comprehensive report from 2017. It notes, for example, how the gun lobby mass-produces light-weight "tactical" rifles designed for shooters with smaller frames, often colored-coded with respect to gender. VPC specifically found that Smith & Wesson at one point offered its M&P 15 – the same gun used by Cruz – in "Pink Platinum, Purple Platinum, and Harvest Moon Orange."

In the past, some gun producers, like Thompson/Center, have been staggeringly candid about their bid to appeal to younger consumers. For instance, in a review of Thompson/Center's child-friendly gun "Hotshot," the company's director of marketing quoted back in 2014: "We're targeting the six- to 12-year-old range and feel that with the inclusion of the one-inch spacer in the box, there will be a longer period that the child can use the rifle, potentially out to 15 years old."

Meanwhile, youth-centered trade publications, like NRA Family or Junior Shooters, heavily feature guns tailored for kids and adolescents, often framing them as family-oriented purchases that preserve American values, like freedom.

"Each person who is introduced to the shooting sports and has a positive experience is another vote in favor of keeping our American heritage and freedom alive," wrote Andry Frink, editor of Junior Shooters, in a 2012 editorial. "They may not be old enough to vote now, but they will be in the future. And think about how many lives they will come in contact with that they can impact! Each of us affects others, and it is up to us how we make an impact on the future."

While federal law prohibits anyone under eighteen years old from owning a handgun, it's fair to say that the gun lobby has, for better or worse, deeply embedded itself into parts of American youth culture. According to a 2015 survey by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, about 72 percent of gun owners started hunting between the ages of six and fifteen. About 1 in every 18 high school students go to school armed with a gun, the American Academy of Pediatrics found in 2019.

The Washington Post observed that many states throughout the south and midwest have no age restriction on long guns (rifles and shotguns) to begin with. Given the wide swathe of literature that correlates gun ownership with household deaths and injuries, we should be especially concerned about more guns getting into the hands of kids and adolescents, Josh Sugarmann, Director of VPC, told Salon.

"We know from decades of research that bringing a gun into a home increases the risk of homicide, suicide and unintentional injury. That's just a fact," Sugarmann stated in an interview. "And the answer to that is 'let's introduce children to it as early as possible?' We don't apply that same standard to things like alcohol."

Over the past several decades, gun manufacturers have largely marketed toward younger audiences through traditional modes of print advertising, like magazines and catalogues. But more recently, they've drastically narrowed their focus on one channel in particular: social media.

This largely appears to be the case with Smith & Wesson, which now heavily relies on its Instagram page in particular to promote its products. While Smith & Wesson engages in many of the tactics discussed above – that is, posting pictures of teens shooting guns and drawing dubious associations between its products and the military – Smith & Wesson also apparently employs its own "influencers" and "sponsored shooters" to connect more intimately with younger audiences.

The phenomenon, Everytown's complaint alleges, is especially controversial because these personalities routinely fail to disclose their financial linkages to Smith & Wesson, despite promoting the company's products. The result, Brown told Salon, is that the company's influencers are able to pass off their paid promotions as authentic opinions – and in the process, avoid a relationship with youngsters feels "transactional."

"If someone tells you, 'Hey, I'm being paid to do this,' it changes [the relationship] from an individual connection to 'I'm dealing with a sales person,'" Brown told Salon. "But that's not how the law is supposed to work. That's not how disclosure is supposed to work. There are people selling things every single day who are influencers. And typically, the way it's supposed to work is: a disclaimer…and a statement."

Smith & Wesson's apparent brand ambassadors include shooting instructor Ava Flanell, trick shot artist David Nash, digital marketer Nikki Boxler, former chief of police Ken Scott, as well as professional competition shooters Jerry Miculek and Julie Golob – all of whom respectively have thousands of Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube followers. These influencers often use subtle ways of disclosing their relationship to Smith & Wesson, like naming the company hidden hashtags or putting it in "More" or "About Me" sections. However, according to the FTC Endorsement Guidelines, such admissions are a far cry from the gold standard, which demands recurring disclosures throughout each new post with simple and clear language. Salon reached out to the aforementioned influencers, but none responded to requests for a comment. Smith & Wesson also failed to respond to Salon's inquiries. Asked whether Instagram had any responsibility to moderate poorly-disclosed endorsements of firearms, a Facebook spokesperson told Salon: "Branded content that promotes weapons are not allowed on Instagram and we remove posts that we find to be violating."

While the apparent lack of disclosure by the named influencers is legally questionable, it's also concerning with regards to Instagram's user demographics, Brown said. According to Statista, nearly 30% of Instagram's users fall into the 18-24 age range. A 2017 AP-NORC survey found that 73% of American teens use Instagram, with 66% on Facebook.

"Adolescents are more susceptible to advertising and especially advertising that endorses or simulates risky behavior, right?" Lefkowitz said. "And that's why alcohol companies, cigarette companies, and car companies have to be careful about the way that they market it."

Sugarmann suggested that it's only a matter of time before the gun lobby is held to account for its adolescent marketing efforts.

"The industry has just sort of been operating under the radar for a very long time on this front," he said. "And it's…an area that deserves very close scrutiny."

#AUKUS

Australia resisted using nuclear power for decades. Here's why the AUKUS deal is making people there angry

By Isabelle Jani-Friend, CNN 

The US and UK will be sharing technology and expertise with Australia to help it build nuclear-powered submarines as part of a newly-announced defense pact between the three countries. The move has sparked fury in France, which has lost a long-standing agreement to supply Australia with diesel-powered subs.

© Paul Hennessy/NurPhoto/Getty Images October 1, 2018 - Cape Canaveral, Florida, United States - The USS Indiana, a nuclear powered United States Navy Virginia-class fast attack submarine, is escorted as it departs Port Canaveral in Florida on October 1, 2018, on its maiden voyage as a commissioned submarine. The nearly 380-foot-long USS Indiana was commissioned in a ceremony at Port Canaveral on September 29, 2018, and is the Navy's 16th Virginia-Class fast attack submarine. (Photo by Paul Hennessy/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

But it's not only the French who are furious. Anti-nuclear groups in Australia, and many citizens, are expressing anger over the deal, worried it may be a Trojan Horse for a nuclear power industry, which the nation has resisted for decades.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern spoke personally to her Australian counterpart, Scott Morrison, to tell him the vessels would not be welcome in the waters of her country, which has been a no-nuclear zone since 1984.

Six countries -- the UK, US, China, Russia, India and France -- already have nuclear-powered subs in their fleet, and many major developed economies, including the US and UK, use nuclear in their energy mix. In France, 70% of the country's electricity is nuclear.

So what's all the fuss about? Here's why some Australians are bothered by this deal.

How is nuclear power made?

Nuclear power is the world's second-largest contributor of low-carbon electricity after hydropower, according to the International Energy Agency. It accounts for around 10 percent of the world's electricity, generated by just over 440 power reactors.

The power comes from a process known as nuclear fission, which involves the splitting of uranium atoms in a reactor that heats water to produce steam. This steam is used to spin turbines, which in turn produce electricity.

Uranium is a heavy metal found in rocks and seabeds, and it's a powerful element. One pellet of enriched uranium -- about the size of an eraser on the end of pencil -- contains the same energy as a ton of coal or three barrels of oil, according to GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy.

While the process itself generates no emissions, greenhouse gases are generally emitted during the mining of uranium, and the enrichment process can be carbon intensive.


Is nuclear renewable?

The simple answer is "no." The energy produced by nuclear power plants is in itself renewable, and the steam produced in nuclear reactors can be recycled and turned back into water to be used again in the nuclear fission process.

© LENNART PREISS/AFP/Getty Images A nuclear power plant in Gundremmingen, Germany on February 26, 2021. Germany is reducing its use of nuclear power, while New Zealand still bans it entirely.

The materials used in its production, however, are not renewable -- the metal is technically finite. But there is an argument that it can be used sustainably; the uranium resources across the world are so large that energy experts don't foresee it running out.

Many groups that oppose nuclear power, however, do so because of the environmental destruction caused by uranium mining.

Governments in many parts of the world are relying on nuclear energy to help decarbonize their economies. It is widely regarded as an efficient way of producing electricity, and depending on the energy used to mine and enrich the uranium, it could potentially be a zero-emissions power source.

Beyond its low-carbon credentials, nuclear power is considered to have the highest capacity factor of any energy source, which means nuclear plants run at maximum power for more of the time than other types. In the US, they run at high capacity 92.5 percent of the time, government data shows. For coal, it's around 40 percent, and wind is around 35 percent.

Nuclear power can prevent millions of tons of emissions from entering the atmosphere each year, compared to fossil fuels.

Sounds great. So why are so many Australians against it?

It's not just Australia. Several countries have put the brakes on further development of the nuclear power industry since the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant lost power in an earthquake and tsunami, which meant the cooling systems failed, leading to nuclear meltdowns and hydrogen explosions, sending harmful radiation into the atmosphere. Parts of the city remain off limits.

It was the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986, when a test that went wrong triggered an explosion and fire, releasing devastating amounts of radioactive material into the air. Thirty-one people were killed in the accident itself, while many more died from the effects of radiation exposure in the following years, with some estimates in the tens of thousands.

But Australia's anti-nuclear movement goes further back than that, to a strong protest movement in the 1970s. This emerged largely because of concerns around the environmental impacts of mining uranium -- which Australia has huge reserves of -- but also due to worries around risks to public health, particularly among communities living near proposed facilities.

There are also concerns around how to safely store nuclear waste. Explosions or leaks of stored waste can impact human health too, though such disasters are far less common than they once were.

In 1977, the Movement Against Uranium Mining in Australia collected 250,000 signatures for a moratorium on extracting the metal, even though nuclear power wasn't being used in the country. But Australia still mines the metal today and exports it to generate nuclear power in other parts of the world.

There is growing political pressure in Australia coming from leaders of the Liberals -- which is Australia's conservative party -- to start using nuclear power. Without it, some argue, reaching net zero by 2030 will be impossible. It has resisted nuclear largely because it has had plentiful coal and gas reserves, but Australia is under pressure to wind down its use of fossil fuels.

When announcing the new deal, Morrison said Australia was not seeking to develop "civil nuclear capability," which would include nuclear power plants. But Greens Party leader Adam Bandt criticized the agreement in a tweet as putting "floating Chernobyls in the heart of Australia's cities," saying it "makes Australia less safe."

Bob Brown, a former Greens leader who campaigned against nuclear warships coming into Tasmania in the 1980s, told the Australian Financial Review on Thursday the deal put the country closer to developing a nuclear energy industry and warned of a backlash.

"I think it's very cowardly what the government's done," Brown said. "It's made a decision without reference to the public, knowing the public would oppose it."

And what's New Zealand's stance?

New Zealand is one of the few developed countries that does not have any nuclear reactors whatsoever. It also has a zero-nuclear zone which prevents nuclear weapons or nuclear ships from entering into its territory.

In September 1978, the New Zealand government released a Royal Commission of inquiry into nuclear power, and a decision was made for the country to use its own resources to produce electricity, rather than implementing nuclear plants.

Hydroelectric energy -- which harnesses energy from the movement of water -- now provides 80 percent of the country's power, and investing in nuclear plants is still not considered to be cost effective. The initial cost of building nuclear power facilities is extremely high, according to the World Nuclear Association.

However, the main reason for New Zealand's opposition to nuclear power is -- as in Australia -- public opinion and concerns around safety and the disposal of nuclear waste.

New Zealand's anti-nuclear stance applies to nuclear power, nuclear-powered vessels, and nuclear weapons.



A grass fire burns at a uranium mine near Mt Brockman in the Kakadu National Park, Australia on September 1, 2004.

Kristi Noem won't mandate masks in South Dakota schools — but she wants to make students pray

David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement
September 17, 2021

Gage Skidmore.

South Dakota's Republican Governor Kristi Noem refuses to mandate masks for schoolchildren and teachers but she's trying to make students pray in public. Gov. Noem, who is widely expected to run for president in 2024, has let the coronavirus run rampant in her state of just 886,667 people – a population so small New York City is ten times larger. And yet coronavirus is running rampant in South Dakota, which ranks number eight in the nation for coronavirus cases per capita.

Governor Noem just made clear she does not see herself as a government or political leader, but as a religious one. Speaking to Real America's Voice personality David Brody, Noem declared she will bring back prayer in schools (even though voluntary prayer has always been legal) and thinks political leaders are supposed to "minister" to their constituents.

Complaining that the actions other government leaders are taking "are not biblical," Noem says they are supposed to "line up with God," which is false.

"I think that it's really time for all of us to look at the actions of our leaders and see if they line up with the word of God," Noem said, "see if they're biblical and if they really are following through on those actions that God's called us to do to protect people, to serve people, and to really minister to them."

Protecting, serving, and ministering – but not in the fight against the deadly pandemic.

"We've seen our society, our culture, degrade, as we've removed God out of our lives, and people become what they spend their time doing," Noem declared. "When I was growing up, we spent every Sunday morning, every night, every Wednesday night in church, we were our church, family was a part of our life, we read the Bible every day as a family together, and spent time with each other, recognizing that we were created to serve others."



Again, Noem makes clear she does not believe serving and protecting others has anything to do with COVID-19.

"I don't know families do that as much anymore and those biblical values are learned, in the family, And they're learned in church when the doors are open so people can be there and be taught."

"We in South Dakota, have decided to take action to really stand for biblical principles. We had a bill that was passed during legislative session two years ago that put the the motto 'In God We Trust' in every single school building it is displayed. Now it is displayed in every K-12 school building in the state of South Dakota.

"I have legislation that we'll be proposing this year that will allow us to pray in schools, again, I really believe that focusing on those foundational biblical principles that teach us that every life has value every person has a purpose will recenter our kids and help us really heal this division that we see taking over our country."

MSNBC's Steve Benen notes, "given that the United States is a democracy, and not a theocracy, officials' actions are supposed to line up with the Constitution and the rule of law, not how some people interpret scripture."

"What the governor seemed to be suggesting, however, isn't a system in which students pray on their own," he adds, "but one in which school officials intervene in children's religious lives. In the United States, that's not legal: As my friends at Americans United for Separation of Church and State recently explained, 'The South Dakota Supreme Court struck down mandatory recitation of the Lord's Prayer in the state's public schools in 1929. The U.S. Supreme Court invalidated school-sponsored prayer and Bible reading in public schools in 1962 and '63.'"