'Polluted' babies, millions dead: Scientists sound alarm on global pollution

Kyle Bagenstose, USA TODAY
Wed, May 18, 2022

By many measures, modern science has greatly improved the American way of life. Advances in chemistry and other technologies over the past century have made food more affordable and transportation more convenient and paved the way for a plethora of consumer goods. About 4 in 5 U.S. households own a computer and smartphone.

But science is revealing the human costs of these advances.

The production and consumption of the foods, fuels and materials that dominate daily life are leading to large-scale environmental pollution that can impact the health of Americans and people across the globe.

In early May, a groundbreaking study from the University of California, San Francisco of 171 pregnant women in the USA found more than 9 in 10 had measurable amounts of 19 different chemicals and pesticides in their bodies. Researchers said many of those substances pass through the placenta and into developing fetuses, adding evidence to a National Institutes of Health report that warned babies are born “pre-polluted” with chemicals.

The full extent of health effects from such exposures is unknown, but scientists worry they could contribute to rising U.S. rates of autoimmune diseases, developmental disorders such as autism and reproductive harms, such as the mysterious decline of sperm counts in men.

Tracey Woodruff, a director of the Reproductive Health and Environment Program at the University of California, San Francisco and co-author of the study, said the work only scratches the surface of what Americans are exposed to and the potential health effects.

“Pregnancy is such an important time for susceptibility to environmental chemicals, both for the fetus and the pregnant person,” Woodruff said. “Our understanding of exposures is not keeping up. ... What are these chemicals doing?”

Tuesday, a study published in the journal The Lancet expanded on pollution concerns globally, revealing that air and water pollution causes 1 in 6 deaths worldwide. At more than 9 million deaths per year, such pollution kills more people than malnutrition, roadway injuries and drug and alcohol use combined, the study found.

Most harmed are developing nations in East and Southeast Asia, where historically low levels of environmental protections have led to dangerous and runaway pollution. The report laid out the interconnected nature of the threat.

Richard Fuller, president of the environmental nonprofit Pure Earth, said Americans can be exposed to the pollutants through imported products such as spices and baby food, or as harmful particulates in air traveling across oceans. Air emissions from worldwide manufacturing and transportation contribute to global warming, meaning that no nation escapes the harm they create.

“A good percentage of the air quality in San Francisco is actually from coal-fired burning in China that’s crossed the entire Pacific,” Fuller said. “These particles will move and cause damage many thousands of miles away from where they started.”

Indian fashion students, wearing anti-pollution masks, gather for a march through a marketplace to create awareness on air pollution in New Delhi on Nov. 2, 2018.

Air pollution originating in the USA is still a problem, particularly for “fenceline” communities near industrial facilities.

A report from the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project this month found that nearly half of 118 U.S. oil refineries, crucial to the production of gasoline and plastics used in consumer goods, emit the carcinogenic chemical benzene at levels potentially unsafe to residents downwind. Twelve plants, ranging from Pennsylvania to Indiana to Texas, further exceed a safety limit established by the Environmental Protection Agency, the report found.

“EPA and the oil refining industry really need to do more to crack down on these benzene emissions, because the fenceline concentrations at too many refineries are high enough to pose a potential threat to neighborhoods that are close by,” said Eric Schaeffer, executive director of the nonprofit.

Industry pushed back on the notion that common chemicals are linked to health effects.

The American Chemistry Council, a trade association, wrote in an email to USA TODAY that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said mere exposure to a chemical "does not by itself mean" it will cause harm. The ACC noted the new study on pregnant women drew no such conclusions. Companies are "serious" about chemical safety as well as performance, the council said.

"Our members undertake extensive scientific analyses to evaluate potential risk of their chemicals, from development through use and safe disposal," the group wrote. "We work with regulators, retailers and manufacturers to provide them with information about our chemicals."

Pollution a planetary threat

Though the changing climate is often viewed as the most pressing global environmental threat, researchers warned that on-the-ground pollution poses ecological and humanitarian catastrophes of its own.

Roland Geyer, an industrial ecology researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said the pollution threat is a crisis akin to climate change and the loss of biodiversity.

In 2017, Geyer found that since the mass production of plastics began in the 1950s, more than 8.3 billion tons of plastics have been produced, 79% of which ended up in the environment or landfills. That comes out to about 2,300 pounds for every person on the planet. Half was generated just in the prior 13 years, and the amount is set to double by 2050.

“We were just blown away by how much plastic we've made and how incredibly careless or incompetent we are at managing that material,” Geyer said.

Once plastics are in the environment, they can take thousands of years to break down. Larger pieces degrade into “microplastics,” which studies have found littered throughout food products and the human body, where they can disrupt hormones, harm the immune system and increase risk of chronic disease.

A blue rectangular piece of microplastic was found in debris collected in 2010 from the Thea Foss Waterway in Tacoma, Wash. Tiny bits of broken-down plastic smaller than a fraction of a grain of rice are turning up in oceans, from the water to the guts of fish and the excrement of sea otters and giant killer whales.

Experts liken the exposure of humans to plastics and chemicals to past problems with the toxic metal lead, and said it offers a cautionary tale.

After research linked lead to kidney and cardiovascular damage in adults, as well as brain and nervous systems in children, the United States banned its use in paint in 1978 and in gasoline in 1996. Though lead poisoning from old paint and water pipes remains a concern in many parts of the USA, particularly in marginalized communities with older housing stock, the median blood level of children has fallen more than 15-fold.

Geyer noted it took decades for enough scientific evidence to accumulate before the phaseouts were made, a timeline that troubles him as plastics proliferate across our planet.

“It’s a bit like running a giant global experiment,” Geyer said.

Lead shows how wealthy nations often offload chemical risks to other nations, Fuller noted. The Lancet study found lead still contributes to nearly a million deaths a year across the globe, primarily in India and Central and Western Africa. Much of it can be attributed to the improper recycling of lead-acid batteries and "e-waste" (outdated electronics) originating from wealthier nations.

The United States was the second biggest contributor to e-waste in 2019, behind China and ahead of India.

“It’s done in backyards, and a lot of the lead is released into the land and poisons local kids and floats down to their pastures and gets picked up by (agricultural) products,” Fuller said.

Air pollution, which kills about 6.5 million every year and contributes to global warming, often comes from factories in developing nations that export goods to wealthy trading partners, according to The Lancet report.

There are growing dangers for Americans. Though environmental laws such as the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act have decreased the amount of many toxins in the environment over the past 50 years, experts said regulators remain far behind in catching up to the threats of the modern era, particularly in newer chemicals.

Of the more than 40,000 chemicals in commerce, only a fraction have been robustly studied for potential human health effects, Woodruff said.

Some of the most concerning are PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” which are commonly used in water-resistant products and nonstick pans. Studies show more than 96% of Americans have at least one PFAS in their blood, some of which have been linked to cancer, high cholesterol, reproductive harm and other health effects.

Woodruff places responsibility with the EPA’s chemical safety program. Employees of the agency told USA TODAY it has not been able to thoroughly evaluate new chemicals before companies place them into commerce. Woodruff said even when chemicals are found to be hazardous and phased out, her study of 171 American women shows replacement chemicals are often utilized before being fully evaluated.

“Chemicals that had been a focus of regulatory or market-based campaigns, they seem to be either remaining stable or going down” in women, Woodruff said. “But their replacements are going up.”

In response, the American Chemistry Council said it interacts with six regulatory agencies under 12 different laws meant to ensure the safety of products, and it supported the overhaul in 2016 of the Toxic Substances Control Act, the nation's primary chemical safety law.

"We continue to work with EPA, FDA and other federal agencies to strengthen our regulatory system and help ensure that policies are made using the best-available science and the weight of the evidence to make decisions," the group wrote.

In a statement, the EPA said although the change to the chemicals law in 2016 gave the agency unprecedented authority to analyze the safety of chemicals, Congress has not appropriated additional funding. That led to a doubling of the workload without new staff and caused the agency to miss deadlines for 90% of an initial set of chemical reviews, it said.

"EPA ... will continue to struggle to review the safety of new chemicals quickly absent additional resources," the agency said, adding that the White House asked Congress for an additional $64 million and 200 employees.
Pollution solutions exist but don’t come easy

Geyer, the plastics researcher, is among experts across various disciplines who say modern pollution risks call for new solutions.

Efforts to cut down on pollution have often focused on the “end fate” of materials, such as recycling plastics or repurposing materials. Research has shown such solutions to be mostly futile. Geyer's study found that just 9% of all plastic created has been successfully recycled.

The figure is lower in the USA – about 6% – and even European nations that invest deeply in recycling top out at about 40%, Geyer said. Globally, the majority of plastic still ends up in the environment or landfills, and smaller fractions are incinerated.

Stephanie Wein, a clean water advocate with the nonprofit PennEnvironment, said that such solutions misplace responsibility. Though the group has successfully advocated for plastic bag bans in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia to help clean up neighborhoods, Wein noted such efforts “don't solve the plastics crisis.” Even well-intentioned consumers find it difficult to cut down on plastics in a world where nearly every product is encased in it, she said.

“The onus should not be on local governments or consumers to deal with the waste,” Wein said. “The onus should instead be on the companies that create it.”

Geyer said the magnitude of the problem requires that governments determine a sustainable annual amount of plastic and chemical production, then work to ratchet industry down to those levels.

“There will always be plastic ... it's such a cheap and incredibly useful material,” Geyer said. “But we need to agree that this is too much, and we need to bring it down.”

Other experts said solutions need to come from bolstered federal agencies such as the EPA, with help from Congress through more funding and new authorities.

John Beard, executive director of the Port Arthur Community Action Network in Port Arthur, Texas, is among those who say the agency could be doing more now.

In Port Arthur, a French-owned Total Energies oil refinery is one of 12 facilities the Environmental Integrity Project calculated was emitting benzene at levels above EPA limits. Beard said the city is rife with cancer, but little is being done to understand and address hazards.

“We need more monitoring along the fenceline communities, and also beyond the fenceline, because the effects are carried downwind,” Beard said. “We have to regulate how these refineries go about their business.”

The sun begins to set over an oil refinery in Port Arthur, Texas, in this May 17, 2007 file photo.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: New studies highlight health risks of modern chemicals and pollution

PHOTO ESSAY

The Wider Image: In Mexico, a decade of images shows Mennonites' traditions frozen in time

Thu, May 19, 2022,
By Jose Luis Gonzalez and Cassandra Garrison

ASCENCION, Mexico (Reuters) - The Mennonite community in Chihuahua, Mexico, can trace its roots as far back as a century ago, when the first such settlers came seeking ideal farming land, isolation from the outside world and the preservation of their religion.

Here, their way of life is simple, with virtually no use of electricity or the internet. The community supports itself through its centuries-old tradition of farming: corn, chili peppers, cotton, onions.

But life can be difficult for them as modern technology creeps closer to their doorstep. It's not as easy to maintain their isolation as it was a hundred years ago.

From low water reserves due to drought worsened by climate change to the rising cost of diesel to run farming pumps, the community has its own set of challenges as it seeks to thrive and grow.

For the last 100 years, Mexico has been home to Mennonite farmers, who migrated from Canada, where many still live.

Descendants of 16th-century Protestant Anabaptist radicals from Germany, the Low Countries and Switzerland, Mennonites rejected military service and the concept of a church hierarchy, suffering years of persecution and making them reliant on the patronage of rulers eager to exploit their belief that agriculture and faith are intertwined.

The community of El Sabinal - Spanish for "The Juniper" - was founded nearly 30 years ago in the dry, desert-like terrain of Chihuahua in northern Mexico. Today, Mennonite farmers have transformed it into fruitful farmland, often using antique farm equipment. They live in simple brick houses they build themselves, usually consisting of one open room.

As the Mennonites expanded their farmland in drought-prone Chihuahua, where they have several communities, the demand for water increased. Over the years, they have faced allegations of sinking illegal wells from local farmers who complain the government gives them preferential treatment.

"It is very expensive to pump diesel here. There is still water, but they have to sink more wells," said Guillermo Andres, a Mennonite who arrived in El Sabinal as a teenager. His devout family eschews the use of electricity and pumps well water using diesel fuel, an increasingly costly practice.

The Mennonites' native language is typically Plautdietsch, a unique blend of Low German, Prussian dialects and Dutch. Many Mennonites, especially men who interact with local laborers, also speak Spanish.

From schools to general stores, almost everything the Mennonites need they have built for themselves within the confines of their own communities.

Mennonites generally finish school by the age of 12. Boys and girls sit separately in classrooms, just as men and women do in church pews on Sundays.

It is not uncommon to see a child younger than 10 operating a tractor or driving a horse-drawn buggy on the white, dusty roads within the community.

These blue-eyed, blond-haired people marry young and focus on expanding their families. Many farmers said they had more than 10 children.

In this way, they practice their religion through their everyday life. Men tend to the fields while women maintain the gardens at home and care for the children.

The Mennonites' interaction with the outside world is mostly restricted to their relationships with local people who work for them as laborers in the community or to trips into town to buy goods.

"The traditions are living quietly in a neighborhood without trucks, without rubber tires, without electricity," Andres said. "Our traditions come from Russia, from Russia to Canada and from Canada to Mexico.

"I don't know about it (technology); that's how I was born and that's how I've been all my life; that's how I like to continue," he added.

(Reporting by Jose Luis Gonzalez in Chihuahua and Cassandra Garrison in Mexico City; editing by Jonathan Oatis)

The SEC has taken the first step toward undermining 401(k) plan fiduciaries

Alicia H. Munnell - Yesterday

© Getty ImagesThe SEC has taken the first step toward undermining 401(k) plan fiduciaries
The Securities and Exchange Commission has decided to allow Amazon.com Inc.’s shareholders to vote on a proposal requiring the company to prepare a report assessing the extent to which the company’s current retirement plan investment options align with its corporate climate action goals. This proposal is being pushed by a nonprofit shareholder advocacy group As You Sow. The group wants to replace low-fee index funds with ESG funds, which tend to be actively managed and involve significantly higher fees. The SEC decision is wrongheaded and could hurt retirement saving.

The SEC used to allow companies to exclude this type of proposal from proxy statements, because they relate to the company’s ordinary business operations – the wages and benefits provided to employees. The agency simply viewed it as impractical to resolve operational problems at an annual meeting. In this new era, however, the SEC has adopted a new stance – it does not support the exclusion of any proposal pertaining to “significant social issues.”

The significant social issue in this case is climate change, and As You Sow is going after broad market index funds, which by their very nature include fossil fuel companies in the asset mix. The organization’s website focuses particularly on low-cost target-date funds that serve as the default investment in most 401(k) plans. Vanguard funds, which are used by 14 of the 16 companies identified as bad actors, receive special attention. Although other target-date funds, such as those from BlackRock, Fidelity, American Funds, T. Rowe Price TIAA-CREF, J.P. Morgan and State Street also received failing grades.

As You Sow is not advocating for simply adding an ESG option to the company’s 401(k) plan investment roster, but rather to replace low-cost index funds with high-cost ESG funds as the plan default. They contend that dropping fossil fuel companies would allow investors to reduce risk and earn higher returns, while supporting socially beneficial practices and outcomes.

Such a shift, however, would be a terrible idea for many reasons, including:
It isn’t clear that this form of social investing is effective. The SEC itself has started to crack down on “greenwashing”— the claim that investments will save the world with little evidence to support it.

Moreover, ESG funds are expensive (on average 80 basis points more than index funds). Essentially, they are a marketing ploy by financial-services firms to repackage costly, actively managed investments—which were becoming increasingly less appealing—in a trendy wrapper.

Even more pernicious, social investing allows people to think that they’re really solving an important world problem when, in fact, they are doing nothing. It’s delusional to think that 401(k) participants can lead the way on fighting climate change by not investing in fossil fuel stocks. Other investors will step in and pick up the stock in undervalued fossil fuel companies.

So, what happens now? The best outcome would be that shareholders vote down the proposals, and no one has to write a report. The alternative is that the proposal is approved and the report tries to reconcile the company’s and its retirement plan’s objectives. This would be an impossible task. Fiduciaries under ERISA are supposed to invest in the best interest of plan participants, not get involved with ineffective divestures that involve lower returns and higher fees.

If As You Sow creates pressure for a climate-pure default in 401(k) plans, fiduciaries will face either the wrath of disappointed socially active participants or future lawsuits by participants angry over low returns and high fees. The ultimate bad outcome is that companies throw up their hands and stop offering 401(k) plans.

All this could have been avoided if the SEC just stuck to its knitting

FICTIOUS CAPITAL

Billionaire founder of crypto exchange Binance says he's 'poor again' after its luna holdings — once worth $1.6 billion — crashed and are now worth just $2,200

Weilun Soon
Wed, May 18, 2022

Changpeng Zhao, founder of Binance, joked he was "poor again" after the crypto luna took a dive.REUTERS/Darrin Zammit Lupi

Crypto exchange Binance's founder Changpeng Zhao tweeted "poor again" after crypto-token luna crashed.

Binance's holdings of the coin were once worth $1.6 billion but are now worth about $2,200.

According to Bloomberg estimates, Zhao is still a billionaire and Binance is the world's largest crypto exchange.

Chanpeng Zhao, the wealthy founder of crypto exchange Binance, joked on Tuesday that he was "poor again" after the exchange's investments in the luna cryptocurrency crashed from $1.6 billion just a month ago to about $2,200 this week.

In a tweet on Monday, Zhao said that Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, held 15 million luna tokens. Binance received these tokens in exchange for its $3 million investment in 2018 into the Terra network that luna is based on. Its luna tokens were "never moved or sold" as of Monday, according to Zhao.

Insider has reached out to Zhao for comment.

Binance's luna holdings were worth $1.6 billion in early April when the token hit its peak price. But its recent crash saw that value shrink to about $2,200 this week. The coin is trading at about $0.0001468 as of Thursday.

Luna's value has rapidly plunged in the past two weeks.

Its implosion started when its sister token, TerraUSD, lost its peg to the US dollar two weeks ago. The two tokens' valuations are tied to each other. When TerraUSD's price fell, investors rushed to dump their holdings of that token in a scenario similar to a bank run. TerraUSD's plunge, in turn, dragged down luna's price.

The two tokens' free fall was estimated to have wiped out more than $50 billion in paper value, Insider reported on Sunday.

Zhao on Monday urged the Terra team to reimburse its retail investors first. "To lead by example on PROTECTING USERS, Binance will let this go and ask the Terra project team to compensate the retail users first, Binance last, if ever," he tweeted.

Despite his comments, Zhao, 45, definitely isn't broke. He has a net worth of about $14.8 billion as of Thursday, based on Bloomberg's estimates. The majority of his wealth likely comes from his estimated 70% stake in Binance, according to Forbes.

Binance's market value is estimated to be six times that of its nearest competitor, Coinbase, Forbes reported in March. Binance took in about $14.6 billion in trading fees last year, according to MarketWatch, which quoted a report published by financial-services consultancy Opimas.

Bitcoin is just the latest in the American tradition of buying snake oil


Tim Rowland

The Herald-Mail
Thu, May 19, 2022

The world’s also-ran nations are always looking for an angle, be it as a tax haven, an opaque repository of foreign assets or as home to some oddball tourist attraction, like swallows or sea turtles.

El Salvador, trying to get the jump on other nations, decided it could make a splash on the world scene by being the Bubba of Bitcoin. Whoops. It made a splash all right, the same sort of splash a dead sailor makes when they throw him overboard.

The financially beleaguered nation went all-in on cryptocurrency in September by making Bitcoin its national currency and floating a $1 billion crypto bond.

In other words, El Salvador took its entire economy to Las Vegas and put it on red. And we all know what happened.

Actually, El Salvador is lucky. Bitcoin is only down 50%. Some went entirely down the flume. If you had $1 million in Luna yesterday, today you don’t even have enough to buy a ham sandwich.

Fortune favors the — RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!

What? You mean a financial investment hyped by Mike Tyson and Kim Kardashian turned out to be a sham? No.

Employing someone, who has famously blown through multiple fortunes, as a pitchman for financial planning is, even by American standards, nutty beyond belief.

Normal Ohioans meanwhile have to be breathing a sigh of relief that Republican voters rejected the senatorial candidate who wanted to make the state “pro-God, pro-family, pro-Bitcoin.”

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Because nothing says “family” like rooting around in a dumpster together searching for fish bones. And how you equate God with Bitcoin, I can’t even begin to say. It wasn’t like Jesus cast the money changers out of the temple so he could put his cash into Ethereum.

None of this is unique to the American condition, obviously. In the 19th century, a horse-drawn wagon would roll into dusty backroad communities and talk its citizens into spending their last three cents on Dr. Caldwell’s Syrup Pepsin instead of groceries.

Last century it was penny stocks. You could buy 50,000 shares of Cressen Consolidated Mining and Milling Co., and maybe a year later you would get notice as an official registered shareholder that aforementioned entity was now officially insolvent and had liquidated off its last remaining assets, which at that point amounted to six folding metal chairs and half a jar of Sanka.

Very, very infrequently, one of these companies would turn into Microsoft, at which point the lucky investor would — being all too aware of the odds — stop investing and start selling a correspondence course advertised in the back of Popular Mechanics magazine with a guy in a plaid suit saying, “I made a zillion dollars in penny stocks and you can too!”

Can, but won’t.

And sure enough, there is no shortage of true believers today. You can’t swing a cat without hitting a cryptocurrency, none of which you’ve ever heard of, with names like Tron, ZCash, Tezos, Neo, Dash, Ox and literally thousands of others.

Hey, if it’s your thing, knock yourself out. But most people are going to be reluctant to put their life savings into a global currency cooked up by a kid in his parents’ garage wearing a T-shirt with Taco Bell stains.

I acknowledge these might be brilliant people. But the American monetary system is the one thing the government does really, really well. It dominates the globe. If the goal is to launder drug money or scam senior citizens, it might not be perfect, but if I put a dollar in the bank tonight I know it’s going to be there tomorrow, which is a lot more than you can say for these geniuses who think they can do better.

So if they want to start a revolution, maybe they should focus their talents on something that actually needs fixing, like the health insurance industry or the Department of Motor Vehicles.

BitLicense. That’s something I’d buy into.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columist.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Cryptocurrencies seem to be modern version of penny stocks

Analysis-Crypto crash leaves El Salvador with no easy exit from worsening crisis

FILE PHOTO - El Salvador uses Bitcoin as legal tender

Wed, May 18, 2022, 
By Nelson Renteria, Sarah Kinosian and Rodrigo Campos

SAN SALVADOR/NEW YORK (Reuters) - El Salvador's big bet on bitcoin, which the Central American nation has been buying since September, has soured in recent weeks as a cryptocurrency rout shaved over a third of the value of the government's holdings, Reuters calculations show.

Under populist President Nayib Bukele, a vocal cheerleader for the currency, El Salvador went all-in on bitcoin, not just becoming the world's first country to adopt it as a legal tender but also sketching out plans for a volcano-powered crypto mining hub and plans to issue the first sovereign bond linked to the coin.

With global borrowing costs on the rise and a big debt repayment on the horizon, El Salvador has other fiscal headaches than the impact of the currency's swoon. But the crypto slump has also closed some potential off-ramps from the crisis, including the now-postponed bitcoin bond.

"The government's financial problems are not because of bitcoin, but they have gotten worse because of bitcoin," said Ricardo Castaneda, senior economist and country coordinator for El Salvador and Honduras at think tank Central American Institute for Fiscal Studies (ICEFI). For the government, he said, "bitcoin ceased to be a solution and has become part of the problem."

Bitcoin has fallen 45% since El Salvador officially adopted it in early September, and 26% from its May high as crypto assets have been swept up in a risk-off investing environment.

The combined market value of all cryptocurrencies recently fell to $1.2 trillion, less than half of where it was last November, based on data from CoinMarketCap.

El Salvador's debt stood at $24.4 billion as of December, from $19.8 billion at end-2019, after the Bukele administration allocated millions of dollars to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic effects over the past couple of years.

The International Monetary Fund estimates that the current account deficit for its remittance and external financing-reliant economy will hover near $2 billion through 2025.

But adopting bitcoin set the country at loggerheads with multilateral lenders like the IMF, from which Finance Minister Alejandro Zelaya said https://www.reuters.com/article/us-el-salvador-economy-exclusive/exclusive-el-salvador-seeks-imf-funding-sees-golden-opportunity-for-economy-says-finance-minister-idUSKBN2AW1GV last year the government was seeking $1.3 billion.

The fund has recommended that El Salvador ditch bitcoin altogether. Any deal for a credit line would have to address risks including "those related to the adoption of bitcoin as legal tender as well as risks related to economic governance," an IMF official said on Wednesday.

Ratings agencies have warned bitcoin adoption could facilitate money laundering, and importantly, the bitcoin risk has given bond investors another reason to demand higher returns

As of Wednesday, they were seeking a record-high premium of 2,445 basis points over U.S. Treasuries.

Bukele's moves to centralize power, from removing all the top judges on the country's supreme court to muscling through authorization to seek immediate re-election despite constitutional term limits, have helped drive the risk premium higher.

"If there isn't potential for bitcoin-growth dividends or innovative bitcoin-financing, then the Bukele administration will have to prioritize spending priorities and identify financing options," according to Siobhan Morden, head of Latin America Fixed Income Strategy at Amherst Pierpont.

Reuters calculations of a $36 million paper loss in bitcoin, enough to make at least some of those coupon payments, is based on Bukele's tweets and an estimate of prices on the purchase dates. The government has spent some $104.2 million on 2,301 coins now worth just $67.9 million using Wednesday's volume weighted average price.

The country has to service $329 million in interest due on its international bonds this year as well as $800 million in a bond set to mature in January.

ICEFI's Castaneda listed financing options including the Central American and Latin American development banks - CABEI and CAF, respectively - as possible patches for financing the $800 million payment due in January. Another option, he said, is to nationalize the country's pension fund to cover the fiscal deficit - which could be done by transferring the public's savings to a government account.

A debt restructuring for El Salvador is "inevitable" if the country continues with the "current policy mix," said Polina Kurdyavko, head of emerging markets at BlueBay Asset Management. "Debt in El Salvador could be sustainable with the right (IMF) program. But they have to act now."

The country's finance minister, Zelaya, declined to comment for this story.

Salvadoran bonds trade between 43.5 cents and 34 cents on the dollar except for the January maturity at 75 cents, reflecting cautious optimism that the country could make that payment.

The cost to insure investors against a Salvadoran sovereign default over the next five years on Wednesday hit its highest level since 2020, according to S&P Global data.

(Reporting by Nelson Renteria in San Salvador, Sarah Kinosian in Mexico City and Rodrigo Campos in New York; Additional reporting by Jorgelina do Rosario in London; Editing by Christian Plumb and Matthew Lewis)

Grim 2022 drought outlook for Western US offers warnings for the future as climate change brings a hotter, thirstier atmosphere

Imtiaz Rangwala, Research Scientist in Climate, 

Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, 

University of Colorado Boulder

The Conversation
Thu, May 19, 2022

Farmers in some regions are being encouraged to preserve and establish grasslands that can survive drought and protect the soil. AP Photo/Mark Rogers

Much of the western U.S. has been in the grip of an unrelenting drought since early 2020. The dryness has coincided with record-breaking wildfires, intense and long-lasting heat waves, low stream flows and dwindling water supplies in reservoirs that millions of people across the region rely on.

Heading into summer, the outlook is pretty grim. The National Weather Service’s latest seasonal outlook, issued May 19, 2022, described drought persisting across most of the West and parts of the Great Plains.

One driver of the Western drought has been persistent La Niña conditions in the tropical Pacific since the summer of 2020. During La Niña, cooler tropical Pacific waters help nudge the jet stream northward. That tends to bring fewer storms to the southern tier of the U.S. and produce pronounced drought impacts in the Southwest.

The other and perhaps more important part of the story is the hotter and thirstier atmosphere, caused by a rapidly warming climate.

As a climate scientist, I’ve watched how climate change is making drought conditions increasingly worse – particularly in the western and central U.S. The last two years have been more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 Celsius) warmer than normal in these regions. Large swaths of the Southwest have been even hotter, with temperatures more than 3 F (1.7 C) higher. Studies suggest the Southwest’s ongoing 20-year drought is the most severe in at least 1,200 years, based on how dry the soils are.

A hotter atmosphere sucks more moisture from the soil

A thristier atmosphere tends to extract more water out of the land. It exacerbates evaporative stress on the land, particularly when a region is experiencing below-normal precipitation. High evaporative stress can rapidly deplete soil moisture and lead to hotter temperatures, as the evaporative cooling effect is diminished. All this creates hydroclimatic stress for plants, causing restricted growth, drying and even death.

As a consequence of a warming climate, the U.S. Southwest has seen an 8% increase in this evaporative demand since the 1980s. This trend is generally happening across other parts of the country.

The thistier atmosphere is turning what would otherwise be near-normal or moderately dry conditions into droughts that are more severe or extreme. As the climate heats up further, the increasing atmospheric thirst will continue to intensify drought stress, with consequences for water availability, long-lasting and intense heat stress, and large-scale ecosystem transformation.

Climate models project ominous prospects of a more arid climate and more severe droughts in the Southwest and southern Great Plains in the coming decades.

In addition to direct impacts of increasing temperatures on future droughts, these regions are also expected to see fewer storms and more days without precipitation. Climate models consistently project a poleward shift in the midlatitude storm tracks during this century as the planet heats up, which is expected to result in fewer storms in the southern tier of the country.

Expect flash droughts even in wetter areas

The changing nature of droughts is a concern even in parts of the U.S. that are expected to have a net increase in annual precipitation during the 21st century. In a hotter future, because of the high evaporative demand on the land, prolonged periods with weeks to months of below normal precipitation in these areas can lead to significant drought, even if the overall trend is for more precipitation.

Large parts of the northern Plains, for example, have seen precipitation increase by 10% or more in the last three decades. However, the region is not immune to severe drought conditions in a hotter climate.

At the tail end of what was the wettest decade on record in the region, the northern Plains experienced an intense flash drought in the summer of 2017 that resulted in agricultural losses in excess of .6 billion and wildfires across millions of acres. Record evaporative demand contributed to the severity of the flash drought, in addition to a severe short-term precipitation deficit. A flash drought is a drought that intensifies rapidly over a period of a few weeks and often catches forecasters by surprise. The likelihood of flash droughts that can cause severe impacts to agriculture and ecosystems and promote large wildfires is expected to increase with a warmer and thirstier atmosphere.

During the 2017 flash drought, a North Dakota farmer stands in a wheat field that should have been twice as high at that point. 

AP Photo/Blake Nicholson

Flash droughts are also emerging as a growing concern in the Northeast. In 2020, much of New England experienced an extreme hydrologic drought, with low stream flows and groundwater levels and widespread crop losses between May and September. Aided by very warm and dry atmospheric conditions, the drought developed very rapidly over that period from what had been above-normal wet conditions.

As humanity enters a hotter future, prolonged periods of weeks to months of below-normal precipitation are going to be of a greater concern almost everywhere.
Heading into unfamiliar territory

Other forms of droughts are also emerging.

Atmospheric heating is causing snow droughts as more precipitation falls as rain rather than snow and snow melts earlier. Shorter snow seasons and longer growing seasons because of warmer temperatures are changing the timing of ecological responses.

The ‘bathtub ring’ on Lake Powell, one of the nation’s largest reservoirs, attests to its falling water level over two decades of drought in Arizona. The Colorado River reservoir is crucial for water supplies and hydropower. 

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Land is greening up earlier and causing an earlier loss of water from the land surface through evapotranspiration – the loss of water from plants and soil. This could result in drier soils in the latter half of the growing season. As a result, parts of the central and western U.S. could see both increased greening and drying in the future that are seasonally separated across the growing season.

With a rapidly changing climate, we are entering unfamiliar territory. The world will need new ways to better anticipate future droughts that could transform natural and human systems.

Read more: Hydropower's future is clouded by droughts, floods and climate change – it's also essential to the US electric grid

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Imtiaz Rangwala, University of Colorado Boulder.

Read more:

Hydropower’s future is clouded by droughts, floods and climate change – it’s also essential to the US electric grid


As Colorado River Basin states confront water shortages, it’s time to focus on reducing demand


Trees are dying of thirst in the Western drought – here’s what’s going on inside their veins

Imtiaz Rangwala receives funding from USGS, USDA, NOAA, US Forest Service. He is affiliated with the University of Colorado Boulder, North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center and Western Water Assessment.

Cold War Relic Threatens Europe's Plans to Ditch Russian Oil



Stefan Nicola and Rachel Graham
Wed, May 18, 2022

(Bloomberg) -- Berlin risks running out of fuel unless German officials can find a way to keep a Cold War relic from falling victim to geopolitics.

A refinery on the Polish border, which supplies the bulk of the jet fuel for the German capital’s airport and gasoline for the region’s vehicles, is caught up in the European Union’s standoff with Moscow over the war in Ukraine. A plan to ban Russian oil imports by the end of the year threatens to choke off supplies to the facility in the small town of Schwedt, which would cripple Berlin and much of eastern Germany in the process.

The PCK refinery is directly connected to a pipeline pumping Russian crude from the other side of the Ural mountains. Because the facility is far from a major port, there’s no easy alternative, and the fact that it’s controlled by the Kremlin’s oil champion Rosneft PJSC multiplies the complexity.

From Berlin to Germany’s Baltic coast and parts of western Poland, “virtually every plane, police car, fire truck and ambulance is powered by fuel from Schwedt,” said Annekathrin Hoppe, mayor of the town of 34,000 on the Oder river. Closing the refinery “would be a disaster.”

The facility, which covers an area more than twice the size of New York’s Central Park, was built in the 1960s to cement former communist East Germany’s reliance on the Soviet Union. The struggle to find a solution shows that those links are still strong more than three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

To comply with the EU’s planned oil embargo, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government is weighing some heavy-handed solutions, including taking control of the refinery as it did with Gazprom PJSC’s German unit. But a change of ownership wouldn’t resolve the main issue: replacing the 12 millions tons of crude pumped to the refinery every year through the Druzhba pipeline, named after the Russian word for “friendship.”

“The refinery is not configured for anything else” but Russia’s high-sulfur crude oil, said Ben Van Beurden, chief executive officer of Shell Plc, which owns a stake in PCK that it had been trying to sell. The refinery declined to comment for this story.

German Economy Minister Robert Habeck traveled to Schwedt last week to address concerns over the refinery’s future. With hundreds of workers straining to hear, he climbed on a table to better deliver his message on how the government is working to ensure that operations can continue if Russian oil is banned.

“We need your production, your work to safeguard Germany’s supply,” Habeck told PCK’s staff, adding that there will likely be disruptions. “I don’t want to take you for a fool or paint a picture that’s too rosy.”

German authorities are scrambling for options and have determined that an old pipeline linking Schwedt to the Baltic port of Rostock could be used for crude delivered via tanker. But its relatively small size means it could only cover some 60% of normal volumes. To boost supplies, plans to increase the pump pressure and modernize the infrastructure are under discussion, according to officials familiar with the matter.

Another option would be to have tankers dock in Gdansk in Poland and send crude through a pipeline that connects to the Druzhba. That would require the help of Warsaw, which has its own supply issues to deal with as it phases out Russian energy.

Polish Climate Minister Anna Moskwa said the government, which is already helping to supply another German refinery in Leuna, wants Rosneft out of PCK’s ownership. She indicated the country might seek even more in return.

“We are working with the German side on a new joint model of managing the refineries so that it’s optimal both for Polish and German societies,” she said. “I can assure you that it’s a business model. It’s not charity.”

Michael Kellner, a deputy German economy minister, said Wednesday on NDR television that he’s optimistic that a solution can be found with the Polish government. If needed, Germany could tap oil reserves to supply Schwedt, he said, adding that the country is prepared for every eventuality given the refinery’s “massive importance” for the region.

Locals in Schwedt, which boasts a church dating back to the 13th century, are skeptical that decades-old infrastructure connections can be re-routed successfully in little more than six months.

“There have been several crises with Russia since the plant was founded, but those never affected the supply relationship,” said Gundolf Schuelke, head of the regional chamber of industry and commerce. “This conflict — with its massive scope and sanctions as well as counter-sanctions — is unprecedented.”

Berlin already had a taste of what could happen if Russian crude dries up. In 2019, supplies through the Druzhba were found to be contaminated. Within just a few weeks, Berlin was running short and needed to secure emergency deliveries of heating oil, diesel and gasoline from Hamburg.

In that case, the issue was short-lived. Now, a more structural shift is under way, and PCK has done little to prepare for a time without access to cheap Russian crude — or the end of the fossil-fuel era.

Over the longer term, city officials are pushing to transform not just the refinery but also the local economy by creating an “innovation campus” to attract startups and sustainable industrial firms.

Hamburg-based Bio-Lutions International AG is setting up a plant that will turn straw and tomato stalks into an alternative for plastic packaging. Leipzig-based Verbio Vereinigte BioEnergie AG is already producing biodiesel, bioethanol and biomethane at the PCK site and shares its vast pipeline, rail and processing infrastructure.

But those efforts aren’t an immediate replacement for the refinery, which employs around 1,200 people and sustains at least as many more jobs at local partners. Also, heat generated by the plant keeps 80% of Schwedt’s homes warm during the winter.

“If PCK will stop production, there is no fuel in East Germany and no fuel in Berlin anymore,” Claus Sauter, Verbio’s chief executive officer, said on a conference call last week. “A whole region will die.”