It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Tuesday, November 16, 2021
Support staff in Winnipeg School Division vote in favour of strike
Support staff in the Winnipeg School Division have voted in favour of striking amid wage negotiations.
In an update on Monday, Carla Paul, president of the Winnipeg Association of Non-Teaching Employees (W.A.N.T.E.), said 999 members voted in favour of the strike while 42 voted against it.
"The W.A.N.T.E. Collective Bargaining Committee now has a strong mandate from the membership to proceed with a strike action," Paul said in the update.
No information regarding a strike date was released.
W.A.N.T.E. represents around 1,700 support staff in the Winnipeg School Division (WSD), including educational assistants, library technicians, interpreters, and a number of other staff positions.
The vote comes after W.A.N.T.E. rejected a proposal from the division in October. The association said at the time if a "more respectful proposal" was not submitted, it would be asking the membership for a job action mandate.
A WSD spokesperson told CTV News the division does not comment on active negotiations.
CTV News has reached out to W.A.N.T.E. for comment.
Russia's biggest steelmakerlooks to nuclear
15 November 2021
Rosenergoatom has agreed to partner with Russia's biggest steelmaker, NLMK, on clean power supply, including potentially the supply of nuclear energy to new facilities at the huge Stoilensky mining and processing site. "Increasing the share of low-carbon energy sources is one of NLMK Group’s priority initiatives," the company said. "Nuclear energy is one of the main decarbonisation tools, currently accounting for a third of global low-carbon electricity production," it added.
Inside the Stoilensky beneficiation plant (Image: NLMK)
NLMK lists "Minimisation of environmental footprint, including a reduction of specific emissions per tonne of steel ... to the level of the best available EU technologies" among its goals.
Rosenergoatom already has agreements to supply over 3 TWh of clean electricity to NLMK this year, which is equivalent to about 380 MW of nuclear generation at a 90% capacity factor. The partnership agreement the companies announced on 12 November could see this increase when new facilities at Stoilensky start production in 2027 or 2028, the companies said.
Rosenergoatom's deal with NLMK also includes an aspect of demand management in which large electricity consumers are paid a premium to reduce their demand during times of peak demand. "The absolute values across the country are very modest," said Rosenergoatom's Deputy General Director and Sales Director, Alexander Khvalko. "However, the demand for this service is growing at a good pace. During this year we have increased the total unloading capacity from 5 to 100 MW."
“Rosenergoatom intends to continue to cooperate with industrial consumers within the framework of free contracts, supplying them with low-carbon electricity produced at nuclear power plants." said Khvalko. "This service is becoming more and more popular," he added. "This year alone, Rosenergoatom has signed free contracts for the amount of about RUB5 billion (USD69 million)."
Stoilensky is a large iron ore extraction and processing site in the Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine. It produces about 18% of Russia's iron ore in the form of concentrates, sinter ore and iron ore pellets to the value of around RUB52.7 billion per year. It employs 5900 people.
The World Steel Association (WSA) recently named NLMK a 'Sustainability Champion', which means the association considers NLMK has proven its commitment to the principles of sustainable development. In 2020, NLMK Group also joined Step Up, the WSA's decarbonisation programme, which aims to reduce the industry’s environmental impact, and prepared data on the life cycle of the resources it uses in the production process.
Researched and written by World Nuclear News
Exxon launches sale of shale gas properties in Texas
Reuters Shariq Khan and Sabrina Valle Publishing date: Nov 15, 2021 •
HOUSTON — Exxon Mobil on Monday launched a sale of its oil and gas properties in the first major U.S. shale field, a spokesperson confirmed, as part of a portfolio reshuffling to focus on more lucrative assets.
The top U.S. oil producer set a goal three years ago of raising $15 billion from asset sales, and put several U.S. and international assets on the market as energy prices have recovered from the pandemic-induced slump.
It will open a data room on Thursday for its Barnett Shale holdings that include 2,700 wells across about 182,000 acres in North Texas, home of the first horizontally drilled shale wells. Exxon spokesperson Sarah Nordin confirmed the sale process.
Production operations will continue normally during the marketing process, Nordin said. There has been no agreement reached on a sale and no buyer was identified, she said.
The producing properties are valued at between $400 million and $500 million, according a person familiar with the matter. U.S. gas prices are up 75% year to date, settling at $5.01 per million British thermal units on Monday.
Bids are due Dec. 21 and Exxon aims to close any sale in January. The properties’ shale gas production has declined by half since 2016, to around 227 million cubic feet per day (mcfd) in the first half of this year, according to a marketing document seen by Reuters.
The wells were among natural gas properties Exxon last year said it wanted to sell. It put about 5,000 natural gas wells in the Fayetteville Shale in Arkansas on the block in August.
Exxon, which suffered a historic $22.4 billion loss in 2020, is selling assets in Asia, Africa and Europe as it as focuses on production ventures in Guyana, offshore Brazil and the Permian Basin.
(Reporting by Shariq Khan in Bengaluru and Sabrina Valle in Houston Editing by Matthew Lewis)
Palm oil land grabs ‘trashing’ environment and displacing people
Growing rush for land is destroying ecosystems and disrupting lives to satisfy global demand for goods, study warns
Burnt land next to a palm oil plantation in Central Kalimantan. Indonesia is the biggest producer of the crop, which is ranked at highest risk for land grabs.
Businesses and governments must stop the growing rush of commodities-driven land grabbing, which is “trashing” the environment and displacing people, says new research.
Palm oil and cobalt were extreme risks for land grabs according to an analysis of 170 commodities by research firm Verisk Maplecroft published last week. It also warned that, alongside cobalt, other minerals used for “clean” technology, including silicon, zinc, copper, were high risk and undermined the sector’s label.
The research showed that goods such as coconuts, garlic, tea and cocoa were also high risk for land grabbing.
In 2007, a world food price crisis led to a land rush as companies tried to secure production and costs. A UN report in September said commodity exports in the decade after grew 20%, to $4.38tn (£3.27tn) by 2019.
Verisk Maplecroft said the demand for more land to produce goods had been accompanied by displacement of indigenous communities and damage to natural capital – “such as clean air and water, pollinating insects, and soil quality” – crucial to battling the climate crisis.
Will Nichols, Verisk Maplecroft’s head of environmental research, said investors should scrutinise supply chains and pressure companies they work with to do more.
“There is a lot of money to be made from trashing the environment rather than saving it when you are a landowner or someone looking to invest in these kinds of industries and you’re aware that the government isn’t going to stand in your way,” said Nichols.
“The onus falls on corporations to be diligent about where they are sourcing, auditing suppliers, making sure commodities are coming from where they are told they are coming from.”
Nichols added that governments were responsible for enforcing regulations and eliminating corruption.
Campaign group Focus on the Global South published a letter signed by 257 organisations last Tuesday rejecting carbon-offsetting pledges from corporations and warning that initiatives such as tree planting will displace indigenous populations while land is still exploited for industrial agriculture.
Despite world leaders agreeing to stop deforestation at Cop26 this month, Ward Anseeuw, at the International Land Coalition, said there was a gap between government pledges and action on the ground.
Anseeuw highlighted Madagascar, where he said a new land law voted in this year by parliament actually reversed efforts to allow poorer farmers to secure land rights. He said the law would strip away land rights handed out since 2005.
“It gives government very strong central power over these lands and they can decide unilaterally what can happen. That opens up the door for a huge land grab. More than 3 million households could be affected,” he said. “It really shows the contradiction of what is being discussed, and the actions or decisions being taken at a global level, and what is going on in the field with governments and specific companies.”
Indigenous leaders march at Cop26 in Glasgow. Land displacement often affects indigenous people who are key to protecting biodiversity.
Kirtana Chandrasekaran, a programme coordinator at Friends of the Earth, said agribusiness was driving land grabs.
“There is a huge connection. In Indonesia, for example, there are several million hectares that have been grabbed from small-scale producers. Sometimes they do produce some palm oil for their own consumption but the problem is when it becomes needed for high-scale production for export,” said Chandrasekaran.
“You see huge lands rights violations, where people are completely thrown off land and or harassed and threatened.”
She said displacement often affected indigenous people who are key to protecting biodiversity.
Chandrasekaran said the increasing production of commodities was driven not by demand but by companies’ desire to lower prices, as well as trade agreements, such as the EU’s proposed deal to import beef from South America.
She said this drive for commodities was despite most of the world’s food being produced by family farms, not by big corporations.
“People are still consuming things that are produced locally by small-scale producers. Commodities production can be considered food, but it’s highly processed, not accessible outside urban centres and not very nutritious,” she said.
How the secret world of soil microbes helps keep carbon in the ground
The largest terrestrial carbon sink on earth is the planet's soil. One of the fears that many scientists have is that a warming planet will liberate significant portions of the soil's carbon, turning it into carbon dioxide (CO2) gas, and so further accelerate the pace of planetary warming. One of the key players in this story is the microbe: Invisible, and yet the predominant form of life on earth.
"Microbes are everywhere and in everything," says Kristen DeAngelis, professor of microbiology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and senior author of the study, recently published in ISME Communications. "There are billions of microbes in one teaspoon of soil; a trillion times more microbes than stars in the known universe. And yet, we don't know that much about them."
It seems that microbial activity has a large effect on the atmosphere, especially in how microbes help convert organic carbon—think of all the fallen leaves, rotting tree stumps, grasses and other organic matter—into soil, keeping that carbon out of the atmosphere. It's this soil organic matter, or SOM, that acts not only as a carbon sink but also gives soil its ability to absorb water and prevent flooding as well as to be a nutritious source of energy for plant life.
And yet, it's not entirely clear how microbes form SOM. "Our study sheds light on the relevance of microbial community composition and activity to shape the composition of SOM," says lead author Luiz A. Domeignoz-Horta, now at the University of Zurich's department of evolutionary biology and environmental studies, but who completed his research for this paper as part of DeAngelis's lab at UMass Amherst. "Before our study, no one knew that the particular composition of microbial communities was important for the formation of SOM."
The team conducted an experiment in which they inoculated "model soils," or sterile mixtures of sand and clay, with different microbial communities, and then fed the microbes sugars and vitamins so that they could grow over the course of four months, building SOM the whole time. The group was then able to measure the SOM generated by these different communities, as well as to test how persistent the SOM was depending on the microbial community that created it.
To do this, the team subjected the soils to a controlled process of pyrolysis—or heating, up to 650 O C, in the absence of oxygen. "As we heated the soils, we recorded when the soil began to release carbon gas. More 'thermally stable' samples of SOM reached temperatures above 400O C, while the less thermally stable samples emitted more carbon in the 200—300O C range," says Domeignoz-Horta, who led the team's international collaboration. "This assay was performed by our soil biochemists' collaborators in Switzerland, and it is a great example of the importance of a multidisciplinary research team to advance science," observes Domeignoz-Horta.
What the researchers discovered is not only further evidence linking microbes to SOM formation, but that different microbial communities shaped the composition of SOM in distinct ways, including the SOM's ability to withstand being turned into CO2. While it seems that bacteria are primarily responsible for driving the creation of SOM in this model system, it is the presence of fungal communities that render soil able to withstand warming temperatures.
More information:Luiz A. Domeignoz-Horta et al, Direct evidence for the role of microbial community composition in the formation of soil organic matter composition and persistence,ISME Communications(2021).DOI: 10.1038/s43705-021-00071-7
A colorful example of a rock that is partly weathered—in this case, a volcanoclastic rock from Puerto Rico that is being transformed into clays and iron oxides from the outside in. Credit: Eric Slessarev / LLNL
Rock weathering controls the potential for soil carbon storage at a continental scale.
New research from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and collaborators found that rock weathering—the process of chemical transformation by long exposure to water and the atmosphere—boosts soil organic carbon storage by altering soil mineralogy. The research appears in the journal Biogeochemistry Letters.
As rock-derived primary minerals weather to form soil, they create reactive, poorly crystalline minerals that bind and store organic carbon. By implication, the abundance of primary minerals in soil might influence the abundance of poorly crystalline minerals, and consequently soil organic carbon storage.
"We found that the link between primary mineral weathering, poorly crystalline minerals and soil carbon has not been fully tested, particularly at large spatial scales," said LLNL scientist and co-lead author Eric Slessarev. "To close this knowledge gap, we designed a model that links primary mineral weathering rates to the geographic distribution of poorly crystalline minerals across the U.S., and then used this model to evaluate the effect of rock weathering on soil organic carbon."
The team found that poorly crystalline minerals are most abundant and strongly correlated with organic carbon in geographically limited zones that experience enhanced weathering rates, particularly where humid climate and plenty of primary minerals co-occur. This finding confirms that rock weathering alters soil mineralogy to enhance soil organic carbon storage at continental scales, but also indicates that the influence of active weathering on soil carbon storage is limited.
Most of the terrestrial biosphere's carbon is stored below ground as soil organic carbon (SOC). Small changes in the relative size of the global SOC pool can influence atmospheric CO2 levels, and hence global climate. But in most soils, a significant fraction of SOC is associated with minerals that limit its rate of exchange with the atmosphere.
The team identified a quantitative relationship between primary mineral weathering rates and stocks of poorly crystalline minerals (PCM) that accounts for both climate and the availability of readily weathered minerals. Team members also tested the role of primary mineral weathering contributing to carbon storage at continental scales.
Primary mineral weathering rates, PCM stocks and carbon storage are linked because poorly crystalline minerals are relatively transient weathering products. Studies of soil age gradients show that these minerals accumulate during the initial stages of weathering but later decline as the stock of primary minerals is exhausted and PCMs ripen into less reactive crystalline secondary minerals. Across rock types, these minerals are most abundant in soils formed from volcanic parent materials rich in feldspars and glass with feldspar-like composition and in humid climates, where ample water facilitates higher weathering rates.
"Taken together, these facts indicate that the primary mineral weathering rate is a key factor that determines the abundance of PCMs," said LLNL scientist and co-author Jennifer Pett-Ridge. "PCMs disappear over time as they ripen into more crystalline minerals; so additional active weathering is required to maintain soil PCMs and lead to the conditions needed for heightened carbon storage."
LLNL researchers Noah Sokol and Erin Nuccio also contributed to the research.
More information:Eric W. Slessarev et al, Rock weathering controls the potential for soil carbon storage at a continental scale,Biogeochemistry Letters(2021).DOI: 10.1007/s10533-021-00859-8
Biden proposes 20-year ban on Chaco Canyon drilling at Tribal Nations Summit
#MMIWG President Joe Biden also signed an executive order to combat "the epidemic of missing or murdered Indigenous peoples."
By Clyde Hughes & Don Jacobson & Darryl Coote President Joe Biden delivers remarks Monday during a virtual Tribal Nations Summit as part of national Native American Heritage Month in the South Court Auditorium of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building near the White House in Washington, D.C.
Nov. 15 (UPI) -- The Biden administration announced on Monday efforts to improve protections for Native American tribal lands and traditions, including a proposed 20-year ban on oil and gas drilling at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico.
The announcements came as President Joe Biden held the first Tribal Nations summit in five years at the White House.
The Interior Department in the coming weeks will begin consideration of a plan for a 20-year halt on federal mineral rights leasing within a 10-mile radius around Chaco Culture National Historical Park in northwestern New Mexico, the administration announced.
The Greater Chaco Landscape "is a region of great cultural, spiritual, and historical significance to many Pueblos and Indian Tribes" that contains "thousands of artifacts that date back more than 1,000 years," the White House said in a statement.
Chaco cultural sites were listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987 and are one of only 24 such sites in the United States.
"For the past decade, Pueblos and Tribes in Arizona and New Mexico have raised concerns about encroaching oil and gas development threatening sacred and cultural sites, and Congress has passed a series of actions to temporarily defer new leasing," the administration said.
The Biden administration proposed a 20-year ban on oil and gas drilling at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico. File photo by Brendakochevar/Wikimedia Commons
The proposed withdrawal will not apply to individual allotments or to minerals within the area owned by private, state or tribal entities, nor would it impose restrictions on other developments, such as roads, water lines, transmission lines or buildings.
The New Mexico Land Office has already implemented a moratorium on new state mineral leases within a 10-mile radius of Chaco Culture National Historical Park.
The measure was one of several new projects aimed at enhancing protections for Native Americans announced at the Tribal Nations Summit.
"The White House Tribal Nations Summit is an opportunity to celebrate the progress we have made in this new nation-to-nation era and map out plans to improve outcomes for this generation of Native Americans and for the seven generations to come," the White House said.
Biden on Monday also signed an executive order for several departments to create a strategy within 240 days to improve public safety and justice for Native Americans and to address "the epidemic of missing or murdered Indigenous peoples."
"It's long overdue," he said during the signing ceremony. "We're going to make some substantial change in Indian Country, and it's going to continue."
The strategy must also establish a plan to address unsolved cases involving Native Americans, provide coordination among the various departments and strengthen and expand Native American participation in the Amber Alert in Indian Country initiative.
The order also calls for supporting tribal and non-federal law enforcement to respond to violence against this marginalized population; improve data collection analysis and information sharing; and strengthen prevention, early intervention and victim and survivor services.
Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland delivers remarks Monday during a virtual Tribal Nations Summit as part of national Native American Heritage Month in the South Court Auditorium of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building near the White House in Washington, D.C.
Photo by Sarah Silbiger/UPI |
And it directs the departments of justice, homeland security and interior, to provide support for tribal nations to implement "tribally centered" responses to safety and crime.
"This builds on the work we did together on reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act in 2013 when we granted authority to tribes to exercise jurisdiction over non-Indian offenders who commit violence on tribal lands," Biden said.
"We're going to reauthorize that again, we're going to expand the jurisdiction to include other offenses like sex trafficking, sexual assault and child abuse."
Garland said inremarks at the summit that he is "eager" to work with Haaland to develop the plan and that the Justice Department on Monday launched a steering committee that will work with other agencies to develop a comprehensive plan to address the crisis of missing or murdered indigenous people. The executive order was signed as the United States' Native American communities combat violence committed against its people.
The National Crime Information Center has reported 5,712 cases of missing American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls, though the number could be higher.
Biden in his executive order cited research that said Native American women are disproportionately the victims of sexual and gender-based violence as half have experienced sexual violence. The vast majority of Native American survivors, it said, reported being victimized by a non-Native American individual, it said.
"We acknowledge that our country's historically failed to meet the crisis of missing or murdered Indigenous people with the urgency and the resources it demands," Garland said. "We also recognize that solving this crisis requires that we work in partnership with one another. The president's executive order will build on and expand our efforts to do exactly that."
The administration said the infrastructure bill Biden signed Monday and the proposed Build Back Better measure being debated in Congress will provide "billions of dollars" to support Native American families with programs that will cut the costs of raising a family, along with easing healthcare costs and addressing climate change.
"Investments in the Build Back Better Plan would bring record funding for tribes in the areas of child care and preschool programs," the White House said. "This transformative cradleboard to college funds will make it easier for Native women and other family providers to remain in the workforce and increase educational opportunities and outcomes for children."
Amazon to pay California $500,000 for failing to disclose COVID-19 cases to workers
Amazon agreed to pay $500,000 to California's government and to change its workplace practices after allegedly failing to properly inform employees of COVID-19 cases in their workplaces.
Nov. 15 (UPI) -- Amazon will pay $500,000 in a settlement with California's attorney general's office, which alleges the company illegally withheld information from its workers about COVID-19 cases within the company.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta said Amazon violated California's "right-to-know" law, which requires companies to notify workers of COVID-19 cases at their worksite, by failing to notify warehouse workers and local health agencies of case numbers "often leaving them in the dark and unable to effectively track the spread of the virus."
"This led to workers not knowing if they had been exposed to two, 20, or even 200 cases of COVID-19," Bonta said during a press conference. "This left many workers understandably terrified and powerless to make informed decisions to protect themselves and to protect their loved ones."
In addition to paying $500,000 toward "further enforcement of California's consumer protection laws," Amazon also agreed to make changes to its workplace policies.
Under the agreement, Amazon must notify warehouse workers within one day of the exact number of new COVID-19 cases, adequately inform workers of disinfection and safety plans and employees' COVID-19 related rights, notify health agencies of COVID-19 cases within 48 hours to avoid potential outbreaks and submit to monitoring by the California attorney general's office regarding its COVID-19 notifications.
"Today's first-of-its-kind judgment will help ensure Amazon meets that requirement for its tens of thousands of warehouse workers across California," Bonta said. "Bottom line: Californians have a right to know about potential exposure to the coronavirus to protect themselves, their families and their communities."
In September, Amazon reached a settlement with former workers, Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, who were illegally fired for speaking out against the company's coronavirus response and environmental policies.
AN OBSCURE DARWIN IDEA COULD BE KEY TO SOLVING THE CLIMATE CRISIS It has taken a century and a half to make people take Darwin’s proposal seriously and apply it to trees.
ROB MACKENZIE AND CHRISTINE FOYER 11.14.2021
MORE THAN 150 years ago Victorian biologist Charles Darwin made a powerful observation: that a mixture of species planted together often grows more strongly than species planted individually.
It has taken a century and a half — ironically about as long as it can take to grow an oak to harvest — and a climate crisis to make policymakers and landowners take Darwin’s idea seriously and apply it to trees.
There is no human technology that can compete with forests for the take-up of atmospheric carbon dioxide and its storage. Darwin’s idea of growing lots of different plants together to increase the overall yield is now being explored by leading academics, who research forests and climate change.
Scientists and policymakers from Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, and the US came together recently to discuss if Darwin’s idea provides a way to plant new forests that absorb and store carbon securely.
WHY WE SHOULD PLANT MORE FORESTS
Planting more forests is a potent tool for mitigating the climate crisis, but forests are like complex machines with millions of parts. Tree planting can cause ecological damage when carried out poorly, particularly if there is no commitment to diversity of planting. Following Darwin’s thinking, there is growing awareness that the best, healthiest forests are ones with the greatest variety of trees — and trees of various ages.
Images showing how trees grow more strongly when planted in diverse forests, compare the size of the trees at 11-years-old. The trees are oak (left) and larch (right). The tree half-disc on the right of each image was planted in a more diverse area. All trees come from the same estate and were grown under otherwise similar conditions.Author provided
In mixed forests, each species accesses different sources of nutrients from the others, leading to higher yields overall. And those thicker stems are made mostly of carbon.
Mixed forests are also often more resilient to disease by diluting populations of pests and pathogens, organisms that cause disease.
Darwin’s prescient observation is tucked away in chapter four of his 1859 famous book On the Origin of the Species. Studies of this “Darwin effect” have spawned vast ecological literature. Yet it is still so outside of the mainstream thinking on forestry that, until now, little major funding has been available to prompt the use of this technique.
Darwin also famously described evolution by natural selection, a process by which genes evolve to be fit for their environment. Unfortunately for the planet, human-induced environmental change outstrips the evolution of genes for larger, slower reproducing, organisms, like trees.
A man studies an exhibit on Charles Darwin and the history of science at Darwin’s home in Kent.Vicky Jirayu/Shutterstock
Modern gene-editing techniques — direct DNA surgery — can help speed things up once careful laboratory work identifies the key genes. But only the evolution of human practice — that is, changing what we do — is fast and far-reaching enough to rebalance the carbon cycle and bring us back within safe planetary limits.
HEALTHIER TREES CAPTURE MORE CARBON
At our meeting we discussed a study of Norbury Park estate in central England, which describes how — using the Darwin effect and other climate-sensitive measures — the estate now captures over 5,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year, making it quite possibly the most carbon-negative land in the UK. Such impressive statistics don’t happen by accident or by sticking some trees in the ground and hoping; care and ecological nous are needed.
Trees of different ages also continuously provide harvestable timber and so steady jobs, in stark contrast to the other methods of forestry, where large areas are felled and cleared at the same time.
The UK government, like other administrations, has laid down requirements for responsible large-scale tree planting. These requirements continue to be revised and improved. There are still vital questions about which trees we should plant, where we should plant them, and what to do with them once they’ve grown.
It has been said that it is impossible to plant a forest, but it should certainly be possible to design a plantation that will blossom into a forest for future generations. We need forests to be a practical, dependable, and just response to our climate and biodiversity crises, and Darwin has shown us the way.
This article was originally published on The Conversation by Rob MacKenzie and Christine Foyer at University of Birmingham. Read the original article here.
The UN responded to Elon Musk's challenge to prove how his wealth could tackle world hunger by revealing a $6.6 billion plan
tlevin@insider.com (Tim Levin)
Elon Musk is the wealthiest person on the planet, with almost $300 billion mostly derived from Tesla stock.
Elon Musk dared the UN to show him how $6 billion could fight world hunger.
The UN has gotten back to the world's richest person with a proposal.
Musk said he would "sell Tesla stock and do it" if the UN could show how the money would be spent.
Elon Musk dared the United Nations to show him how $6 billion of his wealth could address world hunger. On Monday, the UN got back to him with a plan.
The UN's food-assistance branch, the World Food Programme (WFP), laid out how $6.6 billion in investments could prevent 42 million people across 43 countries from starving. The head of the WFP, David Beasley, called out Musk, the world's richest person by far, in a tweet announcing the proposal.
"This hunger crisis is urgent, unprecedented, AND avoidable. @elonmusk, you asked for a clear plan & open books. Here it is!," Beasley said. "We're ready to talk with you - and anyone else - who is serious about saving lives."
Late last month, Musk challenged the WFP to explain how $6 billion could solve world hunger. He said if the organization could show exactly how the money would be spent, he would "sell Tesla stock right now and do it." Musk's challenge was a response to a CNN interview with Beasley during which he called on billionaires like Musk and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to chip in $6 billion — a small amount in proportion to their vast fortunes — to save millions of people at risk of starvation.
The WFP's proposal, titled "A one-time appeal to billionaires," describes how billions donated by the world's richest people could be spend to stave off hunger. It includes $3.5 billion for food and its delivery and $2 billion for cash and food vouchers, among other expenditures.
Market forces halved methane emissions from Uinta Basin oil and gas wells; but that's not the whole story
Map of the Uinta Basin in eastern Utah, methanols observational sites, and oil/gas wells. Observational sites include Horsepool (HPL), Castlepeak (CSP), and Fruitland (FRU). The grayscale is the atmospheric footprint of the HPL site as simulated by the HRRR-STILT transport model. Satellite imagery from Google Earth. Credit: University of Utah
As important as emissions of the greenhouse gas methane are in the climate conversation, recently factoring prominently in the recent COP26 conference in Glasgow, researchers have painfully little long-term data on emissions from wells and other oil and gas infrastructure. That makes answering questions about the sources and magnitudes of emissions, as well as year-to-year trends across an entire production region, difficult.
Answers are starting to come from Utah's Uinta Basin, home to possibly the longest continuous methane monitoring site in an oil and gas-producing region. Since 2015, researchers have been tracking emissions from oil and gas wells and report that, over that time, emissions from the region have fallen by half.
But more analysis of leak rates shows that the oil and gas industry has a ways to go in stopping methane leaks, which impact the climate and human health and can impose costs on Utah's economy.
"Our work in the Uinta Basin shows that the methane emissions can change over multiple years," says professor John Lin, of the University of Utah Department of Atmospheric Sciences, "and it is important to bring a long-term perspective and monitor these emissions over multiple years as well."
"The earth has only one atmosphere," says research associate professor Seth Lyman, director of the Bingham Research Center at Utah State University's Uintah Basin campus, "and emissions in one area can impact air quality and climate across the globe. Oil and natural gas facilities are not evenly distributed around the state or around the world, but climate impacts from fossil fuels are not dependent on the location of emissions."
The study is published in Scientific Reports and is funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and a subcontract from the University of Arizona.
Monitoring in the Uinta Basin
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, with around 85 times more global warming potential than carbon dioxide over the first 20 years it's in the atmosphere. Methane has a tremendous potential to absorb infrared energy, which it then re-directs back to the Earth's surface, thereby trapping the heat and warming the planet.
Methane is the "gas" part of oil and gas production. Because it's hard to keep every component of the gas production process airtight, methane can leak from wells, pipelines—anywhere along the way.
It can also react in the atmosphere to form ozone, which is where Lin and his colleagues from the University of Utah, Utah State University and West Texas A&M University come into the story. In the early 2010s, researchers were studying high levels of wintertime ozone pollution in the Uinta Basin. One study involved flying an aircraft-based sensor over the basin, home to around 10,000 oil and gas wells. Aircraft-based measurements are good, but they're only a snapshot of a moment in time.
"I wanted to compare estimates from ground-based observations against the aircraft estimates and see how the emissions change over multiple years," Lin says.
In 2015, with funding from NOAA, the team installed the first of what would become three sensors in the basin. It was good timing—after years of booming oil and gas production, oil prices began to fluctuate and fell off by the 2020s, affecting production in the region and giving the researchers a glimpse into how economic forces and methane emissions were related.
How and why emissions fell
Between 2015 and 2020, the researchers observed, methane emissions in the Uinta Basin approximately halved. Natural gas production also fell to around half of its peak, as fossil fuel prices collapsed after 2014. This initial result is good news—less methane in the air is good for the climate and for human health.
But the researchers also noted that the amount of methane still leaking from the remaining wells in 2020 was about six to eight percent of the produced natural gas, about the same as it was in 2015.
"This means that the leak rate has stayed at a constant—albeit high—rate, even with decreases in natural gas production," Lin says. This result was surprising because previous research had suggested that lower-production wells would leak a higher proportion of methane. "This may account for the high leak rate in general in the Uinta Basin since the average Uinta well produces less gas compared to many other counterparts around the U.S.," he says. "However, it was nonetheless surprising that the leak rate did not increase as the Uinta wells decreased in production."
The researchers ruled out regulation as contributing to the emissions decline since Environmental Protection Agency regulations in the past few years applied only to new wells. Surveys of some of the companies in the Uinta Basin did show that one company voluntarily took action to detect and repair leaks, but the extent of such voluntary action is unknown.
What methane leaks cost us
So if methane emissions decreased with a drop in gas production, does that mean emissions might go up if production rebounds? Maybe, Lin says but adds that leak detection and repair technologies have been improving in recent years, so the methane emissions could even decrease in the future as production increases.
"This will depend on decisions made by individual companies, as well as on changes that have occurred or that may occur in the regulatory landscape," says Lyman.
Just as economic forces impacted oil and gas production and methane emissions in recent years, continued leaks can impose their own expenses, particularly on Utah's economy. Lyman says that the majority of crude oil processed in Utah's refineries comes from the Uinta Basin. Beyond the climate implications, leaking methane is wasted energy (about three to five percent of all energy produced in the basin, the study estimates), which increases costs for companies.
Also, leaking methane impacts Uinta Basin air quality. "Besides the obvious (and more important) health impacts to residents of the Basin, air quality problems lead to increased regulation of oil and gas development, which increases costs, and those costs are passed on to consumers," Lyman says.
Hopefully, this study inspires other oil and gas regions in the U.S. and around the world to conduct their own continuous monitoring, says Erik Crosman, assistant professor at West Texas A&M University. "We need a detailed understanding of how methane emissions are evolving," he says, "and observations like those we conducted in the Uinta Basin help toward filling in those gaps."Inactive oil wells could be big source of methane emissions
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Inside the Stoilensky beneficiation plant (Image: NLMK)
