CANADA

NOT JUST ATM'S WERE DOWN SO WAS 911

Far-reaching implications of Rogers outage shows need for competition: Expert

Fri, July 8, 2022 



TORONTO — A widespread Rogers Communications Inc. outage that caused trouble for 911 services, retailers and transit operators Friday had many warning the incident is a sign that monopolistic telecommunications companies need more competition.

"The outage is illuminating the general lack of competition in telecommunications in Canada," said Vass Bednar, executive director of McMaster University's master of public policy program.

The country's telecom sector is dominated by three large carriers — Rogers, BCE Inc. and Telus Corp. — and their hold on the industry has long been a concern of academics, who have called for regulators to increase competition for mobile and internet services in Canada.

The Competition Bureau is currently fighting Rogers' plans to purchase Shaw Communications Inc. for $26 billion despite the planned sale of its Freedom Mobile business to Quebecor Inc. because the regulator feels the deal would only bolster Rogers' monopoly and not create a viable fourth carrier.

When the outage began Friday, Rogers, Shaw and the Competition Bureau had just wrapped a two-day mediation period that ended with no resolution.

The company offered no explanation for the outage or its expected duration, number of customers affected and location, but promised technical teams are "working hard to restore services as quickly as possible."

When everything from 911 services to GO Transit is impacted by a Rogers outage, the reach of telecommunications companies is very obvious, Bednar said.

"But unless we're going to see people switching their providers today or new publicly run options suddenly springing up, there's not much more that we can do right now other than perhaps factor in people's anger and frustration, as the pending Rogers-Shaw deal is considered."

She added that people should be compensated for the disruption.

"It's a huge expense to Rogers, but even a modest decrease on people's bills would acknowledge some kind of deficit."

Beanfield, an independent fibre network operator, called the outage "every telecom provider’s nightmare," but said it was also an example of why it has long been concerned with the lack of rivals for Rogers, Telus and BCE.

"A lack of competition and choice can lead to a building with the population of a small town going completely dark- cut off from all communications," the company said on Twitter.

"If you can't even get help from a neighbour, where do you go? How do you call 911?"

The business implications are likewise tremendous, the company added.

"The consequences of such an outage for the financial sector, the lack of functioning ATMs, of working bank branches, can be catastrophic," it said.

"Not to mention the independent businesses across the country with no way of processing payment."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 8, 2022.

Companies in this story: (TSX:RCI, TSX:BCE, TSX:T)

Tara Deschamps, The Canadian Press

Massive Rogers outage snarling telecom, banking  and government  services continues

 

AT 8 PM MDT ROGERS IS STILL DOWN

Fri, July 8, 2022

Cellphone users in Toronto fiddle with their phones in the middle of the massive Rogers network outage on Friday. (Alex Lupul/CBC - image credit)

A massive outage at Rogers has brought down internet and cellular service across Canada, and has also interrupted government services and payment systems for businesses and individuals.

The outage began some time early Friday morning, and as of 5 p.m. ET had not been fixed.

The company does not have an estimate when it will be fixed, said Kye Prigg, Rogers' senior vice-president of access networks and operations, on CBC's Power & Politics.

"I wouldn't like to say whether it's going to be fully online today or not, but we are working very, very hard on making sure that we get everything running as soon as possible," he told host Catherine Cullen.

"[But] we're getting very close to understanding the root cause of the of the failure. And we're taking actions along with our network vendors to recover the situation."

"We don't understand how the different levels of redundancy that we build across the network coast to coast have not worked," he said.

WATCH | Rogers 'close' to finding source of problem: 

The company has approximately nine million wireless customers and just shy of three million on the cable and internet side of the business.

Responding to questions about compensation, Rogers said Friday afternoon that it would be "proactively crediting all customers" — but did not provide further details.

While the company isn't divulging a root cause, cybersecurity firm Cloudflare says it is unlikely to have been caused by a cyberattack. "Based on what we're seeing and similar incidents in the past, we believe this is likely to be an internal error," the company said in a blog post.

Canada's electronic spy agency, the Communications Security Establishment, agrees with that assessment, telling CBC News in a statement Friday there is "no indication" the outage is due to a cyberattack.

Whatever the reason, the impact has been dramatic. Internet monitoring watchdog group Netblocks.org reports that total internet traffic in Canada was at 75 per cent of its normal level on Friday morning.

Rogers-owned flanker brands like Fido and Chatr are also offline, but even services not directly controlled by Rogers, such as emergency services, travel and financial networks, are having problems.

WATCH | Not a cyberattack, government official says: 

Debit payment services have also been interrupted.

"A nationwide telecommunications outage with a network provider … is impacting the availability of some Interac services," a spokesperson for Interac confirmed to CBC News.

Change in traffic on the Roger's network since yesterday

"Debit is currently unavailable online and at checkout. Interac e-transfer is also widely unavailable, impacting the ability to send and receive payments."

Bell confirmed that it is having no issues on its network, although it says customers are having difficulties connecting to anything on a Rogers network.

"The Bell network is operational and calls and texts between Bell customers or to other providers are not impacted," the company said on Twitter.

Telus networks were also working normally.

CBC's radio station in Kitchener, Ont., has been taken offline and off the air as a result of the outage.

The Toronto Police Service tweeted that Rogers customers in that city were having trouble connecting to 911, but stressed that the 911 service itself was working properly, as long as people weren't calling from a Rogers-affiliated device.

"We are working to resolve these issues," the force said.

Other emergency services reported a similar status.

"Although Rogers is experiencing a nationwide outage, our tests have shown 911 is still working," a spokesperson for the Fredericton Police Service told CBC News.

Officials in Winnipeg and Vancouver also stressed that emergency services are operational, but people on the Rogers network can't seem to access them.

Under Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) rules in place since 2017, telecom networks are supposed to ensure that cellphones are able to contact 911 even if they do not have service.

Canada's telecom regulator did not immediately reply to a request from CBC News as to whether the 911 problems seen Friday are in breach of those rules. In a tweet, the CRTC said it also doesn't have reliable phone service due to the Rogers outage.

WATCH | Here's what regular Canadians told us: 

Outage 'incomprehensible' 

They aren't the only ones. Ordinary Canadians told CBC News on Friday that the outage is unacceptable.

"This can't happen again without changes being made," said Torontonian Andrew Revai. "People can tweet all the memes they want about losing connectivity but how will Rogers keep this from happening again?"

Ottawa resident Robert Hubscher said "it's incomprehensible" that a company as big as Rogers could have an outage this widespread for this long.

He uses Rogers for his cellphone and home internet, and said he's glad he has some services with other companies to maintain connections right now.

"It's a little scary that the regulatory bodies are not looking at this more seriously," Hubscher said.

Government services including already bottlenecked passport offices, Service Canada, Public Services and Procurement Canada and the Canada Revenue Agency are also affected.

WATCH | Regulations need overhaul, expert says:

The Canada Border Services Agency says the ArriveCan app is disabled because of the outage, so anyone arriving in Canada must have a paper copy of their vaccination status.

Telecom analyst Vince Valentini with TD Bank, who covers Rogers, says it's not good for the company's reputation to have an outage of this scale, especially since it seems to be across all of its services, from internet to wireless.

"The longer this situation lasts, we believe there could be minor risks to customer churn," he said. "And also there could be credibility issues for Rogers in the future as it attempts to ramp up sales."

It's the second time in as many years that Rogers has been rocked by a major outage, as the company's wireless and cable networks went down in a similar fashion in April 2021. At the time, Rogers blamed an issue with a software update at one of its telecom equipment suppliers.

That time, the company offered customers rebates for their services, which ended up working out to a few dollars per customer. If the same metric is applied this time, Valentini says the company could be on the hook for about $28 million in rebates.

Technology analyst Ritesh Kotak says he suspects the cause of the outage is "an update gone wrong" in one of Rogers' internal systems.

Regardless of why, Kotak says it underscores how vulnerable Canada's economy is to outages like this, and says he makes sure all his telecom services come from different providers for this exact reason.

"It shows just how reliant we are on this technology," he said in an interview. "From some government services … to working from home, all that has literally been shut down."

Vass Bednar, executive director of of McMaster University's Master of Public Policy in digital society program, says the outage underlines a long-simmering problem with Canada's telecom network, which is that both the infrastructure and the services themselves are owned by private companies.

That's not the case everywhere in the world, where private sector players control one or the other, and often compete with a public option.

"The internet and cellular services ... seem like a public good," she told CBC News. "They seem like critical digital infrastructure that we all need to use, and yet they are privately owned and operated."

"Maybe it's time for Canadians to seriously rethink that."

Angela MacIvor/CBC

Biologists' fears confirmed on the lower Colorado River

BRITTANY PETERSON

Wed, July 6, 2022 

DENVER (AP) — For National Park Service fisheries biologist Jeff Arnold, it was a moment he'd been dreading. Bare-legged in sandals, he was pulling in a net in a shallow backwater of the lower Colorado River last week, when he spotted three young fish that didn't belong there. “Give me a call when you get this!” he messaged a colleague, snapping photos.

Minutes later, the park service confirmed their worst fear: smallmouth bass had in fact been found and were likely reproducing in the Colorado River below Glen Canyon Dam.

They may be a beloved sport fish, but smallmouth bass feast on humpback chub, an ancient, threatened fish that’s native to the river, and that biologists like Arnold have been working hard to recover. The predators wreaked havoc in the upper river, but were held at bay in Lake Powell where Glen Canyon Dam has served as a barrier for years — until now. The reservoir’s recent sharp decline is enabling these introduced fish to get past the dam and closer to where the biggest groups of chub remain, farther downstream in the Grand Canyon.

There, Brian Healy has worked with the humpback chub for more than a decade and founded the Native Fish Ecology and Conservation Program.

“It’s pretty devastating to see all the hard work and effort you’ve put into removing other invasive species and translocating populations around to protect the fish and to see all that effort overturned really quickly,” Healy said.

As reservoir levels drop, non-native fish that live in warm surface waters in Lake Powell are edging closer to the dam and its penstocks — submerged steel tubes that carry water to turbines, where it generates hydroelectric power and is released on the other side.

If bass and other predator fish continue to get sucked into the penstocks, survive and reproduce below the dam, they will have an open lane to attack chub and other natives, potentially unraveling years of restoration work and upending the Grand Canyon aquatic ecosystem — the only stretch of the river still dominated by native species.

On the brink of extinction decades ago, the chub has come back in modest numbers thanks to fish biologists and other scientists and engineers. Agencies spend millions of dollars annually to keep intruders in check in the upper portion of the river.

Under the Endangered Species Act, government agencies are required to operate in ways that will not “jeopardize the continued existence” of listed animals. That includes infrastructure.

Even before the discovery of smallmouth bass spawning below the dam, agencies had been bracing for this moment. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation recently enlisted a team of researchers at Utah State University to map the nonnative fish in Lake Powell and try to determine which could pass through the dam first.

A task force quickly assembled earlier this year to address the urgency the low water poses for native fish. Federal, state and tribal leaders are expected to release a draft plan in August containing solutions for policymakers who intend to delay, slow and respond to the threat of smallmouth bass and other predators below the dam.

There are a variety of solutions, but many will require significant changes to infrastructure.

In the meantime, National Park Service, U.S. Geological Survey and Arizona Game and Fish Department are moving quickly to try to contain the issue. During an emergency meeting, they decided to increase their monitoring efforts in other shallow areas and block off the entire backwater where the smallmouth bass were found so they can't swim out into the river.

“Unfortunately, the only block nets we have are pretty large mesh, so it will not stop these smaller fish from going through, but it will keep the adults from going back out,” Arnold said, noting it's the best they can do with available resources.

Experts say leaving more water in Lake Powell would be the best solution to ensure cool water can be released through the dam, although it's tough to do in a river under so much stress.

Last month, the Department of the Interior notified the seven western states that depend on Colorado River water that they must devise a way to conserve up to 4 million acre-feet of water in 2023 — more than Arizona and Nevada’s share combined — or face federal intervention. It is unclear where that conserved supply would be stored, but Healy says he hopes Lake Powell is being considered.

“If we want to protect some of the values for which Grand Canyon National Park was established, we need to really think about how water is stored,” Healy said. “That issue needs to be at the table.”

____

The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/environment

Hawaiian waters may get too hot for

humpback whales due to climate change

Ben Adler

·Senior Editor

Thu, July 7, 2022 

The warm, shallow waters near Hawaii are a renowned breeding ground for humpback whales. An estimated two-thirds of North Pacific humpback whales are born there, and the massive creatures — adult males can be up to 52 feet long and can weigh 45 tons — figure in the mythology of native Hawaiians. For the locals who make their living giving tours to whale-watching visitors, they are also an important part of the state’s economy.

But that may all be upended in the decades to come, due to climate change — and the more greenhouse gases that are emitted this century, the fewer whales there will be in Hawaii, according to a new study.

Humpback whales give birth in waters that range from about 70°F to 82°F, but at their current pace of warming, two-thirds of the waters near Hawaii will surpass 82°F by the end of this century, the study found.

A breaching humpback whale off the Hawaiian coast. (David Fleetham/VW PICS/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

The paper, published earlier this week in Frontiers in Marine Science, was authored by three graduate students at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and two co-researchers at the Pacific Whale Foundation.

“We expected to see critical warming in some of the breeding grounds, but the number of critically affected areas was a surprise,” said Hannah von Hammerstein, one of the co-authors, in a statement that accompanied the study’s publication.

But the findings were not hopeless. The research also showed that in a “middle of the road” scenario, in which nations cut emissions to a more moderate level, only 35% of current breeding grounds would become too hot by 2100.

“While the results of the study are daunting, they also highlight the differences between the two emission scenarios and what still can be won by implementing emission mitigation measures,” said von Hammerstein, a graduate student in geography and environment.

“Our findings provide yet another example of what is to come with anthropogenic climate change, with humpback whales representing merely one impacted species,” said the paper’s co-author Martin van Aswegen, a graduate student in marine biology.

How hot is too hot for the human body? Our lab found heat + humidity gets dangerous faster than many people realize


W. Larry Kenney, Professor of Physiology, Kinesiology and Human Performance, Penn State, 

Daniel Vecellio, Geographer-climatologist and Postdoctoral Fellow, Penn State,

 Rachel Cottle, Ph.D. Student in Exercise Physiology, Penn State, 

 S. Tony Wolf, Postdoctoral Researcher in Kinesiology, Penn State

THE CONVERSATION
Wed, July 6, 2022 

Long-term exposure to high heat can become lethal. Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Heat waves are becoming supercharged as the climate changes – lasting longer, becoming more frequent and getting just plain hotter. One question a lot of people are asking is: “When will it get too hot for normal daily activity as we know it, even for young, healthy adults?”

The answer goes beyond the temperature you see on the thermometer. It’s also about humidity. Our research shows the combination of the two can get dangerous faster than scientists previously believed.

Scientists and other observers have become alarmed about the increasing frequency of extreme heat paired with high humidity, measured as “wet-bulb temperature.” During the heat waves that overtook South Asia in May and June 2022, Jacobabad, Pakistan, recorded a maximum wet-bulb temperature of 33.6 C (92.5 F) and Delhi topped that – close to the theorized upper limit of human adaptability to humid heat.

People often point to a study published in 2010 that estimated that a wet-bulb temperature of 35 C – equal to 95 F at 100% humidity, or 115 F at 50% humidity – would be the upper limit of safety, beyond which the human body can no longer cool itself by evaporating sweat from the surface of the body to maintain a stable body core temperature.

It was not until recently that this limit was tested on humans in laboratory settings. The results of these tests show an even greater cause for concern.
The PSU H.E.A.T. Project

To answer the question of “how hot is too hot?” we brought young, healthy men and women into the Noll Laboratory at Penn State University to experience heat stress in a controlled environment.

These experiments provide insight into which combinations of temperature and humidity begin to become harmful for even the healthiest humans.

Each participant swallowed a small telemetry pill, which monitored their deep body or core temperature. They then sat in an environmental chamber, moving just enough to simulate the minimal activities of daily living, such as cooking and eating. Researchers slowly increased either the temperature in the chamber or the humidity and monitored when the subject’s core temperature started to rise.

That combination of temperature and humidity whereby the person’s core temperature starts to rise is called the “critical environmental limit.” Below those limits, the body is able to maintain a relatively stable core temperature over time. Above those limits, core temperature rises continuously and risk of heat-related illnesses with prolonged exposures is increased.

When the body overheats, the heart has to work harder to pump blood flow to the skin to dissipate the heat, and when you’re also sweating, that decreases body fluids. In the direst case, prolonged exposure can result in heat stroke, a life-threatening problem that requires immediate and rapid cooling and medical treatment.

Our studies on young healthy men and women show that this upper environmental limit is even lower than the theorized 35 C. It’s more like a wet-bulb temperature of 31 C (88 F). That would equal 31 C at 100% humidity or 38 C (100 F) at 60% humidity.

Similar to the National Weather Service’s heat index chart, this chart translates combinations of air temperature and relative humidity into critical environmental limits, above which core body temperature rises. The border between the yellow and red areas represents the average critical environmental limit for young men and women at minimal activity. W. Larry Kenney, CC BY-NDMore
Dry vs. humid environments

Current heat waves around the globe are approaching, if not exceeding, these limits.

In hot, dry environments the critical environmental limits aren’t defined by wet-bulb temperatures, because almost all the sweat the body produces evaporates, which cools the body. However, the amount humans can sweat is limited, and we also gain more heat from the higher air temperatures.

Keep in mind that these cutoffs are based solely on keeping your body temperature from rising excessively. Even lower temperatures and humidity can place stress on the heart and other body systems. And while eclipsing these limits does not necessarily present a worst-case scenario, prolonged exposure may become dire for vulnerable populations such as the elderly and those with chronic diseases.

Our experimental focus has now turned to testing older men and women, since even healthy aging makes people less heat tolerant. Adding on the increased prevalence of heart disease, respiratory problems and other health problems, as well as certain medications, can put them at even higher risk of harm. People over the age of 65 comprise some 80%-90% of heat wave casualties.
How to stay safe

Staying well hydrated and seeking areas in which to cool down – even for short periods – are important in high heat.

While more cities in the United States are expanding cooling centers to help people escape the heat, there will still be many people who will experience these dangerous conditions with no way to cool themselves.


Even those with access to air conditioning might not turn it on because of the high cost of energy – a common occurrence in Phoenix, Arizona – or because of large-scale power outages during heat waves or wildfires, as is becoming more common in the western U.S.

A recent study focusing on heat stress in Africa found that future climates will not be conducive to the use of even low-cost cooling systems such as “swamp coolers” as the tropical and coastal parts of Africa become more humid. These devices, which require far less energy than air conditioners, use a fan to recirculate the air across a cool, wet pad to lower the air temperature, but they become ineffective at high wet-bulb temperatures above 21 C (70 F).

All told, the evidence continues to mount that climate change is not just a problem for the future. It is one that humanity is currently facing and must tackle head-on.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: W. Larry Kenney, Penn State; Daniel Vecellio, Penn State; Rachel Cottle, Penn State, and S. Tony Wolf, Penn State.

Read more:

What is a heat dome? An atmospheric scientist explains the weather phenomenon baking large parts of the country

Knowing how heat and humidity affect your body can help you stay safe during heat waves

W. Larry Kenney receives research grant funding from the National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Aging.

Daniel Vecellio is supported by a training grant from the National Institute on Aging through the Penn State Center for Healthy Aging.

Rachel Cottle is supported by a training grant from the National Institute on Aging through the Penn State Center for Healthy Aging.

S. Tony Wolf is supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Heat and Drought Bake the World. Thank Climate Change

BY EVE OTTENBERG
JULY 8, 2022


Panamint Valley, Death Valley National Park. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

The canary in the coal mine is dead. He died of heat prostration. Along with him went plenty of humans, poorly protected from the climate collapse: In India this spring, in the American Southwest, Midwest and South late spring, in Xinjiang, China also in spring and in large parts of Africa right now. That’s before summer even really got cooking. Last summer the American Northwest baked at 116 degrees Fahrenheit for days, and in places like the British Columbia town of Lytton, the mercury hit 122 degrees, before the town spontaneously combusted and burnt to the ground. This formerly once-in-a-millennium roasting now occurs yearly, across huge swaths of the planet, thanks to human-induced climate change. Summers these days in Reno, Nevada average 10.9 degrees hotter than they were in 1970, while countries like Iraq at times feature heat of 120 degrees. And most Iraqis don’t have air-conditioning.

So it was kinda hard to feel sorry for Europeans unhappy with temperatures in the 104-109 degree range, back in mid-June. That was comfortable compared to what homeless people in India and the greater Middle East endure. Because lots of Europeans have air-conditioning. No such luck for those sleeping, and often expiring, on oven-hot concrete under highways on the subcontinent.

And yet European calefaction broke records, as every new heat wave seems to do at this early stage of the climate collapse. Catalonia, Spain, hit 109 degrees, one of its hottest temps ever, while 104-degree temperatures in France were, according to the Washington Post June 2, “the earliest the country has hit that high a temperature in recorded history.”

Extreme heat means drought, and drought means no food. So lots of places are watching Famine gallop over their withered farmlands. In Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia, people currently starve. The number of them is 23 million, according to Oxfam, which blasted G7 countries on June 28 for doing too little about this disaster, “for leaving millions to starve and cooking the planet.” Worldwide “323 million people are on the brink of starvation…Nearly a billion people, 950 million are projected to be hungry in 2022,” Oxfam slammed the U.S. and its European hangers-on.

Since western nations, after all, burned most of the oil, coal and gas that caused these droughts, Oxfam is right – those countries should exhibit the good grace to fork over enough money to feed the people they’ve famished. But no. G7 skinflints don’t think so. This African drought, the worst in 40 years, is, according to the U.S. and its vassals, largely somebody else’s problem.

So we humans have a dilemma of our own making. Or rather of the making of our economic-political system, aka capitalism. We burned too much oil, coal and gas, it overheated the planet, but we can’t seem to stop. One factor aggravating the situation is the war in Ukraine. If the west – the chief climate collapse culprit until China, more recently, got into the act – had put a vast, sturdy, renewable infrastructure in place, or maybe even partly in place, that war would have been a chance to begin the switch. But instead of proceeding carefully and methodically, our rulers lost their heads. Or rather, they shot themselves in the head by sanctioning Russian energy, instead of the hard work of negotiation and then commenced racing around like the proverbial headless chickens in a mad scramble to find more oil, coal and gas. Concern about fossil fuel burning turning parts of the planet into infernos was pitched out the window. The race to pump more oil and find more gas began, even, at the behest of the so-called Greens in Germany (an exceedingly bloodthirsty bunch – who knew?), to burn more coal. It is a race to the grave.

Leading the charge to the cemetery is the American Republican party – though lately Biden’s been no slouch in this suicidal headlong stampede either. But if GOP science denialists get control of half or all of congress, expect them to toss sane climate discourse into a ditch. If they retake the white house in two years – that is, if we all survive a possible atomic apocalypse, courtesy of Joe “Russian Roulette” Biden and his neocons – well, those supposedly “freak” heat waves we’ve been having won’t become so freakish anymore, as Republican idiots implement policies to turn the planet into what some have aptly called a greenhouse gas chamber. Disastrously, those heat attacks have already become the spring, summer and autumn norm. What do we do if they start happening in winter?

The planet is burning and the arsonists are in charge, as environmentalist Naomi Klein once quipped. Some of the most dedicated arsonists sit on the supreme court. Proof? The Koch court’s recent neutering of the Nixon-created Environmental Protection Agency. With that imbecile decision, the so-called jurists might just as well have proclaimed, “we don’t believe our senses or the world’s best scientists. We believe corporate propaganda.” The arsonists’ handiwork is there to see for anyone with open eyes. But the supremes are partisan ideologues, blind to truth and truth’s sister, justice, and they are far too busy dumping precedents and doing the bidding of mega fossil fuel corporations to consider that the Environmental Protection Agency, was founded to, uh, protect the environment. As for why the environment screams for that protection, the so-called jurists on the court are too stupid to listen.

For instance, currently 90 percent of the American west withers in drought. Lake Mead dried into a mucky shadow of its former self. Rain and snowpack vanished and may not be coming back. As of June 15, Phoenix had experienced temperatures over 110 degrees for days running. “And, even more concerning,” reported earther June 15, “it’s broken an overnight heat record of 90 degrees F. This was the first time it was so hot at night so early in the season.” So even when the sun don’t shine, it’s heat stroke time in Phoenix.

Meanwhile the same day, according to the Washington Post, 165,000 residents of Odessa, Texas were without water during a scorcher, after a pipe broke. Temperatures hovered around 100 degrees. How you stay cool and hydrated – life and death matters in such heat – without running water is a bit of a challenge.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, the next day the Post ran a headline: “Extreme heat and humidity kill thousands of cattle in Kansas.” Cows, you see, can’t flop down in front of the air conditioner until the heat wave passes. “At least 2000 cattle are known to have died as of [June 14]…That tally was based on the number of requests the agency received to help dispose of carcasses.” Beef farming wrecks the climate and therefore needs to be pared down, but this was not the method of doing so that most environmentalists had in mind.

These quondam “freak” now routine heat spasms signify that the planetary thermostat is out of whack. There may be little we can do about that – it’s damage already done. But we sure as shootin’ can stop making things worse. Everyone knows how we do that. We go gangbusters installing wind and solar. Like China does. For that that we need politicians who don’t wrap themselves into a pretzel the way Biden did – war on Russia, oopsies no oil, gotta find more oil no matter what, cause now it’s a titanic political liability with skyrocketing prices at the pump; instead of keeping his head and instituting a program to build up renewables (no, tariffs on solar tech from China are not good policy) that will enable us to dampen fossil fuel burning. And we certainly don’t need politicos like Trump, whose torch-it approach to the earth means an early tomb for much of our species. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene summed up the GOP approach to this catastrophe, when she said climate change is good for us, making her the Dr. Kevorkian of homo sapiens. If people like that wind up running the world’s second biggest carbon polluter, it means lethally hot times ahead, while farmers stare at dead crops and millions wonder when they will eat their next meal.


Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Hope Deferred. She can be reached at her website.

Noam Chomsky and the United Nations Warn of Collapse

BY ROBERT HUNZIKER   JULY 8, 2022 JULY 8, 2022

Image by Javier Miranda.

It’s entirely possible that doomsayers of the world, though widely ridiculed, could be on target about the prospects for global societal collapse. But, of course, when? According to a recent Noam Chomsky interview, it’s an ongoing grind that will end with a thud.

The onset of societal collapse is not hidden. Rather, similar to animals in the wild, people sense when something’s out of the ordinary, amiss, trouble brewing, on the alert. There’s tension in the air, tempers flare, strangers lash out, and society turns against establishment protocols; it’s the antithesis of The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet (1952-1966) and Father Knows Best (1954-1960). Instead, it’s Mad Max (1979) redux. It is today’s world, and people sense trouble, something’s not right.

As for confirmation of those haunting feelings that something’s not right, a recent UN report discusses prominent risks of “global collapse”: UN 2022 Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction, aka: GAR2022 d/d May 2022, more on this later.

Accordingly, escalating synergies of (1) disasters (2) economic vulnerability and (3) ecosystem failures increasingly accumulate into a juggernaut of collapse, and finally, similar to an orderly line of tripped dominoes, it cascades without enough notice.

On the heels of the recent UN warning, Noam Chomsky also echoes the central premise of doomsayers: “The challenge ahead is beyond anything humans have ever faced. The fate of life on the planet is now at hand.” (Chomsky – Principal speaker for the American Solar Energy Society 51^st annual conference, University of New Mexico, June 21, 2022).

Chomsky is an iconic fixture of the Left known for strength of character, brilliance, and omniscience. His opening statement at the conference: “We are at a unique moment in human history. Decisions that must be made right now will determine the course of future history if there is to be any human history, which is very much in doubt. There is a narrow window in which we must implement measures to avert cataclysmic destruction of the environment.”

Chomsky questions survivability of humanity with one key sentence, as follows: “If there is to be any human history, which is very much in doubt.” This statement didn’t come from George Carlin in one of his cynical monologs on American ethics or morals. It’s Noam Chomsky, the father knows best figure of academia.

Chomsky speaks the same sentiments as the doomsayers of the world and in concert with an unlikely but factual United Nations doomsayer analysis, which is much deeper, and scarier, than publicly realized, more on that to follow.

Are they onto something?

Chomsky: The facts are clear. There are two major issues in front of us. The immediate crisis is severe. The crisis is coming to a head in Washington D.C., capitol of the most powerful nation/state in world history.

The fate of the world hangs in the balance of what happens in Washington. It’s not a secret. Indeed, New York Times energy environment correspondent Coral Davenport described a long carefully executed campaign to destroy organized human life on Earth in a recent NYT article: Republican Drive to Tilt Courts Against Climate Action Reaches a Crucial Moment, NYT, June 19, 2022.

Chomsky admits the Times article may seem outrageous, but he feels it is completely accurate. As explained therein, the campaign has been carried out meticulously for years by the Energy System. It’s enormous in institutional breadth, including fossil fuel companies, banks and other financial institutions and a large part of the legal community. It also has an international base of support called NATO.

It’s not widely known but in the post cold war era NATO formally undertook an expanded mission based upon the following dictum by the Secretary General: “To guard pipelines that transport oil and gas that is directed for the West and more generally to protect sea routes used by tankers and other crucial infrastructure of the energy system.” (Source: NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, 2004-09, outlining NATO’s mission at NATO conference)

The Energy System campaign has a strong political base in the Republican Party, especially since 2009. The McCain platform (2008) included a climate program until the Koch brothers got involved. And refused to tolerate it, launching a huge juggernaut bribery intimidation and enormous lobbying campaign to stop it, and going so far as to create a fake citizens group in opposition. They were successful.

Regarding Washington today and Davenport’s column: The Supreme Court, which is reactionary, will consider measures that restrict the use of fossil fuels to limit the effects of environmental destruction. If they strike down EPA authority, it’ll become a precedent for others winding their way thru the legal system. (Addendum- Subsequent to Chomsky’s speech, the far-right Court hammered the EPA, clobbering prospects for a green future in favor of a very dark world order.)

According to Chomsky, for most of history Homo sapiens lived in harmony with nature, until Aug 6 1945 the day that taught two stark lessons: (1) Human capacity reached a level to destroy everything (2) Very few seemed to care. The upshot: “Now, we are at the point when the major institutions of organized society are intent on destroying organized human life on Earth and the millions of other species.” And, too few seem to care enough to stop it.

The famous Doomsday Clock (University of Chicago) was reset during the Trump administration at two minutes to midnight for the first time since 1953. Now at 100 seconds. It will be set again in January, and Chomsky believes a good case can be made to move the second hand even closer to midnight, which is the final hour when humanity self-destructs, either with a bang or suffocation.

In addition to the primary concerns surrounding the dictates of the Doomsday Clock of a growing threat of nuclear war and of failure to prevent lethal global heating, a new concern has been added: The deterioration of rational discourse. ”Unless that gap can be closed, there’s no hope of closing the dread in time to save ourselves.”

Moreover, for Chomsky, there’s a deeper question. It is the famous Fermi Paradox… in brief: Where are they?

Enrico Fermi (1901-1954) was a distinguished astrophysicist (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1938) and he felt certain about the reality of a huge number of planets with conditions to sustain life to lead to higher intelligence, and that we were within reach of advanced communication.

But we cannot find a trace of them out there.

So, where are they?

According to Chomsky, one response that has been proposed and cannot be dismissed is that higher intelligence has actually developed numerous times throughout the eons but has always proven to be lethal. Similar to today’s merry-go-round tinkering with fission and excessive levels of greenhouse gases, “they discovered the means for self-annihilation but did not develop the moral capacity to prevent it. Perhaps that is inherent with higher intelligence. We are now confronted with whether that principle holds for modern humans.”

Watch out below!

The UN’s GAR2022 defines risks of an impending collapse of global society unless drastic remedial measures are adopted on a worldwide coordinated basis. However, get real, what are the odds of a worldwide coordinated effort?

The risk of global collapse, as dealt with in the UN Global Assessment Report or GAR2022 has received little or no media attention.

Yet, it is the first-ever UN flagship global report with findings that current global policies are “accelerating the collapse of human civilization.” The report does not suggest that collapse is a “done deal.” Rather, without radical change, it’s where the world is headed.

The collapse scenario suggested in GAR2022 is explained in much more detail in a separate contributing paper: Pandemics, Climate Extremes, Tipping Points and the Global Catastrophic Risk – How These Impact Global Target, published by the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction.

The contributing paper discusses the impact of crossing planetary boundaries outside of what’s referred to as a “safe operating space for human societies to develop within a stable earth system,” resulting in Global Catastrophic Risk or GCR events. GCR events are defined as those events that lead to more than 10 million fatalities or more than $10T in damages.

The UN papers do not specify whether any of several collapse scenarios has actually begun, but according to the report, the world is clearly “tending dangerously towards these collapse scenarios.” No precise timetables are given.

Are the UN Reports Watered Down?

The following article addresses the issue of tampering with UN reports: Nafeez Ahmed (special investigations reporter – Byline Times) UN Warns of ‘Total Societal Collapse’ Due to Breaching of Planetary Boundaries, Defend Democracy Press, 26 May 2022

Nafeez Ahmed, a British investigative journalist and a former Visiting Research Fellow at the Faculty of Science and Technology at Anglia Ruskin University (est. 1858) Global Sustainability Institute authored the referenced article in Democracy Press. The following commentary comes directly from his article:

But there are reasons to suspect that a collapse process has already started, even if it is still possible to rein in.

A senior advisor to the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction and contributor to the Global Assessment Report who spoke to Byline Times on condition of anonymity, claims that GAR2022 was watered-down before public release.

The source said that the world had “passed a point of no return” and “I don’t feel that this is being properly represented in UN or media as of now”.

“The GAR2022 is an eviscerated skeleton of what was included in earlier drafts.”

The UN GAR2022 is a landmark document. It is the first time that the United Nations has clearly underscored the impending risk of “total societal collapse” if the human system continues to cross the planetary boundaries critical to maintaining a safe operating space for the earth system.

Yet, despite this urgent warning, not only has it fallen on deaf ears, the UN itself appears to have diluted its own findings. Like the fictional film Don’t Look Up, we are more concerned with celebrity gossip and political scandals, seemingly unable – or unwilling – to confront the most important challenge that now faces us as a species.

Either way, these UN documents show that recognizing the risk of collapse is not about doom mongering, but about understanding risks so we can make better choices and avoid worst-case outcomes. As the report acknowledges, there is still much that can be done. But the time for action is not after 2030. It’s now.

Postscript: Effective Monday, July 4, the Italian government put restrictions on water on cities and towns in the north. The Po River, a source for agriculture, is at a 70-yr low. Global warming is hammering the country as drought has started to affect south-central Italy as well. Meanwhile, in South America the city of Santiago is rationing water to a population of 6.8 million, as human-caused global warming knows no boundaries. China has reduced water usage from January to October 2022 for Guangzhou (15M pop.) and Shenzhen (12.5M pop.) because the East River is down 50% The US Bureau of Reclamation is rationing some of the seven southwestern states as Lake Mead approaches the Dead Pool, getting frighteningly close! Only recently the Bureau demanded cuts by all seven states w/i 60 days in what’s considered an emergency situation.

For additional factual evidence of spreading drought worldwide, Google these articles: (1) World Drought Gets Worse, Cities Ration, May 8, 2022 or (2) Drought Clobbers the World, August 27, 2021.

The world climate system is no longer normal.

What does it take to get governments of the world to unify a global plan to combat their own destruction? For decades leaders of the world have failed to take global warming seriously. What now?

Then again, as suggested by Professor Chomsky, we’ll find out if the Fermi Paradox holds true for modern humans, as it has, in theory, for advanced (higher intelligent) civilizations over eons. But, that’s lights out, so what’s to find out?

Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at rlhunziker@gmail.com.

As if Poverty and Debt Will Make Us Rich

BY RON JACOBS
JULY 8, 2022

Photograph Source: Jay Tamboli – CC BY 2.0

I’ve been the president of my union local since May 2021. A couple weeks ago we shook hands with the negotiating team for the City of Burlington, Vermont on a contract that beat most everyone’s expectations. Some of the highlights are a minimum 12% wage increase over the first two years and the first paid family leave clause in any municipal contract in Vermont. Meanwhile, another set of negotiations with the local school district seem to be heading in the opposite direction. Sitting in these two different negotiations while also reading economist Michael Hudson’s latest book, The Destiny of Civilization: Finance Capitalism, Industrial Capitalism, or Socialism, provides me with a unique vantage point regarding that destination. Working people carry on their lives knowing on some level that it could all go to hell no matter how much they are getting paid. At the same time, they seem to still believe enough in the ability of US capitalism to adjust itself, thereby making the future less intimidating than it would be with no such faith.

While both sides in the negotiations attempted to predict the future of the economy over the next four years, Hudson’s warnings that the basis of the current phase of capitalism resides in the creation of debt and the manipulation of that debt by the financial industry loomed ominously in my brain. Indeed, the very fact that an economic entity that produces nothing but debt for most of the world’s people is considered an industry should be ominous enough. Yet, cities, corporations, individuals with retirement accounts and students with student loans stumble on, borrowing and processing debt as if it were a promise of a better future instead of just a promissory note. Then again, what other choices do they have?

That question is not necessarily answered in Hudson’s text. What is answered, however, is how the world economy—especially that part of it tied into Washington and Wall Street—got to this point. Originally presented as a series of lectures at China’s Global University for Sustainability, The Destiny of Civilization is a fairly plainspoken and incredibly astute history of US capitalism, especially in its most recent phase known as neoliberalism. It is also an economic textbook of a kind one will rarely see in any university economics syllabus today.

Hudson’s fundamental argument is that the US-led capitalist economy is a a rentier economy; an economy based on the accumulation of income received without actually working or providing intrinsic value. This is the essence of feudalism, where the noblemen extracted goods, labor, money and other benefits from those who lived on and farmed the land (peasants or serfs, if you will) claimed by nobility. This often left the peasantry with little to no food after he paid his fee/rent to the aristocrat that claimed the land. When capitalism began to create its won wealth for the early capitalists, some of the latter’s earliest actions were to create laws taxing this unearned income. This allowed them to build infrastructure and ultimately provide public services for those the capitalists hired. According to Hudson, the capitalists wished to tax the rentier economy—nobility, landlords, etc.–out of existence. Unfortunately for the working people of the world, this did not occur. Instead, as the biggest capitalists accumulated more and more wealth through their exploitation of labor and their influence in government, they became the new rentier class. Their agenda included first and foremost an end to taxes on their wealth.

This brings us to today, when governments of the democracies are nothing but tools of the wealthy and the fire sale on public infrastructure is still raging. Schools, health care, roadways, parks, even the military and law enforcement; everything is on the block and those with the highest bid have no shame in taking it for their own. To destroy or privatize and sell back to those who created it as they see fit. The role that government once played in preventing this dictatorship of wealth is gone for all practical purposes. Hudson explains why and how this occurred. In doing so, he uses the words of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and others associated with the theories of capitalism to prove his point (and theirs) that the current system we know as neoliberalism is not the same system those writers had in mind. It is, however, what socialists like Rosa Luxemburg predicted would occur as the process of financialization assumed its current dominant position in the world capitalist economy. We know from looking around us that it is an economy enforced by wars, but also through loans and other economic tools designed to impoverish whole nations; something Hudson calls financial conquest. As he writes, these tools are presented to the loan recipients as if their impoverishment will make them rich.

Part of Hudson’s intentions seems to be to warn the Chinese of the pitfalls untaxed and unearned income can bring. It is his contention that China would be smart to maintain control of certain parts of its economy—resources, infrastructure creation including education and health care, even housing—and to fight against those in its wealthy class who want to privatize these things. Hudson argues is this that gives China its economic power. Likewise, it is this which makes the US consider China its enemy. The billionaire class that now owns the White House and Congress has no interest in allowing the US government to tax their gross accumulation of wealth, not to rebuild highways or educate its citizens. Their motivation is greed and the current system feeds that greed beyond what us regular folk can even begin to comprehend.

The Destiny of Civilization is an important book that should not be ignored. Forward thinking faculty should introduce it into their courses—economics, history, wherever they can fit it. More importantly, the rest of us should also read it. The analysis it provides is concise, clearly written, and one of the most important one can find anywhere. This is how the US economy really works. At home and abroad. The fact that it doesn’t work for working people, middle class citizens, or the youth doesn’t mean it will change or go away because it doesn’t work. As Hudson makes clear, it works precisely for those who created it and that doesn’t include you or me. The future can be a continuation of the neoliberal nightmare we are in, a fascist nightmare of which we caught a glimpse of under Trump, or a socialist and democratic society that works towards sustaining the world and its people, not impoverishing the lot of them for the benefit of the very few.


Ron Jacobs is the author of Daydream Sunset: Sixties Counterculture in the Seventies published by CounterPunch Books. His latest offering is a pamphlet titled Capitalism: Is the Problem. He lives in Vermont. He can be reached at: ronj1955@gmail.com.

The Beasts of Nuclear Proliferation

BY BINOY KAMPMARK  JULY 8, 2022 JULY 8, 2022

Ohio Class nuclear-powered submarine. Photo: US Navy.

When faced with the option of acquiring nuclear technology, states have rarely refused.  Since the splitting of the atom and the deployment of atomic weapons in war, the acquisition of a nuclear capacity has been a dream.  Those who did acquire it, in turn, tried to restrict others from joining what has become, over the years, an exclusive club guarded by self-justified psychosis.

Members of the nuclear club engage in an elaborate ceremonial in claiming that their nuclear weapons inventory will eventually be emptied.  Non-nuclear weapons states allied to such powers go along with appearances, taking comfort that nuclear weapons states will offer them an umbrella of security.

This insane hypocrisy underlines such arrangements as the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.  Central to the document is the discouragement of non-nuclear weapons states from weaponizing nuclear technology as long as members of the nuclear club pursue “good-faith” disarmament negotiations. While it is true to say that the NPT probably prevented a speedier, less infectious spread of the nuclear virus, it remains a constipated regime of imperfections that has merely delayed proliferation.

Most tellingly of all, most non-nuclear weapon states have complied with their undertakings.  Nuclear weapons states have not, disregarding serious multilateral nuclear disarmament.  Nor do they have an incentive to alter current arrangements, given that any changes to the NPT can only take place with the unanimous support of the three treaty depositories: Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The NPT supporters pour scorn at alternative approaches to nuclear weapons, such as the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which had its first meeting of state parties in Vienna from June 21 to 23.  While the Albanese government did send Susan Templeman MP to the meeting as an observer, Canberra has remained consistently opposed to the TPNW as a threat to the accepted disarmament and NPT framework.  Dated and spurious concepts such as extended nuclear deterrence and the interoperability of Australian and US military systems tend to be common justifications.

The AUKUS security partnership that was announced in September 2021 by Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom, has muddied the pool of non-proliferation.  A central component of the agreement is a promise to share nuclear propulsion technology with Australia, enabling it to acquire eight nuclear submarines to be supposedly built in Adelaide, South Australia.  While much of this is wishful thinking (Australia has no expertise in the field, and will have to rely wholeheartedly on expertise from the other two), the glaring problem in the arrangement is what it does to non-proliferation arrangements.

While the previous Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison was ignorantly confident that the agreement would comply with Australia’s own non-proliferation commitments, such confidence is misplaced.  For one thing, Article III of the NPT exempts naval reactors from nuclear safeguards, which threatens a pillar of the regime, namely, limiting the production and use of highly enriched uranium (HEU) which can be used, in turn, to make nuclear weapons.

Non-proliferation experts have not been enthusiastic with these promised new beasts for the Royal Australian Navy.  Daryl G. Kimball, director of the Arms Control Association, notes the salient difference between deepening defence cooperation on the one hand with allies and proliferating “sensitive HEU nuclear propulsion tech in contravention of US and global nonpro principles.”

Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, greeted AUKUS with much gloom when it was announced.  Its provisions on nuclear technology would “further intensify the arms race in the region and the dynamics that fuel military competition.”

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi is visiting Australia to discuss the issue of safeguards regarding nuclear material used for naval propulsion.  This is nothing short of problematic, given that IAEA inspectors are unable to inspect such material for extended periods of time when the vessel is at sea.

Grossi, in mild understatement, calls this “quite complex”, though is keen to accommodate Australian commitments to non-proliferation alongside the acquisition of nuclear technology.  “There is a period of 18 months which was given by the three partners – the United States, United Kingdom and Australia – to define how the project is going to be implemented but, already we have started this interaction, this joint work of technical levels so that we can reconcile both things.”

In a statement made prior to Grossi’s visit, Foreign Minister Penny Wong reiterated Australia’s “longstanding” support of the “IAEA’s mission to harness the peaceful use of nuclear technology in areas like medicine, industrial processes and environmental monitoring, as well as upholding the international nuclear non-proliferation regime.”

This world as described by Senator Wong is distinctly pre-AUKUS.  Despite promises of “open and transparent engagement with the IAEA on nuclear safeguards”, the whinnying horse of proliferation has bolted from the stable. Assurances to avoid the future development of an Australian nuclear weapons capability or a national nuclear fuel cycle also ring hollow.

The precedent of permitting Australia to be the only non-nuclear weapons state with HEU-propelled technology is also seismic on another level.  There will be nothing stopping China and Russia doing what the United States and the UK promise to do: proliferate naval reactor technology and long-range missiles with a nuclear capability.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com