'More drilling and fracking is a climate calamity': scientists draft letter to POTUS urging renewables

POTUS skirts tackling climate change in SOTU address

 despite apocalyptic IPCC report

Jessica Corbett 
Common Dreams 

March 30, 2022

"In this moment of climate emergency," five scientists began a new open letter to U.S. President Joe Biden, "we write with utmost urgency to advise you and your administration to halt recent moves towards increasing fossil fuel production and instead take bold action to rapidly reduce fossil fuel extraction and infrastructure."

Biologist Sandra Steingraber—who is leading the effort with Peter Kalmus, Robert Howarth, Michael Mann, and Mark Jacobson in conjunction with Food & Water Watch—shared a link to the letter on Twitter Wednesday and urged fellow scientists to add their signatures.

"We say the White House call for more drilling and fracking is a climate calamity," Steingraber said. "Sign with us!"

The letter—which its initiators plan to present to the president next month after collecting "a critical mass" of signatures—follows a similar message from October and comes as Biden works to ramp up U.S. gas shipments to Europe in response to Russian President Vladimir Putin's war on Ukraine.








Kalmus, who also shared the document Wednesday, tweeted that "the president's fossil fuel expansion takes us deeper into climate catastrophe."

The scientists' effort aligns with recent remarks from climate campaigners and other experts, who have argued since the war began last month that European nations' attempts to reduce their reliance on Russian fossil fuels—a key source of revenue for Putin's government—show the importance of a swift global shift to clean energy.

"Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm recently said 'we are on war footing' in calling for increased oil and gas production," the scientists' letter states, referencing the U.S. official's speech at a Houston conference earlier this month. "This is backwards thinking. Instead of fossil fuels, we must apply that level of urgency to building a renewable energy economy."

"Rather than working to increase oil and gas production," the letter adds, "we urge you to use your executive authority to redirect these massive investments, mobilize the country, and rally the global community around a program of energy security through a rapid transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy."

Recalling that when Biden ran for president, he pledged to listen to science, the five experts wrote that "as scientists who look at data every day, we implore you to keep this promise and listen to what the scientific community is saying about fossil fuels and the climate crisis."

They specifically pointed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released last month, which features "a series of dire warnings about the unfolding climate catastrophe," including that "the scientific evidence is overwhelming that we must act now—we simply do not have time to waste."

"Already millions of Americans and even more across the world are being impacted by extreme weather, drought, flooding, sea level rise, and wildfires," the letter notes. "The IPCC report highlights millions being impacted by climate change-induced food insecurity and water scarcity."

The letter warns that "these problems will only accelerate as we continue our reliance on fossil fuels. And, this is on top of the significant health and environmental justice impacts that power plants, export facilities, and other fossil fuel infrastructure have on neighboring communities."

"The United States, Europe, and the rest of the world desperately need energy independence," the document declares, "but allowing more drilling and fracking, approving more pipelines, and expanding export facilities not only fail to address short-term energy needs, they lock us into decades of reliance on fossil fuels and ensure runaway climate chaos for the long run."

Atmospheric methane '162% greater than pre-industrial levels': greenhouse gas traps '87 times' more heat than CO2

Brett Wilkins and
Common Dreams

April 07, 2022

Climate scientists on Thursday stressed the need for urgent action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions following new data showing a record increase in atmospheric methane levels for a second consecutive year.

"Our data show that global emissions continue to move in the wrong direction at a rapid pace," National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Administrator Rick Spinrad said in a statement. "The evidence is consistent, alarming, and undeniable."


As NOAA notes, carbon dioxide remains the biggest climate change threat. However, scientists say that reducing methane emissions—the largest anthropogenic sources of which are animal agriculture and energy production—is relatively easy.

Spinrad said that "reducing methane emissions is an important tool we can use right now to lessen the impacts of climate change in the near term, and rapidly reduce the rate of warming. Let's not forget that methane also contributes to ground-level ozone formation, which causes roughly 500,000 premature deaths each year around the world.

Kassie Siegel, director of the Center for Biological Diversity's Climate Law Institute, said that "this report is especially alarming because if carbon dioxide is the fossil-fueled broiler of our heating planet, methane is a blow torch, with 87 times more short-term heating power. Yet despite methane reductions being a relatively cheap and easy way to get phenomenal climate benefits, the industry has fought regulations at every turn."

"Polluters' record profits must be used to properly seal and remediate every well and fix every methane leak," she added. "But methane reductions have to be one part of a transformative global effort to phase out deadly fossil fuels in favor of truly clean renewable energy. Anything less puts us on a catastrophic path to an unrecognizable world."

According to NOAA:
Preliminary analysis showed the annual increase in atmospheric methane during 2021 was 17 parts per billion (ppb), the largest annual increase recorded since systematic measurements began in 1983. The increase during 2020 was 15.3 ppb. Atmospheric methane levels averaged 1,895.7 ppb during 2021, or around 162% greater than pre-industrial levels. From NOAA's observations, scientists estimate global methane emissions in 2021 are 15% higher than the 1984-2006 period.

Meanwhile, levels of carbon dioxide also continue to increase at historically high rates. The global surface average for carbon dioxide during 2021 was 414.7 parts per million (ppm), which is an increase of 2.66 ppm over the 2020 average. This marks the 10th consecutive year that carbon dioxide increased by more than two parts per million, which represents the fastest sustained rate of increase in the 63 years since monitoring began.


Scientists fear soaring concentrations of methane—which is up to 87 times more potent than CO2 over a 20-year period—may have triggered a potentially irreversible climate feedback loop.

Last September, the European Union and the United States pledged to voluntarily reduce methane emissions 30% from 2020 levels by the end of the decade. More than 100 nations have signed on to their Global Methane Pledge.

The world's three leading methane emitters—China, Russia, and India—have not joined the effort, nor have other major methane polluters like Australia and Iran.

Critics call the 30% target a step in the right direction but insufficient to adequately address the emissions crisis. The International Energy Agency said last October that a 75% reduction in methane emissions by 2030 is "essential" to combating the climate emergency.

Other U.S. efforts to slash methane emissions have been hampered by opposition from the fossil fuel industry and the politicians it influences through campaign contributions. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), whose family owns a coal brokerage and who is currently by far the largest recipient of oil and gas industry contributions, has been a staunch opponent of a proposed fee on methane pollution.

NOAA's methane report comes days after the United Nations published its latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, whose findings U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called "a file of shame, cataloging the empty pledges that put us firmly on track towards an unlivable world."

NOAA's Spinrad stressed that "we can no longer afford to delay urgent and effective action needed to address the cause of the problem—greenhouse gas pollution."

Xin Lan, a scientist at NOAA's Global Monitoring Laboratory, said that "we need to aggressively reduce fossil fuel pollution to zero as soon as possible if we want to avoid the worst impacts from a changing climate."

PROPERTY IS THEFT

Some landlords got a piece of Texas’ $2 billion in rent relief money — and evicted their struggling tenants anyway

Grungy Old Door With A Yellow Eviction Notice 

Shutterstock/ Mr Doomits

LONG READ 

The Texas Tribune April 08, 2022

When Cherice Scott received a notice last September that she, her husband and their four children would soon be kicked out of their Katy apartment, she said employees at the complex told her not to worry about it.

Scott and her husband had fallen behind on rent in June after Scott stopped working to take care of her youngest daughter, who has Down syndrome, and the medical bills piled up.


The next month, their landlord started the eviction process, even though Scott, 37, had taken the rental office staff’s advice and requested help from Texas’ $2 billion, federally backed rental assistance fund. Scott said she spoke to the office staff and walked away believing she didn’t need to worry about eviction as they waited for the relief money — or to bother showing up to court.

When the state sent the rent relief check to the wrong address, Scott said the staff assured her they were working to get the money re-sent.

“I trusted them,” Scott said. “I shouldn’t have.”

Scott had landed a new job as a dietician at a local hospital when she returned from work one afternoon in early October to find most of her belongings spread out on the lawn and the locks changed. Thieves had walked off with their electronics.

Jeff Williams, a Harris County justice of the peace, had approved the eviction without Scott present in court — a typical outcome in eviction cases when tenants don’t show up to their hearings.

Scott wanted to know: What happened to the rent relief money?

After weeks of phone calls, a Texas Rent Relief program staffer told Scott that her former landlord had indeed received the rent relief money in mid-November — more than $11,000, enough to cover the six months’ back rent they owed.


Cherice Scott’s son, 6-year-old Teegan McKinney, plays at a park in Houston. 

Credit: Annie Mulligan for The Texas Tribune

“They were very well informed that that money was there and it was coming to them,” said Scott, who’s now living in a short-term rental in Missouri City with her four kids. “Yet they still pushed us out.”

Scott’s former landlord — Blazer Real Estate Services, a Houston property management company — did not respond to calls and emails requesting comment. An employee at Blazer’s office who answered the phone declined to answer questions.

The federal government and the state of Texas both had people like Scott and her family in mind when they hurriedly created a safety net for struggling renters amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Texas received more than $2 billion out of the American Rescue Plan Act, the $1.9 trillion federal stimulus package President Joe Biden signed into law last year, to set up the Texas Rent Relief program, designed to help such families stay in their homes as the pandemic triggered a tsunami of business closures and hundreds of thousands of layoffs.

But The Texas Tribune interviewed tenants from across the state who were approved for federal rental assistance and were evicted anyway.

Two landlords, like Scott’s, evicted their tenants in the period between the initial rent relief application and when the government money arrived and then kept it — an apparent violation of the program’s requirements for landlords. In those cases, the check was initially sent to the wrong property — and only arrived after the tenant was kicked out.

One landlord received federal money through the Texas Rent Relief program and later chose not to renew their tenant’s lease — which was legal in that case.

In order to receive federal rent relief funds through the state, landlords had to sign an agreement that forbids them from evicting tenants for nonpayment during the time period covered by the assistance.


But housing advocates and lawyers who represent tenants facing eviction say they routinely see cases of Texas landlords accepting thousands of dollars from the government and evicting the tenants the money was intended to help.

The Tribune contacted government agencies involved in the program and found that none of them — including the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, which runs the state rent relief program — track how often this happens.

And it’s not just happening in Texas.

According to the National Housing Law Project, 86% of the 119 lawyers across the country who responded to a survey gauging how the end of a federal moratorium on evictions was affecting tenants said they had seen cases where landlords either declined to apply for assistance from rent relief programs or took the money and proceeded to kick out their tenants.

“The industry standard here is fraud,” said Stuart Campbell, managing attorney at Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center, speaking generally about instances in which landlords receive rent relief funds and evict tenants. “These landlords are the prime beneficiary of these rental assistance programs and just en masse have been violating the provisions of the programs and on top of that consistently misleading judges and securing judgments and evictions, even when they’re receiving funds.”

Many landlords have tried to work with their tenants to try to avoid evictions for back rent during the pandemic, said David Mintz, vice president of government affairs for Texas Apartment Association, a trade group of rental property owners.

But receiving rent relief dollars wasn’t guaranteed, so some landlords filed for eviction in case the money didn’t come through and as a last resort after months of going without rent, Mintz said. Under the program rules, landlords are allowed to evict only in specific situations, such as lease violations related to criminal activity, property damage or “physical harm” to others, Mintz pointed out.

If tenants feel they have been unjustly evicted, they can appeal the eviction, Mintz said. Any allegations that “either a renter or a rental property owner isn’t following the program rules” should be reported to the program to be investigated, he said.

“We believe owners have done their best to try to understand the intricacies of the program and comply with its requirements,” Mintz said.

When Congress set aside more than $46 billion for emergency rental assistance, they intended for that money to keep people in their homes, said U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia, a Democrat from Houston. The idea of landlords taking rent relief dollars and still evicting tenants is “outrageous,” she said, and could warrant investigation.


Since being evicted from their home in Katy, Cherice Scott and her four children have lived in hotels and other temporary settings, most recently a short-term rental in Missouri City.

 Credit: Annie Mulligan for The Texas Tribune

“I think any landlord that accepted money or got money directly for rent absolutely should not have evicted anyone,” Garcia said. “And if they did, it should be audited and reviewed by [government investigators] so that we can recoup our funds for the misuse of the dollars.”

Texas closed the rent relief program to new applicants in November, citing overwhelming demand for rental assistance dollars. The state received another $47 million in March, which TDHCA said would go toward helping tenants who applied before the November cutoff. As of Wednesday, the program has assisted more than 300,000 households.

The money was considered crucial to prevent a wave of tenants losing their homes as eviction bans expired; in recent months, three Texas metro areas — Houston, Dallas and Fort Worth — have seen some of the highest eviction case filings in the country among the 31 cities tracked by Eviction Lab, a research center based at Princeton University that tracks eviction filings.

To qualify for rental assistance from the Texas program, tenants had to fall below a certain income level, prove they experienced some kind of financial hardship during the pandemic and make the case that they would be at risk of losing their home if they didn’t receive rent relief.

A collection of state and federal agencies — including the TDHCA — are tasked with looking into allegations of fraud, waste and abuse in rent relief programs. But none of the agencies contacted by the Tribune would say whether any landlord has been credibly accused of taking rent relief money and improperly ousting their tenants, or whether they have imposed penalties on landlords for doing so.

Some tenants who spoke to the Tribune about their cases said they called a hotline used to report fraud, waste and abuse in the state rent relief program and never heard back about their complaints.

Scott said she complained to a program staffer in October about her landlord’s conduct, and the staffer referred the complaint to the program’s anti-fraud division. Two months later, Scott received an email acknowledging her complaint — but said she hasn’t heard back since.


Stephanie Gates’ rental assistance check initially went to the wrong address — and reached her landlord less than two weeks after she was evicted from her Round Rock home in January. 

Credit: Eddie Gaspar/The Texas Tribune
“I was a good tenant”

Stephanie Gates also thought the state rent relief program would save her from an eviction. In her case, the check arrived in time — but went to the wrong place.

At the height of the pandemic in 2020, Gates, a 42-year-old Round Rock resident, saw her hours as a temp working in guest services at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport cut in half, and by January 2021 she was behind on rent for her two-bedroom apartment. In June, Gates said she lost her job after she missed a week of work because of a medical problem.

But in September, Gates received good news: Not only did she qualify for help paying back rent, but the program would cover her rent through November — 11 months all together, totaling $12,740.

“I’m sitting thinking, ‘My rent’s paid, OK, all I have to worry about is December and January,’’’ Gates said.

Then in December, the property owner filed an eviction case against Gates and gave her a notice to vacate.

It turns out the state program had sent the check in September — to the wrong address.

At a Jan. 10 eviction hearing, Gates said she told Williamson County Justice of the Peace KT Musselman she had been approved for rent relief and explained that the check went to the wrong address — facts she said the property manager, who represented the landlord in court, backed up.

Despite that, the property manager told Musselman they wanted to proceed with the case, Gates said. Musselman sided with Gates’ landlord and granted the eviction.

In a phone interview, Musselman declined to say why he ruled in favor of Gates’ landlord. But Musselman expressed sympathy for the landlord, noting that they had gone 11 months without rent from Gates. Even if the rent relief check was in hand, it wouldn’t have covered the amount sought by the landlord, Musselman said.

“I can understand an apartment complex coming at this point in the process and saying, ‘It's time to figure out what's going to happen here or move forward,’” Musselman said.

Alexander Stamm, an attorney with Texas RioGrande Legal Aid who is representing Gates, said Musselman shouldn’t have let the trial take place at all because of a Texas Supreme Court order requiring judges to postpone eviction cases if a landlord confirms they have joined a tenant’s application for rent relief.

“In our view, the judge made a mistake letting the trial proceed as soon as [the property manager] confirmed that the owner had a pending application for rental assistance,” Stamm said in an email.

On Jan. 27, Williamson County constables came to execute the eviction. Newly homeless, Gates stood on the curb in the cold guarding her belongings until a friend could get off work to help her move them.

“I did everything right, and to still have my stuff thrown down the street … it’s just something that I’m still trying to process,” Gates said.

Less than two weeks after Gates’ eviction, she spotted something in her online account with the rent relief program: A pair of checks totaling $12,650 had cleared the property owner’s bank account. Her former landlord had taken the rent relief funds after they evicted her.

Attempts to reach the property owner — RDRH Holdings Inc., an Austin-based corporation — and its president were unsuccessful. Lee Reznicek, a property manager who oversees Gates’ former home for Austin-based Hill Country Property Management, declined to comment when reached by email.

Stamm alleges that RDRH Holdings violated six requirements set out by the program in a contract landlords must sign in order to receive funds.

For example, the program bars landlords from accepting rent relief payments after they evict a tenant. The rent relief checks cleared RDRH’s bank account on Feb. 4 — less than two weeks after Gates was evicted.

Landlords who received rent relief dollars can’t evict tenants “for any reason related to rent or fees during the time period covered by the funds,” according to the program requirements. But those are the exact grounds that RDRH Holdings cited when it sued to evict Gates, Stamm said.

According to the program rules laid out in the agreement Gates’ landlord signed July 13 to receive the funds, if a landlord receives rent relief money after evicting the tenant, they’re supposed to send the money back to TDHCA within 10 days. As of Feb. 17, Gates’ former landlord hadn’t done so, Stamm said.

“You can’t have it both ways with Texas Rent Relief,” Stamm said. “You can’t get paid directly, and also break the promises you made that were designed to keep someone in their home.”

At the moment, Gates is bouncing back and forth between her father’s house and a friend’s while she appeals her eviction in an attempt to strike it from her record and make it easier for her to find a new place.

“I was a good tenant,” Gates said. “You know, we just had the problems from [the pandemic] last year, which everybody did.”

“Tenants are still the ones holding the bag”

Both the federal and state government added enforcement provisions when they created the rent relief programs. In Texas, two state agencies — the TDHCA, which oversees the statewide rent relief program, and the State Auditor’s Office — have the authority to look into allegations of waste, fraud or abuse within the program. At the federal level, that job falls to the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Inspector General.

TDHCA operates the state hotline where complaints originate. If the agency finds the allegations are credible, it can refer the cases to the state auditor’s office, the Treasury’s inspector general or local law enforcement agencies.

TDHCA says it has received more than 7,500 complaints through the hotline — not all of them related to fraud, waste or abuse — but the agency won’t say how many times it has referred cases to outside agencies for investigation. The State Auditor’s Office declined to say whether it has launched any investigations into potential fraud, waste and abuse of the program.

As of last week, $20.1 million in rent relief has been recaptured, TDHCA spokesperson Kristina Tirloni said, adding that not all of that was connected to allegations of fraud, waste or abuse.

Tirloni said the agency doesn’t track what portion of those clawed-back funds came from landlords found to have improperly evicted their tenants after receiving assistance — or categorize what scenarios would result in recapturing the money.

“TDHCA has taken very seriously the responsibility of helping Texas renters and landlords overcome the financial burden brought on by the pandemic,” Tirloni said.

But none of that recovered money is helping tenants ousted from their homes, said Julia Orduña, Southeast Texas regional director for Texas Housers, a nonprofit low-income housing advocacy group.

“Maybe the money will be returned to Treasury and the wrong will be righted for the government,” Orduña said. “But the tenants are still the ones holding the bag.”

That happens even when tenants win their eviction cases in court.

Diana Johnson, 35, was waiting on rent relief in January when her landlord tried to evict her and her seven children from their three-bedroom apartment in Southeast Dallas.

Johnson, a manager of a hair salon and certified nursing assistant, had asked the program in October for help covering rent while she recovered from giving birth to her son and couldn’t work. Texas Rent Relief approved her for a little over $3,100 — about three months’ worth of rent.

Johnson’s landlord — a partnership owned by Mark Musemeche, a Houston developer — had already accepted more than $4,200 in federal money in August to pay four months of rent, according to a copy of Johnson’s rent ledger she provided to the Tribune. Around that time, Johnson said she caught COVID-19 and had to miss a month of work.

Johnson had asked the office manager whether they had received the latest check, she said. They told her there was no way to see if they had received it, she said.

The morning of her March 18 eviction hearing, a Texas Rent Relief staffer told Johnson that her landlord had cashed the check two days earlier and gave her the check number. Johnson’s lawyer recorded the call.

When Dallas County Justice of the Peace Juan Jasso heard about the check and phone call, he asked the property manager whether they had received the check, Johnson said. The property manager quickly confirmed that they had — and Jasso tossed the eviction.

But Johnson’s victory was short-lived. The same day, her landlord told Johnson her lease wouldn’t be renewed when it expired the following week, she said.

Johnson’s trying not to dwell on the saga. She’s focused on finding a new place for her and her seven children to live. Her landlord gave her until the end of May to do so.

“The more I sit here and think about it, I just know to just go ahead and do what I need to do,” Johnson said.

Calls to Musemeche were not returned. An employee at the apartment complex, Crestshire Village Apartments, declined to comment.
“It takes away your pride”

Since their October eviction from their Katy apartment, Scott and her four children have lived in hotels and other temporary settings.

She said the past few months have been hard. Around the time of the eviction, Scott and her husband separated. He took the car, which made it difficult for Scott to hunt for work and shelter. Then she gave up her job at the Katy hospital to care once more for her youngest daughter.

Weeks after her eviction, Scott received an email from Texas Rent Relief on Nov. 9 acknowledging that it had initially sent the check to the wrong address. But the program had fixed that error, the email said.

“As the tenant was evicted from the unit associated with this application, pursuant to program policies, rental arrears are only approved for the time period the tenant was in the unit,” the email reads.

In other words, Scott had already been evicted, but Texas Rent Relief was letting the landlord keep the money — more than $11,000 — in apparent contradiction of its own policy.

Tirloni, the TDHCA spokesperson, declined to discuss individual tenants’ cases, including Scott’s, citing state law that prevents TDHCA from disclosing information about people who receive benefits from programs administered by the agency. But she said the program doesn’t allow landlords to receive back rent if they’ve evicted a tenant — the opposite of what the email to Scott said.

“We strive to always do better,” Tirloni said in an email. “As much as we work to mitigate human error, the potential for application errors exists. If issues are discovered or brought to our attention, like payments sent to an incorrect address, or payments sent to a landlord who has evicted the tenant, we will take corrective measures, like recapture or other necessary steps.”

Meanwhile, Scott is trying to rebuild her life. In late March she started a new job teaching at an early learning center. But she still hasn’t found a place to live. She said she has spent thousands of dollars on application fees to at least 10 homes and apartment complexes — and all of them have denied her because she now has an eviction on her record.

“It's embarrassing,” Scott said. “It takes away your pride and makes me feel like I failed as a parent. It hurts, that really hurts. But I don’t want to give up.”

Disclosure: The Texas Apartment Association has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2022/04/08/texas-landlords-rent-relief-evictions/.

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Meet the scientist who wants to control the weather

Matthew Rozsa, Salon
April 07, 2022

Photo by Micah Tindell on Unsplash

It is easy to forget that clouds — yes, those big, cottonball-resembling things in the sky — are comprised of thousands of tiny particles, so small that they float through the air instead of settling on the ground. These are known as aerosols, and for scientists like geoengineering expert Dr. Hannele Korhonen — who has ambitions to control the weather — they are a lifelong passion.

That passion is at the heart of "How to Kill a Cloud," a new documentary that premieres on VICE's The Short List on Thursday, April 7th on VICE.com. The title is apt both literally and for figurative reasons: It chronicles Korhonen's doomed pie-in-the-sky dream — which takes her from her native Finland to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on a $1.5 million grant — to make it possible for people to create rainclouds in the desert. As Korhonen hobnobs with one percenters and wrestles with the ethical implications of manipulating the weather, "How to Kill a Cloud" uses a light touch to cut between Korhonen's obviously sincere and brilliant fascination with science and the grubby networking that is required as she pursues her dream.

The ambition to control the weather sounds like the domain of mad scientists — or at least, of the very rich countries that can afford such luxury technology. Yet such ambitions also inevitably lead to thorny ethical and political drama: in China, for instance, where clouds are routinely "seeded" with silver iodide or liquid nitrogen to stimulate snow or rainfall, intense debates preside over who has access to which cloud's water, and when and where such cloud-seeding is appropriate.

"I think there is a larger question as it pertains to geopolitics as well, in terms of the wealthy countries being in the position of being able to do this and bringing the top scientific minds from around the world in order to do this research and who actually gets to own this research is the UAE in the end," docuseries curator Suroosh Alvi told Salon. "And if they have issues with Iran or Qatar across the Gulf, will they be able to flood them out? I think it is very, very political and gets us into the ethical kind of issues around it."

Many scientists think the technology being developed could be used to help slow down or solve the problems associated with climate change.

Yet while it seems frightening for people to be able to control the weather, greenhouse gas emissions have already begun changing the atmosphere through the process known as climate change. In a sense, humanity is already past the point of no return when it comes to altering the weather. The only difference is that, if Korhonen's visions is realized, humans will have the technology to do so deliberately.

"The difference with weather modification is that you make science where you try to find means [to] control it the way you want it — and when you want it," director Tuija Halttunen explained to Salon. "The contradiction is that many of the scientists who I met during film are very concerned about climate change." Many scientists think the technology being developed could be used to help slow down or solve the problems associated with climate change, although "they don't want to do that" necessarily, Halttunen said, because that would merely be a temporary fix: "The final answer is any way to cut down the emissions and not to find means for how to keep up this [wasteful] way of life."

Yet "How to Kill a Cloud" is not all about ethical debates and the future of humanity. There is also plenty for the science buffs out there, as Halttunen and Korhonen capture beautiful shots of clouds and break down how people can understand them not as ephemeral dreams from the sky, but as real-life objects.

"There wouldn't be any clouds if there weren't impurities in the atmosphere and in the air," Halttunen told Salon when asked about the filmmakers' fascination with clouds. "In a sense, the air must be dirty to get clouds, because the water gets on the surface on the particles." The impurities mean that rain droplets aren't pure liquid water, but contain impurities too. "There is always the impurity in the air," Halttunen continued.

Perhaps this is an appropriate metaphor for the dilemma captured in "How to Kill a Cloud" — the purity of Korhonen's fascination with science and stated desire to help humanity, and the imperfections of the tiny particles of capitalism and geopolitics that get mixed in with those ambitions. Within this milieu, the documentary serves as something of an effort to create good — both by shedding light on the sausage-making side of science and by providing readers with some entertaining and legitimate science to help the medicine go down more smoothly.

"By putting this out there and pushing it as far as we can and as wide as we can, that's one way to help mitigate [misinformation]," Alvi told Salon when asked if the documentary could be an antidote to the bad science circulating online. "I think the director, she felt that the protagonist Hannele did kind of ignore the politics of it all in order to be an ambitious scientist. Maybe that's okay if she is a scientist and she's doing good work, but we don't know if it'll get weaponized down the road or not."

BAD NEWS FOR ARACHNOPHOBES

Number of spider species creeps up to 50,000

Agence France-Presse
April 06, 2022

50,000 spider species have been identified, but they're not all deadly like this Australian funnel-web spider - THE AUSTRALIAN REPTILE PARK/AFP

There are now 50,000 known different species of spider crawling the Earth, the World Spider Catalog announced Wednesday -- and there might be another 50,000 out there.

The WSC, based at the Natural History Museum of Bern in the Swiss capital, said the 50,000th spider registered is the Guriurius minuano, which belongs to the Salticidae family of jumping spiders and hunts its prey on shrubs and trees in southern Brazil, Uruguay, and around Buenos Aires.

It was described by the arachnologist Kimberly S. Marta and her colleagues from Brazil and is named after the now-extinct Minuane people who lived in the area.

The first scientific description of a spider was in 1757 and while it has taken 265 years to reach 50,000, the rate of discovery is steadily increasing, and it is thought it could take less than 100 years to discover the same number again.

"We estimate that there are still approximately 50,000 more spider species out there to discover," said the WSC's publishers.

The spider catalogue is freely available on the museum's website.

"Spiders are the most important predators in Earth's terrestrial habitats, and their ecological significance should not be underestimated," the museum said.

"Consuming some 400 to 800 million tonnes of insects every year, they are the most important regulators of insect populations. Accordingly, they are also of fundamental importance to humans."

How Tesla CEO Elon Musk's Twitter stake could affect his legal battles with SEC

Alexis Keenan

·Reporter

Wed, April 6, 2022, 

Elon Musk’s ongoing disputes with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over Twitter (TWTR) posts became more convoluted this week when an SEC filing revealed that the Tesla (TSLA) CEO had become the social media company’s largest shareholder and a subsequent filing showed Musk’s appointment to its board.

Musk acquired a 9.2% stake as a passive investor in Twitter, the social media platform at the heart of a nearly four-year legal battle between Musk and the agency in addition to being a company that Musk has specifically questioned for allegedly treading on free speech. Late Tuesday, he filed another disclosure changing his passive investor role to an active one.

Securities experts say that, in theory, Musk’s new ownership interest in Twitter should not influence his current legal battle with the SEC. However, his filings could invite new conflict.

“Mr. Musk is entitled, so long as he is acting in a legally compliant manner… to amass this ownership as a passive investor,” Marc I. Steinberg, former SEC enforcement attorney and professor at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law, told Yahoo Finance. “As far as what the SEC may do, that's a matter of conjecture."

Tesla CEO Elon Musk leaves Manhattan federal court after a hearing on his fraud settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in New York City, U.S., April 4, 2019. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

'It certainly will get the SEC’s attention'

In 2018, Musk agreed to settle the SEC’s claims that certain tweets of his ran afoul of securities law. In a consent decree, Musk agreed to have Tesla pre-approve his tweets and other written communications that could contain information material to Tesla or its shareholders.

But in February 2022, Musk and Tesla accused the SEC in court documents of illegally using its subpoena power to investigate his and Tesla’s compliance with the agreement. On March 8, Musk requested that the court terminate or amend the consent decree. So far, the court has not yet ruled on the request.

Under SEC rules, shareholders who acquire more than 5% ownership in a publicly traded company must disclose their interest within 10 days of the acquisition. Musk signed his passive investor filing outside that timeframe, 21 days after his reported March 14 purchase of the shares.

At a minimum, Musk's failure to meet an established disclosure deadline provides poor optics to the New York federal court handling his request to undo the 2018 settlement agreement with the SEC, according to the experts. Additionally, his filings appear as if they may provide the SEC with new hooks to allege more securities violations.

According to Steinberg, Musk also may have filed the wrong form initially when he indicated his role as a passive rather than active shareholder. SEC rules require shareholders to make that distinction public, which indicates the shareholder's authority to directly or indirectly influence the management or policies of the company.

"If he had discussions to join the board...then clearly he was not being a passive investor," Steinberg said, noting Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal's announcement that conversations with Musk in "recent weeks" made it clear to the company that Musk would bring value to its board.

“I think he has enhanced liability exposure," Steinberg said. "It certainly will get the SEC’s attention."

Tweet posted to Twitter account for Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal on April 5, 2022

A matter of passive or active investing

University of Kentucky Law School professor Alan J. Kluegel agreed that Musk’s new ownership in Twitter, alone, shouldn’t alter the New York court’s decision.

He did note, though, that how the SEC responds to Musk’s Twitter holdings may depend on the Tesla CEO's role as an active investor versus a passive one.

“The law clearly allows investors to make such a change [from passive to active],” Kluegel told Yahoo Finance. Still, he said, the change requires Musk to publicly file with the SEC as an active investor and to observe a cooling off period, during which he is prohibited from making acquisitions of new shares and from casting votes on his shares.

Chester Spatt, former chief economist for the SEC and professor of finance at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business, suspects that Musk has undermined his posture towards the SEC by giving it and the public late notice of his stock accumulation.

“I think it further weakens his position," Spatt told Yahoo Finance. "I think that's a big deal under the circumstances of his already being on a short leash. I can imagine that the commission pursues that.”

On the other hand, he says, Musk exposed shareholders' lack of faith in the company’s management, evidenced by the rally that his interest in the company produced in Twitter’s stock price.

Spatt and Kluegel agreed that even as a purported passive investor, Musk’s ownership interest created active-type effects.

Usually, investors file as passive investors so that they can continue buying up shares without pushing up a company’s stock price, Kluegel said, but in this case, "the price spike occurred even with the passive filing, indicating that the market doesn’t really believe Musk’s stated intentions.”

Spatt added that "usually even a takeover bid doesn't produce this type of valuation response. And that’s to Musk’s credit.” At the same time, he added, Musk’s failure to comply with the SEC’s deadline opens another problematic door: “I would doubt you can thumb your nose at a regulator quite like that.”

Alexis Keenan is a legal reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow Alexis on Twitter @alexiskweed.

A fourth Chinese billionaire founder-CEO has stepped down as Beijing keeps up the pressure on its tech giants

CAPITALI$M WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS

A fourth Chinese billionaire founder-CEO has stepped down as Beijing keeps up the pressure on its tech giants

Weilun Soon
Fri, April 8, 2022, 6:50 AM·3 min read

E-commerce giant JD.com's founder Richard Liu is the latest Chinese tech CEO to quit his public leadership role.

These exits come as Beijing is cracking down on the sector, and as a slower economy crimps margins.

China's class of billionaire founder-CEOs are feeling the heat.

China's class of billionaire of founder-CEOs are feeling the pressure of government scrutiny.

Ultra-wealthy Liu Qiangdong, also known as Richard Liu, is stepping back from his role as chief executive of JD.com, China's Amazon-like e-commerce giant.

JD.com said on Thursday that Liu has left his role as CEO, but that he remains chairman of the company's board.

Liu founded JD.com in 1998 — four years after Jeff Bezos founded Amazon — and has a net worth of $13.3 billion, according to Bloomberg's Billionaires Index.

He joins a growing procession of founder-CEOs quitting public leadership roles amid a sweeping crackdown by China's government on its burgeoning technology sector.

In 2020, Zhang Yiming, founder of TikTok-owner ByteDance, stepped down as CEO and subsequently from his chairman role. In 2021, Su Hua, founder of TikTok's main rival Kuaishou; and Colin Huang, founder of popular e-commerce platform Pinduoduo, all gave up their roles as CEO.

In 2019, Jack Ma stepped down as chairman of JD.com's main rival Alibaba.

All rank among the richest people on the planet, per Bloomberg, but even their wealth has not staved off scrutiny by Beijing. None of the departing founders have publicly cited government pressure as reasons for leaving or changing roles, but their departures all coincide with increasingly aggressive regulation and threats of breakups.

"These founders may say that they're leaving for personal reasons, but it's too much of a coincidence," said Naubahar Sharif, professor at the Hong Kong University of Technology and Science who researches on China's technology policies. "The predominant driver is politics, and now these old guards need to make way for their successors."

The central government has taken aim at labor and consumer rights issues, launched antitrust probes against tech companies, and increased oversight on data security.

The uncertainty has dented investor confidence and hurt company earnings. Last month, Alibaba and social-media giant Tencent both reported their slowest revenue growth on record. JD.com also posted its first annual loss in three years.

JD.com and others are also firing thousands of workers.

Liu has generally stayed out of the public eye since he was accused by a student of rape in 2018. US prosecutors dropped charges against him, citing insufficient evidence. The student, Liu Jingyao, subsequently filed a civil claim in the US against Richard Liu in 2019, seeking damages.

Alibaba's Jack Ma has remained quiet since sparring with regulators in late 2020 over a potential public listing of one of Alibaba's subsidiaries.

Pressure from Beijing means the founders may be making the only calculation available to them, said Sharif. "Maybe their time in the sun is over? Maybe they should let someone else take the role that Beijing can work with?" he said.

Philippines teachers outraged over 'politicking' in school learning


FILE PHOTO: Philippine Vice President Leni Robredo's campaign rally

Fri, April 8, 2022

MANILA (Reuters) - The Philippines education ministry came under fire from teachers on Friday over a learning module that contained negative content about presidential candidate Leni Robredo, and praise for incumbent Rodrigo Duterte, including a fake endorsement from Britain's queen.

In one online module, students age 17-18 were required to identify spelling, grammar and content errors from a sample of news headlines, and detect statements that were "unsubstantiated generalisations", all of which involved opposition leader Robredo.

The module, which was created in 2020, started circulating on social media on Thursday, just over four weeks away from a presidential election.

Duterte is not running for re-election but has a bitter rivalry with Robredo, who has been critical of his government's pandemic response and effectiveness of his bloody war on drugs.

ACT Teachers Partylist, a congressional group representing teachers, expressed outrage over the learning material and said teachers had struggled enough from two years of pandemic restrictions on face-to-face learning.

"Strict adherence to the procedures and safeguards in the production of modules will give justice to them and will ensure that the people's taxes indeed go to quality education instead of shoddy teaching materials and politicking," it said in a statement.

Education Secretary Leonor Briones said the module had not passed the standard review process and had since been withdrawn.

In a text message she said authorities also were "exerting all efforts to warn teachers against participating in partisan politics".

Other exercises contained quotes that students where required to examine for accuracy, credibility and reasonableness, including one about Duterte purportedly by Britain's Queen Elizabeth, saying "Filipinos are very fortunate to have him".

Robredo on Friday said education authorities should not publish content that "would poison people's minds".

A UNION DEMAND SINCE 1936

Proposed bill would shorten California workweek to 32 hours. Here's what you need to know


Hayley Smith
Fri, April 8, 2022, 

Workers carry out lunch on 2nd Street in San Francisco last fall. A proposed bill in the state Legislature would change the definition of a workweek from 40 hours to 32 hours for companies with more than 500 employees.

 (David Paul Morris / Bloomberg / Getty Images)

A proposed bill winding its way through the state Legislature could make California the first state in the nation to reduce its workweek to four days for a large swath of workers.

The bill, AB 2932, would change the definition of a workweek from 40 hours to 32 hours for companies with more than 500 employees. A full workday would remain at eight hours, and employers would be required to provide overtime pay for employees working longer than four full days.

The bill was authored by Assembly Members Cristina Garcia (D-Bell Gardens) and Evan Low (D-San Jose). At the federal level, a bill by Rep. Mark Takano (D-Riverside) is pushing for similar changes under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Reached by phone Friday, Garcia said the idea was prompted in part by the exodus of employees during the COVID-19 pandemic, many of whom were seeking a better quality of life. More than 47 million Americans voluntarily quit their jobs in 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

"We've had a five-day workweek since the Industrial Revolution," Garcia said, "but we've had a lot of progress in society, and we've had a lot of advancements. I think the pandemic right now allows us the opportunity to rethink things, to reimagine things."

Garcia and other proponents say a four-day workweek would lead to an increase in productivity and profits, and point to case studies already underway in Iceland and at companies such as Kickstarter. (The Times' editorial board in September argued that the concept was worth a try.)

Opponents say a four-day workweek would stunt job growth in the state and could create untenable conditions for employers. The California Chamber of Commerce included the bill on its "job killer" list, writing that it would significantly increase labor costs, expose employers to litigation and impose requirements that are "impossible to comply with."

Here's what you need to know about this potentially monumental change:

Who would be covered by AB 2932?

The bill as written would apply to employers in California with at least 500 employees. According to the state's Employment Development Department, that's about 2,600 businesses and more than 3.6 million employees.

Unionized workforces, or those with collective bargaining agreements, are exempt, Garcia said.

How would it work?

The bill seeks to amend Section 510 of the California Labor Code by redefining the workweek from 40 hours to 32, with eight-hour workdays remaining in place.

Under the bill, employees who work in excess of 32 hours would be compensated at a rate of at least 1.5 times their regular rate of pay, as is currently required for those who work in excess of 40 hours.

Crucially, the bill would also prohibit employers from reducing an employee's regular rate of pay as a result of the reduced hourly workweek requirement.

Garcia said conversations are ongoing about how the rules would work for salaried employees. She said the bill does not apply to workers with collective bargaining agreements because "I like to think of this as a floor, and oftentimes our bargaining agreements are better."

But, she added, "we have to start the discussion someplace."

What are the potential benefits?

Iceland ran two large-scale trials of the concept between 2015 and 2019, in which about 1% of the nation's workforce reduced their workweek to 35 or 36 hours with no reduction in pay.

The nation found that productivity and service remained the same across the majority of trial workplaces, and worker well-being increased dramatically across a range of indicators, including perceived stress and burnout and health and work-life balance.

As a result of the trials, at least 86% of the country's workforce are now working shorter hours or gaining the right to shorten their hours.

"The fact of the matter is many other companies are already doing this, and other countries too, so I think this is the direction we're going," said Low, the bill's co-author, noting that many companies that have tried similar strategies have also reported better customer engagement and lower utility costs.

"This is going to attract more [employees] to your company, because it's undisputed workers are looking for more flexibility," he said.

What are the potential disadvantages?

Ashley Hoffman, a policy advocate at the California Chamber of Commerce, said additional labor costs imposed by the bill would amount to a minimum 10% increase in wages per employee per week, among other concerns.

"This significant rise in labor costs will not be sustainable for many businesses," she wrote in opposition to the bill, noting that labor costs are often one of the highest costs a business faces, and that many companies operate on very thin profit margins.

"Such a large increase in labor costs will reduce businesses’ ability to hire or create new positions and will therefore limit job growth in California," Hoffman said. "This is especially true now as businesses are still recovering from the impacts of COVID-19 and resulting rises in supply chain costs."

Hoffman also said the bill could have the unintended consequence of a reduction in hours for workers.

What happens next?

AB 2932 is currently with the Labor and Employment Committee for review.

"Now we have an opportunity for business and labor and workers to have an honest and frank conversation about what this looks like, and then we'll make changes accordingly," Low said, adding that the bill was a "work in progress."

A hearing date has not yet been set, he said.

Facebook Suffers a Big Setback

The ambitions of the social network in the metaverse are shaken up.

ROB LENIHAN
APR 9, 2022 8:07 PM EDT

In 1992 novel "Snow Crash", author Neal Stephenson coined a term to describe a place where human avatars interact with each other.

That term was "metaverse" and since that time the word has become part of the lexicon as the concept moves away from the realm of science fiction and into daily life.

A Costly Conversion

The company formerly known as Facebook (FB) - Get Meta Platforms Inc. Class A Report went so far as to change its name in October to Meta as Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg described the metaverse as "the next frontier."

The metaverse has been defined as a network of 3D virtual worlds focused on social connection, but Meta has been running into some significant obstacles on the road to that next frontier.

The company was rocked after Frances Haugen, a former product manager, accused the social media giant of of putting profits over the impact of hate speech.

The conversion has also been costly, with Meta Platforms posting weaker-than-expected fourth-quarter earnings in February.

The results hit Zuckerberg right in the wallet, as he lost $29.7 billion from his net worth, while his company dropped almost $237 billion in market capitalization a day after the results came out.

The company said its Reality Labs division lost $10.2 billion in 2021, more than double the operating losses recorded in 2020 - $4.62 billion. In 2019, the operating loss was $4.5 billion.

And now comes the Security and Exchange Commission.

The agency recently ruled that Meta must give investors an opportunity to consider and vote on a shareholder proposal that questions the ”social license to operate an emerging technology like the metaverse” without fully understanding the potential risks and negative impacts.

Natasha Lamb, managing partner of Arjuna Capital, one of the parties who filed the proposal in December, said the "SEC’s decision is a victory for investors that seriously question Zuckerberg’s leadership and pivot into the metaverse."
'We Value the Views of Our Investors'

"This ruling clears the way for investors to further understand the potential psychological and human rights risks of the metaverse and weigh in on whether Meta should be pumping $10 billion a year into an emerging technology, especially when they are so clearly failing to manage the risks on their core platforms," Lamb told TheStreet.

She added that it is important to keep in mind how material Meta’s pivot to the metaverse is to investors.

"Meta stock suffered the largest decline in stock market history when it reported negative earnings growth last quarter, driven by this $10 billion investment," she said.

In response, a Meta spokesperson said “we value the views of our investors and regularly engage with them to get their perspective. We look forward to continuing the dialogue, including at our Annual Shareholder Meeting in May."

Meta came out against the proposal in its proxy statement, saying "we believe that we have the right approach in place for our metaverse efforts."

"Given that we are already working with numerous researchers, experts, and advocates around the globe to better understand potential risks and mitigations, which is informing how we design the products and experiences that are just being built, our board of directors believes this proposal is unnecessary," the proxy statement said.

The proposal it is unlikely to pass since Zuckerberg controls the voting shares. However, this does not mean the controversy will disappear.

"There are a confluence of pressures that Meta is facing, from anti-trust litigation, to whistleblower testimony, to congressional hearings," Lamb said. "It’s important for investors to speak up, which is what we are doing through this proposal, but there are other factors at work that Meta needs to respond to. We have been advocating for better governance at Meta for 6 years and we will continue to do so."

Kenny Ching, assistant professor at the WPI Business School, said that, in general, "we do not have great evidence for the benefits or drawbacks of the metaverse, as the phenomenon is not only nascent but extremely complex."

'Pump The Brakes'

"While there is some early research suggesting that the metaverse environment may promote toxic antisocial behavior," he said, "this view has to be tempered by the positive impact such as potential productivity boosts through gamification and obviation of physical distance."

Ching said that it will be interesting to see the findings from the third party evaluation, and the subsequent legal development.

"While we should regard the findings with a healthy dose of skepticism," he said, "the case itself will be a test for how society will eventually come to accept--or reject--the metaverse."

In a way, Ching said, "the reactions to the case are probably more important than the eventual findings."

"My overall prediction though, is that momentum for the metaverse's growth will not be adversely impacted," he said. "It is unlikely findings from the evaluation will be definitive given how complex and nascent the phenomenon is."

Justin Lacche, Commissioner of the Omniverse Sports League, which features four minor league sports teams competing physically and in the metaverse, said there is a long-established history where regulatory commissions "pump the brakes" when technology or new paradigms evolve very fast.

"It's very important for businesses to partner with regulatory agencies to demystify the metaverse to avoid unnecessary blocking purely on awareness issue," he said.

For his own part, Lacche said he has been impressed many municipalities and regulatory agencies as the world evolved during the Covid-19 pandemic.

"It is in all of our interests as business people, technologists those of us in social science, who want to democratize opportunity to calmly get on the same playing field of understanding because then we all can move fast together," he said.