Republican Governor Nixes Thousands of Green Energy Jobs, Fearmongers About Communism

Molly Taft
Mon, January 23, 2023 

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin delivers his State of the Commonwealth address on January 11, 2023.

The governor of Virginia is blocking a potential Ford battery factory that would have provided thousands of jobs in an impoverished area—based on fearmongering about China.

The proposed factory is a partnership between Ford and Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd., also known as CATL, a Chinese battery manufacturer. As of last year, CATL was the world’s largest manufacturer of batteries for electric vehicles, holding onto a whopping 50% of the market share; it is one of Tesla’s most important suppliers. The $3.5 billion factory, which would produce EV batteries for Ford vehicles, would have created some 2,500 jobs in one of Virginia’s poorest areas, the Richmond-Times Dispatch reported.

All those jobs, it seems, weren’t tempting enough for Youngkin. Just days after news of the Ford and CATL partnership—and the possible choice of Virginia as a location—broke, the Daily Caller, a right-wing outlet, reported that Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin had instructed the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, a state agency, to take Virginia out of the running for housing the plant.

Youngkin didn’t publicly comment on the move until his annual state address on January 11. “I’ve said before that I want ‘Made in America’ to mean ‘Made in Virginia.’ But let me be clear, ‘Made in Virginia’ cannot be a front for the Chinese Communist Party,” Youngkin said during the address. Later, Youngkin told reporters that the Biden administration has a “maniacal focus on getting rid of all fossil fuel generation, replacing it with solar, wind, or replacing every car immediately with batteries” when “the reality is that the technology that in fact drives all that is owned and dominated by the Chinese.”

Youngkin elaborated on his comments in an interview with Bloomberg TV on Friday, when he referred to the Ford-CATL partnership as “a Trojan-horse relationship.”

“This is not a zero-sum game and I would have loved to have Ford come to Virginia and build a battery plant, if they were not using it as a front for a company that’s controlled by the Chinese Communist Party,” he said.

Youngkin’s actions don’t come in a vacuum; in fact, they may signal a coming wave of similar Republican attitude. As Axios reporter Jael Holzman outlined on Twitter last week, Republicans have begun raising concerns about Chinese control as a way to stymie or stall green energy developments. Politicians, including Sen. Marco Rubio and Tennessee Rep. Mark Green, have recently expressed concerns about a Texas-based battery company with some Chinese operations that got a Department of Energy grant, while the GOP is reportedly looking into other clean energy firms for Chinese connections, according to Holzman.

Bloomberg reported in December that the two companies were considering a setup that would allow Ford to own the plant, while CATL would oversee the production of the batteries. This arrangement would allow the factory to get production credits outlined in the Inflation Reduction Act that encourage national production of EV batteries. Youngkin told Bloomberg that he was also concerned about the potential complexities involving the subsidies when it came to the partnership.

Some Virginia politicians saw the move as little more than an attempt to court Republican voters ahead of Youngkin’s potential 2024 presidential bid.

“To deny [people in the community] jobs because you’re in last place in Republican presidential primaries [is] gubernatorial malpractice,” Democratic State Sen. Scott Surovell told the Richmond Times-Dispatch. “I mean, this is clearly just obvious to me that the governor’s in some kind of out-China-bashing-contest with [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis and Governor Greg Abbott out of Texas.”

Gizmodo

SEE

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2023/01/former-pro-china-carlyle-group-ceo.html

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2023/01/cut-nose-spite-face-youngkin-says-ford.html

BYE BYE STOCKTON

California’s Next Flood Could Destroy One of Its Most Diverse Cities. Will Lawmakers Try to Save It?

Jake Bittle, Grist
Mon, January 23, 2023 

Photo: Justin Sullivan (Getty Images)


In early 1862, a storm of biblical proportions struck California, dropping more than 120 inches of rain and snow on the state over two months. The entire state flooded, but nowhere was the deluge worse than in the Central Valley, a gash of fertile land that runs down the middle of the state between two mountain ranges. In the spring, as melting snow mixed with torrential rain, the valley transformed into “a perfect sea,” as one observer put it, vanishing beneath 30 feet of water that poured from the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. People rowed through town streets on canoes. A quarter of all the cows in the state drowned. It took months for the water to drain out.

More than 150 years later, climate scientists say the state is due for a repeat of that massive storm. A growing body of research has found that global warming is increasing the likelihood of a monster storm that could inundate the Central Valley once again, causing what one study from UCLA and the National Atmospheric Center called “historically unprecedented surface runoff” in the region. Not only would this runoff destroy thousands of homes, it would also ravage a region that serves as the nation’s foremost agricultural breadbasket. The study found that global warming has already increased the likelihood of such a storm by 234 percent.

In the crosshairs of that storm is the Stockton metropolitan area, which sits at the mouth of the San Joaquin River. Stockton and its neighboring suburbs are home to almost 800,000 people, and they rank among the most diverse places in the country — as well as some of the most economically distressed places in California. Thanks to decades of disinvestment, the city’s only flood protection comes from decades-old, leak-prone levees. If a major rain event caused enough runoff to surge down the mountains and northward along the San Joaquin, it could burst through those levees, inundating the city and flooding tens of thousands of homes. One federal study found that much of Stockton would vanish beneath 10 to 12 feet of water, and floods in the lowest-lying areas could be twice as deep. The result would be a humanitarian disaster just as costly and as deadly as Hurricane Katrina.

The “atmospheric river” rainstorms that rolled into California from the Pacific Ocean this month have underscored the Golden State’s vulnerability to floods, but experts insist that the destruction of Stockton isn’t inevitable. As is the case in flood-prone communities across the country, local officials know how to manage water on the San Joaquin River, but they’ve struggled to obtain funding for Stockton and other disadvantaged cities along the waterway. Even as California lawmakers have plowed money into drought response in recent years, they’ve left flood measures by the wayside, and the federal government has also been slow to fund major improvements.

“Areas like Stockton that don’t have political clout … often get bypassed terms of consideration for funding,” said Mike Machado, a former California state senator who has long advocated for better flood management in the Central Valley. “Even if any funding is available, Stockton is usually at the bottom of the list.”

Even as Stockton’s infrastructure decays, the city’s flood risk is only increasing thanks to climate change, which will cause more severe rains in the San Joaquin Valley and further stress the city’s levees. The city has grown at a rapid pace over the past two decades, but state and local officials have been more focused on protecting local agricultural irrigators from drought than on protecting the city’s residents from flooding. When the next big storm hits, it is Stockton’s communities of color, which make up more than 80 percent of the city’s population, that will see the worst of the damage.

“We are at the bottom of the bowl,” said Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, the executive director of Restore the Delta, a Stockton-based environmental nonprofit. “We’re the drain. And they don’t value us.”

The Central Valley’s flood protection system has never been equal. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, farmers and ranchers constructed a hodgepodge of levees along rivers like the San Joaquin, piling sand only high enough so that water would flood someone else’s land rather than their own. The levees were owned and maintained by local districts, rather than any centralized governing body, so wealthier areas ended up with stronger defenses.

As the region’s flood protection system expanded, the San Joaquin region fell behind. To protect the state capital of Sacramento in the 1920s, the federal Army Corps of Engineers built a diversion system called the Yolo Bypass that funnels water away from the city, but Stockton never saw any similar investment. Local authorities couldn’t raise as much money to bolster levees as their counterparts around Sacramento, and money from the state and the federal government never filled the gap.

This is in part because lawmakers have overlooked Stockton’s vulnerable populations, according to Jane Dolan, president of the Central Valley Flood Protection Board, a state agency that oversees flood management. But Dolan says the disparity also exists because leaders along the San Joaquin River have long tended to focus more on securing water for agricultural irrigation than on managing the rivers, which has made it hard to secure momentum for big flood improvements.

“They don’t have that consensus about managing floodwaters and allowing space for the river,” she told Grist. “Politicians from city councils to Congress are all focused on water supply.”

Not only does the San Joaquin have the shoddiest flood protection infrastructure, but it also faces the greatest degree of risk from climate-fueled storms. Both the UCLA study and a separate study by Dolan’s organization found that warmer climates will increase runoff in the San Joaquin watershed by more than they will in the Sacramento watershed — in large part because higher temperatures will cause what used to be snow to fall as rain instead. Furthermore, Stockton faces flood risk from all sides: Not only does the San Joaquin River flood during rain events, but the Calaveras River on the city’s north side does as well. Water from the Pacific Ocean could even flood the city from the west during high tides as it pushes across a long flat expanse known as the Delta.

“The San Joaquin Valley is the most vulnerable to intense floods, because the climate science is clear that there will be less snow there, and more rain,” said Dolan. The river’s levee system was designed for a long snowmelt, not an all-at-once deluge, she added, which means that bigger atmospheric river storms are all but certain to overwhelm it.

Despite this risk, Stockton has expanded rapidly over the past few decades. Not only has the city grown into a hub for the valley’s all-important agricultural industry, its relatively cheap land and proximity to the populous San Francisco Bay Area has made it a boom site for new warehouses and packing facilities owned by companies like Amazon. During the last housing boom, developers built subdivision after subdivision along the San Joaquin River to house new arrivals, relying on the decades-old levees to protect them.

As it has grown, Stockton has become one of the most diverse cities in the country, with substantial Mexican, Filipino, Chinese, Cambodian, and African American communities. Many of these have poverty rates that are much higher than the state average, and they also face severe environmental justice risks: The neighborhoods of southwest Stockton are surrounded by freeways, factories, and port infrastructure, making them among the most exposed in the state to soot and diesel pollution.

“Because of redlining and historical discrimination, we have a lot of people of color, and people are at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, right behind these levees,” said Barrigan-Parrilla.

Mary Gómez is a 50-year resident of the Conway Houses, a low-income housing development on the south side of Stockton. The development sits just feet from the Walker Slough, a small waterway that drains off the San Joaquin River. Gómez, 70, told Grist that she worries about flooding from the river frequently and feels the area doesn’t get enough attention from city officials.

“It’s because they think we’re ghetto,” she said. “We are worried, because what if it floods [upstream] and we don’t hear about it, and they don’t tell us? Who’s gonna come and help us, or get us out? There’s so many of us that don’t have cars, that have kids.”

Gómez said she also worries about whether the neighborhood’s elderly and disabled could get out in time. The last time it came close to flooding, she said, her neighbors told her that she should protect her house with sandbags.

For decades, local officials have tried to secure state and federal money for flood protection projects, but progress has been slow as the risk has only increased. Way back in 1995, when the federal government was weighing whether to deem the levees in north and central Stockton inadequate, the area’s flood control authority had to self-finance levee improvements through tax assessments on local property owners — a costly proposition in a relatively low-income area with a meager tax base.

“We have a severely disadvantaged community,” said Chris Elias, director of the San Joaquin Area Flood Control Agency, the authority that manages the region’s levees. “We cannot impose too much burden on them — they’ve borne too much burden already. So we explore those other funding avenues. But just like everything else, we are competing with a whole bunch of other priorities that the state has.”

The state has passed a number of bond measures over the years to fund flood improvements, but local officials say Stockton hasn’t received a fair share of that money. For every five dollars spent in Sacramento, Elias said, Stockton has seen only one dollar of spending. He said that’s in part because the state money went to projects that were already “shovel-ready,” and Stockton-area officials lacked the resources to design projects and apply for grants.

Federal help has also been hard to come by. In 2010 the Army Corps of Engineers finally decreed that many of Stockton’s levees were inadequate and that much of the city was vulnerable to massive flooding. The agency spent the next seven years studying the problem, but in the end it proposed only a partial solution. While the Corps agreed to pursue a $1.3 billion suite of levee repair projects in north and central Stockton, it punted on a proposal to bolster the levees in south Stockton and two nearby suburbs — the parts of the area that faced the greatest economic hardship and the greatest exposure to flooding on the San Joaquin. The agency’s argument was that repairing levees in those areas would encourage new development, thus increasing the risk. It has since agreed to revisit that decision, but in the meantime tens of thousands residents in the area are still just as vulnerable to flooding as they were a decade ago.

In response to questions from Grist, a spokesperson from the Corps’s Sacramento district said that the agency had been constrained by an executive order that limits federal investment in flood-prone areas.

“Deferring decisions regarding the area to the south of Stockton … allowed [the Corps] and its state and local partners to prevent further delays in gaining congressional authorization to protect Stockton from catastrophic flooding,” said the spokesperson. He added that the agency plans to “reexamine federal interest in the [area] and identify potential flood risk management and ecosystem restoration opportunities.… However, the outcomes of that study are not yet determined.”

Another problem is that levees alone aren’t sufficient as a flood management strategy. No matter how high you build a levee, a future flood can always overtop it, and the consequences when a levee breaks are often worse than they would have been if the levee hadn’t been there in the first place, as was demonstrated in New Orleans after Katrina. Many local officials believe that, instead of just building more levees, the state should give flood waters another place to go by creating natural floodplains out of conserved land. That’s what the state did near Sacramento with the Yolo Bypass.

“You can build a levee stronger and better, but it’s still vulnerable to breaking,” said John Cain, director of conservation at River Partners, a nonprofit that advocates for such floodplain restoration projects. “If you want to have more resiliency in the system, you literally need more room.”

Cain’s organization has put this approach to the test about 20 miles upstream on the San Joaquin by purchasing unused land and converting it into a natural floodplain. During big rain events, water flowing downstream on the river can spill onto the reserved land instead of flowing toward Stockton, taking pressure off the city’s levees. Officials in Stockton have been trying to replicate this strategy closer to the city by creating a wide flood bypass called Paradise Cut on reserved farmland. The project would reduce the depth of potential flooding in the Stockton area by as much as two feet, but the Army Corps rejected that project back in 2018 as well, questioning whether it would pass a cost-benefit analysis.

Meanwhile, state funding for flood management has all but dried up even as lawmakers plow billions into drought relief, leaving Stockton dependent on the slow-moving Army Corps of Engineers for project money. Governor Gavin Newsom’s proposed budget for the coming year proposes to spend just $135 million on flood management, less than a third of what Dolan’s organization says the state should be spending every year. The proposed budget also seeks to claw back $40 million that was allocated in last year’s budget for floodplain restoration along the San Joaquin River.

Newsom’s office did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

Machado, the former state senator, hopes this month’s storms will bring some attention to flood risk in the state, but he’s not sure the attention will translate into new spending.

“After a flood, the holes get plugged, the sun comes out, and they forget,” he told Grist. “All of a sudden you’re in a drought period, or an extended period with no imminent threat of a flood, and it becomes a backburner issue.”

Gabriela Aoun contributed reporting to this story.

Gizmodo

Julian Sands is the latest to vanish. Is the climate crisis behind a string of California hiker tragedies?

Josh Marcus
Mon, January 23, 2023 

From top, clockwise: The British actor Julian Sands who has been missing for several days after hiking on Mount Baldy, right. Jeffrey Morton and Crystal Paula Gonzalez recently died while hiking during California’s severe storms (Getty/iStock/Orange County Sheriff’s Department/cbsnews)

On a clear day, the peak of southern California’s 10,000ft Mount Baldy looms over the Los Angeles skyline.

The mountain is emblematic of a growing threat: the deadly impact of the climate crisis on one of America’s favourite pastimes, the great outdoors.

This month, as climate-amped superstorms battered California, first responders have carried out 14 rescue missions on Mount Baldy’s peak, the highest summit in the San Gabriel mountain range.

Two people have died and a third man, the British actor Julian Sands, is still missing after nearly a week.

“We’ve had so many storms over southern California. Those conditions up there are extremely dangerous at the moment,” Mara Rodriguez, of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, told The Independent.


Conditions are so treacherous on the mountain – wind-blown sheets of thick ice, avalanche risk and heavy snow – that police have often been unable to carry out rescue efforts on the ground.

“We had to pull ground crews out Saturday evening,” Ms Rodriguez said of the search for Sands, who has been described by family members to The Independent as a “heroic mountaineer” and experienced outdoorsman.

“We haven’t been able to reinsert them due to the condition of that area. There’s concerns about avalanches up there. The ice is just crazy dangerous so all of our search efforts at this point have been by air.”

Los Angeles with Mount Baldy and the San Gabriel mountain range behind (Getty)

Multiple people have died or been reported missing in the San Gabriel mountains during the storms.

Crystal Paula Gonzalez, a mother-of-four known to family as the “Hiking Queen”, died after falling more than 500ft down Mount Baldy last Sunday.

Her last posts on Facebook revealed how she had decided to turn around because of deteriorating conditions on the mountain.

“Our mother was a kind, loving, lively soul,” her daughters said in a statement. “She had a thirst for adventure that she instilled in all of us during our childhood. She inspired those that met her on the trails. She loved life and life loved her back.”

Another experienced hiker, Bob Gregory, 61, has been missing since last Friday on Mount Islip in the San Gabriel range.

Julian Sands has been missing in the San Gabriel mountain range for nearly a week (Getty Images)

Mr Gregory had shared a trail map of his planned route but rescue teams have been unable to locate him. Deep snow has impeded ground missions and limited rescuers to aerial searches over the massive snow drifts.

"My worst fear is that you know accidents, accidents happen," his son, Jimmy Gregory, told local TV station KCAL. "He probably slipped. He probably went off the wrong trail. Or even the weather right now – weather is, really, a big factor right now."

In early January, one missing hiker, 63-year-old Jeffrey Morton was found dead in southern California’s Carbon Canyon Regional Park after failing to return from a pre-dawn hike.

Officials said poor weather in the area had hampered their ability to use helicopters in the search.

Such dangerous conditions will only worsen due to the climate crisis, Joe Biden said on Thursday, as he visited California to assess the damage from the severe storms.

“If anybody doubts climate is changing, they must have been asleep for the last couple of years,” Mr Biden said.

“Extreme weather caused by climate change means stronger and more frequent storms, more intense drought, longer wildfire seasons, all of which threatens communities across California.”

The recent storms that have swamped California are called “atmospheric rivers” – bands of water vapour that form over the ocean and can be hundreds of kilometres wide.

When these atmospheric rivers hit the heights of mountain ranges, the water vapour becomes heavy snowfall.

Atmospheric rivers increase the risks of flash flooding and rock slides as California has witnessed across the state in recent weeks.

And the problem is worsening due to the climate crisis, scientists have warned. As the air heats up, it becomes capable of holding more water and leads to more rainfall.

Organisations like the American Hiking Society (AHS) have warned about the impacts of the climate crisis on outdoor pursuits.

“World renowned trails like the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), have been forced to close sections due to fires, drought conditions leave hikers without water sources, and views are obstructed and health impacted by smoke,” the AHS said. “Impacts like extreme heat, flooding, and other exacerbated weather events are being felt around the world.”

And it’s not just during winter rain storms.

Extreme heatwaves and wildfires, both exacerbated by the climate crisis, have led to the temporary closure of hundreds of kilometres of the Pacific Crest Trail, one of the US’s most treasured hiking trails which begins at the Mexica border and runs 4,264km (2,650 miles) through California, Oregon, and Washington to Canada.

“We see a lot of people altering their trip plans because of smoke, because of fire impacts,” Jennifer Tripp, trail operations manager for the PCT, told local TV station KCRA.

Last autumn, extreme heat was blamed for several hikers’ deaths in California and Arizona.

The new challenges to hiking in California are a reminder that the climate crisis goes beyond just impacting natural systems like polar bear migration or shark habitat, but extends to how humans interact with those systems, sometimes with deadly results.

This article was amended on January 23 2023. A caption previously identified one of the men photographed as missing hiker Bob Gregory, but this was not the case. The image shows Jeffrey Morton, whose body was found in January.

CORPORATE WELFARE BUMS

Canada oil group says federal, provincial tension blocking carbon capture talks


 TD Securities Calgary Energy Conference in Calgary

Mon, January 23, 2023 
By Nia Williams and Steve Scherer

Ottawa (Reuters) -The chief executive of Cenovus Energy Inc on Monday said friction between the federal and Alberta governments was making it difficult to hold meaningful discussions on funding carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology needed to decarbonize the oil and gas sector.

Cenovus CEO Alex Pourbaix was speaking on behalf of the Pathways Alliance, a collaboration between Canada's six largest oil sands producers targeting net-zero emissions by 2050. It is planning to develop a CCS hub in northern Alberta, expected to cost C$16.5 billion ($12.3 billion) by 2030.

Of that, the group wants public money to fund 66%, or roughly C$10.9 billion, and says government support would speed up decarbonization and help establish a competitive clean-tech industry in Canada.

So far the federal government has unveiled an investment tax credit worth C$2.6 billion over the next five years, but both Ottawa and Alberta say the other should contribute more.

Alberta's conservative Premier Danielle Smith is a vocal critic of Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and has slammed many aspects of federal climate policy, accusing Ottawa of trying to cripple the western province's energy sector.

Trudeau told Reuters in an interview earlier this month Alberta was "hesitating around investing in anything related to climate change".

"It's very hard to have meaningful discussions with another party when you're lobbing rocks at each other," Pourbaix told Reuters in an interview.

"I would like to see the temperature turned down a little bit."

Pourbaix said there still needs to be a "significant discussion" between the federal and provincial governments and industry, and Pathways has set a target for that to happen early this year.

"I've had both levels of government telling me that they're supportive of doing that and engaging on that. I think it has not occurred yet to the level it needs to resolve the differences that the groups may have," he added.

Smith must win an election in May in order to remain Alberta's premier.

Asked to comment on the industry's call to tone down political rhetoric, Taylor Hides, a spokesperson in Smith's office, said Alberta's government is willing to invest in CCS and is looking forward to "working with our industry partners" to create jobs.

Keean Nembhard, a spokesperson for the federal natural resources ministry, said the government is looking forward to "continued dialogue with provinces and territories" on the best ways to promote CCS growth, but noted the technology alone is not a "silver bullet" to cut emissions.

Canada is the world's fourth-largest producer of crude, most of which comes from Alberta's oil sands. The oil and gas sector is the country's highest-polluting industry and needs to drastically cut emissions if Canada is to achieve its climate commitments.

'NO TIME TO SLIP'

The Pathways Alliance has already said Ottawa's goal of cutting oil and gas emissions 42% by 2030, equivalent to a 35-megatonne reduction, is impossible.

The group could achieve a 22-megatonne reduction in emissions by 2030, said Pathways President Kendall Dilling, but that depends on key components like public funding being agreed and a smooth regulatory approval process for CCS.

"We don't have time to slip," Dilling said.

"Canada's track record on major infrastructure development in the last decade has been abysmal," he said. "If we run into those same kind of troubles, then 2030 will not be realized."

Another recent source of federal-provincial conflict has been Ottawa's "Just Transition" bill, which Ottawa says is meant to help retrain fossil fuel workers for clean energy jobs, but which Smith says will instead destroy better paying oil and gas jobs.

Pourbaix and Derek Evans, CEO of Pathways member MEG Energy Corp, said their biggest concern is that Alberta will not have enough workers for decarbonizing the oil patch.

"I'm terrified we don't have enough people on our side of the business to get the work done today, let alone what we're planning on doing if we're going to spend C$16.5 billion by 2030," Evans said.

The six companies in the Pathways Alliance, representing 95% of Canada's oil sands production, are Cenovus, MEG, Suncor Energy Inc, Canadian Natural Resources Ltd, Imperial Oil Ltd and ConocoPhillips.

($1 = 1.3383 Canadian dollars)

(Reporting by Nia Williams in British Columbia and Steve Scherer in Ottawa; Editing by Marguerita Choy, Jonathan Oatis and Deepa Babington)

With Starship testing, SpaceX moves one step closer to making science fiction a reality



Aria Alamalhodaei
Mon, January 23, 2023 

SpaceX is poised to conduct a wet dress rehearsal of the Starship launch system from its Starbase site in southeastern Texas, a major milestone in CEO Elon Musk’s quest to turn long-haul interplanetary transportation from science fiction to reality.

It's the strongest signal yet that Starship’s first orbital flight test could well and truly be imminent. The wet dress is a critical series of prelaunch tests that includes propellant loading of both the upper stage and booster, and a run-through of countdown to around T-10 seconds, or just before engine ignition. If no major issues crop up during the testing, the next step would be “de-stacking,” or the separation of the Starship second stage and Super Heavy booster. That would be followed by a full static fire test, where engineers would light up all 33 of the booster’s Raptor 2 engines. The launch system would then be re-stacked before the first orbital flight test.

This could all take place in a matter of weeks -- March is not off the table for the orbital flight test -- but that’s assuming that everything goes well and no major mishaps take place (they’re not unheard of). It also assumes that the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, the body that regulates commercial launches, issues SpaceX the all-important launch license fairly soon. The FAA has been basically mum about the status of its evaluation of SpaceX’s plans, though it’s been conducting extensive assessments of the Starship launch program for some time.

One can think about Starship as SpaceX’s raison d’être, the means by which the company will, as Musk puts it, preserve “the light of consciousness” in the cosmos. Given that Starship could have the potential to put as much as 100 tons into orbit -- and given that there is not yet a robust market to support and exploit such a capability -- it seems clear that Starship was designed with Mars in mind. The company will likely end up spending billions of dollars to work toward this goal.

It’s not just SpaceX that is betting big on Starship’s success. NASA is also counting on Starship to work, to the extent that the agency made it a central piece of its Artemis moon program. In April 2021, NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to develop a version of Starship to land on the moon for the Artemis III mission, which will take place no earlier than 2024. The agency later expanded that contract by $1.15 billion to include a second crewed Starship mission for later in the decade.

But before any of that can happen, Starship needs to reach orbit. And it may happen sooner rather than later.

1% ER

Incoming Biden chief of staff Zients is nearly wealthy enough to buy the entire White House

Jan. 23, 2023

By Steve Goldstein

Jeff Zients, then the White House’s Covid-19 response czar, speaking in April 2021.

The person widely reported to be President Joe Biden’s next chief of staff has just about enough assets to swap it for the entire White House, were it ever for sale.

The financial disclosure form for incoming White House chief of staff Jeffrey Zients lists assets ranging in value between $89 million and $442 million. That form is based on data as of May 2022, from his previous role at coordinator of the COVID-19 response. Zients according to the Associated Press, the Washington Post, and other outlets, will replace Ron Klain as White House chief of staff.

Zillow Z, +2.92% lists the valuation of the White House at $481 million, though of course 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is not for sale.

The disclosure form lists a mix of funds, including such broad based investments such as the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust SPY, +1.20% and the Vanguard Total Stock Market VTSAX, +1.25% index fund. Other funds he held invested in bonds and gold.

Zients started his business career at the consulting firm Bain & Co., and later held a similar role at Mercer Management Consulting. He was also the former chief executive of the Advisory Board Company, a healthcare consulting firm that is now a unit of UnitedHealth UNH, -0.19%.

The vast wealth of Zients has led to criticism from groups including the Revolving Door Project, which said he became “astonishingly rich by profiteering in healthcare.” It pointed to settlements in firms he either controlled or invested in which paid millions to settle allegations of Medicare and Medicaid fraudulent billing.

In President Obama’s White House, Zients was director of the National Economic Council and acting director of the Office of Management and Budget. He helped lead the effort to repair the Healthcare.gov website after a botched rollout.

AP sources: Biden to pick Zients as his next chief of staff





ZEKE MILLER, MICHAEL BALSAMO and SEUNG MIN KIM
Sun, January 22, 2023 

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is expected to name Jeff Zients, who ran the administration's response to the COVID-19 pandemic at the start of Biden's term, as his next chief of staff, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Biden's current top aide, Ron Klain, is preparing to leave the job in the coming weeks.

Since serving as COVID-19 response coordinator, Zients has returned to the White House in a low-profile position to work on staffing matters for the remainder of Biden's first term.

The two people familiar with the matter were not authorized to publicly discuss Biden's plans before an official announcement and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The Washington Post first reported on Zients' expected appointment. The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

The change at the highest levels of senior staff comes as Biden passes his two-year mark in office and pivots to a defensive stance against a House Republican majority hungry to investigate his administration's actions and his family. The White House remains mired in controversy over discoveries of classified documents at Biden's home in Wilmington, Delaware, and at his former institute in Washington, with the latest tranche of found records disclosed Saturday evening.

Biden, 80, is also preparing to launch his reelection campaign in the coming weeks, bolstered by a string of legislative accomplishments in the first two years of his presidency when Democrats controlled both chambers of Capitol Hill. He is confronting a Republican presidential field that is far from formed but for now is led by former President Donald Trump, whom Biden defeated in 2020.

The president's main sphere of advisers, in addition to Zients, on politics and legislation will continue to include presidential counselor Steve Ricchetti, senior advisers Mike Donilon and Anita Dunn, legislative affairs director Louisa Terrell, and Jen O'Malley Dillon and Bruce Reed, who are deputy chiefs of staff.

Klain will remain in Biden's political orbit, according to a person familiar with his plans — not unlike the role played by Cedric Richmond, who was the president's first director of the White House Office of Public Engagement and now is a senior adviser at the Democratic National Committee.

The outgoing chief of staff was also known to be friendly with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. But some liberal critics of Zients swiftly went on the attack against the appointment even before it was official, highlighting in particular his private-sector ties.

Jeff Hauser, the founder and director of the Revolving Door Project, a progressive group that advocates for liberal appointees in government, said Sunday that the selection of Zients as the top White House aide did not jibe with Biden’s “Scranton Joe” political image.

“Unfortunately, Zients is a veteran of private equity, rapacious health care providers, and Big Tech, which sets up a fundamental question that could determine Biden’s political future: Will a Zients-led executive branch pursue the unpopular misconduct of people like Jeffrey Zients?” Hauser said. “It would be against Zients’ character to pursue corporate lawbreaking, but it is also the only way Biden can retain the mantle of populist against the likes of (Florida Gov. Ron) DeSantis and Trump.”

“Ron Klain has been an open ear and even-handed engager of actors across the Democratic Party," said Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. "Whomever the next Chief of Staff is, that will be the continued hope and expectation. There will likely be an early relationship and trust building stage.”

Zients, vice chairman of Biden’s transition operation after his November 2020 election, brings significant managerial expertise in government and the private sector. He was the director of the National Economic Council during the Obama administration and acting director of the Office of Management and Budget.

The longtime management consultant developed a Mr. Fix It reputation, tapped to lead the Obama administration's effort to repair HealthCare.gov after the bungled initial rollout of the site in fall 2013. Zients served as top executive at the Advisory Board Co., a Washington consulting firm.

Former President Barack Obama also enlisted Zients in 2009 to eliminate the backlog in applicants for the Cash for Clunkers program, which offered rebates to drivers who swapped old cars for fuel-efficient vehicles. Zients later took on a similar challenge to smooth sign-ups for an updated version of the GI Bill.

Another coming perk for White House aides: Zients, who was an initial investor in Call Your Mother, a bagel shop in Washington, had a penchant for hosting “Bagel Wednesdays” for staff. (Zients divested his shares before joining the White House in 2021).

Zients and his deputy on the White House’s pandemic response team, Natalie Quillian, left the Biden administration last April before returning quietly in the fall of 2022. As they left, Biden thanked him for “stunning” and “consequential” progress battling the pandemic.

“When Jeff took this job, less than 1% of Americans were fully vaccinated; fewer than half our schools were open; and unlike much of the developed world, America lacked any at-home COVID tests,” Biden said when the White House announced Zients' departure last year. “Today, almost 80% of adults are fully vaccinated; over 100 million are boosted; virtually every school is open; and hundreds of millions of at-home tests are distributed every month.”

___

Kim reported from Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.

Scientists Have a Genius Plan: Turn Abandoned Mines Into Gravity Batteries

Darren Orf
Mon, January 23, 2023 

Turning Abandoned Mines Into Gravity BatteriesEnergy Vault

Gravity batteries use gravity and regenerative braking to send renewable energy to the grid.

Scientists created a battery that uses millions of abandoned mines worldwide (with an estimated 550,000 of them being in the U.S. alone) to store energy.

Some companies are trying to build gravity batteries that can be dropped anywhere, regardless of if there are mines in the area.

Supplying the world with renewable energy is a two-fold problem. The first is making technologies like wind and solar as robust and affordable as coal and natural gas. With recent estimates suggesting solar will outpace coal in 2025, that first problem is quickly being solved. The second one, figuring out how to store that energy, is a bit trickier.

Unlike fossil fuels, solar and wind can’t provide an uninterrupted stream of energy. After all, the sun sets and winds die, but scientists and engineers have developed myriad ways to store that renewable energy for when the grid needs it. One idea is to supplement lithium-ion batteries with iron-air batteries that could charge our homes via rust (yes, rust), or transform existing coal-fired power plants into nuclear ones. But another much talked about technology is what’s known as “gravity batteries,” which use regenerative braking and, well, gravity to send energy to the grid.

The big problem is exactly that—they’re big—making them unfeasible (and unattractive) for certain areas. However, earlier this month, scientists revealed a gravity battery that takes advantage of vestiges of dirty energy’s past by using millions of abandoned mines worldwide (with an estimated 550,000 of them being in the U.S. alone) to store energy.

The research into these new batteries, led by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), examined a technology known as Underground Gravity Energy Storage (UGES). At its most basic, this battery lowers large containers of sand into a mineshaft when energy is expensive (aka peak hours). Using regenerative braking, these mines would transform the sand’s potential energy into actual energy, and the bigger the mine, the bigger the battery.

To recharge, the mine then brings sand back to the surface when energy is cheap. Unlike conventional batteries such as lithium-ion, gravity batteries experience zero self-discharge, which is the slow loss of energy over time while being stored. That means these mines can be on standby to provide much needed energy for months or even years. Using abandoned mines also provides tons of benefits as it preserves jobs, hides unsightly infrastructure underground, and leverages connections to the grid that already exist.

“Mines already have the basic infrastructure and are connected to the power grid, which significantly reduces the cost and facilitates the implementation of UGES plants,” IIASA researcher Julian Hunt said in a statement. The researchers published their results in the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute journal on Thursday.

According to the BBC, some companies are already investigating ways to transform abandoned coal mines into next-gen batteries. However, others find the geographic limitations of mine-based gravity batteries could limit the adoption of the technology worldwide. The IIASA even admits that the world’s greatest benefactors of this technology would be countries like Russia, India, and the U.S., where a lot of mines already exist. That’s why outfits like Energy Vault, a Swiss-based gravity battery company, are trying to build aesthetically pleasing gravity batteries that can be dropped anywhere and even feel at home in urban and suburban settings.

Just like how humanity’s green energy future will likely be a mix of solar, wind, and next-gen nuclear power stations, energy storage will also be an eclectic mix of chemical and gravity batteries — both above and below ground.

SERIAL RAPIST IN A LAB COAT

Prosecutor: Doctor sexually abused patients entire career

LARRY NEUMEISTER
Mon, January 23, 2023

NEW YORK (AP) — A prosecutor urged a New York jury Monday to convict a doctor of federal sex trafficking charges, saying that he hid behind his white coat and the prestige of Columbia University to sexually abuse patients for decades. His defense lawyer countered that acquittal was appropriate because he'd already been punished for those crimes.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jane Kim described the evidence against former gynecologist Robert Hadden, 64, as “devastating” and “damning” as she recounted testimony by nine victims as well as two nurses who worked with Hadden during a career that stretched from the late 1980s until 2012.

“He donned his white coat and took the oath all doctors do to ‘do no harm’ and then he did the exact opposite,” Kim told the Manhattan federal court jury.

She said he tried to “hide behind his white coat" and the prestige of Columbia University as he won over vulnerable patients before sexually abusing them.

“The defendant had a plan, a strategy,” Kim said. “This wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing.”

She said he would ask patients about their sex lives and would conduct lengthy breast examinations that should only last 30 seconds to a minute on every visit for some women. Then, she said, he “hid behind the cover of gynecological exams ... to keep pushing the envelope, to see how far he could go.”

Defense attorney Kathryn Wozencroft agreed that what some of Hadden's patients endured at his hands was “disgusting and horrible” and deeds that made it appropriate for a doctor to lose his medical license.

“The harm they suffered is real," she said, adding that “we're not challenging what happened in the exam rooms.”

But she said his guilty plea to charges in New York state court seven years ago was for all of those abuses and it would be wrong to convict him of the new charges based on those same crimes. After that plea, Hadden, of Englewood, New Jersey, surrendered his medical license but wasn’t required to serve any jail time.

Wozencroft said the sex trafficking charges require that Hadden knew that the four patients the charges pertain to were traveling over state lines and that he enticed them to do so because he wanted to sexually abuse them.

The defense has maintained throughout the two-week trial that Hadden wasn't aware of where his clients were traveling from or the roster of his appointments each day.

According to the indictment against Hadden, the doctor sexually abused patients from 1993 through at least 2012 while he was working at two prestigious Manhattan hospitals, Columbia University Irving Medical Center and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.

The institutions have already agreed to pay more than $236 million to settle civil claims by more than 200 former patients.

Among the former patients who have spoken publicly was Evelyn Yang, whose husband, Andrew Yang, ran unsuccessfully as a Democrat for president in 2020 and for New York City mayor in 2022.

In 2020, she said Hadden sexually assaulted her eight years prior, even when she was seven months pregnant. She had called the sentence in the state case a “slap on the wrist.”

The Associated Press generally withholds the names of sexual abuse victims from stories unless they have decided to tell their stories publicly, which Yang and others have done.

Hadden has remained free on $1 million bail since his 2020 arrest

Nigeria opens 'game changer' billion-dollar deep seaport

Mon, January 23, 2023 
By Seun Sanni

LAGOS (Reuters) - Nigeria opened a billion-dollar Chinese-built deep seaport in Lagos on Monday, which is expected to ease congestion at the country's ports and help it become an African hub for transshipment, handling cargoes in transit for other destinations.

President Muhammadu Buhari has made building infrastructure a key pillar of his government's economic policy, and hopes that this will help his ruling party win votes during next month's presidential election.

The new Lekki Deep Sea Port is 75% owned by the China Harbour Engineering Company and Tolaram group, with the balance shared between the Lagos state government and the Nigerian Ports Authority.

"This is a transformative project, game changer project. This project could create at least 200,000 jobs," Chinese Ambassador to Nigeria Cui Jianchun told Reuters after the port was commissioned by Buhari.

China is among the largest bilateral lenders to Nigeria and has funded rail, roads and power stations.

(Writing by MacDonald Dzirutwe; Editing by Jan Harvey)

Scrub Hub: Passing a wind farm, I see some turbines spinning and others motionless. Why?

Karl Schneider, Indianapolis Star
Mon, January 23, 2023 

Wind farms are becoming more common in Indiana. The state already boasts the fourth largest "farm" in the U.S. and produces nearly 3,500 megawatts of wind energy, with more on the horizon.

The towering windmills reaching up to the sky produce slightly more than 9% of all the electricity used in the state. That's enough to power more than 1 million homes, according to the American Clean Power Association.

With more projects in the works that will produce another 302 megawatts, and a handful of bills proposed in this session of the General Assembly, wind power is likely to continue to grow across the state. And with the increasing presence of the conspicuous energy generators comes some curiosity.

So, for this edition of Scrub Hub, we took to our trusty submission form and chose a question from Teresa, who asked: Why are the wind turbines not turning right now?

Wind turbines operate in a rural area north of Lafayette, Indiana, on Wednesday, August 4, 2021.

It’s possible for the blades on wind turbines to reach up to speeds of 200 mph, so it may seem odd when some are spinning very quickly while the blades on others nearby are not moving.


We dug around in some state, federal and industry reports and reached out to academic experts in energy technology to determine why some turbines in a wind farm spin while others remain still.

Short Answer: The turbine is down for maintenance

Wind turbines, like all machines, need both scheduled and unscheduled maintenance. In some instances that explains why some are operating but not others.

The basic components of a wind turbine are the visible tower and rotor blades, as well as the gearbox and generator located at the top of the tower.

Scheduled maintenance helps prevent wear and tear from breaking parts and unscheduled maintenance occurs when the turbine experiences any of a number of failures.

Regular preventative maintenance can include periodic equipment inspection, oil and filter changes, calibration and adjustment of various parts, as well as replacing brake pads and seals. General housekeeping and blade cleaning can also temporarily keep a turbine from spinning.

In larger wind farms, several turbines on a circuit can be inoperable and not spinning because they are all down for maintenance, said John Roudebush, program chair of Ivy Tech College’s Energy Technology program.

More Scrub Hub:Hoosiers may not be able to plant the same trees they used to

Long answer: Curtailment, congestion and wind speed

Energy transmission in Indiana is run through the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, commonly known as MISO. The group manages the flow of electricity by balancing demand versus what’s being generated, which means there are times where excess electricity is being produced.

“(Sometimes) we don’t need the power as demand is down or another power plant is selling power to the customers instead,” Roudebush wrote in an email. “Power plants compete on the grid. A coal plant, a natural gas plant, or a wind farm will all bid to sell power during some part of the day and MISO will pick the cheapest bid for the day. Generally, wind is the cheapest but not always.”

John Hall, assistant professor at the University of Buffalo’s Engineering and Applied Sciences, focuses his research on the technical aspects of wind energy. While some wind turbines will operate normally, he said others may be stopped to match production with grid demand.

“Basically, you have the utility company distributing power and buying and selling in real time,” Hall said. “Based on how much they need, wind farms would turn turbines off accordingly.”

The industry calls a wind turbine that is not spinning “parked,” Hall said, and this is done with a braking system that holds the rotor in place. Once energy demand rises, the brake is released and almost immediately the turbine starts delivering electricity to the grid again.

Another obvious answer to why the turbines may not be spinning is that the wind speed is not high enough.

Generally, turbines can generate power with wind speeds as low as 5 mph. If speeds fall below that, there just isn’t enough to turn the sometimes massive blades.

On the other hand, wind that is too fast can cause damages to the turbines, so operators of wind farms will park the rotors until the wind calms down. Turbines generally shut down when wind speeds hit about 55 mph.

“The system is not designed for that, so they shut it down,” Hall said. “That’s OK because we rarely get winds over that speed, and it would not be worthwhile to design for that for the few instances.”

To help improve the efficiency of wind farms, Hall said banking excess power is a huge research area right now.

“There are studies on new battery technology and super capacitors and different ways to get around that issue,” Hall said.

More:Toxic pollution, fossil fuels, floodplains: Top environmental bills to watch this session

Another solution for storing excess electricity is by making hydrogen, Hall said. Wind farm operators would be able to create hydrogen and store it for use later when the grid demand increases.

While fossil fuel plants may be more responsive to the constantly moving supply and demand for electricity, Hall said the future depends on renewables.

"If folks are concerned about climate and want a better future for the next generation and everything, renewable energy like wind and hydro-electric and tidal power are all really not just sources of energy but vital to perhaps our existence," Hall said.

Karl Schneider is an IndyStar environment reporter. You can reach him at karl.schneider@indystar.com. Follow him on Twitter @karlstartswithk

IndyStar's environmental reporting project is made possible through the generous support of the nonprofit Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Why do some wind turbines spin as others nearby stand still?