New Brunswick·Opinion

Fredericton's housing crisis prevents immigrants like me from pursuing a Canadian dream

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N.B. is courting newcomers, but the housing situation

awaiting many is desperate

Arun Budhathoki · for CBC Opinion · Posted: Nov 07, 2021 7:00 AM AT | Last Updated: November 7

Arun Budhathoki returned to Fredericton this fall to continue his studies. He is not sure whether he can afford to stay. (Submitted by Arun Budhathoki)

This column is an opinion by Arun Budhathoki, a Nepalese writer and graduate student living in Fredericton. For more information about CBC's Opinion section, please see the FAQ.

In September, I returned to Fredericton to continue my education, having been away from Canada for six years.

When I looked at the rental market, I could not believe how much things have changed — and also how sky-high rents are hurting the very newcomers the New Brunswick government wants to attract.

My journey from Nepal had been difficult, and I fell sick for a week. It wasn't COVID-19, thankfully. An old Canadian friend had generously picked me up from the Fredericton airport and let me stay with him as I recovered from the viral fever.

I search online for a room to rent, and to my utter disbelief I saw how prices had skyrocketed from what I encountered when I first came here, in 2013.

I asked my friend: what kind of immigrants does New Brunswick want? Is it just white-collar, cash-loaded newcomers who can afford the housing? What happens to lower-income newcomers who are captivated by the Canadian dream?

When I lived here before, during 2013-15, I paid about $300 to rent a room in a house. Of course, I understand things can change after five or six years.

A single room now rents from at least $500 and even rooms on the north side are above that. This amount may not be high in Canada, but that is a high monthly salary back in Nepal.

Early connections with a city

I should explain what took me away from Fredericton six years ago. When the news of the April 2015 Nepal earthquake hit me, my mind froze like the wintry St. John River. That year was probably the lowest in my life; later, there was a suicide in our extended family, and my parents were corralled by a political group and almost killed during the elections.

Guest columnist Arun Budhathoki says the City of Fredericton does not have a plan to help newcomers find affordable housing, and to entice them to stay permanently. (Gary Moore/CBC)

Far away from home, I was not able to digest it. A sense of responsibility troubled my conscience. When I was invited to read from my book Prisoner of an iPad: New Poems at an international book fair, I boarded a flight from Toronto and left Canada, always hoping to return.

One year's leave from the University of New Brunswick extended to four more, because of several circumstances. It was not easy for me to leave my family behind.

I feel bad to say this, but perhaps Canada is selling a fake dream to immigrants and should be honest about its housing crisis.

When I ask around about high rents, the typical answer involves COVID-19. It is also true that many folks from Ontario have moved to Fredericton during the pandemic, seeking lower house prices and the ability to work from their new homes. Realtors love this, I presume.

I wrote to my university about affordable housing, but they said they could do nothing about it, and it was the harsh reality that international students need to face.

• Fredericton housing crisis leaves some newcomers living in wretched conditions

• Loss of affordable rents forces growing number onto waitlist for subsidized housing

I wrote to the City of Fredericton. A reply said Mayor Kate Rogers has set up the Fredericton Affordable Housing Advisory Committee and developed a housing needs assessment/strategy for the city, although it also said that they had no immediate solutions.

Getting stuck like a thunderbolt

Reality strikes newcomers like a thunderbolt when they realize that housing is not as affordable as thought. I had assumed that the right to housing is enshrined in the Canadian Constitution, but I have learned that this is not so.

I feel bad to say this, but perhaps Canada is selling a fake dream to immigrants and should be honest about its housing crisis.

Tents began appearing along the banks of the St. John River this spring, in an evident sign that people could not access affordable housing in Fredericton. (Elizabeth Fraser/CBC)

I keep hearing that Canada needs immigrants as its population is aging. But just granting them a passage to come here might not be enough. When people do not have a roof to live under, social ills emerge. Canada needs productive and happy immigrants and not those overwhelmed by housing prices, trying to meet their ends every month.

It is the responsibility of Fredericton and its educational institutions to address the housing crisis. If not, many newcomers and even Canadians will continue to face its wrath.

There's a strong disconnect between New Brunswick's aspirations to lure immigrants and the housing market. If immigrants do not have access to proper jobs and the housing prices continue to skyrocket, I do not think any immigrant would live in New Brunswick.

• Record sales and prices for Fredericton real estate in 2020

Before returning to Canada, I dreamed of bringing my family here next year and raising them here.

New Brunswick is safer, quieter and cleaner than my hometown. However, I might have to reconsider that plan now.

Sometimes my mom would question my choices.

"Your younger sister is doing fine in the United States, and why do you wish to return to a cold country again?" she told me.

My response would be the same: "It is safer, and I need to finish my studies."

Arun Budhathoki came to Fredericton with dreams that he could build a life here for his family, once he completes his studies. Now, he is not certain. (Submitted by Arun Budhathoki)

I always liked Canada, and I could have gone to Australia or the United States back in 2013, but I took the leap of faith and arrived in the little-known city of Fredericton.

As I aspire to plant my roots here again, dreary paths lie ahead. But taking a walk down such paths is better than staying idle.

I believe in this city, and I know there's a reason why I'm back again: to chase the Canadian dream.

However, the housing crisis might deter it yet again.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arun Budhathoki

Contributor

Arun Budhathoki is a Nepalese freelance journalist, poet and writer based in Fredericton.

Silent hand signal that helped rescue U.S. teen was originally created in Canada

Sean Leathong

CTV News Toronto

 Videojournalist
Monday, November 8, 2021

TORONTO -- A silent signal, an open hand, a thumb tucked in, then covered by four fingers, originally created in Canada to help women who are in distress has played a major role in saving a 16-year-old girl in the United States.

"It was definitely a relief to see not only that this young woman in such a dangerous situation could use the signal but people knew how to respond to the signal," Andrea Gunraj from the Canadian Women's Foundation told CTV News Toronto.

The Canadian Women's Foundation created this signal and launched a campaign in April 2020. It was aimed at helping who may be in a dangerous situation at home reach out while in lockdown.

Gunraj was surprised at how well it was received.

"By July of 2020 we found that 1 in 3 people in Canada had heard of the signal for help or saw it being used and it went viral all over the world,” she said. “Over 70 countries showed it."


The signal gained traction on social media, particularity on Tik Tok with multiple posts aimed at teaching young women how to quietly call for help.

That is exactly what a 16-year-old girl was doing, through the passenger window of a car on the I-75 South in Kentucky a little after 12 p.m. this past Thursday.

"There was some people behind her, that noticed she was making hand gestures that signifies for, I need help,” Deputy Gilbert Acciardo from Laurel county Sheriff department in Kentucky said.

The girl, who is from North Carolina had been missing since Tuesday. She had been taken by a man in a car from her home state, to Ohio, and then headed south when she was spotted.

Those who saw the signal, called 911, following the car she was in for nearly 15 kilometers, until police were able to make a traffic stop.

"We don't know how long coming down the interstate from Ohio that she had been doing this to other motorists hoping that they would notice that she was in distress," says Acciardo.

James Herbert Brick, 61, was arrested and is facing charges of unlawful imprisonment, and possession of material showing a sexual performance by a minor.

Now the girl is being reunited with her family in North Carolina. Something that could have been so much worse, stopped by a hand signal.

"What a powerful thing,” Andrea Gunraj said. “ A signal is only as good as it's responded to."

Knowing that this signal can convey the most important of messages, understood by so many, and it's working.

Bank of Canada governor says central bank’s role includes reducing inequality

JORDAN PRESS
OTTAWA
THE CANADIAN PRESS

PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 9, 2021

The governor of the Bank of Canada has laid down an argument for the central bank’s actions during the pandemic, hours after the country’s opposition leader suggested the bank stay in its inflation-targeting lane.

The Bank of Canada enacted extraordinary measures during the pandemic to keep credit flowing and encourage low interest rates to spur demand.

Its program to purchase government bonds, known as quantitative easing, encouraged low rates on things such as mortgages and business loans while keeping borrowing costs low for a federal government spending historical amounts on emergency aid.

Speaking to a conference of central banks, Tiff Macklem said creating an inclusive recovery was fundamental to the central bank’s role in helping to manage the economy.

Macklem echoed calls earlier in the day by his American counterpart that leaving untouched entrenched inequalities holds back some citizens and economies from realizing their full potential.

Macklem also said talk about how to create an inclusive recovery shouldn’t be seen as an expansion of central bank mandates, but rather it is already part of their marching orders.

“This conversation in central banks has sparked a debate about whether central banks are expanding their mandates, whether we’re overreaching and getting distracted from our focus on inflation targeting, and even a criticism that we should stay in our lane,” he said Tuesday.

“My own view is that we are tasked with serving our citizens, not some of our citizens.”

High inflation is ‘transitory but not short-lived,’ says BoC governor Tiff Macklem

Macklem made the comments to end the conference on diversity and inclusiveness organized jointly by the Bank of Canada, the U.S. Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the European Central Bank. The Bank of Canada is set to host the conference next year.

But before that, the federal government has to renew the Bank of Canada’s mandate, which has happened every five years over the last three decades.

The bank has been charged with anchoring inflation to between one and three per cent, a range that often sees it target price increases to roughly two per cent.

The pandemic upended the central bank’s inflation framework, first by dropping inflation in 2020 to 0.7 per cent, and now sending the consumer price index to an 18-year high – the annual inflation rate was 4.4 per cent in September – amid supply-chain issues that Macklem has warned will push up inflation rates further, keeping them higher for longer.

The inflationary roller-coaster has sparked calls on Parliament Hill from the Opposition Conservatives that the central bank’s own actions, coupled with historic deficits, are driving up the cost of living.

Speaking to reporters earlier in the day, Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole warned Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that the central bank’s marching orders should focus only on inflation-targeting and nothing more.

“We’re really worried about our economic future,” O’Toole said after unveiling Pierre Poilievre, a frequent critic of the central bank, as his new finance critic.

“We also don’t think the mandate of the bank should be extended – we’ve been very clear on that – to include a range of other factors. We have to focus on our fundamentals.”

A decision on the central bank’s mandate should be made by the end of this year, or early next.

The Tories have also taken aim at the central bank’s quantitative easing program, which reduced returns on short-term government bonds and likely made buyers think more about long-term bonds that lock in debt at today’s low interest rates.

Macklem said Tuesday that the bond-buying program challenged public perceptions of the Bank of Canada’s independence from political influence.

He also said it is more important than ever for central banks to be clear about their actions and objectives.

“Trust comes when everyone understands the actions we are taking, and why,” he said.

MORE STUFF IN SPACE

The US Space Force Has Detected an Unknown Object Orbiting Near China's Satellite

And it 'appears to be a deliberate synchronization'.

By Brad Bergan Nov 10, 2021 

China's Long March-3B vehicle rocketing to space.

CCTV / YouTube

China's satellite might have a companion.

The U.S. Space Force has detected a mysterious object orbiting in parallel with China's new Shijian-21 spacecraft, according to an initial report from SpaceNews.

And, since it might be moving under its own power, we're still not clear on what it is. But we have several theories about what it might be, from a new space junk device to the latest exhibition of space war tactics.
China's space junk-cleaning satellite might have a companion

China's Shijian-21 satellite was launched into space atop a Long March-3B rocket, back on Oct. 23. At the time, China's state-run news agency Xinhua said its spacecraft "entered the planned orbit successfully", and would "be mainly used to test and verify space debris mitigation technologies." There's not much to parse in this announcement with relevance to the newly-detected object, but China isn't usually very forthcoming about space endeavors. But on Nov. 3, the U.S. military began to monitor an unidentified object orbiting in parallel with Shijian-21, and the Space Force's 18th Space Control Squadron categorized the detection as an "apogee kick motor", dubbing it 2021-094C.

An apogee kick motor is typically used to lift payloads into operational orbits, including geostationary orbits (GEO). When they're finished with them, satellites sometimes kick their apogee kick motors away, but this is "pretty rare", and "almost always done by launching to the GEO graveyard, ejecting the motor, and then lowering the payload into GEO proper," said Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in a Gizmodo report. Graveyard orbits are where the lion's share of space junk resides, where satellites go after they've outlived their usefulness. This is typically deliberate, so the risk of in-space collisions is reduced as the volume of blindingly fast bits of debris becomes more abundant in orbital space.

Unknown object's motion 'appears to be a deliberate synchronization'

GEO is a special case of orbital trajectories, where satellites assume an orbit that moves in synchrony with the geographical location on Earth below. This makes them appear to "stand still" to observers on the ground, despite how fast they are still moving through space. Satellites are typically installed in these comparatively high orbits to provide telecommunications or weather data for a specific region of Earth. But ejecting an object from a satellite in GEO "is a bad idea and very rare," added McDowell in the report, since this heightens the risk of a subsequent collision with other satellites and equipment in GEO or lower trajectories.

However, nobody said it had to be an apogee kick motor, and the evidence suggests it's actually something else. As of writing, it's "currently unknown whether the object is an [apogee kick motor], an object possibly related to space debris mitigation tests, or part of potential counterspace operation tests," wrote SpaceNews in their report. "The object could be used to test rendezvous and proximity operations, refueling experiments or manipulation using a robotic arm or other means." Both Shijian-21 and 2021-094C are still orbiting the Earth roughly 50 miles (80 km) above nominal GEO, "which is well within the band" typically employed to relocate GEO satellites, added McDowell in the report. They're roughly 37 miles (60 km) apart, and this "appears to be a deliberate synchronization," said McDowell to Gizmodo, which doesn't fit the Space Force's apogee kick motor designation. "If you just ejected and said bye-bye, you'd expect a steadily increasing separation," he added. And after renewed interest in monitoring space war tactics amid rising tensions between China and the U.S., we can be certain that the superpowers of the world are monitoring this situation very closely.

Space Station Will Make an Emergency Maneuver After Detection of Threatening Space Junk

A fragment from a Chinese weather satellite will come to within 2,000 feet of the ISS, prompting the orbital relocation.

By George Dvorsky

The International Space Station as seen from Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft on 28 September 2021.Image: Roscosmos

An impromptu “space debris evasion maneuver” has been scheduled to prevent errant space junk from slamming into the International Space Station, in what is becoming an increasingly routine procedure.

Preliminary calculations suggest the space junk will come to within 1,970 feet (600 meters) of the International Space Station on Thursday, November 11 at approximately 8:00 p.m. ET (Friday, November 12 at 4:00 a.m. Moscow time), according to Russian space agency Roscosmos. That’s too close for comfort, requiring the ISS to be positioned farther away from the danger zone. The maneuver is scheduled for Wednesday at 3:15 p.m. ET (11:15 p.m. Moscow time).

“The impact probability and risk to the International Space Station is very low,” a spokesperson from NASA explained in an email, adding that “the maneuver is a standard space station maneuver and does not require the crew to take any specific action.”

The sudden need to relocate the ISS is not expected to affect the launch of Crew-3, which blasts off later today from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, as NASA officials noted yesterday during the pre-flight news conference.

The offending chunk of junk is a remnant of the Fengyun-1C spacecraft. China deliberately destroyed its own weather satellite in January 2007 as part of an anti-satellite missile test. The event prompted howls of outrage, as experts criticized China for contributing to the militarization of space and for deliberately producing a dangerous cloud of orbital debris. A fictional version of this event was portrayed in the 2013 film Gravity, in which a rapidly expanding cloud of debris, accidentally caused by Russia shooting down a defunct spy satellite, destroyed the ISS.

To keep that story rooted in fiction, flight controllers plan to move the ISS by igniting the engines of Russia’s Progress MS-18 transport vehicle, currently docked to the station. The chosen impulse strength will move the space station at a rate of 2.3 feet per second (0.7 meters per second) for six minutes, according to Roscosmos. The maneuver will increase the space station’s altitude by 4,068 feet (1,240 meters), placing it in an operational orbit some 262 miles (421 km) above Earth.

The ISS has performed 29 avoidance maneuvers over the past 22 years, including three in 2020. The most recent happened on September 22, 2020, when space junk belonging to a Japanese rocket stage threatened to pass within 0.86 miles (1.39 kilometers) of the orbital outpost.

It’s an upward trend that’s likely to get worse over time, as satellites increasingly enter low Earth orbit and as the volume of orbital debris likewise increases—and as we continue to drag our collective feet and neglect to do anything meaningful, such as limiting the objects allowed in space or funding the development of satellites capable of cleaning up our orbital mess.

Correction: A previous version of this post incorrectly identified the Progress MS-18 as a Soyuz MS-18.

More: Space Force detects mystery object in orbit alongside Chinese satellite.

WHO YA GONNA CALL?

THE CURSE OF THE NINETIES

John Deere Workers Remain on Strike and Reject Two-Tier Pay

Though the company offered raises and concession on health care and retirement, the union is standing firm. 

And so far, the public is behind them.

By Dave LeshtzTwitter

THE NATION
TODAY 

Members of the United Auto Workers strike outside of a John Deere plant in Ankeny, Iowa.

 (Charlie Neibergall / Associated Press)

DAVENPORT, IOWA—In October the United Auto Workers and Iowa’s labor movement were on the march.

Community support and sympathetic media were solidly behind the 10,100 striking John Deere and Company employees. Workers at America’s biggest maker of agricultural machinery were justifiably insulted by Deere’s initial contract offer of a 5 percent raise following a year of record-breaking profits. They had been deemed essential workers, but apparently none were as essential as Deere’s CEO John May, who made $15.6 million in 2020—a 160 percent raise.

Dozens of businesses contributed discounted meals, drinks, haircuts, chiropractic services, fishing gear, and even a free session at Davenport Axe Throwing. The Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union in North Liberty donated 8,000 pounds of food. RWDSU Local 110 Vice President Bob Dixon said, “It’s about corporate greed…. people need to come together as members and as employees to fight against that.”Top ArticlesREAD MOREIt’s in the Air





Iowa Senate Democratic Leader Zach Wahls and other Democratic legislators delivered strong statements of support, as did Iowa’s Federation of Labor, the Teamsters, the Iowa Farmers Union, and Senator Bernie Sanders. Secretary of Agriculture—and former Iowa governor—Tom Vilsack visited a picket line in Ankeny. “You deserve a fair price and a fair deal,” Vilsack told the workers. He thanked them for supporting his gubernatorial campaign in 1998: “The UAW was with me from the get-go. You don’t forget the people that were with you.”

Election Day in Iowa was also the day UAW members voted on a renegotiated contract, after overwhelmingly rejecting a tentative agreement on October 10. The second agreement between Deere and UAW leaders would give workers an immediate 10 percent raise with two additional raises of 5 percent over the course of a six-year contract. Workers would receive a bonus of $8,500 upon ratification of the contract. Deere also made some concessions on health care and retirement, but the two-tier salary system remained, with so-called “supplemental employees” paid substantially less than their coworkers doing the same jobs.

Many union members, anxious about their paychecks as the holidays approach, believe it is time to declare victory and get back to work. The majority disagree and voted down the second agreement by roughly 55 percent to 45 percent. Some say the rejection reflects a continuing dissatisfaction with their own leaders. Others blame uncertainty about the company’s Continuous Improvement Pay Plan, which is based on a complex incentive system. Many point to an overall sense that Deere management doesn’t respect them, despite their loyalty and hard work during the Covid pandemic.

Resentments hardened when Deere obtained an injunction to limit the number of picketers to four at any one time. The injunction went so far as to ban burn barrels for keeping warm at night. Tension spiked further when UAW member Richard Rich, a 56-year-old Deere warehouse inspector for 15 years, was struck and tragically killed by a car while crossing a poorly lit road near a picket line.

Public support doesn’t appear to have diminished, and Iowa unions continue to stand with the UAW. The Hawkeye Area Labor Council in Cedar Rapids, IBEW 405, and the Iowa City Federation of Labor are among those collecting and delivering household and hygiene items to strikers.

Deere management insists that the contract on the table is its “last, best, and final offer.” A Deere executive also issued a veiled threat, according to the Des Moines Register, to make up for the slack in domestic production by shifting some of the work to overseas factories. No word yet from Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds or Senators Charles Grassley and Joni Ernst—all Republicans—on how they feel about the prospect of jobs in their state being outsourced to workers in other countries.

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C.M. Lewis

Will Iowa’s labor movement keep moving? The two sides are said to be talking, but the outcome is hard to predict. Most of today’s strikers are young, with little knowledge of Iowa’s militant labor history to inspire them. They aren’t aware that the UAW was preceded by the Farm Equipment Workers who organized John Deere over 70 years ago. (See The Long Deep Grudge: A Story of Big Capital, Radical Labor, and Class War in the American Heartland, by Toni Gilpin).

Several UAW members I’ve recently talked with were not aware that Iowa’s Republican-led legislature nearly abolished public-sector unions in 2017 by stripping the guts out of Chapter 20, an Iowa collective bargaining law that operated efficiently and fairly—with no strikes—since the 1970s. Despite the heroic efforts of the University of Iowa’s Labor Center to educate workers, we still have many miles to go.

The good news is that the Republican assault on collective bargaining in Iowa hasn’t worked. Unions must hold a recertification vote every time a contract is renegotiated, and more than 50 percent must vote Yes, with nonvotes counted as No votes. Against all odds, almost every union in the state has voted Yes to recertify.

It’s a rocky road, but the labor movement is marching on in Iowa.

John Deere workers in Orléans, France support strike by their American coworkers

Our reporters

WSWS.ORG

Yesterday, reporters for the World Socialist Web Site travelled to the John Deere tractor parts factory in Orléans, south of Paris, which employs some 800 workers. They discussed the ongoing month-long strike by more than 10,000 John Deere workers in the United States, who are opposing the efforts of the company and United Auto Workers union to impose a concessions-laden contract.

The Orléans Deere workers expressed their support and solidarity for their striking co-workers internationally and denounced the efforts of the company to pit workers against one another across national boundaries.

“They should continue to fight for their rights,” said Weigel, who has three years’ experience at Orléans. “Whether it is in the United States or in France, it is always the big companies that profit off of the workers, and then whine about having to raise wages by 1-2 percent.

Weigel holds a sign saying "John Deere workers in France support the strike in the USA"

“We should unite together against the multinational in order to not be their prey. The workers in different countries have to be able to help each other.”

Matthieu, who has eight years’ experience at the Orléans plant, said, “We’re in solidarity with the American workers, especially since we hear that they don’t get to go on strike very often. They negotiate for a period of several years. And we heard that the boss just got a 160 percent pay increase.”

“We have to have international solidarity,” he explained. “Here there are certain production lines that, every time we go on strike, the company threatens us that these jobs may be taken away elsewhere. It’s a constant blackmail against our jobs. They threaten us.”

He described the conditions for the workers in France. “Prices for everything are rising,” he said. “They’re announcing another year of exceptional profits for John Deere. Each time there is an annual bargaining meeting in April they announce profits, and they’re always considerable. Then they announce a 1 percent pay increase. There is high inflation but they tell us it is only 1.2 percent. Then they don’t understand why we would want to strike.

“They announce profits, the shareholders take everything, and they give us crumbs.”

In April this year, the Orléans plant was shut down for three days by Deere workers who were demanding increased bonuses and pay increases. “We wanted the bonus to not be a percentage of wages [which would give higher bonuses to management] but that the same sum would be paid to everyone.”

“The trade unions did not pay strike pay during the strike and when we struck for three days they asked the management only that the deduction from our salary be spread over three months,” he noted. Nor, in the case of the strike in the US, did the union seek to keep workers up to date about the struggle. “The trade unions did not come to see us saying there is a strike in the US,” he said. “We found out about it because it was in the news.”

“There is a growing anger,” Matthieu said. “The previous time there was a strike, there were only about 30 people who participated. This time there were over 200.”

Mélanie is a temporary worker at John Deere. A large portion of the Orléans plant workforce is made up of such temporary workers. They are hired via subcontractor agencies on short 18-month contracts, which they are unable to renew.

“What you describe about the trade unions in the United States, I have the impression that it is the same everywhere,” she said, referring to the corruption scandal that exposed millions of dollars in kickbacks to the UAW leaders by the giant automakers. “Here the unions organise little strikes, toward the employer they adopt a strong enough tone, but really there is nothing much more than that. They are even supposed to give a debrief meeting with us every month but they don’t do it. They could take all our questions to try to address problems, but it doesn’t happen.”

“Concretely I would say to the US workers to not give up. Everything comes to those who demand it. They shouldn’t give up because they are 10,000 fighting it.”

Benjamin, a temporary worker with three months at the plant, told our reporters: “We are following this closely. There is support for the strike here that is sure. If they can make things change, they need to improve their working conditions.”

PERSPECTIVE
John Deere strike at the crossroads

Jerry White
WSWS.ORG

The nearly month-long strike by 10,100 John Deere workers in Iowa, Illinois and other states is at a critical turning point. In the week since workers voted down a second company proposal backed by the United Auto Workers union, Deere has gone on the offensive.

There are two alternative roads confronting workers. On the one hand, Deere and the UAW are dead set on getting a contract through that throttles workers’ incomes and allows the company to continue to reap record profits. They will continue to conspire and use every weapon and dirty trick at their disposal to divide workers and crush their resistance.

Striking Deere workers outside of a John Deere plant, Wednesday, Oct. 20, 2021, in Ankeny, Iowa. 

(AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

But the path to the strike’s victory exists and is this: Workers taking the initiative into their own hands, establishing rank-and-file organizations at every plant and warehouse, and appealing directly to autoworkers and Deere workers in the US and internationally to mobilize in support of their struggle, which has the potential to impact the fate of all workers.

The company has launched a media blitz, with top executives fanning out to tout their supposedly generous offer and suggesting its defeat by a 55-45 percent margin was largely due to a minority of unreasonable workers. With the UAW failing twice to push through its demands, Deere has sent text messages directly to workers in a naked effort to divide them and force a re-vote on the deal, which management insists is its “last, best and final” offer.

The walkout has caused serious delays in the shipment of replacement parts farmers need to keep their Deere equipment running during the last few weeks of the harvest season. After the contract was defeated, management announced it was stepping up its strikebreaking “customer service continuity plan,” which includes deploying supervisors, engineers and other salaried workers to its facilities and ramping up production at factories outside the US.

While Deere officials publicly declare they still want an agreement to bring back the current workers, they have not ruled out hiring scabs to replace the strikers. “If we walk through this and the information that’s in front of folks, the deal that’s in front of them, doesn’t work for them, we have to figure out how we continue to serve our customers going forward,” Cory Reed, president of Deere’s Worldwide Agriculture & Turf Division, said in a Des Moines Register article published Monday. “That planning is always ongoing.”

Far from mobilizing the union’s 400,000 members to oppose these strikebreaking threats, the UAW is forcing the Deere workers to fight the multinational giant alone. After its second deal with the company was voted down, the UAW International issued a perfunctory three-sentence announcement, declaring it would resume meetings with Deere management—not the workers—to “discuss next steps.”

The UAW has imposed a complete information blackout on Deere workers and has not even acknowledged any of its closed-door discussions with the Deere bosses. Meanwhile, it is continuing to keep Deere workers on starvation rations of $275 a week in strike benefits despite a strike fund—paid for with workers’ dues—valued at nearly $800 million.

There is no doubt that UAW officials are plotting with corporate management to wear down the resistance of workers and force a re-vote on the same deal, or a slightly modified one that still fails to meet workers’ demands.

With Deere expected to rake in nearly $6 billion in profits this year—at least 62 percent more than its previous record in 2013—striking workers are determined to secure a $10 an hour raise to offset more than 25 years of UAW-backed wage concessions and protect their families from the rising cost of fuel, food and other basic necessities. They also want to restore fully paid retiree health care benefits for every generation of workers, which the UAW gave up in 1997.

The UAW is determined not to win the strike, but to defeat it. UAW President Ray Curry, Vice President Chuck Browning and the rest of the affluent business executives at the UAW’s “Solidarity House” headquarters know a victory for the Deere workers would spark a far wider rank-and-file rebellion against the UAW. Workers at Caterpillar, Volvo and Mack Trucks, at GM, Ford and Stellantis, at auto parts suppliers Dana, Faurecia and Lear, and countless other locations all work under contracts with divisive tiered wage and benefit systems and other oppressive conditions, imposed by the same bribe-taking UAW officials through lies, threats of job losses and outright vote rigging.

The battle at Deere is part of what is developing into the largest strike wave in the US and internationally in generations. Since the beginning of the year, there have been more than 150 strikes in the US, involving workers from virtually every sector of the economy. Thousands—including Deere workers; Kellogg’s workers; nurses and other health care workers in California, West Virginia and Massachusetts; Alabama coal miners; Scranton, Pennsylvania teachers and Columbia University grad students—are currently on strike. Another 30,000 Kaiser Permanente health care workers in California and Oregon are set to strike on November 15, and 60,000 film and production workers, who were ready to strike last month, are voting on a deeply despised sellout contract this weekend.

These are part of a growing wave of international struggles—including strikes by teachers, nurses and other public sector workers in Canada, Portugal, Sri Lanka, Mexico and other countries, as workers seek to combat the austerity measures capitalist governments are imposing to pay for massive corporate and bank bailouts.

The conditions are emerging for these struggles to be unified into a powerful industrial and political counteroffensive by the working class against decades of eroding living standards and the explosion of social inequality.

These militant struggles are being fueled by the response of capitalist governments all over the world to the pandemic, which has prioritized profit over lives. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the wealth of billionaires in the US alone has risen by 70 percent—from nearly $3 trillion to over $5 trillion—even as 89 million workers lost their jobs, 47 million people were infected with COVID-19 with unknown long-term consequences, and more than 776,000 died.

After being forced to risk their lives, workers all over the world are refusing to accept wages that fail to keep up with inflation, exhausting schedules that rob them of their family life and health, and the lies of company executives and union bureaucrats who say there is no money to meet their just demands.

In every struggle which is taking place or emerging, the biggest obstacles to workers’ unification are the corporatist unions, which function as a labor police force and partners in the exploitation of the working class. That is why increasing numbers of workers, including educators, health care workers, Amazon workers, and auto and auto parts workers at Volvo Trucks, Dana, Deere and the Detroit automakers, are joining the growing network of rank-and-file factory and workplace committees, which reject the authority of the pro-company unions and fight for the independent interests of the working class.

On Saturday, workers at an online meeting sponsored by the World Socialist Web Site voted to establish the Deere Strike Rank-and-File Solidarity Committee to mobilize the broadest support for the striking workers.

To fight transnational corporations like Deere, workers need a global strategy. The striving of workers for international solidarity has been expressed by the Deere workers in Mannheim, Germany, who have repeatedly voiced their support for their brothers and sisters in the US. In May, the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) was founded to coordinate the growing struggles of the working class across all national borders.

The fight against capitalist exploitation is inseparable from a fight to eliminate the pandemic and end the sacrifice of human life for corporate profit. The growing wave of strikes and struggles across the world must be developed into a conscious political struggle to establish workers’ power and reorganize economic life based on socialist planning and production for human need, not private profit.

Vikings’ ocean-crossing voyage strictly business

By: Gwynne Dyer
Tuesday, Nov. 9, 2021
OPINION


IT was already known that the first and only verified Norse settlement in North America was at L’Anse aux Meadows, at the northern tip of Newfoundland. The specialists even assumed that it happened in the early 11th century, because the Norse sagas more or less said so. But the traditional carbon-14 dates were all over the place.

The Dutch-led team of archaeologists who solved the riddle used three pieces of wood from the settlement that had been cut by metal (and therefore Viking) tools. They found a specific tree ring in each piece that had been hit by a massive burst of cosmic radiation in AD 993, and then counted tree rings outwards to the last growth ring in the year the trees died: 28 more rings, so 1021.

Clever work and a solid date at last, but we already know from the sagas that the site was only inhabited for a few years. Many people also suspected that "Vinland," as the Norse called it, was never meant to be a permanent colony.

Nevertheless, it’s striking how this obscure bit of archaeological news has been amplified in the media, presumably because it provides opportunities for homilies about the evils of colonialism. Wrong target. Leif "The Lucky" Ericsson and his comrades were actually just interested in trade.

The settlements back in Greenland that the Norse at L’Anse aux Meadows came from had only been founded themselves one generation before, in AD 985. There were probably fewer than 1,000 Norse in Greenland in 1021, and the last thing on their minds would have been to set up another settlement a further 1,500 km by sea from Europe.

"By sea," because Norse longships kept in sight of land whenever possible. It’s only 750 kilometres as the bird flies from Greenland to Newfoundland, but the longships sailed north up the Greenland coast, a short hop across open ocean to Baffin Island, west along the Baffin coast, another brief ocean passage, and then south down the Labrador coast to L’Anse aux Meadows.

So what motivated them to go so far? Timber, for one thing, as there are few trees in Greenland and none big enough to make keels for ships or roof beams for houses. But there was plenty of good timber in southern Labrador and Newfoundland. Just go and cut some, and come home again. Why did they need a year-round base at L’Anse aux Meadows?

Because they needed trade goods to pay for all the things they had to import from Europe: grain, iron, wine, glass and luxury goods. So having discovered a whole new region, it seemed worthwhile to take a look around and see what low-bulk, high-value resources it might have to offer.

To do that, they needed the year-round base, because they could not get out of their fjords back home in Greenland until the sea-ice retreated in late May. That didn’t leave enough time to sail to L’Anse aux Meadows, explore farther south, and get home again before the autumn freeze-up. The crews had to over-winter in Newfoundland.

They explored the St. Lawrence River and what is now Canada’s Maritime provinces. They may have made it down to the New England coast. There were clashes with the "Skraelings," they called the native inhabitants, and even among the Vikings themselves. (They were quarrelsome people.) At least one Norse baby was born in North America.

But they found nothing as valuable as the walrus ivory they were already hunting at Disko Bay far up the Greenland coast, and the ivory from there was covering the cost of their imports. So they wound the Vinland operation up, went home, and lived happily ever after — until the climate turned against them three centuries later.

No villains, no victims, no harm done. An utterly inconsequential outcome of the first contact between Europeans and the Americas. Although Vinland appeared on European maps as early as 1070, no European bothered going there again for half a millennium.

So you can imagine my dilemma when the Newfoundland Museum asked me 20 years ago to write a guide to a major exhibition on the Vikings and the Skraelings in Vinland. (I’m a Newfoundlander, I’m a freelancer, and we look after our own.) How can you make a big deal out of this damp squib?

Well, the ancestors of all modern human beings came out of Africa about 60,000 years ago. Some turned left and headed into Europe, where they were stopped by the Atlantic, too broad to cross. Others turned right, and populated Asia, Australasia and eventually the Americas via the land-bridge in the Bering Strait.

But the descendants of the ones who turned left never saw the descendants of those who turned right again until AD 1021 in Newfoundland. Full circle. Will that do?

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is The Shortest History of War.

Nalleli Cobo: the young activist who led her LA neighborhood against big oil


Nalleli Cobo in front of the oilwell near her home that regulators have ordered to be permanently closed and secured. Photograph: Jessica Pons/The Guardian

The outspoken

After forcing the closure of an oilwell that was making her family and community sick, Cobo seemed about to become a household name – but then she fell seriously ill

by Nina Lakhani
Wed 10 Nov 2021 

At the age of nine, Nalleli Cobo started getting nosebleeds so severe that she had to sleep sitting up so as not to choke on the blood. Then there were the stomach cramps, nausea, headaches and body spasms, which made walking difficult. For a time she wore a heart monitor as doctors struggled to understand what was wrong.

But it wasn’t just Cobo. The nine-year-old was growing up in University Park, a low-income, majority-Latino neighborhood in Los Angeles, the smoggiest city in the US, which ranks highest in the country for deaths linked to air pollution. She and her three older siblings were raised by her Mexican mother, grandmother and two great-grandparents. (Her father was deported to Colombia when she was three.) And suddenly, almost her entire family was ill – including her mother, who developed asthma at 40, as did her grandmother at 70.

We won, and it was 10 times more awesome because it was the youth demanding our right to a livable futureNalleli Cobo

It was the same story throughout the neighborhood: previously healthy children were suddenly missing school and spending hours at the emergency room, but nobody knew why. Not long afterwards a foul smell engulfed the community. It was like rotten eggs, recalls Cobo, and so nauseating that they had to keep the windows closed at all times. Sometimes it smelled like artificial guava or chocolate, mixed with rotten eggs.

Cobo’s mother works for Esperanza Community Housing, and she enlisted the organisation to help investigate. It turned out the stench was caused by the oilwell located 30ft (9 metres) from the family home. The oil company Allenco had ramped up drilling. (The guava and chocolate odours were the company’s attempt to alleviate the problem.) At Esperanza’s request, the campaigner group Physicians for Social Responsibility sent a group of toxicologists to meet the community and explain the health threats posed by the oilwell.

“That’s when we started connecting the dots between the oilwell, the smell and sick kids,” says Cobo. Now 20, she is speaking to me on a video call from her bedroom in LA, while cuddling her five-month-old fluffy white puppy, Albondiga, which means meatball in Spanish. “It’s when I started learning the ropes of activism.”

Cobo in a family photograph. 

Photograph: Courtesy of Nalleli Cobo

Cobo and her mother started knocking on doors and co-founded People Not Pozos (People Not Wells) – a grassroots community group, which filed complaints to regulators, shared stories at town hall meetings and testified at city hall and other government hearings. Cobo was a natural storyteller – honest, passionate and compelling – but recalls how it wasn’t always easy to be heard. “I was often dismissed as a silly little girl, like my story didn’t matter because I didn’t know all the science or all the fancy terms.”

Inspired by her mother’s activism, she refused to give up. “My mom always told me that I had to be an important member of the community. If sharing my story was going to help create change, why would I stay silent?”

Cobo’s youth and persistence captured the attention of local media, lawmakers and A-list celebrities. A barrage of local and federal investigations was launched. When environmental protection officials spent a short time at the site, they too got ill.

Then, on a chilly November evening in 2013, when Cobo was 12 years old, the phone rang. The family was having dinner – Mexican potato soup, she remembers. By the time Cobo’s mother put the phone down, she was crying at the extraordinary news: Allenco was suspending operations at the well.

Cobo was beside herself with joy. “I started screaming: ‘We did it, we did it,’ ran to the window and opened it for some fresh air – something so basic that we hadn’t been able to do for years,” she says.

The change when the drilling stopped was almost instant. “It was like day and night. My nosebleeds stopped, no more headaches or heart palpitations, I didn’t need my inhalers every day. All the kids started to feel better. I’ll never forget that moment,” says Cobo.

The victories kept on coming for Cobo and her community. In September, Los Angeles County supervisors voted unanimously to phase out oil and gas drilling and ban new drill sites in the unincorporated areas of the most populous county in the US. More than 1,600 active and idle oil and gas wells, which are mostly located in communities of colour, could be closed over the next few years.

‘I’ve always wanted to be president.’

 Photograph: Jessica Pons/The Guardian

But the industry is expected to oppose the unprecedented move and the fight is far from over, says Cobo. “I dream of a world where all urban oil drilling is read about in history books. A world with 100% clean renewable energy, where people can breathe the air outside without getting sick, and open their faucet and drink the water because it’s clean. That’s the world I’m fighting to achieve, a better and safer one for all of us.

“A lot of times when you’re in this fight they make you feel like you’re going to lose, and there are moments when I break down and cry. But I am a person of faith, so I think about David and Goliath, and that’s how this story is going to end. Me and my community, we are David; the oil industry, the broken regulatory system, the billionaires are all Goliath, but their tactics won’t stop my community from fighting.”

A 2020 analysis by the nonprofit FracTracker Alliance found that about 2.2 million people in California live within half a mile of an oil or gas well; another 5 million live within one mile. More than 60% of the 25,000 drilling permits issued by the state between 2015 and 2020 were in majority-Latino communities.

In 2015, the South Central Youth Leadership Coalition, which Cobo co-founded, joined other organisations to sue the city of Los Angeles for rubber-stamping oil projects in communities of colour. As a result, the city adopted new requirements for drilling applications to ensure compliance with state environmental review rules and to protect vulnerable communities. The oil industry countersued and lost.

“We won, and it was 10 times more awesome because it was the youth demanding our right to a livable future,” says Cobo, who has spoken out about environmental racism – the dumping of polluting and hazardous industries such as toxic chemical plants, fossil-fuel sites and highways in places where people of colour and indigenous communities live, work and play.

“It’s heartbreaking and infuriating how these industries and billion-dollar corporations have gotten away with poisoning us. The way the oil industry sees us is as just a little speck, but we’re humans.”

Cobo knows fossil fuel companies aren’t the only bad guys. “Our elected officials have a lot of power, but we vote them in and it’s their job to represent us. When they get into these positions of power, too many forget that. We need to work hard to humble them, remind them.”

Amid pressure from the community, as well as growing media and celebrity attention, the city of Los Angeles filed multiple lawsuits against Allenco. In 2020, the state oil and gas regulators ordered the site to be permanently closed and secured. The company, which has said that it has invested heavily in environmental safety and should be allowed to restart operations, has appealed. (Neither the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office nor Allenco responded to requests for comment.)

As a practising Catholic, Cabo is upset that the Roman Catholic archdiocese, which owns the land, leased it to Allenco. “They teach us we must protect God’s creation, that we have to stand up for others and do what Jesus would do, so why are they being hypocrites? Ultimately the archdiocese is choosing profit over people’s health; that’s not what Jesus would do, plain and simple.” (The Los Angeles archdiocese did not respond to questions.)

Stricter rules and laws concerning drilling practices have come into effect at every level of government in California – city, county and state – after years of permits being greenlit without any environmental impact assessments. But permits to extract fossil fuels are still being approved, and the problem is so much bigger than one state.

Nalleli Cobo speaking at a climate rally outside the Los Angeles 

city hall in February 2020. 

Photograph: SOPA Images/Alamy

Last month, when it seemed half the US was on fire or flooded, the Biden administration announced that, to comply with a court ruling, it would open millions of acres for oil and gas exploration in the Gulf of Mexico. It claimed the recent UN report warning the climate crisis was spiralling out of control was not “sufficient cause” to revise the environmental impact analysis conducted by the Trump administration.

“It’s so frustrating…,” says Cobo. “The science is there, we’re being poisoned, our lives are being shortened, we’re sick, when will it be enough for them?”

Cobo has met a long list of celebrities, but her personal favourite is Jane Fonda. “She’s always on it, looking to do more – she’s such a badass. Jane genuinely wants to create change; she doesn’t just turn up for the selfie.”

At an event with the actor Joaquin Phoenix last year, Cobo was loudly cheered after she declared her run for the White House … in 2036. She wasn’t joking. “I’ve always wanted to be president, ever since my mom bought the Elmo book about the first female president. I think politics is such a beautiful thing, if done properly.”

Inevitably, Cobo has been compared to the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, whom she met in 2019 at the LA climate march. Then, it seemed that Cobo was also about to become a household name, with her face on posters for the global youth climate strike. But then she got ill.

In early 2020, at the age of 19, she was diagnosed with a rare type of cancer, so advanced and aggressive that surgeons removed her entire reproductive system – six organs and 22 lymph nodes – which was followed by gruelling rounds of chemotherapy and radiotherapy. It has been hugely traumatic.

“The only thing I’ve ever been 1,000% sure about in my life is wanting to be a mom, so I froze my eggs before undergoing the radical hysterectomy,” she says. But she was only diagnosed after five years of struggling to get doctors to take her worsening menstrual problems seriously. Cobo wonders about the role systemic inequalities played in her getting sick, and the delay in getting treatment.

She has been cancer-free for six months, but suffers from episodes of severe pain and fatigue, making it difficult for her to get out of bed some days. Yet she says she will not give up her fight. She turns 21 in December and plans to restart college in January, having missed two years, though concerns about the impact of stress on her long-term health are forcing her to rethink a lifelong ambition to become a civil rights lawyer. Instead she’s considering a career as a medical sonographer. “Even though I can’t get pregnant, I could help make sure women have the safest and healthiest pregnancy possible,” she says. Whatever she ends up doing, serving her community remains the goal.

New Membrane Technology From Osmoses Could Make Carbon Capture Feasible

MIT spin-off Osmoses may have the answer to low cost carbon capture technology.


Carbon Capture Technology. Image credit: European Union

BySteve Hanley
Published 2 days ago

Carbon capture is an idea that doesn’t get much love here at CleanTechnica headquarters. Whenever the topic comes up, the minions who bring you the clean tech news of the day wrinkle their noses as if a noxious odor just invaded our work space.

We see it as a scam cooked up by the fossil fuel companies to divert our attention away from the fact that the Earth is overheating because of the pollution created when coal, oil, and methane are burned. The flim flam goes like this — “Let us burn every molecule of fossil fuel we can find now and we promise, cross our hearts and hope to die, we will find some magic way to suck all that crud back out of the atmosphere later, God willing and the creek don’t rise. Trust us!”

Basically, we think carbon capture is a lie told by fossil fuel companies to slow down the push for meaningful climate action, so it’s somewhat of a surprise when we hear about something that suggests carbon capture might actually work. The technology relies primarily on membranes that allow oxygen to pass through, but not pollutants like carbon dioxide and methane. The problem is, those membranes cannot tolerate harsh industrial environments and tend to break down quickly.

Hello, Osmoses

Meet Osmoses, an MIT spinoff started this year by Francesco Benedetti and Holden Lai. On its website, the company says, “Efficient and sustainable separations are critically needed to cut costs and emissions in the chemical industry and enable sustainable energy solutions. With exceptional stability, productivity, and selectivity, Osmoses molecular filters can separate molecules 100,000 times smaller than the thickness of human hair.”

Recently, the company raised $3 million in funding to pursue its research and scale up its technology for commercial applications, thanks in large measure to The Engine, an MIT investment vehicle that supports new technology ventures like Osmoses. The money will accelerate its mission to eliminate energy waste with efficient separation technology, reducing production costs and CO2 emissions.

“Today, molecular separations represent 15% of global energy use and generate 16% of CO2 emissions annually. While gas separation processes are critical for the more than 13,000 chemical and power plants operating in the U.S., the traditional approaches to purify methane, hydrogen, and oxygen are not only a source of significant energy waste, but also very costly for production companies,” Osmoses says.

The company claims its membrane platform technology integrates easily with existing energy infrastructures and solves the inherent trade-off between permeability and selectivity. It is stable in industrial conditions and delivers up to 5 times the selectivity and 100 times the permeability of conventional membranes.

“There’s an increasing need for gas separation membranes and the global category will continue to surge in the coming years, representing a $10 billion and growing market opportunity overall,” says Benedetti.

“We’ve developed and proven the viability of Osmoses’ materials platform to overcome traditional membrane challenges, to deliver membranes offering the most sustainable alternative to thermal processes. Our molecular filters can be manufactured at scale using established techniques, consume 40% to 60% less energy than commercial alternatives, and most importantly, deliver excellent separation.

“Osmoses’ solution is not just critical for reduced emissions, but for maintaining domestic industry and job growth. Without such a cost-effective solution, these tasks could be exported to countries with less stringent emissions targets, which is not good for the U.S. and not good for our planet.”

The Osmoses platform addresses the rising demand for biogas and hydrogen, as well as the increasing need for CO2 removal. It provides a cost effective, high performance technology that supports the global renewable energy transition. It can increase the sustainability of existing energy infrastructures such as natural gas, decarbonize new and existing industries in power generation and materials manufacturing, and enable carbon-free energy solutions like hydrogen.

“Osmoses has the potential to fully decarbonize the hardest sectors of the economy — industrial material production — which together account for upwards of 30% of U.S. CO2 emissions,” says Michael Kearney of The Engine in a press release.

Holden Lai, co-founder and CTO of Osmoses, says, “The technology is proven in the lab and we are excited to take it to the next stage of testing at scale through collaboration with manufacturers and industrial partners. Delivered through modular units, the platform is an easy transition with existing infrastructure and will accelerate, streamline, and improve margins for commercial pursuit of natural and biogas upgrading, carbon capture powered by oxy-fuel combustion, and hydrogen recovery opportunities.”

Technology For Today

On its website, Osmoses says,

“Membrane separation technology that matches the performance of incumbent methods could drastically reduce energy consumption in the chemical, energy, and petrochemical sectors. Using membrane technology to purify hydrogen and renewable natural gas would also accelerate the replacement of coal for electricity generation. Across industries, replacing absorption and distillation with membrane technology for separations can reduce annual U.S. energy costs by $4 billion and eliminate 100 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions.”

It claims this new technology presents an opportunity to re-imagine and rebuild America’s energy infrastructure in the post-pandemic era while creating new jobs. “Green and readily available alternative energy sources, such as hydrogen and renewable natural gas, will only see widespread adoption if cost-competitive with conventional sources. Osmoses wants to be part of this revolution.”

The company says its technology has the ability to:

Promote carbon dioxide removal from natural gas and biogas while reducing energy consumption by more than 40% and cutting methane loss by more than 70% compared to current commercially available membrane systems.

Reduce the cost of oxygen-nitrogen separation in nitrogen and oxygen production by 10% relative to leading membrane systems.

Dramatically reduce the cost of hydrogen purification by using Osmoses’ highly selective membranes.

Greatly reduce the cost of carbon dioxide capture.

The Takeaway

Is this new membrane technology from Osmoses a magic bullet that will let fossil fuel companies continue to pour waste products into the atmosphere? Not quite. But it brings another tool to the fight to decarbonize human activities, and for that we should be grateful. It is unknown at this time whether the company’s technology could make large-scale carbon capture cost effective. Expect to hear more about this company in the near future.

Tiny grains, severe damage: Hypervelocity dust impacts on a spacecraft produce plasma explosions and debris clouds

by American Physical Society

Measurements of electric fields, magnetic fields, and camera images reveal the plasma 

explosions and clouds of debris created when very high velocity dust impacts the Parker 

Solar Probe spacecraft. By watching the dispersal of these small plasma and debris clouds,

 scientists can learn about how larger clouds of dust and debris are blown away from stars

. Credit: NASA

The Parker Solar Probe spacecraft, NASA's newest and most ambitious effort to study the sun, has broken a lot of records: it has gotten closer to the sun than any other spacecraft to date, its instruments have operated at the hottest temperatures, and the probe is the fastest human-made object ever. But those records come at a cost: The spacecraft is moving so fast that running into even a tiny grain of dust can lead to serious damage.

New research by scientists at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado, Boulder and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) examines collisions between the Parker Solar Probe spacecraft and dust. Led by David Malaspina, a researcher at LASP, and Assistant Professor in the Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences Department at the University of Colorado, the team drew on electromagnetic and optical observations from Parker Solar Probe to produce the most complete picture yet of how hypervelocity dust impacts may damage a spacecraft and disturb its operations.

Traversing near-sun space at up to 180 kilometers per second (about 400,000 miles per hour), Parker Solar Probe plows through the densest region of the zodiacal cloud. The zodiacal cloud is a thick, pancake-shaped dust cloud that extends throughout the solar system and is made up of tiny dust grains shed from asteroids and comets. As Parker Solar Probe barrels through this region, thousands of tiny (about 2 to 20 microns in diameter, or less than a quarter of the width of a human hair) dust grains strike the spacecraft at hypervelocity (faster than 6,700 miles per hour). Upon impact, the material that makes up the dust grains and the spacecraft surface is heated so much that it first vaporizes, then ionizes. Ionization is a process where atoms in the vaporized material are separated into their constituent ions and electrons, producing a state of matter called plasma. The rapid vaporization and ionization creates a plasma explosion lasting less than one thousandth of a second. The largest of these impacts also generate clouds of debris that slowly expand away from the spacecraft.

In the new study, Malaspina and colleagues used antennas and magnetic field sensors to measure disturbances to the electromagnetic environment around the spacecraft produced by dust impact plasma explosions (Figure 1). The findings could lead to new insights into space weather around the sun. For example, these measurements allowed the team to study how these plasma explosions interacted with the solar wind, or the stream of ions and electrons that the sun generates on a constant basis.

"With these measurements, we can watch the plasma created by these dust impacts be swept away by the flow of the solar wind." Malaspina said. He added that learning how this "pick up" process works on a small scale may help scientists better understand how larger plasma regions, such as those in the upper atmospheres of Venus and Mars, are swept away by the solar wind.

The findings also have major implications for the safety of Parker Solar Probe and spacecraft that will come after it.

The team observed how metallic flakes and paint chips knocked loose during collisions with dust drifted and tumbled near the spacecraft. Those pieces of debris created streaks in the images taken by navigational and scientific cameras on Parker Solar Probe.

"Many image streaks look radial, originating near the heat shield," said study co-author Kaushik Iyer of APL, referring to the large shield that protects Parker Solar Probe from the intense heat near the sun. The study also reports that some debris scattered sunlight into the Parker Solar Probe navigation cameras, temporarily preventing the spacecraft from determining how it was oriented in space. That can be a dangerous prospect for a spacecraft that relies on precise pointing of its heat shield to survive.

Parker Solar Probe was launched in 2018 and has completed nine full orbits of the sun. Before its prime mission ends in 2025, it will complete another 15 orbits.

As Parker Solar Probe continues its journey of exploration near the sun, it can now add one more record to its long list: most sand-blasted spacecraft. 

The results of this study will be presented on November 11, 2021, at the 63rd Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics in Pittsburgh, PA.

Researchers get a look at the sun's dusty environment

More information: Abstract: TO06.00006. Rapid plasma bursts and lingering debris clouds driven by hypervelocity dust impacts on Park Solar Probe: and unintentional active experiment in the inner heliosphere

Provided by American Physical Society 

Hypervelocity dust impacts cause plasma explosions on Parker Solar Probe

But the spacecraft is still doing fine.

By Charles Q. Choi 

SPACE.COM

An artist's depiction of Parker Solar Probe studying the sun. (Image credit: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory)

The fastest spacecraft ever flown, NASA's Parker Solar Probe, regularly experiences high-speed collisions with dust particles that create explosions of plasma, a new study finds.

Launched in 2018, the Parker Solar Probe is NASA's latest and most ambitious effort to investigate the sun. To date, it has gotten closer to the sun than any other mission; its equipment has operated at the hottest temperatures of any spacecraft; and the probe is the fastest human-made object ever.

However, the extraordinary speed at which the Parker Solar Probe flies — about 447,000 mph (720,000 kph) during its closest approaches to the sun — means that running into even a tiny grain of dust can trigger explosions, which could make the probe the most sand-blasted spacecraft ever.



Measurements of electric fields, magnetic fields, and camera images reveal the plasma explosions and clouds of debris created when very high velocity dust impacts the Parker Solar Probe spacecraft. By watching the dispersal of these small plasma and debris clouds, scientists can learn about how larger clouds of dust and debris are blown away from stars. 

(Image credit: NASA/JHUAPL/LASP)

"The Parker Solar Probe has been struck by dust tens of thousands of times," study lead author David Malaspina, a space plasma physicist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, told Space.com. "During its ninth orbit of the sun, of 24 total planned orbits, there were periods where the Parker Solar Probe was struck by a hypervelocity dust grain every 12 seconds on average."

To learn more about the kind of havoc these collisions might wreak, the researchers analyzed data gathered by the probe's antennas and magnetic field sensors. The result is the most complete picture yet of how hypervelocity dust impacts — ones that occur at more than 6,700 mph (10,780 km/h) — may damage a spacecraft and disturb its operations.

While flying near the sun, the Parker Solar Probe barrels through the densest region of the zodiacal cloud. This thick, pancake-shaped cluster of dust, which extends throughout the solar system, is made up of tiny dust grains from asteroids and comets.

As the spacecraft hurtles through this cloud, thousands of dust grains about 2 to 20 microns wide strike it at hypervelocity, generating explosions that last less than a thousandth of a second. In comparison, the average human hair is about 100 microns wide.

Upon impact, the dust grains and the impacted spacecraft surface get heated so much that they vaporize and then fragment into electrons and ions, forming plasma, the same state of matter that makes up stars and lightning.

"While most dust impacts cause only small effects, a few are very high energy, creating the debris and dense plasma clouds that we focused on in this research," Malaspina said. "We identified about 250 of these very high-energy impacts during the first eight orbits of Parker Solar Probe around the sun."

The largest of these collisions also generate clouds of debris that slowly expand away from the probe.

"Dust impact plasma clouds have been observed on spacecraft since the 1980s, when Voyager passed through the ring plane of Saturn, but no impact plasma cloud observed prior to this has been dense enough to cause such clearly measurable effects," Malaspina said.

As much as dust is pummeling the Parker Space Probe, it remains operational, Malaspina noted. "Most of the dust grains that strike the spacecraft are very small," Malaspina noted. "While this very efficiently sandblasts the spacecraft surface, the risk of encountering a dust grain large enough to cause a catastrophic failure remains low."

This new data can help scientists tinker with spacecraft designs to better protect them from hypervelocity impacts, as well as the resulting plasma and debris, Malaspina said.

For example, researchers may want "to carefully consider the fragmentation properties of exterior materials under hypervelocity impacts," he explained. "This is particularly true for missions where uninterrupted star camera navigation is important, or where electromagnetic attraction of spacecraft debris to spacecraft surfaces may be a concern."

This research is also helping scientists map the structure and density of the interplanetary dust cloud near the sun, "which has never been done with direct spacecraft measurements," Malaspina said. "This can inform updated models of this environment and drive more accurate predictions of dust impact danger on any future missions."

In addition, these findings could lead to new insights into space weather around the sun. For example, the measurements allowed the team to study how these plasma explosions interacted with the solar wind, the stream of particles flowing from the sun. This information, in turn, can shed light on how larger amounts of plasma, such as those found in the upper atmospheres of Venus and Mars, are swept away by the solar wind, Malaspina said.

The scientists will detail their findings Nov. 11 at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society's division of plasma physics in Pittsburgh. They have also submitted their work to the Astrophysical Journal.

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Heinz serves up ketchup made from "Martian" tomatoes

By David Szondy
November 09, 2021

Heinz Marz ketchup was made from tomatoes grown under Martian conditions
Florida Tech

Thanks to a pilot project by Heinz and a team of researchers led by Andrew Palmer at the Florida Institute of Technology, when astronauts set up outposts on Mars they may be able to make their own ketchup using locally grown tomatoes.

One of the biggest hurdles to launching even limited expeditions to Mars is the massive problem of logistics. If astronauts have to carry all the fuel, propellants, air, water, spare parts, and food for a trip that could take over two years, it would require a small fleet of huge ships that are basically spacefaring freighters and tankers.

To overcome this, planners are putting a lot of emphasis on the idea of living off the land so that crews can use Martian resources to produce what they need. One example of this is finding ways to grow food in the soil of the Red Planet, just like Matt Damon's character in the science fiction thriller The Martian.

The Red House recreated Martian conditions
Florida Tech

All that Damon grew in his fictitious Mars habitat were potatoes, but Heinz wants to provide future "Martians" with real ketchup to go with them. To demonstrate this, the company has unveiled its Heinz Tomato Ketchup, Marz Edition, which was made from tomatoes that were grown under the same condition as would be found at a Mars outpost.

The result of a two-year collaboration with Florida Tech, the research team used a greenhouse called the Red House to grow an initial batch of 30 tomato plants selected from Heinz's large seed catalog. These were planted in 7,800 lb (3,538 kg) of Martian analog soil gathered from the Mojave desert and illuminated with red LED lights. They were also grown in the atmosphere, temperature control, and regular irrigation that would be expected in an outpost's greenhouse on Mars.

An initial pilot study involving 30 plants and a follow-up effort where the team planted 450 tomato plants in individual buckets took 2,000 hours. The result was hundreds of tomatoes, but the technique is far from perfected because the expanded test had a poorer yield. This indicates that Martian tomato farming could be improved by growing the plants in troughs instead of pots, introducing a wider variety of microbes, and adding various plants to impair the spread of diseases.


The prototype Mars ketchup
Florida Tech

The harvested tomatoes were used by Heinz to produce a limited run of prototype bottles of Heinz Tomato Ketchup, Marz Edition at its California research facility, one of which was flown to an altitude of 23 miles (37 km), where it was subjected to temperatures of -94 °F (-74 °C). As to how the out of this world ketchup tastes, only a handful of people working at Heinz know.

In addition to helping the first Mars explorers make their fries a bit more palatable, the research can also help people back on Earth grow food in marginal soils.

"What this project has done is look at long-term harvesting of food," says Palmer. "Achieving a crop that is of a quality to become Heinz Tomato Ketchup was the dream result and we achieved it. Working with the Tomato Masters at Heinz has allowed us to see what the possibilities are for long-term food production beyond Earth. There is much we can learn by working with one of the biggest food companies worldwide."

The video below introduces Heinz Tomato Ketchup, Marz Edition.