Sunday, February 06, 2022

In a Landslide Victory, Mexican GM Workers Vote In an Independent Union

A woman wearing a red blouse and jeans and a serious, determined expression holds up a handful of "VOTA SINTTIA" leaflets, fanned out. She is standing in a sunny outdoor location, in front of a red car that has a poster taped on the side.

“Today I believe we as workers are more united than ever,” said Alejandra Morales, SINTTIA’s principal officer, who has worked at the plant for 11 years. “Not only in Silao, but in all of Mexico.” The independent union's landslide victory at the plant is a major breakthrough for workers seeking to break the vice grip of the employer-friendly unions that have long dominated Mexico’s labor movement. Photo: Casa Obrera del Bajio

Auto workers at a General Motors plant in central Mexico delivered a landslide victory to an independent union in a vote held February 1-2. It's a major breakthrough for workers and labor activists seeking to break the vice grip of the employer-friendly unions that have long dominated Mexico’s labor movement.

Turnout among the plant’s 6,300 eligible voters was 88 percent. The independent union SINTTIA (the National Auto Workers Union) picked up 4,192 votes—78 percent of the vote. SINTTIA, which grew out of the successful campaign which ousted the previous corrupt union last year, promised to raise wages and fight for workers on the shop floor.

Workers at the Silao plant voted last August to invalidate the contract held by a well-connected national auto workers union headed by Congressman Tereso Medina of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). That union was affiliated to the Congress of Mexican Labor (CTM), the country’s largest union federation.

CTM affiliates, tied to the long-ruling PRI, have long been criticized for signing employer-friendly “protection contracts,” which lock in low wages and prevent workers from organizing genuine unions.

In this week’s vote, a paltry 247 votes went to another CTM affiliate that appeared on the ballot, with 932 (17 percent) to a third union known as “the Coalition,” widely perceived by workers to be a CTM front. (A fourth competitor got just 18 votes.)

“Today I believe we as workers are more united than ever,” said Alejandra Morales, SINTTIA’s principal officer, who has worked at the plant for 11 years in the paint department. “Not only in Silao, but in all of Mexico.”

The weekend before the vote, Morales reported receiving threats outside her home from three people in a pickup with the license plates removed, part of what she called a “campaign of intimidation and defamation” by “the mafia of anti-democratic and charro unions.” SINTTIA’s secretary of organization reported getting death threats on Facebook and WhatsApp.

SHOT IN THE ARM

SINTTIA’s victory is a shot in the arm for the independent union movement in Mexico; the vote was closely followed domestically and internationally.

Under Mexico’s labor law reform, which went into effect in 2019, all existing union contracts must be voted on by May 1, 2023, a measure aimed at allowing workers to democratically choose their unions—a freedom long denied Mexican workers. Most union contracts in Mexico have been signed behind the backs of workers by employers like GM and corrupt Mexican union officials—often before any workers are even hired.

Thus far, votes to delegitimate contracts and open the door toward choosing a new union have been few and far between. As of mid-January, majorities in only 24 workplaces—less than 1 percent of those where legitimation votes have been held—have opted to throw out the existing union. The GM Silao plant is by far the biggest to do this. It’s also the first where workers have voted to join a new union.

“What we hope is that [workers at] new companies see that they can beat the CTM,” said Juan Armando Fajardo Rivera, the union’s press secretary, who has worked at the plant for 13 years. “The CTM isn’t invincible. If you want a union, you can achieve it with the new reform.”

INTERNATIONAL SUPPORT

Support for the effort to vote in a genuine union at GM Silao poured in from unions and labor activists across the globe. The UAW and AFL-CIO issued statements pushing the Mexican government to ensure the vote was fair and free from intimidation. Unionists from Brazil, Canada, and the U.S. joined an international delegation to the vote; among the Brazilian delegation were eight members of local unions at GM.

The second-place finisher, the CTM-linked Coalition, attacked the international solidarity shown by unions and workers around the globe as “foreign interference,” and made the fear of job loss a centerpiece of their campaign. “Both the Canadians and the Americans want to take our production to their countries,” said a leader of the Coalition in an interview with El Financiero.

SINTTIA, for its part, embraced the support. “The union struggle encompasses the whole world,” said Fajardo Rivera. “It’s not just in Mexico.”

“It’s important to recognize the commitment of workers from other countries,” said Morales, “because it’s important that the whole working class, not just from here but globally, be in constant communication for the betterment of everyone.”

WHAT’S NEXT

Once the results are certified by Mexican labor authorities, SINTTIA will enter negotiations with GM. Earlier this week, the automaker reported it had pulled in a record $10 billion in profits last year.

Workers at the Silao plant make the lucrative Chevy Silverado and GMC Sierra pickups, but earn less than $25 for a 12-hour shift. Foremost on their minds is a wage increase. “What workers would like most is to have a decent salary that is enough for their day-to-day [needs],” said Morales.

Among the other demands that SINTTIA highlighted in its election campaign were bathroom breaks, improved benefits, food and transportation paid for by the company, and better ability to take vacation time.

The independent unions that exist at three of Mexico’s two dozen auto assembly plants—at Nissan, Audi, and Volkswagen—have won higher wages and benefits than those where contracts are controlled by protection unions linked to the CTM. Those unions, who formed the federation FESIIAAAN (the Federation of Independent Unions of the Automobile, Auto Parts, Aerospace and Tire Industries) in 2018, were vocal in their support for SINTTIA.

“We know that those unions have been working for years to obtain what they are earning today [and] their benefits,” said Morales. “We lost a lot over the years, so we are going to have to advance bit by bit.”

Under Mexico’s reformed labor law, the union has six months to negotiate a contract and get it approved by a majority of the plant’s workers.

For more background on the vote, see the January 28 article from Labor Notes“Mexican Auto Workers to Choose New Union in Landmark Vote.”



Dan DiMaggio is assistant editor of Labor Notes.dan@labornotes.org

 
Luis Feliz Leon is a staff writer and organizer with Labor Notes.
luis@labornot


MEXICAN AUTO WORKERS JUST MADE HISTORY BY TAKING BACK THEIR UNION

After years of struggle, thousands of auto workers at the massive General Motors plant in Silao, Mexico, just voted overwhelmingly for a more independent and democratic union.

BY MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ
FEBRUARY 4, 2022
An activist holds up a sign during a protest outside the General Motors' pickup truck plant as workers vote to elect a new union under a labor reform that underpins a new trade deal with Canada and the United States, in Silao, Mexico, Feb. 1, 2022. The sign reads: "We demand free and democratic elections in the GM Silao plant." REUTERS/Sergio Maldonado



Mexican auto workers in Silao, Guanajuato, just scored a huge victory that has been years in the making. After first ridding themselves of a corrupt, business-friendly union last year, 6,500 workers at the massive General Motors plant in Silao voted this week on which union would represent them moving forward. On Thursday, Feb. 3, news broke that workers overwhelmingly voted to join the Independent National Auto Workers Union (Sindicato independiente nacional de trabajadores y trabajadoras de la industria automotriz), securing a major victory for rank and filers who have been fighting for a more independent and more democratic union.

In this interview, recorded before the union election took place, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with auto worker and labor organizer Israel Cervantes about this pivotal struggle and what the union election means for workers and the labor movement in Mexico and beyond. Israel Cervantes was one of the first workers at the Silao plant to begin organizing against both the corrupt union and the company. After working at the plant for 13 years, Cervantes was fired for organizing a demonstration of solidarity with striking GM workers in the US in 2019. He is now the leader of a new organization called Generando Movimiento (Generating Movement).

Pre-Production/Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Spanish-to-English translations provided by Bruce Hobson, coeditor and translator for the México Solidarity Project


New union at GM Mexico plant could benefit US autoworkers

Jamie L. LaReauEric D. Lawrence
Detroit Free Press


It may be too soon to know whether car buyers will see a boost in prices for full-size pickups after workers at a General Motors plant in Mexico voted to form the first independent labor union earlier this week but U.S. autoworkers are cheering the move, saying it makes them more competitive with that nation's workforce.

The union, called the National Independent Union of Workers of the Automotive Industry (SINTTIA), won the vote by a wide margin to represent about 6,500 workers in upcoming labor negotiations at GM's Silao Assembly plant, located about 200 miles north of Mexico City. Both wages and benefits are expected to increase under the union.

GM builds the highly profitable Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra light-duty full-size pickups at Silao. In the current plant contract, it said the wages range from 184.35 pesos to a maximum of 679.53 pesos per day. In dollars, that's about $8.97 to $33.05 per day. In contrast, GM builds the same light-duty pickups at Fort Wayne Assembly in Indiana and will start building the light-duty Silverado at Oshawa Assembly in Ontario soon. GM builds its heavy-duty pickups at Flint Assembly and Oshawa. At those plants, wages range from $18 to $32 an hour.

The 2022 Chevy Silverado starts at $31,500 and climbs to more than $65,000 depending on the model; the GMC Sierra starts at $30,800 and increases to more than $78,000, according to Kelley Blue Book.

An article in the New York Times reports the pay for starting workers at GM's Silao plant is lower than the pay "at some Nissan, Audi and Volkswagen plants in Mexico that are represented by independent unions, and just 60 cents above the country’s daily minimum wage."

UAW members view higher wages in Mexico as good news for both the workers in Mexico and stateside. It brings production costs on par with U.S. factories, potentially giving U.S. workers an edge at winning future products to build.

“Their wages go up, that helps us,” said Eric Welter, UAW Local 598 shop chairman at Flint Assembly. “I don’t know what initial benefit there’ll be, but it makes us more competitive and helps us not to have to make future sacrifices. We’re on a more level playing field in the future.”

'Bleed-off to Mexico'

Welter said the initial benefits will be seen in the U.S. parts and supplier industry.

There, the average wage is about $12 an hour, closer to the wages paid in Mexico, Welter said. He speculates that might prompt suppliers to build more parts in the U.S. rather than in Mexico, then pay to ship them to the states.

“Everyone is trying to get wages up down there, so that it’s not a bleed-off to Mexico,” Welter said

.


GM has made considerable investments in its U.S. operations in recent years. Last month, GM said it will invest $7 billion in four manufacturing sites in Michigan after local and state governments granted it big tax incentives. The investment will include constructing a new battery cell plant in Lansing and expanding its Orion Assembly plant in Orion Township to build the 2024 Silverado EV pickup, along with Factory ZERO in Detroit and Hamtramck.

But other truck plants such as Flint Assembly, Fort Wayne Assembly and Arlington Assembly in Texas have yet to be allocated future electric vehicles, a big concern for other UAW-represented workers.

UAW Local 2209 Shop Chairman Rich LeTourneau at Fort Wayne Assembly did not immediately respond with a comment.

More:GM's huge Michigan investment left out Flint Assembly, leaving workers anxious for future

In a UAW statement issued Thursday, the union said it congratulates the workers of GM Silao on "forming a free, fair and independent SINTTIA union. We commend the Biden Administration and (the office of the United States Trade Representative) for ensuring a fair election process and we look forward to a new era of free, fair, independent unions in Mexico.”

GM's reaction

But what will that all mean for truck prices?

GM spokesman David Barnas declined to comment on how potential wage and benefit gains for workers at Silao might impact GM's U.S. production plans or pricing of future vehicles, noting, "they haven’t even started the collective bargaining process with the newly elected union at Silao yet."

Barnas said the results will be finalized in the following days and GM will act in compliance with the law "to work with the union representatives elected by the workers, SINTTIA, to negotiate a Collective Bargaining Agreement for the manufacturing complex in Silao."




General Motors de Mexico confirms that the compensation benefits in the current collective bargaining agreement remain in place until a new one is negotiated. Barnas said GM is committed to Mexico and its employees.

More:GM CEO Barra earns $23.6 million in 2020, topping 2019 compensation

GM has operated in Mexico for 86 years. Historically, the agreements covering GM Silao provide a total package of salary and benefits that is higher than what the law requires and is competitive with the industry in Silao.

Barnas declined to comment on the current daily wage, citing the recent union voting process and subsequent collective bargaining.

But GM Silao has some of the highest "workplace of choice employee engagement scores" among GM's North America operations and the turnover rate of hourly employees is low, Barnas said.

"Our Silao employees choose GM and elect to remain with the company for extended careers because of the positive and healthy environment that we have established as a corporate leader in Mexico," Barnas said.

An act of courage

The win by the independent union came despite fierce headwinds.

The union was one of four that workers were choosing from, but it represented the only true break from the previous system, said Harley Shaiken, professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, who is an expert on labor issues in Mexico.

Workers had already been represented by a union, but that former union, the Confederation of Mexican Workers, or CTM, was skilled at derailing reform and would fight hard to maintain the status quo, Shaiken said.

The UAW and the AFL-CIO had called on GM and the Mexican government to protect workers’ rights and make sure the vote was carried out fairly and free of intimidation.

"For Mexican workers, this vote took a lot of courage in an entrenched campaign against a powerful opponent," Shaiken said

Unions at Mexican auto plants have long been accused of corruption at the expense of workers, developing protection contracts that benefit the companies and keep wages low.

The path to the current vote was connected to Mexican labor reforms that allowed workers to weigh in on their collective bargaining agreements.

Shaiken said the vote results are a bellwether for how well the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement, would address labor concerns.

More:UAW, AFL-CIO push GM, Mexican government to safeguard workers ahead of union vote

'License to print money'

Besides low wages, workers in Mexico have complained of 12-hour days and work safety issues, said Marick Masters, a business professor at Wayne State University.

The vote to approve an independent union is a "real chance to see a new light," Masters said.

"There’s a lot of distance between recognition and a contract," Masters said. "But this is certainly a step toward an independent labor movement and if that gains momentum, it’ll mean better wages and working conditions. That would level the playing field and perhaps favor U.S. workers."



But even if the new union in Mexico can negotiate higher wages and better benefits, the levels won't rise to the rate of union-represented workers in the U.S. and Canada for a long time, Masters and Shaiken said. Unifor is the union that represents autoworkers in Canada.

But it will provide a better life and improved work conditions for workers in Mexico and benefit GM, Shaiken said.

"Even if wages triple in Silao, which is not going to happen overnight, it still only means they would be at 30% of what the wages are in Fort Wayne," Shaiken said. "These pickups are a license to print money for GM. GM made $10 billion in North America last year. Higher wages mean this could be a more productive plant, with lower absenteeism and result in higher quality.”

More:GM's UAW workforce profit-sharing check will top $10,000

Given that the majority of the pickups GM builds at Silao Assembly are imported to the U.S., raising wages in Mexico could help Flint or Fort Wayne get future product, he said.

"(Lower wage rate) is why GM has an attraction to locate in Mexico," Shaiken said. "This isn’t a small vehicle where the margins are tight, these are one of the most profitable vehicles and the wage scale isn’t just low, they are suppressed, because the workers haven't had a good union."

Price hike 'inevitable'


While Shaiken does not see any potential improved wages or benefits in Mexico forcing GM to raise prices on its full-size pickups, Masters said consumers may feel it in the pocketbook.

Labor costs are a relatively small cost of operations, but anything at the margin is impactful, Masters said.

There are other issues that could raise production costs too, such as GM's move toward an all-electric lineup by 2035. GM has said it will invest $35 billion over the next three years to develop EVs and self-driving cars. But on Tuesday, CEO Mary Barra said GM now plans to increase that investment, but she did not provide a new figure yet.

Also, inflation is growing, boosting prices on most goods, Masters said. All of those things combining will put pressure on prices, he said.

"I think that’s inevitable. There’ll be higher costs of production associated with wage increases and improved working conditions in Mexico," Masters said. "You see the same thing in the U.S. right now with workers demanding higher wages and disengaging from the workforce because they’re dissatisfied and that puts pressure on employers to raise wages."

More: GM to hire 8,000 people this year as it expands into electric vehicles

More: GM issues firm warning to dealers tempted to overcharge on hot new vehicles


GM's new Mexican union a win for U.S., a shocker for Asian carmakers

Major step to level playing field will likely shake up manufacturing landscape

General Motors' Silao plant in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato. Workers there voted for an independent labor union to replace a long-serving union seen as too close to management. (Photo courtesy of GM)

KOSUKE SHIMIZU and KEN MORIYASU,
 Nikkei staff writers
February 5, 2022

MEXICO CITY/NEW YORK -- Workers at a General Motors factory in central Mexico have voted to tap an independent labor union to represent them, replacing a long-serving union seen as too cozy with management.

U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai hailed the move as "a victory for workers" and touted the protections afforded by the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement signed during the Trump administration. The USMCA, which replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement, sought to level the playing field between American and Mexican workers by improving the collective bargaining capabilities of unions.

The new union is expected to bargain hard over rights and wages at GM's plant in Silao -- a trend that could spread to other automakers in the country. Ford Motor, Stellantis, Nissan Motor, Mazda Motor, Honda Motor, Toyota Motor, Volkswagen, Audi and BMW all have Mexican production facilities.

Global automakers have benefited from Mexico's low wages and strategic geography. The central Mexican plateau lies roughly 1,700 meters above sea level and offers a natural downhill glide to the plains of the American South. Nissan in Aguascalientes, for instance, loads hundreds of cars onto a cargo train each evening -- when the railway is least congested -- to deliver to dealerships throughout the U.S.

On Thursday, the National Independent Union for Workers in the Automotive Industry (SINTTIA) beat out three other unions in the vote, including the Confederation of Mexican Workers, which had held the contract since 1995.

SINTTIA, created by the workers at the Silao plant last year, will now represent the facility's 6,000-plus employees.

The USMCA called for a significantly higher minimum wage for the auto industry, requiring that 40% to 45% of the content of automobiles manufactured in North America must be made by workers paid at least $16 per hour.
U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai described the union vote at General Motors in Mexico as "a victory for workers." © Reuters

Mexico's amended labor law of 2019 mandated companies and unions to revisit existing labor contracts and authorize a collective bargaining agreement by May 2023. A majority of workers are required to support the CBA.

When the Silao plant held a vote on the CBA in April 2021, Mexico's Secretariat of Labor and Social Welfare ordered GM to hold another one after suspicions of fraud were raised over vote-counting.

The USTR also invoked the USMCA's "rapid response" mechanism for the first time the following month over the same suspicions.

In an August revote, a majority of workers rejected the CBA.

On Thursday, GM praised the vote as an "unprecedented democratic exercise" and vowed to cooperate SINTTIA according to law.

In a statement from her office, Tai said: "The historic vote this week to choose a union at the General Motors facility in Silao is a victory for workers."

"The USMCA's tools help protect collective bargaining rights and freedom of association for workers," she said. "The next, and equally critical, stage of the process will be good faith bargaining between General Motors and the new union. The United States will continue to work with our Mexican counterparts to protect the rights of workers"

President Liz Shuler of the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions in the U.S., said in a statement that the win was made possible by the USMCA and marked "a significant victory not only for workers in Mexico but around the world."

"Together, in a democratic union, workers will advocate for higher wages and improved health and safety standards at the Silao facility, helping to set new standards in the automobile industry," she said. "The election itself set a hard-won precedent and came only after workers voted to throw out a previous contract that had poor benefits and was negotiated without the workers' input."

Cars line up to be boarded onto a train at Nissan's plant in Aguascalientes, Mexico. (Photo by Ken Moriyasu)

Company-friendly unions have long been an issue in Mexico. While they have been blamed for low wages that squeeze workers, managers at auto plants quietly acknowledge that one of Mexico's biggest draws had been the absence of such hard-nosed unions as the United Auto Workers in the U.S.

Edward Alden, a visiting professor at Western Washington University and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said this may be "the most successful example to date of effective enforcement of labor rights under a trade agreement."

When NAFTA took effect in 1994, the argument made by advocates was that expanded trade would strengthen the American economy. But while NAFTA pressed hard for free trade, it did little to address labor rights in Mexico, leaving a major wage gap between the U.S. and its southern neighbor.

NAFTA saw automakers rush to relocate manufacturing plants from the U.S. to Mexico to take advantage of the low wages and the now-removed tariffs.

"If you look at NAFTA, it was great at expanding trade, and did next to nothing on labor rights," Alden said. "There has been essentially no convergence of Mexican and U.S. wages over the past 30 years."

"So this unionization vote at the GM plant really matters, and should be seen as a real victory" for both former USTR Robert Lighthizer and Tai, he said.

But Alden noted that this formula may not apply outside North America, saying: "Mexico sends 85% of its exports to the U.S. and will agree to almost anything not to lose that access."

The Biden administration is working on an Indo-Pacific framework that would supplement the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, whose predecessor the U.S. pulled out from. The new framework "seems to include labor and environmental commitments but without any promise of greater access to the U.S. market," Alden said. "It's hard to see that producing much of anything."


ICYMI

Study provides first statistical characterisation of methane ultra-emitters from oil and gas

Groundbreaking study in Science provides first statistical characterisation of methane ultra-emitters from oil and gas
Map showing the location of the main gas pipelines and the main sources of methane
 emissions related to the oil and gas industry.
 © Kayrros, Esri, HERE, Garmin, FAO, NOAA, USGS, OpenStreetMap contributors, and the GIS User Community. Credit: © Kayrros, Esri, HERE, Garmin, FAO, NOAA, USGS, OpenStreetMap contributors, and the GIS User Community

The journal Science today released a groundbreaking study of methane ultra-emitters linked to oil and gas activities that for the first time provides a statistical characterisation of these major drivers of climate change across various production activities.

The study, based on Kayrros data, shows a direct relationship (power law) between ultra-emitters monitored and measured from space and smaller  leaks detected by local sensors and aircraft surveys.

Study contributor and Kayrros co-founder and scientific director, Alexandre d'Aspremont, said that their "study supplies a first systematic estimate of large methane leaks that can only be seen from space, showing how these detections relate to wider methane monitoring processes. This is a giant step towards overcoming the current limitations of the methane reporting system which is critical to meeting COP26 commitments to slash methane."

"Global oil and gas accounts for at least a quarter of human-made methane emissions, and recent studies provide mounting evidence that its emissions have been widely underestimated by conventional international UNFCCC protocols in the absence of a global monitoring system able to capture all oil and gas leaks."

Kayrros data scientists Clement Giron and Matthieu Mazzolini also participated in the study. Other co-authors include Thomas Lauvaux and Philippe Ciais of LSCE, Riley Duren and Daniel Cusworth of Carbon Mapper, and Drew Shindell of Duke University.

The Franco-American team of scientists performed a systematic analysis of thousands of images produced daily by the European Space Agency satellite mission Sentinel-5P to estimate the amount of methane released into the atmosphere by oil and gas production activities in 2019 and 2020.

"The actual number of ultra-emitters varies by country, but the relationship between the number of sources and their magnitude remains the same," said lead author Thomas Lauvaux, research scientist at the French Climate and Environmental Science Laboratory (Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement, LSCE).

"Intermittent emission events of 25 tons per hour or more can only be detected with monitoring satellites. These huge intermittent events that are normally undetectable consistently account for 8% to 12% of the overall methane emissions from oil and gas activities of any producing country."

The team used high-resolution atmospheric modeling and machine learning algorithms to detect and quantify hundreds of methane plumes. They then aggregated their emissions estimates at a national scale to evaluate the contribution of ultra-emitters to national reported emissions. To translate their results into a , Shindell performed climate model simulations to quantify the additional contribution to climate change.

The team detected about 1,800 ultra-emitters (25 t/h or more) over the two years, of which roughly 1,200 come from oil and gas facilities and the remainder from a combination of coal mines, agriculture and waste management. Eliminating these oil-and-gas related events would be tantamount to removing 20 million cars from the road based on the 100-year global warming power (GWP100) of methane. Highlights from the study include:

  • The study focused on six major oil and gas producing countries that together account for the majority of ultra-emitters identified through the processing of raw data from the TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) carried by Sentinel-5: Russia, Turkmenistan, U.S., Iran, Kazakhstan and Algeria.
  • Surveyed events range from a lower threshold of 25 t/h to plumes spread over hundreds of kilometers and released at a rate of several hundred t/h.
  • 50 to 150 events detected per month on average.
  • Based on adjusted emissions, oil and gas ultra-emitter estimates represent 8-12% of oil and gas methane emissions from national inventories, a contribution not included in current inventories.
  • Eliminating these emissions is easily achievable.
  • For the first time, the study quantifies the benefit of eliminating ultra-emitters. Estimates range from $6 billion for Turkmenistan and $4 billion for Russia to $400 million each for Kazakhstan and Algeria.
  • Only monitoring satellites can systematically detect ultra-emitters. In-situ sensors and short aerial surveys can only detect smaller leaks. Tasking satellites also are constrained in their capacity to detect ultra-emitters by their low temporal resolution and limited geographical coverage. At lower emission rates, the number of emitters invisible to TROPOMI far surpasses visible ultra-emitters, however.
  • While TROPOMI data help reveal hard-to-detect ultra-emitters, understanding the power-law distribution of these ultra-emitters also sheds light on the link between intermittent high-resolution imagery from aerial surveys and regular low-resolution images from TROPOMI. This goes a long way towards filling the gaps in oil-and-gas methane  coverage and resolving the wide discrepancy between atmospheric measurements and bottom-up methane inventories.

"The staggering scale of these ultra-emitters and the huge benefit that would result from their elimination far exceed what we anticipated when Kayrros started investing in the development of our Methane Watch platform," said Antoine Rostand, Kayrros President and co-founder.

"However concerning the rate of methane emissions from oil and gas may be today, it is comforting to know that these emissions can, for the most part, easily be eliminated—and hugely gratifying to see that our research and our partnership with LSCE has been so rewarding and yielded such hugely beneficial results for the world."

"To our knowledge, this is the first worldwide study to estimate the amount of methane released into the atmosphere by maintenance operations and accidental releases," said Lauvaux.

"Unreported ultra-emitters explain in part the under-estimation in official O&G reported emissions by countries as documented by previous studies. The atmospheric monitoring approach enabled by recent satellite missions provides a unique perspective on O&G activities, and the potential to mitigate these large releases of methane."

Pr. Shindell said that they "find that capturing the methane from these ultra-emitters provides enormous benefits via reduced climate change and improved air quality, so that society as a whole would come out billions of dollars ahead by eliminating these ultra-emitters. As the captured methane is a valuable commodity, the companies or countries capturing the wasted gas also typically come out ahead."

"Our work on oil and gas is just the beginning," said Duren." The team will now look at  from coal extraction and farming activities thanks to several recent satellite missions. These instruments provide images at higher resolution but only cover parts of the globe at lower frequency, but with a higher detection limit than Sentinel-5P. The systematic aspect of satellite monitoring remains a key parameter for future monitoring."

"National greenhouse gas emissions rely primarily on self-reporting, while atmospheric data offers a more rigorous approach to emissions accounting, more independent and more transparent," Lauvaux added. "In the future, atmospheric measurements will play a more important role in mitigation policies by identifying actionable measures and by monitoring the implementation of climate actions."

Monitoring methane emissions from gas pipelines
More information: T. Lauvaux, Global Assessment of Oil and Gas Methane Ultra-Emitters, Science (2022). DOI: 10.1126/science.abj4351www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abj4351
Journal information: Science 
Provided by Kayrros

Discovery unravels how atomic vibrations emerge in nanomaterials

Advances in microscopy reveal source of phonons’ puzzling behavior


Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND APPLIED SCIENCE

A hundred years of physics tells us that collective atomic vibrations, called phonons, can behave like particles or waves. When they hit an interface between two materials, they can bounce off like a tennis ball. If the materials are thin and repeating, as in a superlattice, the phonons can jump between successive materials.

Now there is definitive, experimental proof that at the nanoscale, the notion of multiple thin materials with distinct vibrations no longer holds. If the materials are thin, their atoms arrange identically, so that their vibrations are similar and present everywhere. Such structural and vibrational coherency opens new avenues in materials design, which will lead to more energy efficient, low-power devices, novel material solutions to recycle and convert waste heat to electricity, and new ways to manipulate light with heat for advanced computing to power 6G wireless communication.

The discovery emerged from a long-term collaboration of scientists and engineers at seven universities and two U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories. Their paper, Emergent Interface Vibrational Structure of Oxide Superlattices, was published January 26 in Nature.

Eric Hoglund, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science, took point for the team. He earned his Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from UVA in May 2020 working with James M. Howe, Thomas Goodwin Digges Professor of materials science and engineering. After graduation, Hoglund continued working as a post-doctoral researcher with support from Howe and Patrick Hopkins, Whitney Stone Professor and professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering.

Hoglund’s success illustrates the purpose and potential of UVA’s Multifunctional Materials Integration Initiative, which encourages close collaboration among different researchers from different disciplines to study material performance from atoms to applications.

“The ability to visualize atomic vibrations and link them to functional properties and new device concepts, enabled by collaboration and co-advising in materials science and mechanical engineering, advances MMI’s mission,” Hopkins said.

Hoglund employed microscopy techniques to answer questions raised in experimental results Hopkins published in 2013, reporting on thermal conductivity of superlattices, which Hoglund likens to a Lego building block.

“You can achieve desired material properties by changing how different oxides couple to each other, how many times the oxides are layered and the thickness of each layer,” Hoglund said.

Hopkins expected the phonon to get resistance as it traveled through the lattice network, dissipating thermal energy at each interface of the oxide layers. Instead, thermal conductivity went up when the interfaces were really close together.

“This led us to believe that phonons can form a wave that exists across all subsequent materials, also known as a coherent effect,” Hopkins said. “We came up with an explanation that fit the conductivity measurements, but always felt this work was incomplete.”

“It turns out, when the interfaces become very close, the atomic arrangements unique to the material layer cease to exist,” Hoglund said. “The atom positions at the interfaces, and their vibrations, exist everywhere. This explains why nanoscale-spaced interfaces produce unique properties, different from a linear mixture of the adjoining materials.”

Hoglund collaborated with Jordan Hachtel, an R&D associate in the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, to connect local atomic structure to vibrations using new generations of electron microscopes at UVA and Oak Ridge. Working with high-spatial-resolution spectroscopic data, they mapped interlayer vibrations across interfaces in a superlattice.

“That’s the major advance of the Nature paper,” Hopkins said. “We can see the position of atoms and their vibrations, this beautiful image of a phonon wave based on a certain pattern or type of atomic structure.”

The Collaborative Trek to Collective Success

The highly collaborative effort began in 2018 when Hoglund was sharing research plans to characterize atomic vibrations at interfaces in perovskite oxides.

“I was going to Oak Ridge to work with Jordan for a week, so Jim and Patrick suggested I take the superlattice samples and just see what we can see,” Hoglund recalled. “The experiments that Jordan and I did at Oak Ridge boosted our confidence in using superlattices to measure vibrations at the atomic or nano-scale.”

During one of his later trips to Tennessee, Hoglund met up with Joseph R. Matson, a Ph.D. student conducting related experiments at Vanderbilt University’s Nanophotonic Materials and Devices laboratory led by Joshua D. Caldwell, the Flowers Family Chancellor Faculty Fellow and associate professor of mechanical engineering and electrical engineering. Using Vanderbilt’s instruments, they conducted Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy experiments to probe optical vibrations in the entire superlattice. These well-established macroscopic measurements validated Hoglund’s novel microscopy approach.

From these experiments, Hoglund deduced that the properties he cared about — thermal transport and infrared response — stemmed from the interface’s influence on the superlattice’s well-ordered framework of oxygen atoms. The oxygen atoms arrange themselves in an eight-sided structure called an octahedra, with a metal atom suspended inside. The interaction between oxygen and metal atoms causes the octahedra to rotate across the material structure. The oxygen and metal arrangements in this framework generate the unique vibrations and give rise to the material’s thermal and spectral properties.

Back at UVA, Hoglund’s chance conversation with Jon Ihlefeld, associate professor of materials science and engineering and electrical and computer engineering, brought additional members and expertise to the effort. Ihlefeld mentioned that researchers affiliated with Sandia National Laboratories, Thomas Beechem, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, and Zachary T. Piontkowski, a senior member of Sandia’s technical staff, were also trying to explain the optical behavior of phonons and had likewise found the exact same oxide superlattices to be an ideal material for their study.

Coincidentally, Hopkins had an ongoing research collaboration with Beechem, albeit with other material systems. “Rather than competing, we agreed to work together and make this something bigger than either of us,” Hoglund said.

Beechem’s involvement had an added benefit, bringing Penn State physicist and materials scientist Roman Engel-Herbert and his student Ryan C. Haisimaier into the partnership to grow material samples for the microscopy experiments underway at UVA, Oak Ridge and Vanderbilt. Up to this point, Ramamoorthy Ramesh, University of California, Berkeley, professor of physics and materials science and engineering, and his Ph.D. students Ajay K. Yadav and Jayakanth Ravichandran were the growers on the team, providing samples to Hopkins’ ExSiTE research group.

“We realized we had all of this really neat experimental data connecting vibrations at atomic and macroscopic length scales, but all of our explanations were still somewhat conjectures that we could not prove absolutely without theory,” Hoglund said.

Hachtel reached out to Vanderbilt colleague Sokrates T. Pantelides, University Distinguished Professor of Physics and Engineering, William A. & Nancy F. McMinn professor of physics, and professor of electrical engineering. Pantelides and his research group members De-Liang Bao and Andrew O’Hara employed density functional theory to simulate atomic vibrations in a virtual material with a superlattice structure.

Their theoretical and computational methods supported exactly the results produced by Hoglund and other experimentalists on the team. The simulation also enabled the experimentalists to understand how every atom in the superlattice vibrates with high precision and how this was related to structure.

At this point, the team had 17 authors: three microscopists, four optical spectroscopists, three computational scientists, five growers and two material scientists. It was time, they thought, to share their findings with the scientific community at large.

An initial peer reviewer of their manuscript advised the team to establish a more direct, causal connection between material structure and material properties. “We measured some cool new phenomena making connections over multiple length scales that should affect material properties, but we had not yet convincingly demonstrated whether and how the known properties changed,” Hoglund said.

Two graduate students in Hopkins’ ExSiTE lab, senior scientist John Tomko and Ph.D. student Sara Makarem, helped provide the final proof. Tomko and Makarem probed the superlattices using infrared lasers and demonstrated that the structure controlled non-linear optical properties and the lifetime of phonons.

“When you send in a photon of one unit of energy, the superlattices double that unit of energy,” Hopkins said. “John and Sara built a new capability in our lab to measure this effect, which we express as the second harmonic generation efficiency of these superlattices.” Their contribution expands the ExSiTE lab capabilities to understand new light-phonon interactions.

“I think this will enable advanced materials discovery,” Hopkins said. “Scientists and engineers working with other classes of materials may now look for similar properties in their own studies. I fully expect we will find that these phonon waves, this coherent effect, exists in a lot of other materials.”

The long-standing collaboration continues. Hoglund is in his second year as a postdoctoral researcher, working with both Howe and Hopkins. Together with Pantelides, Hachtel and Ramesh, he expects they will have new and exciting atomic structure-vibration ideas to share in the near future.

Analysis of Japanese and English folk songs finds cross-cultural regularities in music evolution

A team of researchers from Japan, the U.K. and New Zealand has found that despite language differences, Japanese and English folk songs have similar cross-cultural regularities in their musical evolution. In their paper published in the journal Current Biology, the group describes modeling melodies as sequences built from an "alphabet" of 12 scale degrees and analyzing their evolution.


Analysis of Japanese and English folk songs highlights cross-cultural regularities in music evolution
Substitution distance and rhythmic function predict rates of musical evolution Left-hand side 
represents English folk songs (n = 242 highly related pairs); right-hand side represents Japanese folk 
songs (n = 86 highly related pairs). (A) Notes with stronger rhythmic functions (final or stressed)
 are more stable than those with weaker functions (unstressed or ornamental). Dots represent stability
 for each functional type for each highly related pair. Red dots represent means; red bars represent 95
% confidence intervals. (B) Substitutions are more common between smaller distances. Error bars 
represnt bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals (cf. STAR Methods for details). See Figure S3 for 
alternative methods of quantifying substitution distance and rhythmic function, STAR Methods for 
discussion of our choice to focus on rhythmic function as opposed to tonal function, and Figure S4 
and Tables S1–S3 for further sensitivity analyses of these results. 
Credit: DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.01.039


As the researchers note, folk songs are difficult to define, but most listeners can recognize them when they hear them. And, as they also note, folk songs typically represent the times in which they were written and very often evolve over time as conditions change. In this new effort, they sought to learn more about the evolutionary processes of folk songs—both those written in Japanese and those written in English (British and American)—and if there were similarities between the two types. To conduct an analysis of such songs, they first defined folk songs as those that have been transmitted orally from one generation to the next. They next converted the musical notation for more than 10,000 songs into letter sequences so that they could be read and processed by a . The algorithm they used was developed for analyzing evolutionary changes in nature but the researchers thought it could provide insights into folk  evolution as well.

In studying the results provided by the algorithm, the researchers found they were able to track insertions and deletions to songs over time—where the number of notes in a song remained constant but the notes had different values in different places. They also found that insertions or deletions were more common than substitutions. They also noted that the impact on the songs from such insertions and deletions was more profound in the Japanese songs. The researchers also found that changes to notes that played a major role in the folk songs over time were less likely to occur than those that played a more minor role, regardless of language.

The researchers conclude by suggesting that  to folk songs occurred in much the same way in both languages, despite them being written and sung in different scales and tones.Babies are sensitive to rhyme, rhythm and phrases in children's songs

More information: Patrick E. Savage et al, Sequence alignment of folk song melodies reveals cross-cultural regularities of musical evolution, Current Biology (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.01.039]

Journal information: Current Biology ]

© 2022 Science X Networ

DR DOOLITTLE I PRESUME
Fish Have 'Talked' For 155 Million Years, And Now You Can Hear Their 'Voices'


Catfish in a pond. (Sutthiwat Srikhrueadam/Moment/Getty Images)
NATURE

TESSA KOUMOUNDOUROS
5 FEBRUARY 2022

All manner of croaks, chirps, and deep trombone moans permeate Earth's waters, just like the cacophony of sounds that fill its forest air. For example, reefs are surprisingly noisy places, and many of the noisemakers are fish.

"We've known for a long time that some fish make sounds, but fish sounds were always perceived as rare oddities,'' said Cornell University ecologist Aaron Rice.

It was likely assumed fish relied primarily on other means of communication, from color signals and body language to electricity. But recent discoveries have demonstrated fish even have dawn and dusk choruses, just like birds.

"They've probably been overlooked because fishes are not easily heard or seen, and the science of underwater acoustic communication has primarily focused on whales and dolphins," said Cornell evolutionary neuroscientist Andrew Bass.

"But fishes have voices too."

And some sound like the most magnificent foghorn:


Scouring records of anatomical descriptions, sound recordings, and vocal accounts, Rice and colleagues identified several physiological features that allow the ray-finned (Actinopterygii) group of fishes to make these noises without vocal cords. This group contains more than 34,000 currently living species.

"They can grind their teeth or make movement noise in the water, and we do see a number of specializations that are involved," Rice told Syfy Wire.

"Probably the most common adaptation are muscles associated with swim bladders. In fact, the swim bladder muscles of the toadfish are the fastest contracting vertebrate skeletal muscles. These are high-performing adaptations."

Of 175 families of fishes, two-thirds were likely to communicate with sound – much more talkative fish than the one-fifth previously estimated. Analysis suggests these vocal communications may have evolved independently at least 33 times in fishes.



 Clearly, fish have some important things to say.

What's more, fish-speak appeared around 155 million years ago, which interestingly happens to be around the same time evidence suggests land animals with backbones first vocalized too – animals we eventually evolved from.

"Our results strongly support the hypothesis that soniferous behavior is ancient," the team wrote in their paper. "Together, these findings highlight the strong selection pressure favoring the evolution of this character across vertebrate lineages."

Some fish groups were chattier than others, with toadfish and catfish amongst the most verbose groups. However, Rice and the team caution that their analysis only shows the presence of vocalizing fish rather than the presence of absence – it may just be that we just haven't listened hard enough to hear the other groups out yet.

As for what they're trying to say, fish are probably jabbering about food, warnings of danger, social happenings (including territorial arguments), and of course, sex. But who knows what other fishy secrets they may recite!

Some researchers have even been trying to use fish songs as underwater siren calls to beckon fish back to rejuvenating coral reefs.

"Fish do everything. They breathe air, they fly, they eat anything and everything – at this point, nothing would surprise me about fishes and the sounds that they can make," said Rice.

This research was published in Ichthyology & Herpetology.