Monday, October 11, 2021

CONSERVATIVE=CONFEDERATE
The Conservatives Dreading—And Preparing for—Civil War

A faction of the right believes America has been riven into two countries. The Claremont Institute is building the intellectual architecture for whatever comes next.

Updated at 4 p.m. ET on October 5, 2021

By Emma Green

“Let me start big. The mission of the Claremont Institute is to save Western civilization,” says Ryan Williams, the organization’s president, looking at the camera, in a crisp navy suit. “We’ve always aimed high.” A trumpet blares. America’s founding documents flash across the screen. Welcome to the intellectual home of America’s Trumpist right.

As Donald Trump rose to power, the Claremont universe—which sponsors fellowships and publications, including the Claremont Review of Books and The American Mind—rose with him, publishing essays that seemed to capture why the president appealed to so many Americans and attempting to map a political philosophy onto his presidency. Williams and his cohort are on a mission to tear down and remake the right; they believe that America has been riven into two fundamentally different countries, not least because of the rise of secularism. “The Founders were pretty unanimous, with Washington leading the way, that the Constitution is really only fit for a Christian people,” Williams told me. It’s possible that violence lies ahead. “I worry about such a conflict,” Williams told me. “The Civil War was terrible. It should be the thing we try to avoid almost at all costs.”

That almost is worth noticing. “The ideal endgame would be to effect a realignment of our politics and take control of all three branches of government for a generation or two,” Williams said. Trump has left office, at least for now, but those he inspired are determined to recapture power in American politics. My conversation with Williams has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Emma Green: What do you see as the threats to Western civilization?

Ryan Williams: The one we have focused on at the Claremont Institute is the progressive movement. [Progressives think that] limited government, in the Founders’ sense—checks and balances, robust federalism, a fairly fixed view of human nature and the rights attendant to it—all has to give way to a notion that rights evolve with the times.

The biggest institutional part of [the progressive movement] is this large bureaucracy or administrative state, which is insulated from control by the executive or even, increasingly, by Congress.

I would say the leading edge of progressivism now is this kind of woke, social-justice anti-racism. It’s a threat to limited government because it seems to take its lead from scholars like Ibram Kendi, who has proposed a Department of Anti-racism that would basically have carte blanche control over local and state governments. His definition of racism is any policy that results in disparate outcomes for different groups. And we take issue with that. You always have different outcomes between different groups. Human nature is varied. We all have different talents. The pursuit of equal results is only going to be successful in a new woke totalitarianism. I realize that sounds a little hyperbolic, but that seems to be the road we’re on.

Green: We’re going to unpack “woke totalitarianism” in a second, but I want to make sure I’m understanding your starting point correctly. When you say Western civilization, it sounds like you’re not necessarily describing people situated in geography or time but rather a set of ideas that you believe are falling out of fashion or are being actively destroyed by various forces in society. Am I getting you right?

Williams: You can never really divorce a set of ideas and principles from the people in which it grew up. America is an idea, but it’s not just that. It’s the people who settled it, founded it, and made it flourish.

Green: Just to ask the question directly, do you mean white people?

Williams: No, not necessarily. I mean, Western civilization happens to be where a lot of white people are, historically, but I don’t think there’s any necessary connection between the two. The ability to believe in natural rights and a regime of limited government the way the Founders did is not reserved only to white people.

Green: So you believe that there are American citizens of other backgrounds who belong in Western civilization—not just white people.

Williams: No. I think “white” is a pretty arbitrary category—

Green: People of European descent.

Williams: Okay, fair enough. No, it’s not an exclusive inheritance of that.

Green: One beef in the Claremont universe is what you all call “Conservatism, Inc.”: the professional-class conservatives who do panel discussions and run multimillion-dollar think tanks that produce white papers that ultimately don’t lead to anything, in your view. You guys are basically a think tank too. Why aren’t you just a slightly different version of Conservatism, Inc.?


Williams: Fair enough. Our target is not to say that good work doesn’t go on at the large conservative think tanks. But we think we’re in a real regime crisis right now. Our political elites and cultural and corporate institutions seem to believe in a way of doing government that is fundamentally at odds with the original, founding view—or even the view of Lincoln. We disagree on what men and women are; on what human nature is; what rights are. That’s a real crisis. We would love if our bigger brethren focused exclusively on what we think are the real threats: identity politics; this ideology of anti-racism and wokeness, which you said we’ll get to; the notion that borders are anachronistic and even racist, and that citizenship is global rather than national; that China is our main rival; the rise of big tech.

Green: Let’s talk about identity politics and being “woke.” People throw those terms around a lot, and they can obscure more than they illuminate. What do you actually mean when you say you stand against them?

Williams: There are a few strands. The most ascendant one right now seems to be critical theory, which was born in France in the ’60s and migrated to American universities. It has birthed all of these academic centers—gender studies, anti-colonialism, African American studies. It has some core tenets: There’s no such thing as truth in politics; it’s all about narratives and power, and we can’t know truth, fundamentally. There’s no such thing as natural rights; politics is making sure discrete identity groups, especially the ones who’ve been oppressed over time, now have an opportunity to express themselves.

That means deconstructing and disrupting what was the dominant narrative for a long time, which was the Founders’ regime of natural rights. One of the institutional vehicles for it was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was meant to fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence for Black Americans coming out of segregation. But the courts and administrative agencies quickly turned against the color-blind, equal-opportunity vision of the founding and toward affirmative action—this calculation of current oppressor or past oppressor, and the pursuit of equity and social justice. Now this seems to mean that we’re really not going to be where we need to be until all groups are equally represented and have the same outcomes for, say, home ownership, wealth, the proportion of CEOs, or members of Congress. That seems to be the goal of wokeism.


Green: I take it that you would not disagree with the basic spirit of the civil-rights movement, which was to disrupt the legal regime of racism enforced by the state primarily against Black Americans?

Williams: No, I don’t disagree with that.

Green: But you do disagree with how you see this manifest on the left today. Do you have an alternative vision of what racial justice or equality—or whatever term you would use—should look like in 2021? How should we address continuing, legally sanctioned discrimination, assuming you think such a thing exists?

Williams: A true regime of nondiscrimination is when the state cannot disadvantage or advantage any group based on their skin color or ethnicity. That’s the original promise of the Declaration of Independence. It is, in many ways, a color-blind Constitution.

The counter from the left is that there’s systemic racism that has built up over years by certain legal systems. I would have to see some real proof of that. The main evidence seems to be that there are disparate results, thus there’s systemic racism.

Green: Let’s take one concrete policy example. The prison system in the United States disproportionately incarcerates Black men. Reasons for this include laws around sentencing, such as three-strike rules, or the possession of certain drugs being punished more harshly than others. This is an area of policy where the left and the right disagree, fundamentally, about the role race has played in the creation of the current carceral system.


So I guess the question is, in your vision of America, is this a problem? And is it a problem caused by racism?

Williams: It would depend on what is driving the disparate results. We would have to separate out the extent to which sentencing is truly discriminatory—and it ought not to be, if it is—and the extent to which the high incarceration rate of Black Americans is due to their much higher propensity to commit violent crime.

Until we can talk about that—if we can acknowledge that on the left and the right—it would be a wonderful starting point to try to dig into some of the issues you’re talking about, like the different classification of drugs being more associated with one group or another. We have to start, though, with the acknowledgment that a lot more Blacks are in prison because they commit violent crimes at a much higher rate [than Americans of other races]. Whites commit violent crime at a much higher rate than Asians do, so I don’t mean to suggest a racial crime hierarchy. But it’s just a fact we have to acknowledge.

Green: But certain crimes are more likely to be seen by the state, right? It’s easier to enforce against petty theft than white-collar crime. The other thing you might say is, okay, there are poor Black communities where more crime happens, but there are reasons why that’s happening: Those communities have been systematically neglected over time. And we as a society should change that.

I’m pressing you on this because it seems like the people in your orbit spend lots of time opposing the progressive program, but I don’t see you articulating a vision of how to appropriately right these kinds of wrongs.


Williams: To the extent that we can discover real discrimination, solely on the basis of race, we ought to. But we need to reject the notion that different outcomes are de facto evidence of discrimination. There are plenty of examples of poverty, even acute poverty, not leading to crime. I think it has a lot to do with culture, family, and all the rest. I want us to be honest social scientists about the pathologies plaguing America.

Green: Glenn Ellmers wrote an essay for The American Mind about why the Claremont Institute isn’t conservative. One of the things he writes is that some people residing in the United States—“certainly more than half”—are not Americans in any recognizable sense.

What does it mean to declare that more than half of the people residing in the country are not truly American?

Williams: Glenn was, of course, being provocative and polemical. But if Claremont thinks real Americanism is a belief in the principles of the American founding, we have to acknowledge that a good portion of our fellow citizens don’t agree with our principles and conclusions about what politics is for. If we differ on those fundamental things, we’re really two Americas.

Even during the Civil War—I think we’re more divided now than we were then. As Lincoln said, we all prayed to the same God. We all believed in the same Constitution. We just differed over the question of slavery.

Green: This picture you’re painting of unity around a certain set of ideas, principles, and beliefs about the nature of man and God doesn’t feel accurate to the founding conditions of the United States. America was founded as a place where people who had really out-there ideas could come and live peaceably in geographic proximity to one another, eventually governed under a shared constitution. Lots of religious radicals were involved. America was founded on the principle that people needed to tolerate one another, but no more.


How is that different from today, when we are continuing to experience turmoil over who we are and what we believe and what our orientation as a nation should be?

Williams: Well, most of the Founders of America were Christians. There were radicals, to be sure. But there was much more consensus back then on what human nature is—on monotheism, broadly speaking, but really Christianity as well.

Of course, Maryland was a bunch of Catholics who wanted their own place. But there was much more consensus on what government ought to do: to secure the blessings of liberty and natural rights. First among them was freedom of conscience—your freedom to worship as you see fit. I would reject your assertion that pluralism ruled the day in the founding. Pluralism is a term that comes up much later in the American tradition, meaning that the regime is indifferent to the types of groups that are in the country. I don’t think the Founders would have maintained that at all. They thought natural rights were the possession of human beings across the globe, but the conditions for securing good government and protecting those rights were often unavailable. It took a certain bit of luck and civilizational tradition and learning and philosophy to get there.

In many ways, the miracle of America was to solve the problem that had plagued Western Europe for so many years, which was that every religious difference was an existential political difference that led to civil war and misery and depredation. With Madison and Jefferson leading the way, we solved the political-theological problem—that’s the fancy term from Leo Strauss. They solved it well enough that we could all live together as fellow citizens.


That consensus was around for quite a while—broadly speaking, constitutionalism and limited government. We disputed over those things, but everyone thought the Constitution was a good thing and that government ought to protect rights. The glaring problem that plagued us for many years was the obvious contradiction of slavery to the principles of the Declaration. But there weren’t really any Founders who defended slavery as a good thing. Maybe a few from South Carolina, but that was about it. There was a moral consensus, even if they lived up to it imperfectly, embodied in our constitutional culture. We’ve lost that. If we disagree that human biology is a good guide to male- and femaleness, we’re a long way from the consensus of the founding.

Green: Do you think America can hang together in 2021 without Christianity at its core?

Williams: I’m ambivalent about that question. I think it would be bad for America if that longtime Christian core disintegrated. The Founders were pretty unanimous, with Washington leading the way, that the Constitution is really only fit for a Christian people.

I would modify that a bit and say a majority Christian people could maintain that. But if you don’t think your rights ultimately come from a Creator, you’re halfway down the road to our modern confusion.

Green: Writing in the Claremont universe often has a dire tone to it. The essay The Flight 93 Election” is one example of this, or that Glenn Ellmers essay.

The thing I always wonder is: What’s the end game? If you truly have a sense that the American project is in crisis; that our country is not one but two entities; and that what’s at stake is nothing less than our ability to be a free people governed under a shared constitution—are you guys, like, stockpiling weapons?

Williams: The ideal endgame would be to effect a realignment of our politics and take control of all three branches of government for a generation or two. The goal would not be the reconquest of blue America but rather the restoration of the constitutional regime that we think has been lost.

We have to find some modus vivendi to go forward. If we’re two Americas, one of the more perfect solutions might be the return of federalism—the feds laying off in many respects. Let red America be red and blue America be blue. It’s obviously more complicated than that, because even in red states you have plenty of Democrats, and vice versa. But we need to restore a robust federalism, one that allows states much more leeway. We’ve gone much too far into the realm of federal control, arbitrariness, and overreach.

Green: Republicans have lost the popular vote in nearly every presidential election in the last three decades. Do you worry about a project of minority rule—trying to assert your vision upon a country where many, many people do not agree with even your basic premises about what the American republic should look like?

Williams: I reject the premise that just because the popular vote isn’t won, you don’t possess a constitutional majority. We have an Electoral College system for a reason. Democracy, for the Founders, was a means to the end of the protection of rights. They set up a republic, not a democracy. The rule of pure numbers was never the touchstone of justice for the Founders. But the persistent inability of the right to win popular majorities—that is a problem. Ours is a project of persuading our fellow citizens, even independents and Democrats, that the current regime is on the wrong track.

Green: As a descriptive matter, do you think you guys are actually speaking for a silent majority in America that’s actually sympathetic to your goals?

Williams: That’s a testable proposition. I hope so. Trump showed the way it could be done. That was just the beginning.

Green: Many on the right seem to no longer believe in reality. QAnon gets a lot of hype, but many people on the right promote stories and narratives that aren’t supported by evidence or facts, especially about the 2020 election.

Are you at all preoccupied with this problem? I’ve noticed, for example, that one of your Publius fellows this year is a legislative assistant for Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose views certainly do not line up with reality. Does that concern you at all?

Williams: We believe in truth and reason. The question is whose truth and whose reason. That’s part of the contested quality of our national politics. And it’s not just the right. A third of the country thinks the election was given to Biden fraudulently. That includes a lot of Democrats.

Our national standard at the elite-media level these days seems to be something far from the truth. We’re no Q fans at Claremont. But it should not be surprising that, in our ideologically divided times, we have real division over truth and reality. Our national elites, and especially media elites, seem to be an ideological wing of left America rather than neutral arbiters of truth. It shouldn’t be a surprise that a good portion of the disaffected right turns to alternative sources for their political information. Many of those sources are cranks and lunatics, but that’s also nothing new. We’ve always had a robust tradition of firebrands and conspiracy theorists. It’s very American, in a way.

Green: Your answer is strikingly postmodern: You seem to be elevating the existence of multiple narratives, which may or may not hold elements of the truth. It’s also mostly a critique of the other side—a lot of people hate the media and think they don’t say true things. But if you’re trying to articulate what truth is as it relates to the American founding and ethos and mission, I would think you would be singularly concerned with the affairs in your own house. Greene has said she doesn’t think 9/11 happened. She thinks the Rothschilds started wildfires using giant space lasers. We are in a fraught time for coming to a shared consensus about what reality is. Are you doing your part to keep your house clean?

Williams: On the MTG question, it’s always been part of our project to educate folks who work in national politics, policy, journalism, etc. So I don’t think it’s suspect in the least for us to improve the staff of Congress, no matter who the congressperson is. Of course we’re concerned in policing our own house and making sure that there are not, in our political and intellectual coalition, people who reject fundamentally what we think is right. That battle is ongoing.

But I will contest what you said. I didn’t mean to elevate the notion of competing narratives. People are increasingly unsure of where to get valid information. A huge contributor to that has been our elite media.

Green: Do you feel like there is a hopeful future for America, or do you think we are headed toward some sort of generationally defining conflict that could potentially be violent?

Williams: I worry about such a conflict. The Civil War was terrible. It should be the thing we try to avoid almost at all costs.

A lot of normal Americans just want to go about their daily lives, raise their families, and make sure that our kids are successful. It’s really not that ideological, ultimately. I place a huge amount of hope in that. At the national level—the elite level—we have to advance intellectual ideas that we think are true, and the politics that we think will be the most successful. But we underestimate the extent to which we can lower the temperature in America and move forward with a lot more unity.

Green: I’ll look for that the next time I read the Claremont Review of Books—that effort to make sure our temperatures are lowered.

This piece originally stated that Republicans have not won the popular vote in a presidential election in several decades. In fact, George W. Bush won the popular vote in 2004.


Emma Green is a staff writer at ​The Atlantic, where she covers politics, policy, and religion.
What Even Counts as Science Writing Anymore?

The pandemic made it clear that science touches everything, and everything touches science.

By Ed Yong
THE ATLANTIC
Getty; The Atlantic
OCTOBER 2, 2021

LONG READ


I entered 2020 thinking of myself as a science writer. I ended the year less sure.

While the first sparks of the COVID-19 pandemic ignited at the end of 2019, I was traipsing through a hillside in search of radio-tagged rattlesnakes, allowing myself to get electrocuted by an electric catfish, and cradling loggerhead-turtle hatchlings in the palm of my hand. As 2020 began and the new coronavirus commenced its ruinous sweep of the world, I was marveling at migratory moths and getting punched in the pinky by a very small and yet surprisingly powerful mantis shrimp. We share a reality with these creatures, but we experience it in profoundly different ways. The rattlesnake can sense—perhaps see—the body heat of its mammalian prey. The catfish can detect the electric fields that other animals involuntarily produce. The moths and the turtles can both sense the magnetic field of the planet and use it to guide their long navigations. The mantis shrimp sees forms of light that we cannot, and it processes colors in a way that no one fully understands. Each species has its own unique coterie of senses. Each is privy to its own narrow slice of the total sights, smells, sounds, and other stimuli that pervade the planet.

This article was excerpted from The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2021.

My plan was to write a book about those sensory experiences—a travelogue that would take people through the mind of a bat, a bird, or a spider. Such a journey, “not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes,” as Marcel Proust once said, is “the only true voyage.”

It quickly became the only voyage I could make. As the pandemic spread, the possibility of international travel disappeared. Commuting turned from daily reality to fading memory. Restaurants, bars, and public spaces closed. Social gatherings became smaller, infrequent, and subject to barriers of cloth and distance. My world contracted to the radius of a few blocks, but the sensory worlds of other animals stayed open, magical and Narnia-like, accessible through the act of writing.

When I had to pause my book leave to report full-time on the pandemic, those worlds closed too.

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In theory, 2020 should have been a banner year for science writers. A virus upended the world and gripped its attention. Arcana of epidemiology and immunology—super-spreading, herd immunity, cytokine storms, mRNA vaccines—became dinner-table fodder. Public-health experts (and pseudo-experts) gained massive followings on social media. Anthony Fauci became a household name. The biggest story of the year—perhaps of the decade—was a science story, and science writers seemed ideally placed to tell it.

Read: Why the coronavirus is so confusing

When done properly, covering science trains a writer to bring clarity to complexity, to embrace nuance, to understand that everything new is built upon old foundations, and to probe the unknown while delimiting the bounds of their own ignorance. The best science writers learn that science is not a procession of facts and breakthroughs, but an erratic stumble toward gradually diminished uncertainty; that peer-reviewed publications are not gospel and even prestigious journals are polluted by nonsense; and that the scientific endeavor is plagued by all-too-human failings such as hubris. All of these qualities should have been invaluable in the midst of a global calamity, where clear explanations were needed, misinformation was rife, and answers were in high demand but short supply.

But the pandemic hasn’t just been a science story. It is an omnicrisis that has warped and upended every aspect of our lives. While the virus assaulted our cells, it also besieged our societies, seeping into every crack and exploiting every weakness it could find. It found many. To understand why the United States has fared so badly against COVID-19, despite its enormous wealth and biomedical savvy, one must understand not just matters of virology but also the nation’s history of racism and genocide, its carceral state, its nursing homes, its historical attitudes toward medicine and health, its national idiosyncrasies, the algorithms that govern social media, and the grossly deficient character of its 45th president. I barely covered any of these issues in an 8,000-word piece I wrote for The Atlantic in 2018 about whether the United States was ready for the next pandemic. When this pandemic started, my background as a science writer, and one who had specifically reported on pandemics, was undoubtedly useful, but to a limited degree—it gave me a half-mile head start, with a full marathon left to run. Throughout the year, many of my peers caviled about journalists from other beats who wrote about the pandemic without a foundation of expertise. But does anyone truly have the expertise to cover an omnicrisis that, by extension, is also an omnistory?

The all-encompassing nature of epidemics was clear to the German physician Rudolf Virchow, who investigated a typhus outbreak in 1848. Virchow knew nothing about the pathogen responsible for typhus, but he correctly realized that the outbreak was possible only because of poverty, malnutrition, poor sanitation, dangerous working conditions, and inequities perpetuated by incompetent politicians and negligent aristocrats. “Medicine is a social science and politics is nothing but medicine in larger scale,” Virchow wrote.

This viewpoint was championed by many of his contemporaries, but it waned as germ theory waxed. In a bid to be objective and politically neutral, scientists focused their attention on pathogens that cause disease and ignored the societal factors that make disease possible. The social and biomedical sciences were cleaved apart, separated into different disciplines, departments, and scholars. Medicine and public health treated diseases as battles between individuals and germs, while sociologists and anthropologists dealt with the wider context that Virchow had identified. This rift began to narrow in the 1980s, but it still remains wide. COVID-19 landed in the middle of it. Throughout much of 2020, the United States (and the White House, specifically) looked to drugs and vaccines for salvation while furiously debating about masks and social distancing. The latter were the only measures that controlled the pandemic for much of the year; billed as “non-pharmaceutical interventions,” they were characterized in opposition to the more highly prized biomedical panaceas. Meanwhile, social interventions such as paid sick leave and universal health care, which could have helped essential workers protect their livelihoods without risking their health, were barely considered.

To the extent that the pandemic has been a science story, it’s also been a story about the limitations of what science has become. Perverse academic incentives that reward researchers primarily for publishing papers in high-impact journals have long pushed entire fields toward sloppy, irreproducible work; during the pandemic, scientists have flooded the literature with similarly half-baked and misleading research. Pundits have urged people to “listen to the science,” as if “the science” is a tome of facts and not an amorphous, dynamic entity, born from the collective minds of thousands of individual people who argue and disagree about data that can be interpreted in a range of ways. The long-standing disregard for chronic illnesses such as dysautonomia and myalgic encephalomyelitis meant that when thousands of COVID-19 “long-haulers” kept experiencing symptoms for months, science had almost nothing to offer them. The naive desire for science to remain above politics meant that many researchers were unprepared to cope with a global crisis that was both scientific and political to its core. “There’s an ongoing conversation about whether we should do advocacy work or ‘stick to the science,’” Whitney Robinson, a social epidemiologist, told me. “We always talk about how these magic people will take our findings and implement them. We send those findings out, and knowledge has increased! But with COVID, that’s a lie!”

Virchow’s experiences with epidemics radicalized him, pushing the man who would become known as the “father of pathology” to advocate for social and political reforms. COVID-19 has done the same for many scientists. Many of the issues it brought up were miserably familiar to climate scientists, who drolly welcomed newly traumatized epidemiologists into their ranks. In the light of the pandemic, old debates about whether science (and science writing) is political now seem small and antiquated. Science is undoubtedly political, whether scientists want it to be or not, because it is an inextricably human enterprise. It belongs to society. It is interleaved with society. It is of society.

Read: How the pandemic defeated America


This is true even of areas of science that seem to be sheltered within some protected corner of intellectual space. My first book was about the microbiome, a bustling area of research that went unnoticed for centuries because it had the misfortune to arise amid the ascent of Darwinism and germ theory. With nature red in tooth and claw, and germs as the root of disease, the idea of animals benefiting from cooperative microbes was anathema. My next book will show that our understanding of animal senses has been influenced by the sociology of science—whether scientists believe one another, whether they successfully communicate their ideas, whether they publish in a prestigious English journal or an obscure foreign-language one. That understanding has also been repeatedly swayed by the trappings of our own senses. Science is often caricatured as a purely empirical and objective pursuit. But in reality, a scientist’s interpretation of the world is influenced by the data she collects, which are influenced by the experiments she designs, which are influenced by the questions she thinks to ask, which are influenced by her identity, her values, her predecessors, and her imagination.

When I began to cover COVID-19 in 2020, it became clear that the usual mode of science writing would be grossly insufficient. Much of journalism is fragmentary: Big stories are broken down into small components that can be quickly turned into content. For science writing, that means treating individual papers as a sacrosanct atomic unit and writing about them one at a time. But for an omnicrisis, this approach leads only to a messy, confusing, and ever-shifting mound of jigsaw pieces. What I tried to do instead was unite those pieces. I wrote a series of long features about big issues, attempting to synthesize vast amounts of information and give readers a steady rock upon which they could observe the torrent of information rushing past them without drowning in it. I treated the pandemic as more than a science story, interviewing sociologists, anthropologists, historians, linguists, patients, and more. And I found that the writing I gravitated toward did the same. The pandemic clarified that science is inseparable from the rest of society, and that connection works both ways. Science touches on everything; everything touches on science. The walls between beats seemed to crumble. What, I found myself asking, even counts as science writing?

Read: How the pandemic now ends

There has long been a view of science writing that imagines it’s about opening up the ivory tower and making its obscure contents accessible to the masses. But this is a strange model, laden with troubling corollaries. It implicitly assumes that science is beleaguered and unappreciated, and that unwilling audiences must be convinced of its importance and value. It equates science with journals, universities, and other grand institutions that are indeed opaque and cloistered. And treating science as a special entity that normies are finally being invited to take part in is also somewhat patronizing.

Such invitations are not anyone’s to extend. Science is so much more than a library of publications, or the opinions of doctorate holders and professors. Science writing should be equally expansive. Ultimately, What even counts as science writing? is a question we shouldn’t be able to answer. A woman’s account of her own illness. A cultural history of a color. An investigation into sunken toxic barrels. A portrait of a town with a rocket company for a neighbor. To me, these pieces and others that I selected for the 2021 edition of the Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology show that science is intricately woven into the fabric of our lives—so intricately that science writing should be difficult to categorize.

There is an obvious risk here. Of the typical journalistic beats, science is perhaps the only one that draws us out of our human trappings. Culture, politics, business, sport, food: These are all about one species. Science covers the other billions, and the entirety of the universe besides. I feel its expansive nature keenly. I have devoted most of my career to writing about microbes and lichens, hagfish and giraffes, duck penises and hippo poop. But I do so now with a renewed understanding that even as we step away from ourselves, we cannot fully escape. Our understanding of nature has been profoundly shaped by our culture, our social norms, and our collective decisions about who gets to be a scientist at all. And our relationship with nature—whether we succumb to it, whether we learn from it, whether we can save it—depends on our collective decisions too.

This article was excerpted from Ed Yong’s introduction in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2021.
Fragrant consumer products a key source of ozone-forming pollution in New York City

NOAA scientists now turning their attention to Las Vegas and Los Angeles

Tuesday, August 3, 2021

It’s hot. Time for deodorant, sun block, and bug spray; some conditioner to keep your hair from turning to straw, and maybe a little air freshener for the laundry room where a damp pile of workout clothes awaits.


This map of the US shows the route driven by the NOAA CSL mobile lab from Boulder to New York City with a 3-D representation of population density. The pie charts show the fractions of the human-caused VOC emissions that can be attributed to VCPs and vehicle traffic for Boulder, Colorado and New York City. 
Credit: Chelsea Thompson, NOAA Chemical Sciences Laboratory

New research from NOAA finds that personal care products like these are now responsible for a significant amount of the ozone pollution known as smog that plagues major urban areas. In New York City, for example, air samples collected during a 2018 field mission by an instrumented NOAA mobile laboratory showed that fragrant personal care products generated about half of the volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, that were generated by people but not produced by vehicle exhaust. VOCs are a primary ingredient in the formation of ground-level ozone, which can trigger a variety of health problems in children, the elderly, and people of all ages who have lung diseases such as asthma.

The findings were published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“The big takeaway is how much VOC emissions from consumer products increase as urban population density increases, and how much these chemicals actually matter for producing ozone,” said researcher Matthew Coggon, a CIRES scientist working at NOAA who was lead author of the new study.


The NOAA mobile van approaches the World Trade Center in August 2018 collecting air samples that showed just how much personal care products contribute to ozone pollution.
 Credit: Brian McDonald/NOAA Chemical Sciences Laboratory

Now researchers in NOAAs Chemical Sciences Laboratory have turned their attention to two of the largest metropolitan areas in the Southwest U.S. They've been on the road since July conducting mobile laboratory and ground-site measurements in collaboration with university colleagues and stakeholders as part of the SUNVEx field research mission, investigating VOCs and other sources of urban air pollution in Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

A new threat to air quality emerges


For decades, air quality regulators made progress in reducing urban smog by controlling VOCs generated by the transportation and electric power sectors. Despite those gains, a groundbreaking paper published by NOAA scientists in 2018 showed that fossil fuel-based chemicals in a wide range of consumer products had emerged as a rival to tailpipes as a source of VOCs.

Coggon’s study built on another study published earlier this year in Environmental Science & Technology, which found volatile chemical products including paints, cleaners, and personal care products were responsible for 78% of the Manhattan VOC budget, versus just 22%for transportation.



The lead author of that study, CIRES scientist Georgios Gkatzelis, said he was initially skeptical that consumer products could play such a big role in ozone pollution. "Seeing all those cars when biking to work in Boulder, Colorado convinced me they had to be the dominant VOC source,” said Gkatzelis, now a research scientist in Germany. “But after driving our NOAA van though New York City and watching our instrument displays, Matt and I were often shouting at each other in amazement at what we were seeing."

Measurements taken in much less densely developed Boulder, Colorado, showed these volatile consumer products were still responsible for 42% of human-caused VOCs in the local atmosphere, with the transportation sector responsible for the rest. Gkatzelis estimated that averaged nationwide, 50-80% of pollution-forming urban VOCs are associated with volatile chemical products.
Engineered to evaporate

VOCs are a class of carbon-based compounds that arise from many different sources, both natural, like pine forests, and man-made, like fossil fuel emissions. Volatile chemical products are a category of VOCs that share two common characteristics. Key ingredients must evaporate in order for them to function, to carry scent for example, or to cause a residue to stick to a surface. These evaporative ingredients - including the fragrances featured in a wide array of products - are typically derived from fossil fuels.



Schematic illustration of air pollutants present in urban areas that contribute to ozone and aerosol formation (i.e. smog). VOCs arise from both natural (biogenic) and man-made sources, whereas NOx is emitted by human activities. Credit: Chelsea Thompson, NOAA Chemical Sciences Laboratory


VOCs are one of two critical constituents needed to produce ground-level ozone pollution and urban smog - nitrogen oxides (or NOx) being the other. In the air, sunlight can trigger VOCs to react with NOx to form ozone and particulate matter. Air quality regulations typically target both to control ozone pollution.
A new challenge for health officials

The growing body of work shows that emissions from volatile chemical products are ubiquitous, contributing up to half or more of the total anthropogenic VOC emissions in the U.S. and European cities that were investigated. Vehicle traffic dominates the remainder.

Coggon said the current generation of air quality models do not accurately simulate both the emissions and atmospheric chemistry of these consumer products and must be updated in order to capture their full impact on urban air quality. In areas where ozone pollution is a problem, new strategies to control VOC sources may need to be devised, he said.

“We know now that these products are making ozone pollution worse,” Coggon said. “We can’t control what the trees are emitting, but what we can do is look for ways to make these common everyday products less polluting.”
Experts warn of high levels of chemicals in clothes by some fast-fashion retailers

Shein, AliExpress, Zaful stop sales of questionable products to Canadians following Marketplace investigation

Jenny Cowley, Stephanie Matteis, Charlsie Agro · CBC News · Posted: Oct 01, 2021
Out of 38 products ordered from fast-fashion giants, CBC Marketplace found one in five items had elevated levels of chemicals, including lead, phthalates and PFAS.
 (Stephanie Matteis/CBC)

Canadians who purchase cheap fast fashion from online retailers may be exposing themselves to potentially toxic chemicals.

A Marketplace investigation found that out of 38 samples of children's, adult's and maternity clothes and accessories, one in five items had elevated levels of chemicals — including lead, PFAS and phthalates — that experts found concerning.

"People should be shocked," said Miriam Diamond, an environmental chemist and professor at the University of Toronto. Diamond oversaw the lab testing that Marketplace commissioned.

Watch the full investigation


Watch
Toxic Clothing
Lab tests expose toxic chemicals found on new clothes. And how to fight back against overseas fraudsters. 22:30


Scientists found that a jacket for toddlers, purchased from Chinese retailer Shein, contained almost 20 times the amount of lead that Health Canada says is safe for children. A red purse, also purchased from Shein, had more than five times the threshold.

"This is hazardous waste," said Diamond.

This jacket, purchased for $23 from Chinese fast-fashion giant Shein, contained almost 20 times the limit of lead Health Canada says is safe in children’s products.
 (David Abrahams/CBC)

"I'm alarmed because we're buying what looks cute and fashionable on this incredibly short fashion cycle. What we're doing today is to look [for] very short-lived enjoyment out of some articles of clothing that cost so much in terms of our … future health and environmental health. That cost is not worth it."

Shein, which sells products both under its own brand and from third-party suppliers, sent an emailed statement to Marketplace saying it had removed the purse and jacket from its app, and would stop working with relevant suppliers until the issue was resolved. "We are committed to continuous improvement of our supply chain," the company said.

Marketplace found garments containing elevated levels of chemicals from three fast-fashion retailers: Zaful, AliExpress and Shein.

These companies boast hundreds to thousands of styles updated daily at rock-bottom prices. Tops are available for under $5, sneakers for under $10. Marketplace purchased a kids raincoat from AliExpress for just $6 US.

Miriam Diamond, a professor at the University of Toronto, oversaw the lab testing Marketplace commissioned to test for PFAS, heavy metals and phthalates in clothing. Here, she’s holding a purse from Shein that contained over five times the amount of lead that Health Canada considers safe in children’s products. (CBC)

Lead can cause damaging health effects to the brain, heart, kidneys and reproductive system. Children and pregnant people are more vulnerable, and infants and children are the most at risk, according to Health Canada's website.

Lead is a naturally occurring element that can be found throughout the environment, but Joël Mertens, a product environmental impacts expert at the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, said the levels found in Marketplace's lab results were beyond environmental contamination, or the small amounts clothes are exposed to unintentionally during the manufacturing process.

"There were clearly products that were intentionally using lead and intentionally using it in a way that was well above what should be considered responsible — or even safe," he said.

Mertens explained that lead can be used in textile dye pigments, but there are safer alternatives that can achieve the same results.

How to make sense of the new findings on 'forever chemicals' in makeup

MARKETPLACE  What really happens to old clothes dropped in those in-store recycling bins

Diamond pointed to the broader concerns stemming from the industry itself, noting that it's not just the consumer that could be exposed to the ill effects of lead; it's the entire supply chain, from mining the lead to shipping the final product.

"If the final product isn't safe for me, it's definitely not safe for the workers that are handling these chemicals to make it," said Diamond.

Health Canada would not give an interview, but in an emailed statement said it "monitors the marketplace and follows up on all identified consumer product risks."
Expert: Current regulations on phthalates not strong enough in Canada

Other articles of clothing contained elevated levels of phthalates, a group of chemicals often used to make plastic more flexible.

A clear tote purchased from Zaful contained enough phthalates, including DEHP, DiNP and DnOP, that Diamond and Mertens suggested Health Canada review the product.

Health Canada restricts some phthalates in children's toys — like DEHP, DiNP and DnOP — to no more than 1,000 parts per million (ppm) each. However, it is unclear if it would be considered a children's product.

Health Canada has proposed to ban DEHP in all products bought and sold in Canada, but it is not yet in effect.

Diamond said more attention should be paid to all phthalates, many of which are considered endocrine disruptors, which are chemicals that can interfere with hormones. They can also have developmental effects, and target the liver and kidneys, with particular concerns about its effect on people in their reproductive years, she said.

After notifying Zaful of the lab results, the company wrote in a statement that it is recalling the clear tote purse and sending customers who purchased it a refund.

This clear tote purse, purchased from Zaful for $13 US, contained levels of phthalates that concerned experts. (David Abrahams/CBC)

In addition to the tote purse, Diamond flagged elevated levels of phthalates in a children's tutu dress from Shein, a children's dress featuring Elsa from the movie Frozen from AliExpress, the red purse purchased from Shein, a children's raincoat set from AliExpress and a set of plastic bibs from AliExpress. None exceeded Health Canada's limits.

But Diamond still has concern, particularly with the tendency for children to suck on clothing or put it in their mouths. Children's skin also can absorb chemicals easier than adults' skin, she said.

After informing retailers of Marketplace's investigation, Shein, Zaful and AliExpress removed all questionable products from their sites. The companies confirmed they would be investigating further, and taking action against suppliers and sellers if necessary.

Click here for full statements from the companies featured in this investigation

Health Canada addressed the tote in an emailed statement, writing that the presence of phthalates doesn't always mean a risk. The regulator suggested that unless a toddler under age four is sucking on the purse for more than three hours on a daily basis, the purse is not a significant source of exposure to phthalates.

WATCH | Marketplace finds toxic chemicals in some ultra fast-fashion items:

Toxic chemicals found in some Shein, AliExpress and Zaful clothes
A Marketplace investigation found lead, phthalates and 'forever chemicals' in purses, jackets and Disney princess dresses. 2:13


Some scientists are calling for stronger regulations on phthalates in Canada. Unlike the European Union, where the combined amount of phthalates is considered in regulations, Canada restricts each phthalate individually.

"The question naturally arises that combined exposures are possible," said Eva Pip, a biologist and professor at the University of Winnipeg. "You can't have more than 1,000 [ppm] of any individual [phthalates] they list, but you could theoretically have 900 [ppm] of each of them together and still be okay."

In 2021, Health Canada published a document stating that the combined exposure of phthalates to the Canadian environment is "below the levels that are expected to cause death to organisms."

Pip thinks this needs to change. "Given the fact that these chemicals are hormone and developmental disruptors, death [to organisms] is a pretty extreme criterion to determine harm," she said.

Unnecessary forever chemicals found in rain gear


The scientists also tested for PFAS, a collection of fluorinated compounds commonly used in clothing for waterproofing and stain resistance.

Many PFAS are known to be endocrine disruptors, and all are considered "forever chemicals" because they aren't flushed from the body and don't break down in the environment.

Potential harmful effects include "increasing obesity to impairing immune function to different types of cancers to even diabetes,'' Diamond said, noting: "This is a class of chemicals that should not be used unless they're absolutely essential."

A raincoat purchased for $13.21 US from AliExpress contained high levels of PFAS, said Diamond.

Health Canada prohibits the sale and import of any products containing particular fluorinated compounds, including the type CBC tested for, with the exception of products containing trace amounts of the chemical. However, the regulator doesn't specify what a trace amount would be.

"This creates a huge loophole," said Pip. "The manufacturer can claim that presence [of PFAS] in the product is incidental."

When reviewing the amount of PFAS found in the AliExpress raincoat, Pip said: "It is hard to imagine this is an incidental amount."

When CBC brought the lab results to AliExpress, the company removed the raincoat from its online marketplace, confirming that it would be investigating further.

A pink raincoat, purchased from AliExpress for $13.21 US, contained 220 parts per billion (ng/g) of PFAS, a type of ‘forever chemical’ that Diamond says should not be used in any product unless it is ‘absolutely essential.’ Experts considered this amount to be 'high.' (David Abrahams/CBC)

In addition to affecting human health, the chemicals assessed can enter the environment through laundering. A 2019 study from B.C.'s Ocean Wise found that up to 4.3 million microfibres can be shed in just one load of laundry.

Mertens suggests PFAS are not essential, and there's suitable alternatives easily available, such as wax for water repellency, or newer, degradable chemical compounds with similar effects.

"This is actually one of the areas that the industry has been focusing on, especially leading players in the industry, is phasing out PFAS compounds for alternatives," said Mertens.

Health Canada initially told Marketplace it has "identified concerns with PFAS and actively monitors the evolving science related to these substances." With the products that concerned experts, the regulator confirmed it will "assess compliance and take immediate action as appropriate." Ultimately though, the regulator said it is up to companies to provide safe products to Canadians. 

So you still need new clothes. Here's what to do

Mertens says that while the fashion supply chain is complicated and spans many countries, the onus is on the brands themselves to oversee the process so it eliminates unnecessary chemicals.

"There are many, many organizations and groups out there that can help any brand or manufacturer navigate this space. Nobody really has an excuse to say, 'Well, I just don't know how to tackle it,' including small brands."

Mertens suggests consumers look for brands that complete product safety compliance through organizations like Oeko-Tex or Bluesign, which set restricted substances limits in each article of clothing based onrogressive international regulations, like the EU's REACH, which sets safe levels of certain chemicals in clothing.

And if you already own the garments? Diamond says some chemicals can wash out of clothes.

However, she adds, "In the long term, you know, I just don't want to buy it."

Brazil's indigenous leaders call for stronger rights as UN nature summit begins

Issued on: 11/10/2021 - 
Destruction of ecosystems like the Amazon rainforest in Brazil also threatens human lives and health 
© Mauro Pimentel, AFP/File
Text by:NEWS WIRES
4 min
Listen to the article

Indigenous peoples in the Amazon rainforest have a clear message for decision-makers ahead of two global environment conferences: respect our land and human rights to slow climate change and protect biodiversity.

"People who exploit and take out resources don't live (in the Amazon) - but we do. The forest is our home," said Nemonte Nenquimo, a native leader of Ecuador's Waorani people.

"If we don't protect the forest, climate change will get worse and unknown illnesses will come," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a video call from her Amazon community.

About 195 countries are expected to finalise a new pact to safeguard the planet's plants, animals and ecosystems at the two-part COP15 UN summit, which starts on Monday with a virtual session and concludes in May 2022 in Kunming, China.

The accord will build on the 1992 UN Convention on Biological Diversity, designed to protect the planet's rich catalogue of plant and animal species, ensure sustainable use of natural resources and enshrine the "biocultural rights" of indigenous communities.

Such rights are interpreted differently by each indigenous group but often include intellectual property, such as ancestral knowledge and practices handed down between generations.

Those range from farming methods, crops and plant-based medicine used in an area to traditional arts and crafts. Ancient plant remedies often form the basis of modern treatments.

Chile's rare native quillay trees, for instance, long used by the indigenous Mapuche people to make soap and medicine, provided key ingredients for the world's first malaria vaccine and a successful shingles vaccination.

A draft of the proposed new UN biodiversity pact includes a goal to ensure that benefits derived from the use of local genetic richness "are shared fairly and equitably" and also support conservation and sustainable use of those resources.

The draft also calls for a boost in the share of financial and other benefits the holders of traditional knowledge receive from wider use of their ideas and local species.

On Monday, more than 150 civil society and indigenous groups as well as academics, from more than 50 countries, published an open letter calling on world leaders to put human rights at the centre of environmental policy, ahead of the two UN summits.

"To be truly just and sustainable, policies on climate and nature must take into account the needs and rights of communities at the frontline of the crises," said Andrew Norton, director of the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development.

Cultural Appropriation?

How well the intellectual property of indigenous groups is protected today varies from country to country.

A study published this year by Fundacion Nativo, a Venezuela-based indigenous rights nonprofit, found five Latin American nations - Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Mexico and Venezuela - now recognise such rights through law and the constitution.

"Denying a people their biocultural rights is denying their very existence," said Sagrario Santorum, head of development at Fundacion Nativo.

The research, supported by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, showed most Latin American nations allow indigenous communities to hold intellectual property rights and seek compensation when their designs or medicines are copied without permission.

Cultural appropriation came under the spotlight in May when Mexico accused fashion brands, including Zara, of using patterns from the country's indigenous groups without any benefit to the communities. Zara-owner Inditex denied any wrongdoing.

"In Latin America, the legal framework to protect biocultural rights is pretty much there. However, there's a huge gap in implementation and enforcement," said Patricia Quijano, an environmental lawyer in Peru.

"At the end of the day, indigenous groups often don't have the power to protect and exercise those rights," she added.

Indigenous activist Nenquimo, in Ecuador, agreed.

"There are many laws that protect indigenous rights on paper and they sound nice, but it's just on paper," she said of Ecuador's legislation.

Buffer Against Climate Change

Better protection of biocultural rights can help indigenous people manage land and natural resources more effectively in line with "their profound and unique relation with the environment", Quijano said.

That is also important because protecting and restoring carbon-absorbing native tropical forests is a powerful and inexpensive way to combat climate change, forest and indigenous experts say.

A report this year from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) showed that protecting the biocultural rights of forest-dwelling and indigenous communities, along with granting them secure land tenure, reduces deforestation and promotes the sustainable management of natural resources.

"Nature has greater biodiversity where indigenous peoples are present. The land is richer where they are," said Santorum.

"That's no accident. It is the product of a way of life that's transmitted from generation to generation," she added.

Defending indigenous rights is considered particularly crucial to conserving the Amazon and indigenous leaders hope the issue will also garner greater attention at the COP26 UN climate change conference in Scotland next month.

In Brazil - home to the biggest share of the Amazon rainforest - deforestation is surging as a result of expanding cattle-ranching and soy farming, along with illegal logging.

Deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon has risen sharply since right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro took office in 2019.

(THOMSON REUTERS)
This crazy shipping crisis, explained

Andy Serwer with Max Zahn
Sat, October 9, 2021
 California, U.S., April 7, 2021. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

LONG READ

As we head closer to the second anniversary (if that’s the right word for it) of the pandemic, it’s clear we’ve made some great progress fighting COVID-19.

We have testing and vaccines that work. We know masks and social distancing are effective. Despite the nagging disruptions that mark much of what we do — and even worse the horror of continued sickness and death — in some ways, we can hope that the worst is behind us.

But not all of it. An under-recognized characteristic of any pandemic is its nonlinear course, which delivers, in true viral fashion, shocking, unanticipated consequences. That brings us — 20 or so months into the COVID-19 pandemic — to a vast oceanic parking lot dotted with scores of giant container ships off the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles.

No doubt you’ve heard how the world’s supply chain is being stressed like never before, resulting in shortages and delays in everything from semiconductors, to cars, sneakers, exercise equipment, and Rolexes. Initially this was because factories in Asia (for example) had to close for weeks or even months because workers were sick with the coronavirus. That was true and still is the case in Vietnam, for instance.

Now the pain point has shifted to ships. What we are witnessing is a massive, unprecedented traffic jam of humankind's largest sea vessels that is at the very core of the conundrum.

“I don't think anyone's ever seen anything like this in their careers, anyone who's alive,” says a board member of a large shipping company whose family has been in the business for decades. "Containergeddon,” is what Steve Ferreira of shipping consultancy Ocean Audit calls it, according to Reuters.

How bad is this? How did it happen? What does this mean going forward? How will this impact the U.S. economy? And how and when does it get resolved?

Let’s start at the very beginning, (as Maria von Trapp might say). First understand that 90% of the world's global trade is shipped by sea, with 70% in containers. Over the past two decades, a number of trends have shaped the business.

First, when it comes to the United States, we have been increasing our outsourcing and reliance on imported goods. Example: In January 1985 (as far back as data went), we imported $293 million of goods from China (and had a positive trade balance). Flash forward to today, in August of this year, our imports from China totaled nearly $43 billion. That’s up 146-fold in 36 years. Our imports from Asia across the board are up. China is the No. 1 exporting nation to the U.S., but Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam are also on the top 10 list.

Second, companies and consumers increasingly count on just-in-time inventory systems to order goods. That makes for lower inventories, which reduces costs for U.S. companies and allows consumers unprecedented immediate gratification from a global cornucopia of goods. Example: If Pottery Barn needs 50 couches from China, the company orders it, and two weeks later or three weeks later, the couches are on the West Coast of the United States.

Third, the shipping business over the past decade has not been very profitable — ”a fricking nightmare” my source called it — until now (see below), which meant there was little investment in new ships. Meanwhile in the U.S., railroads have been cutting costs and reducing headcount. This on that last point from an AP story:

“More than 22% of the jobs at railroads Union Pacific, CSX and Norfolk Southern have been eliminated since 2017, when CSX implemented a cost-cutting system called Precision Scheduled Railroading that most other U.S. railroads later copied. BNSF, [owned by Berkshire Hathaway] the largest U.S. railroad and the only one that hasn’t expressly adopted that model, has still made staff cuts to improve efficiency and remain competitive.”

Shipping containers are unloaded from ships at a container terminal at the Port of Long Beach-Port of Los Angeles complex, amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, in Los Angeles, California, U.S., April 7, 2021. 
REUTERS/Lucy NicholsonMore

What all this means is that the global supply chain, particularly the part of it that connects Asia to the U.S., has been running at full capacity with no margin for error.

“When you have a problem anywhere in the supply chain, it’s going to have a ripple down effect, like playing dominoes,” says Cathy Roberson, founder and president of supply chain consulting group Logistics Trends and Insights LLC, and former market analyst at UPS Supply Chain Solutions. “If freight is late arriving at port, that means the time scheduled for the truck to be at port is wrong; now you have to go back and reschedule. That will cause additional delays and costs; now you have to put the items in a temporary warehouse if you can find space. Incurring additional costs for that. From there, once you finally get a truck, moving it inland you have to constantly reschedule delivery times. Having to jungle all that, monitor that, takes time and takes people and costs extra money.”

“We’re living on our grandparents’ investments here,” says John Porcari, the port envoy to the Biden-Harris Administration Supply Chain Disruptions Task Force, who was appointed in August to address port congestion. “As global commerce increased, as the e-commerce economy increased, we haven’t made infrastructure investments keep up. Seams in the structure were showing pre-COVID. The pandemic laid bare the underlying reality.” Porcari also points out that the domestic supply chain (ports, rail, and trucks) is almost entirely in the hands of private sector players that do very little data sharing.

So you take all that and then, enter COVID.


When the pandemic first hit full-bore last spring, and much of the world went into lockdown, global trade slowed as factories in China and elsewhere closed. The volume of goods to ship dropped. Meanwhile shell-shocked consumers, not knowing how long they’d be stuck at home, bought food and little else. So both supply and demand fell, ergo shipping volume and rates slumped. But not for long.

By late spring 2020, it became apparent that work from home wasn’t just until Memorial Day weekend, it was until, well, who knows. That’s when Americans began to buy Pelotons (PTON), patio furniture, and hiking boots in earnest. As factories came back on line in Asia, trade began to boom and boom and boom. All that money that once went to movie theaters, MLB games, and tropical resorts began to go instead to buying stuff. Stuff made in China.

Today, ports in the U.S., particularly on the West Coast and especially Long Beach-LA, where 36% of U.S. imports land, are unloading record amounts of cargo. And that’s where the traffic jam is the worst.

It's an understatement to say that demand for cargo ships is extreme. More accurate is off the charts. Check out the Howe Robinson Containership Charter Index, which essentially shows the cost of chartering a giant container ship. Yes, it's up 10X over the past year. The previous record was set back in June 2005, when it hit 2,093 points. (NB: You can see the little dip I was talking about when the pandemic first hit.)

Graph depicts the Howe Robinson Containership Index over time up to Oct. 6. Courtesy of Howe Robinson.

What does that mean in practical terms? Well, shipping companies are mining money, for one. And companies like Walmart (WMT), Costco (COST), Home Depot (HD), and others have responded by chartering their own ships. For how much? Below are two examples. I can’t be more specific because the companies are loathe to have these crazy numbers put out there.

Item: One of America’s largest big box retailers, just chartered a cargo ship for $80,000 a day for one year. A year ago, that would have been $10,000 or $15,000 a day.

Item: One of Japan's "Sogo shosha," or giant holding companies, is looking to charter a ship for $130,000 a day for three years, which would have been $20,000 a year ago. The company will have to put up $35 million for the first nine months in cash, on day one.

Wow! Who’s going to pay for all that? We are of course, via higher priced goods. If that doesn’t scream inflation to you, you must be high. And I’m talking about non-transitory inflation here, as in real inflation that sticks around for years.

Another issue here is that while those big companies can afford to charter their own ships to get their goods, smaller companies can't, which confers a big advantage to the big players at the expense of the little guys. Consider the economic implications of that.

The Washington Post ran an excellent piece recently that got into much of this. Here are just two of the many bullet points worth noting:

“This month, the median cost of shipping a standard rectangular metal container from China to the West Coast of the United States hit a record $20,586, almost twice what it cost in July, which was twice what it cost in January, according to the Freightos index.”

And:

“The seven largest publicly traded ocean carriers — including companies such as Maersk, COSCO and Hapag-Lloyd — reported more than $23 billion in profits in the first half of this year, compared with just $1 billion in the same period last year.” Talk about flush times.

The Post article goes on to describe a system in the U.S. where shippers, ports, truckers, and railroads don’t communicate with each other nearly enough or as much as in other countries. It’s also the case that truckers are overworked and overwhelmed. There are reportedly now 16 containers waiting for every available truck at the port of LA. Railroads are scrambling to hire (back) workers.

So just how bad is that traffic jam off of southern California now? At last count there were 60 ships lined up off Long Beach-LA. (There were some delays there even pre-COVID. Check out these satellite pictures.) There are now too many to anchor — new ships are being told to just drift in deep water. A few weeks ago it was even worse. Last month Popular Science reported that “a record 88 ships were sitting on the horizon, forming a line of vessels stretching south over 40 miles, from the entrance of the Port of Los Angeles all the way down to Dana Point.”


Container ships and oil tankers wait in the ocean outside the Port of Long Beach-Port of Los Angeles complex, amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, in Los Angeles, California, U.S., April 7, 2021. 
REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

If 60 ships doesn’t sound like much, understand that these ships are monsters, carrying as much as 23,000 TEUs (or twenty-foot equivalent units) containers, or half that number of FEUs (forty-foot equivalent units), the latter being the more common intermodal size that you see trucks hauling. Each FEU container can hold up to 29 tons.

Example: An average dishwasher weighs 77 pounds and displaces some 16 cubic feet, (yes, I factored in packing materials.) So one forty-foot container, which can hold up to 58,000 pounds and about 2000 cubic feet of cargo, could contain roughly 125 dishwashers In theory then, doing the math, a single ship could hold 1.4 million dishwashers, (125 dishwashers X 11,500 FEUs per ship) which is about 16% of the total number of dishwashers shipped in the U.S. in a recent year.

Unfortunately, as in the case of bad storms for air travel or a car crash for a highway trip, the delays are spreading. Shippers have been bypassing choked West Coast ports and sending vessels east to Savannah and New York. Now there are 24 ships off of Savannah (which is unprecedented) and seven to nine (depending which day you count) off New York City. Volume coming in is overwhelming the facilities in both locales. “Everyone is so focused on Los Angeles/Long Beach that the other ports are getting passes,” Craig Grossgart, senior VP global ocean at Seko Logistics, tells GCaptain. “Savannah is a mess, New York/New Jersey ports are a mess...”

The crisis has brought out bad behavior and unintended consequences. First, fear of shortages has caused businesses big and small, never mind consumers, to engage in precautionary orders, (hoarding) in anticipation of delays. This of course only exacerbates the problem, by stuffing more goods in the supply chain. Then there’s also additional air pollution created by the ships waiting in those traffic jams.

And you have wing nuts posting false information on social media, like this gem: “There are now 56 cargo freighters anchored off the coast of California from Oakland to Long Beach in what can only be considered a manufactured supply-chain halt.” False. This is not a “manufactured” halt. Facebook reportedly flagged this and other posts like it.

The Washington Post reports that shippers “often decline to send containers inland to collect American farm exports, preferring to rush them back to Asia to capitalize on high eastbound freight rates. That’s why the LA port exports three times as many empty containers as full ones.” Guess what that’s doing to our trade balance.

'This is a wake-up call'


What’s being done about all this? Here’s John Porcari, Biden’s port envoy: “We’re focused first on the short term, next 90 days, and second on longer term structural changes that need to be made. Doing both simultaneously is important. In the short term, we have to work with the system we have and the existing private operators have to increase the tempo on what they have. Over the longer term, as we build a better system — truly a system, not a bunch of individual elements that are flying in loose formation — there’s certainly a role of public investment to augment private investment."

And so yes, LA and Long Beach are expanding their working hours, which is great. But remember the truckers and railroads are working flat out. There are also plans “for more data sharing and squeezing more productivity out of the system,” according to Freight Waves. Fair enough.

I agree with Christopher Tang, a professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, focusing on the global supply chain, who has consulted for companies such as Amazon and IBM. He says: “This is a wake-up call. I think globalization was under the assumption that global trade is frictionless. When you click, you get the product. American consumers in the pandemic have come to understand over-dependence on foreign supplies.

“It’s time for the U.S. to rethink how to coordinate the supply chain. For some products, it’s time for us to produce them in the U.S.; for others, we can diversify the supply chain.”

Or maybe Americans just need to buy less stuff. (Ha!)

I don’t want to be alarmist, but it’s hard to see this completely clearing up anytime soon. Experts say that the snarls could be with us through 2022. Just one, for instance: “Operating ships is far more difficult now,” says my shipping source. “With COVID [protocols] you've got 200 countries with 200 different rules.”

And now, enter the holiday shopping season.

You may recall, back during an August visit to Singapore, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris warned about supply chain disruptions, saying: “If you want to have Christmas toys for your children, now might be the time to start buying them, because the delay may be many, many months...”

On the other hand, this holiday season you might want to consider giving your loved ones boxes of holiday cookies. Locally baked or homemade, of course.

This article was featured in a Saturday edition of the Morning Brief on October 9, 2021.

Correction: Because of some flawed thinking on my part, (I neglected to consider volume in addition to weight), in a previous version of this story I miscalculated the number of dishwashers that a forty-foot container (FEU) and by extension a container ship could hold.

I have now replaced this paragraph:

Example: An average dishwasher weighs 77 pounds. So one container could hold roughly 700 dishwashers (yes, I l factored in packing materials.) In theory then, doing the math, a single ship could hold 8 million dishwashers, which is right around the total number shipped in the U.S. each year.

With this paragraph (where I also clarified that I was referring to forty-foot containers and not twenty-foot containers.)

Example: An average dishwasher weighs 77 pounds and displaces some 16 cubic feet, (yes, I factored in packing materials.) So one forty-foot container, which can hold up to 58,000 pounds and about 2000 cubic feet of cargo, could contain roughly 125 dishwashers In theory then, doing the math, a single ship could hold 1.4 million dishwashers, (125 dishwashers X 11,500 FEUs per ship) which is about 16% of the total number of dishwashers shipped in the U.S. in a recent year.
Why India is on the brink of an unprecedented power crisis


Arunoday Mukharji - BBC News, Delhi
Mon, October 11, 2021

Electricity pylons at sunrise in Delhi, India.

India is on the brink of an unprecedented power crisis.

More than half of the country's 135 coal-fired power plants are running on fumes - as coal stocks run critically low.

In a country where 70% of the electricity is generated using coal, this is a major cause for concern as it threatens to derail India's post-pandemic economic recovery.

Why is this happening?


This crisis has been in the making for months.

As India's economy picked up after a deadly second wave of Covid-19, demand for power rose sharply.

Power consumption in the last two months alone jumped by almost 17%, compared to the same period in 2019.

At the same time global coal prices increased by 40% and India's imports fell to a two-year low.

The country is the world's second largest importer of coal despite also being home to the fourth largest coal reserves in the world.

Power plants that usually rely on imports are now heavily dependent on Indian coal, adding further pressure to already stretched domestic supplies.
What is the likely impact?

Experts say importing more coal to make up for domestic shortages is not an option at present.

"We have seen shortages in the past, but what's unprecedented this time is coal is really expensive now," said Dr Aurodeep Nandi, India Economist and Vice President at Nomura.

"If I am [as a company] importing expensive coal, I will raise my prices, right? Businesses at the end of the day pass on these costs to consumers, so there is an inflationary impact - both direct and indirect that could potentially come from this," he added.

If the crisis continues, a surge in the cost of electricity will be felt by consumers. Retail inflation is already high as everything from oil to food has become more expensive.

Vivek Jain, Director at India Ratings Research described the situation as "precarious".

In recent years, India's production has lagged as the country tried to reduce its dependence on coal to meet climate targets.


India is the world's second largest importer of coal


India's Power Minister RK Singh, in an interview with The Indian Express newspaper, said the situation is "touch and go" and that the country should brace itself for the next five to six months.

A senior government official, on the condition of anonymity, confirmed to the BBC that the situation is worrying.

If this persists, Asia's third largest economy will struggle to get back on track, warns Ms Zohra Chatterji, the former Chief of Coal India Limited - a state-run enterprise responsible for 80% of the country's coal supply.

"Electricity powers everything, so the entire manufacturing sector- cement, steel, construction - everything gets impacted once there is a coal shortage."

She calls the current situation a "wake-up call for India" and says the time has come to reduce its over-dependence on coal and more aggressively pursue a renewable energy strategy.

What can the government do?

The question of how India can achieve a balance between meeting demand for electricity from its almost 1.4bn people and the desire to cut its reliance on heavily polluting coal burning power plants has been a major challenge for the government in recent years.

The vast scale of the problem makes a short-term solution unlikely, according to Dr Nandi.

"It's just the sheer scale of things. A huge chunk of our energy comes from thermal [coal]. I don't think we've reached that stage yet where we have an effective substitute for thermal. So yes, it's a wake-up call, but I don't think the centrality of coal in our energy needs is set to be to be replaced anytime soon, he said.

Experts advocate a mix of coal and clean sources of energy as a possible long-term solution.

Why India can't live without coal

"It's not completely possible to transition and it's never a good strategy to transition 100% to renewables without a backup. You only transition if you have that backup available because then you're exposing a lot of manufacturing to many risks associated with the environment", Mr Jain said.

Long term investment in multiple power sources aside, former bureaucrats like Ms Chatterji say a crisis like the current one can be averted- with better planning.

She feels there is need for closer coordination between Coal India Limited - the largest supplier of coal in the country and other stakeholders.

From ensuring smooth last-mile delivery to demanding more accountability from power companies in India, Ms Chatterji adds, "power producers must stockpile coal reserves, they must have a certain quantity at all times.

But in the past we have seen that has not happened, because maintaining such an inventory comes at a financial cost."

What could happen next?


It is unclear how long the current situation will last, but Dr Nandi is cautiously optimistic.

He says "with the monsoon on its way out and winter approaching, the demand for power usually falls.

So, the mismatch between demand and supply may iron out to some extent".

Vivek Jain adds, "This is a global phenomenon, one not specifically restricted to India. If gas prices dip today, there could be a switch back to gas. It's a dynamic situation".

For now, the Indian government has said it is working with state-run enterprises to ramp up production and mining to reduce the gap between supply and demand.

The government is also hoping to source coal from so-called "captive" mines. Captive mines are operations that produce coal or minerals solely for the company that owns them and under normal conditions are not allowed to sell what they produce to other businesses.

The overwhelming verdict from experts is that short-term fixes may help to get India through the current energy crunch but the country needs to work towards long-term alternatives to ensure its growing domestic power needs are met.

As India works to climb out of one of the worst recessions among the world's major economies the country will aim to avoid any further hurdles.

Since the publication of this article India's Ministry of Coal has released a statement to reassure businesses and consumers that the country has enough coal to supply power plants.

In an announcement on 10 October the ministry said: "Ample coal is available in the country to meet the demand of power plants. Any fear of disruption in power supply is entirely misplaced."
Columbus believed he would find 'blemmyes' and 'sciapods' – not people – in the New World

Peter C. Mancall, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Sun, October 10, 2021


The statue of Christopher Columbus in Columbus Circle, New York City. Zoltan Tarlacz/Shutterstock.com

In 1492, when Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic Ocean in search of a fast route to East Asia and the southwest Pacific, he landed in a place that was unknown to him. There he found treasures – extraordinary trees, birds and gold.

But there was one thing that Columbus expected to find that he didn’t.

Upon his return, in his official report, Columbus noted that he had “discovered a great many islands inhabited by people without number.” He praised the natural wonders of the islands.

But, he added, “I have not found any monstrous men in these islands, as many had thought.”

Why, one might ask, had he expected to find monsters?

My research and that of other historians reveal that Columbus’ views were far from abnormal. For centuries, European intellectuals had imagined a world beyond their borders populated by “monstrous races.”

Of course the ‘monstrous races’ exist


One of the earliest accounts of these non-human beings was written by the Roman natural historian Pliny the Elder in 77 A.D. In a massive treatise, he told his readers about dog-headed people, known as cynocephalus, and astoni, creatures with no mouth and no need to eat.

Across medieval Europe, tales of marvelous and inhuman creatures – of cyclops, blemmyes, creatures with heads in their chests, and sciapods, who had a single leg with a giant foot – circulated in manuscripts hand-copied by scribes who often embellished their treatises with illustrations of these fantastic creatures.


Though there were always some skeptics, most Europeans believed that distant lands would be populated by these monsters, and stories of monsters traveled far beyond the rarefied libraries of elite readers.

For example, churchgoers in Fréjus, an ancient market town in the south of France, could wander into the cloister of the Cathédrale Saint-Léonce and study monsters on the more than 1,200 painted wooden ceiling panels. Some panels portrayed scenes of daily life – local monks, a man riding a pig and contorted acrobats. Many others depicted monstrous hybrids, dog-headed people, blemmyes and other fearsome wretches.



Perhaps no one did more to spread news of monsters’ existence than a 14th-century English knight named John Mandeville, who, in his account of his travels to faraway lands, claimed to have seen people with the ears of an elephant, one group of creatures who had flat faces with two holes, and another that had the head of a man and the body of a goat.

Scholars debate whether Mandeville could have ventured far enough to see the places that he described, and whether he was even a real person. But his book was copied time and again, and likely translated into every known European language.

Leonardo da Vinci had a copy. So did Columbus.

Old beliefs die hard


Even though Columbus didn’t see monsters, his report wasn’t enough to dislodge prevailing ideas about the creatures Europeans expected to find in parts unknown.

In 1493 – around the time Columbus’ first report began to circulate – printers of the “Nuremberg Chronicle,” a massive volume of history, included images and descriptions of monsters. And soon after the explorer’s return, an Italian poet offered a verse translation describing Columbus’ journey, which its printer illustrated with monsters, including a sciapod and a blemmye.

Indeed, the belief that monsters lived at the Earth’s edge remained for generations.

In the 1590s, the English explorer Sir Walter Raleigh told readers about the American monsters he heard about in his travels to Guiana, some of which had “their eyes in their shoulders, and their mouths in the middle of their breasts, & that a long train of haire groweth backward between their shoulders.”

Soon after, the English natural historian Edward Topsell translated a mid-16th-century treatise of the various animals of the world, a book that appeared in London in 1607, the same year that colonists established a small community at Jamestown, Virginia. Topsell was eager to integrate descriptions of American animals in his book. But alongside chapters on Old World horses, pigs and beavers, readers learned about the “Norwegian monster” and a “very deformed beast” that Americans called an “haut.” Another, known as a “su,” had “a very deformed shape, and monstrous presence” and was “cruell, untamable, impatient, violent, [and] ravening.”

Of course, in the New World, the gains for Europeans came at a terrifying cost for Native Americans: The newcomers stole their land and treasures, enslaved them, introduced Old World diseases and spurred long-term environmental change.

In the end, perhaps these indigenous Americans saw the invaders of their homelands as a ‘monstrous race’ of its own – creatures who destabilized their communities, took their possessions and threatened their lives.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Peter C. Mancall, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Read more:
Sanjeev Gupta's GFG Alliance strikes debt deal with Credit Suisse
Sun, October 10, 2021, 1:38 PM·1 min read


 Liberty Steel's Sanjeev Gupta pictured in Scotland


LONDON (Reuters) - The GFG Alliance said on Sunday it had agreed a debt restructuring deal with Credit Suisse for its Australian steel and coal mining assets, and announced plans to inject 50 million pounds ($68 million) into the restart of its Rotherham electric furnace in the United Kingdom.

GFG, owned by commodities tycoon Sanjeev Gupta, has been scrambling to refinance its cash-starved web of businesses in steel, aluminium and energy after supply chain finance firm Greensill Capital filed for insolvency in March.

The debt restructuring for its Australia assets will allow GFG to make a "substantial upfront payment" to Greensill Bank and Credit Suisse, with the balance paid in instalments until the new maturity date of June 2023, a statement from GFG said
.

Zurich-based Credit Suisse had previously disclosed some $2.3 billion worth of loans exposed to financial and litigation uncertainties within Greensill-linked supply chain finance funds, with some $1.2 billion of its assets related to GFG.

Following the cash injection into its UK steel business, Liberty Steel, production will start in October with a plan for output to reach 50,000 tonnes per month as soon as possible, the statement said.

Jeffrey S. Stein, the chief restructuring officer, said in the statement that new lenders in Europe had expressed interest in refinancing GFG's steel assets.

In Europe, GFG said it had launched a legal action against private equity firm AIP, which said it had taken control of GFG's smelter in Dunkirk, Europe's largest primary aluminium producer.


($1 = 0.7332 pounds)