Europe’s EV push nearly faltered over fringe fuels that are years away

SYNTHFUEL

The e-fuels Germany fought for will be expensive and scarce for the foreseeable future

BLOOMBERG

Apr 8th 2023 

It sounds inconceivable that Europe’s plan to usher in the age of electric vehicles almost went awry because of a prohibitively expensive technology that’s virtually unavailable, but that’s exactly what happened.

For several weeks last month, Germany refused to back the European Union’s effective ban of new combustion-engine cars from 2035, demanding that Brussels protect vehicles running on e-fuels. Given the auto industry employs around 786,000 people in Germany, it’s understandable that Berlin would try to protect jobs threatened by the phasing out of engines. Still, the fight for e-fuels made little sense.

Analysts doubt that the synthetic fuels will ever make a meaningful contribution to the industry achieving carbon neutrality. Only 2% of the EU car fleet can fully run on e-fuels in 2035, the lobby group Transport & Environment said in October, citing industry forecasts. Many argue the scarce supply of e-fuels that are years away would be better put to use by sectors that can’t transition to battery power as easily, such as aviation and shipping.

One of the biggest inhibitors is cost. E-fuels are made using renewable electricity to split hydrogen from water and combining it with carbon, an inefficient and expensive process. Synthetic diesel costs between $3.50 and $7 a liter to produce, according to BloombergNEF estimates — about four to seven times the price of traditional diesel in the European wholesale market.

Even after years of scaling up production, e-fuels for passenger cars probably will remain around four times more expensive than fossil-fuel gasoline, while improvements in battery technologies will make EVs more affordable and enhance their performance, LMC Automotive’s Al Bedwell wrote in a blog post last month.

Gerrit Marx, the CEO of Italian truck and bus maker Iveco, last week called the technology “the champagne of propulsion” that makes sense only for a small group of wealthy individuals who’d like to hang on to their combustion luxury and performance cars.

“If you have a Ferrari or if you drive your Porsche Turbo once a weekend, you’re not going to care whether a liter costs €5 or €8, but that’s not a fuel for the future,” Marx said in an interview.

So why did Germany throw such a tantrum? Many point to the country’s unpredictable coalition government of center-left Social Democratic Party, environmental Greens and pro-business Free Democratic Party. FDP Finance Minister Christian Lindner and his party colleague Volker Wissing, Germany’s transport minister, led the e-fuels blitz in Brussels.

German media reported in July that Oliver Blume, then just the head of Porsche and now also the CEO of Volkswagen, was in regular contact with Lindner about e-fuels. A few months earlier, Porsche had joined a group of investors betting $260 million on a startup building an e-fuels plant in Chile.

While the FDP has said it wants to keep all technology options open as the industry cuts emissions, critics have accused the party of trying to woo voters and raise its profile in the German government following a series of poor performances in regional elections.

Either way, Brussels eventually caved, giving Germany assurances that vehicles such as Porsche’s 911 sports car — a model Lindner has owned — may get a future exemption if they run solely on e-fuels. While most industry leaders breathed a sigh of relief that Europe is going ahead with phasing out fossil fuels in cars, Germany’s last-minute strong-arming left some worrying that Berlin set a dangerous precedent for approval of other parts of the Green Deal.

“What if other governments decide to do something similar on whatever issue? The procedural rules are for everybody,” Teresa Ribera, a deputy Spanish prime minister, said last month.

The German government’s behavior underscores the disruptive nature of Europe’s bid to become carbon-neutral by mid-century. The country’s auto industry spent decades perfecting the production of crankshafts, diesel injectors and other components not needed for electric motors, and is now under pressure to retool products and factories with potentially devastating effects to employment. Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Porsche have started the transition, but remain well behind Tesla in EV sales.

There’s no debating this transition will be politically risky. Unfortunately for government leaders, e-fuels look like an unlikely savior of “das Auto” or German jobs.

“E-fuels are a hot topic, offering a way for an industry undergoing enormous change to get some politically useful concessions from regulators,” LMC’s Bedwell wrote. “But the evidence today points to e-fuels in Europe’s light-vehicle sector being backed into a very small corner, or not getting off the ground at all.”

Members of NASUWT teaching union reject UK government pay offer

Sat, April 8, 2023 

LONDON, April 8 (Reuters) - Members of the NASUWT union in England are to be balloted on industrial action after becoming the latest teachers' group to reject a government pay offer, the union said on Saturday.

It said in a statement that 87% of members voted against acceptance of the pay deal. A separate consultative survey showed 77% said they were willing to vote for strike action to achieve a fair pay award.

The government has offered teachers in England a one-off payment this year of 1,000 pounds ($1,241.30) and an average pay rise of 4.5% in the next financial year.

"The government's pay offer failed to come close to addressing the concerns over pay and working conditions of teachers and this has rightly been rejected by our members," NASUWT General Secretary Patrick Roach said.

Double-digit inflation has spurred demands for higher pay across Britain, leading to months of regular strikes that have disrupted travel, healthcare and schooling for millions of people and heaped pressure on the government to find a solution.

On Monday, the National Education Union, Britain's largest education union rejected the government's offer and set two new strike dates.

NASUWT, which in January failed to reach the legal turnout threshold to call strikes, had said it would ballot again to seek backing for industrial action.

($1 = 0.8056 pounds) (Reporting by William James; Editing by Mike Harrison)

How Britain’s bogs are on the frontline against climate change


Joe Shute
Sun, April 9, 2023

Alice Pearson and Tom Spencer of The Moors For The Future Partnership survey exposed peat - Alixandra Fazzina

Time moves in mysterious ways on the peat bogs of northern Britain. Here the black earth forms at just 1mm a year as it accumulates decaying organic matter. That means a layer of peat one metre thick contains roughly 1,000 years of history. Some blanket bogs have been recorded as 9,000 years old.

When in a denuded state, however – as an estimated 80 per cent of these landscapes across Britain currently are – what takes many lifetimes to build can disappear in an instant; millennia washing away in a single storm. We are crouched in a moorland gully in the South Pennines, inspecting the layers of the past that form this unique terrain. I am accompanied by Tom Spencer, research and monitoring officer for the Moors for the Future partnership, which for the past 20 years has worked to conserve the northern uplands.

The trench is a few metres wide and 3.5 metres deep, part of an expansive network running off the tops around Snailsden Reservoir and snaking like eels into the valley below. This should all be wet bog in its natural state: a gurgling morass of deep pools and sponge-like vegetation. Instead the erosion is so severe that great troughs have been cleaved through the dry peat. Melon-sized chunks of earth recently fallen away from the trench walls lie beneath our feet.

In the battle to save Britain’s peat bogs, this is the frontline. ‘Peat is being eroded from where we are sitting on all sides in all extreme weather conditions,’ explains Spencer. To illustrate his point, as he speaks the wind booms like artillery fire above our heads and a persistent rain soaks our clothes. ‘When it freezes, bits fall off. If the wind blows strongly you lose peat off the surfaces. If it rains really heavily there is water erosion and if you get a drought then it dries out and is lost as dust.’

Appearing like a bouquet, sprigs of pink, red and white sphagnum moss grow in the bed of the High Peak District - Alixandra Fazzina

Britain’s wetlands are the closest thing you will find to true wilderness on our small and cluttered isle. The UK holds between nine and 15 per cent of the total peatlands in Europe and around 13 per cent of all the blanket bog on Earth. It is estimated our peatlands store around three times more carbon than all our forests combined. In England alone, peat holds around 584 million tonnes of carbon (equivalent to five years of our total carbon emissions).

Wind-lashed and waterlogged, home to a vast array of internationally important flora and fauna and yet wild and inhospitable, these are the landscapes that encompass the span of British history, and the contradictions of our national psyche. For despite their ecological importance, Britain’s bogs have long suffered an image problem.

They are regarded as the badlands, a lawless wilderness roamed by bandits such as Magwitch in Great Expectations or (more recently) Happy Valley’s Tommy Lee Royce. They are places where dark secrets lie preserved in the naturally acidic soils and ghosts stalk the moors. Dartmoor has its hellhound; in the Pennines, Roman legions have been spotted on the march. The famous will-o’-the-wisp in folklore was an apparition that appeared over marsh gas to lure travellers to their death.

Now, however, Britain is being urged to finally fall in love with our bogs. The Government has placed peatland restoration at the heart of its Net Zero strategy, promising to restore 35,000 hectares of degraded peatland in England by 2025; in Scotland, ministers are promising to restore 250,000 by 2025. Key to this is the Great North Bog, a 10-year project between Moors for the Future and other partners to restore 7,000 square kilometres of upland peat across northern England.

The project, which encompasses five national parks and three areas of outstanding natural beauty, aims to inspire a national movement to embrace our uplands and recognise bogs as vital stores of carbon, as well as helping to prevent the increasing flooding, drought and wildfires.

Wooden and stone dams constructed to hold back water are placed along deeply eroded gullies of exposed peat at the site of regeneration works at Twizle Head - Alixandra Fazzina

Without these urgent restoration efforts, Britain’s peatlands will shift from being the solution to many of our modern-day problems to an aggravating cause. Already it has been estimated that peatland erosion in the UK currently releases around 23 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, making it one of the key contributors to greenhouse gas emissions from land use. Unless we can reverse this, climatologists warn, Britain’s bogs will turn from a carbon sink to a ‘climate bomb’.

There are three types of peatland habitat across Britain: blanket bog, raised bog and fen. Over the centuries, each has suffered its own particular form of degradation. The lowland fens and marshes, in the main, were drained and converted into prime agricultural land.

The uplands of the Pennines have also suffered from extensive grazing, not helped by an ill-fated subsidy scheme in the ’60s and ’70s, which encouraged landowners to drain the moors to home more livestock. But principally, it is atmospheric pollution that has wrought the most damage upon this landscape. The South Pennines are sandwiched between the industrial powerhouses of Manchester and Sheffield. Over the 19th and 20th centuries coal smoke from their factories rose into the air as sulphur dioxide, and fell back as acid rain. This killed off many native plant species and, in particular, sphagnum moss, a miracle plant that holds up to 20 times its weight in water and comprises the building blocks of blanket bog.

Formerly lush hilltops were left bare and devoid of life. The fell walker and author Alfred Wainwright, whose guide to the Pennine Way was published in 1968 shortly after it opened as England’s first official national trail, described Black Hill in the Peak District as ‘a desolate and hopeless quagmire to the sky’. Of its bare summit and the others like it, he wrote, ‘this is peat naked and unashamed’.

Inspecting a peat dam in the rain, Telegraph Journalist Joe Shute meets with members from The Moors For The Future Partnership - Alixandra Fazzina

When Moors for the Future was established two decades ago, that is the landscape they were faced with, according to its head Chris Dean. Acid rain had burned off the vegetation on hilltops such as Kinder Scout and Bleaklow leaving behind bare, fissured peat with pH levels higher than lemon juice, upon which nothing could grow. He describes it simply as an ‘environmental catastrophe’.

It is not just carbon that is lost when a bog erodes. Deposited within the upper layer of the peat lies the toxic legacy of the Industrial Revolution in the form of heavy metals including lead, copper, zinc and arsenic. Microbiologists have even detected the presence of metal-eating bacteria up on the moors when typically they are restricted to urban scrapyards.

In a healthy state, peat keeps this locked away for eternity, but if not it is lost in the erosion. Recent studies have confirmed levels of zinc and copper detected in waterways above EU recommended thresholds. With an estimated 70 per cent of the UK’s drinking water collected from upland catchments, this is a major cause for concern.

Since 2003, Moors for the Future has been working to restore 35 square kilometres of blanket bog across the South Pennines and Peak District. And after many years of struggling to ignite enthusiasm for the project, there is suddenly considerable weight behind the work. Last year the Great North Bog project was awarded £9.3 million in Government funding. In total, Dean estimates, it will take £100 million.

Rishi Sunak has publicly stated his enthusiasm for re-wetting Britain’s uplands, not least because his Richmondshire constituency sits right in the heart of bog country. In a 2021 article for his local paper the Darlington & Stockton Times before becoming Prime Minister, Sunak wrote, ‘We have lots of peat in our Yorkshire uplands and this work – slowing the flow of water off the tops through dams and re-vegetation with heather and sphagnum moss – protects what is a vital environmental resource.’

Various pieces of legislation have also been introduced to protect moorland habitats. In 2021, heather-burning on grouse moors, a commonplace practice that exacerbates peat erosion, was banned on protected areas in England except in exceptional circumstances under licence. However, critics have pointed out that areas where the peat is less than 40cm deep can still be burned – and regularly is. Next year the sale of horticultural peat to amateur gardeners will be banned across England (to the delight of campaigners including Monty Don).

Alice Pearson of The Moors For The Future kneels with a trowel as she plants sphagnum mosses in the High Peak District - Alixandra Fazzina

Although in recent weeks the Government has infuriated environmentalists with the announcement that professional growers will still be able to use peat products until 2030. Once the damage has been halted, actually restoring a bog is relatively simple work and focuses on plugging the gaps and raising the water table. This is done by blocking gullies and creating moorland pools. Over winter, helicopters drop sacks of stones to use as dams and heather brash to protect vegetation. An army of staff and volunteers fan out across the moors planting thousands of plugs of sphagnum moss to help re-wet the landscape.

While in Snailsden, to illustrate what a poor quality bog feels like, Chris Dean urges me to jump up and down on the spot. The ground feels hard and hollow. In a healthy blanket bog the water table should be around 10cm from the surface, and a walker could sink up to their knees. It is this trepidation about what lies beneath, believes the US writer Annie Proulx, that has fuelled our destruction of bogs. The 87-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News has recently published a global history of wetlands called Fen, Bog & Swamp. The book draws upon her own lifelong fascination with these waterscapes of myth and mystery and has been shortlisted for the UK’s Richard Jefferies award for outstanding nature writing.

‘There is that thing of fear which is at the top of the list as to how people feel about wetlands,’ she tells me over the phone. ‘I don’t feel that way but I think people are afraid of wetlands and resent them.’ Proulx insists that we must learn to set aside the antipathy of the past and embrace these ancient landscapes. ‘You have to seek them out but when you are there you can learn a tremendous amount about the world, your place in it, what we need and what we have lost.’

A body of evidence is accumulating as to the many benefits bogs provide. In September, Moors for the Future published the results of a six-year study conducted on Kinder Scout, the highest point in the Peak District, assessing the impact of 50,000 plugs of sphagnum moss it had planted on preventing flooding further downstream.

Before the restoration work, water would shoot off the surface of the bare peat and send upland streams racing down into the river valleys below. But the study found that the sphagnum moss reduced the so-called ‘peak flow’ of water after big storm events by 65 per cent, and increased by 680 per cent the time it took for rain to run off the hilltop.

These results were then computer modelled to apply to the wider valley and predicted that in intense storms there should be a 24 per cent reduction in peak flow affecting communities at risk of flooding. In more prolonged winter rainfall, that reduction would be between six and 12 per cent. ‘When we talk about the financial impacts of flooding,’ explains Tom Spencer, ‘really small margins make a big difference.’

In technical parlance this is known as Natural Flood Management (NFM) – restoring landscapes to make them more effective at holding back water and prevent it surging downstream. Traditionally somewhat overlooked by government funding models, which favour the more precise calculations of concrete defences, the potential of Britain’s wetlands is now increasingly forming part of our flood defence strategy.

This area of The Peak District is so badly scarred by water run-off it has become known as 'the trenches' - Alixandra Fazzina

In December, the Environment Agency published the results of a four-year £15 million study analysing 60 NFM pilots across England. As well as significantly reducing flood risk – collectively the pilots slowed and stored water upstream of 15,000 homes in flood-risk areas – the restored wetlands led to a cascade of other benefits, including creating or improving 610km of river habitat, 4,000 hectares of other habitat deemed beneficial to nature, and planting 100 hectares of woodland.

According to Julie Foley, director of flood risk strategy and national adaptation at the Environment Agency, they are now working on a target to double the number of natural flood management projects from 130 to 260 before 2027.

‘We are working with Government to look at ways in which we can look at funding rules to better reflect the benefits of natural flood management so it can become the first choice rather than the second choice,’ she tells me. Britain’s bogs, she adds, are places of ‘huge potential’ increasing our resilience to wildfires and summer droughts.

One ongoing challenge of peatland restoration, explains Dean, is the difficulty in showing people the benefits. Unlike say, a large-scale tree-planting programme, a re-wetted moor can be somewhat underwhelming to the untrained eye.‘If we’ve done it right, there is nothing to see,’ he admits. ‘We can spend a million pounds on a hillside and five years later people can look at it and ask, where did that go?’

To truly appreciate a bog, you have to look down. Here lurking in the dark treacle water lies an astonishing variety of plants: the brilliant green constellations of sphagnum moss, orange fruits of cloudberry and even the carnivorous sundew, which traps insects in its sticky secretions.

Healthy wetlands attract rare heathland butterflies and red-listed specialist wading birds such as curlew and lapwing. In parts of the Peak District, mountain hares still lope over the moorland grass. This is what happens when we embrace our bogs, Dean insists: a lost world envelops the mire.

Opinion

Idaho at the epicenter of American Redoubt, white Christian nationalism movement 


Bob Kustra
Sun, April 9, 2023 

It’s not often I read a book about our challenging times and find Idaho prominently featured, but that’s how things turned out when I read “Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next,” by Bradley Onishi.

The author, a former white Christian nationalist with nine years in the evangelical movement, including six years in ministry, left the church, earned a doctorate in religious studies and assumed a teaching position at the University of San Francisco.

He wrote “Preparing for War” after Jan. 6, 2021, when he realized that the terrorist assault on the Capitol was the result of white Christian nationalist rhetoric over the years. The book explains how the rise of the new religious right gave birth to white Christian nationalism and how it might play out in the future in even more dangerous and destructive ways.

He now describes his former church affiliation as a movement thoroughly entrenched in American nationalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and xenophobia.

Onishi draws an important distinction between white evangelicalism and white Christian nationalism, which he claims far exceeds the boundaries of white evangelicalism.

White Christian nationalism marries cross and flag and creates the myth of America founded as a Christian nation. It also reflects on what it sees as America’s covenant with God in recognizing its past glory when straight white Christians had exclusive control of America’s politics and culture. Finally, such loyalty and obedience to a God whose nation has failed him creates an apocalyptic vision for white Christian nationalists to act out of a crisis narrative that demands the kind of immediate action we witnessed on Jan. 6.

Brad Onishi had a front-row seat in the growth of the evangelical movement in Orange County, California, where he was raised. He witnessed the Sun Belt migration as white Southerners headed West to recreate their own version of white Christianity, a potpourri of Christian nationalist mythology, libertarian economics and cowboy individualism. Voila! Orange County becomes the epicenter of white Christian nationalism. But its vision was overridden by a California that won the Oscar for the most liberal state in the Union, far outnumbering the white conservatives in Orange County.

And here’s the part of the narrative where Idaho appears stage right. An entire chapter is devoted to an influx of conservative Californians and white Christian nationalists to Idaho and neighboring states.

Onishi credits James Wesley Rawles, a former military intelligence officer, with applying the term American Redoubt to the intermountain states of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and parts of Eastern Washington. The American Redoubt is the intermountain region where white Christian nationalists seek to take over local governments and cultivate Christian nationalist churches, all toward the goal of setting up a theocratic society. Rawles’ website expands on the preparedness required for a Second Civil War he predicts between the right and the left.

This is not a tale Idahoans have trouble understanding given Meridian’s recent experience of a California transplant who attempted to abolish the library district. California plates are as plentiful in Boise these days as Idaho potatoes. Although all Californians moving to Idaho certainly do not fit the mold of white Christian nationalist, sidle up to a bar in Boise next to a displaced Californian and you are likely to hear a lecture on how expensive it is to live in California and how much his home’s equity was worth in the Idaho housing market. But it’s also possible that you will get a riff on the liberal state and the conservative ecstasy of living in a state where the right wing is in its ascendancy.

Onishi counts at least 50 people from his home community of Yorba Linda who he knows have moved to Idaho, which he claims has gone from “flyover country” to the hottest region west of the Mississippi. No argument there.

Some Idahoans when first hearing of California’s “wagon train in reverse” heading to the Gem State may rejoice to think of the newbies serving as a moderating influence on Idaho’s increasingly conservative politics. Onishi dashes those expectations by citing Boise State research showing the new Californians more conservative than native Idahoans.

Onishi portrays many of our new residents as seeking a self-segregated white Christian society without the bother of religious, racial or ethnic minorities. I’m sure Boiseans could quibble with Onishi on some of his generalizations applying to their city, but it’s very difficult to question his premise when you leave Boise for the rest of Idaho. Onishi cites various iterations of the American Redoubt, naming and quoting political/religious leaders setting up their own Christian fortresses in Moscow and Coeur d’Alene, Idaho and Spokane, Washington.

No matter where you travel in the United States today, there is a recognition of Boise as a city on the move and a state growing by leaps and bounds. What is less obvious is this parade of people who move to Idaho to separate themselves from the United States of America, not just California. They are hoping they can remove themselves from a nation growing increasingly diverse by finding refuge in Idaho and other intermountain states.

A manifestation of the Redoubt’s effort at the state level to assume control of Idaho’s local governments is the ongoing attack Republican legislators wage on what they call “woke” ideology but is really nothing but an assault on a compendium of current statutes that trust local governments to act on behalf of their citizens.

They also target the word “diversity” in their efforts to expunge any reference to schools’ preparing students for a workplace and society quite different from the all-white existence these extremists attempt to build in Idaho. And they continue to take aim at their favorite target — the teaching of racism and America’s history of slave holding, which they package in neatly bound critiques of gibberish that ignores our slave-holding past and the racism still deeply embedded in our society.

If you travel out Military Reserve Road, you can visit the Fort Boise Military cemetery of Civil War veterans’ graves and headstones. On its website, you can read about reports of the cemetery haunted by spirits that roam the area. Apparently, those spirits have found their way to the State’s Capitol where the American Redoubt’s Second Civil War pits those clear-eyed and proud about the diversity of America against Idaho Republicans who bow in reverence to those who seek a White Redoubt.

Which shall it be for Idaho’s future? The answer is ours to complete.

Bob Kustra served as president of Boise State University from 2003 to 2018. He is host of Readers Corner on Boise State Public Radio and is a regular columnist for the Idaho Statesman. He served two terms as Illinois lieutenant governor and 10 years as a state legislator.

DISASTER CAPITALI$M

Disturbing Clues at Fukushima Nuclear Plant May Be an Omen for Another Disaster

Darren Orf
Sun, April 9, 2023 

New Fukushima Images Raise Safety ConcernsMatt Cardy - Getty Images

On March 11, 2011, Japan’s Fukushima prefecture experienced a devastating earthquake and tsunami, which killed upwards of 20,000 people.

One of the lasting legacies of the earthquake is the extensive damage to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant that experienced meltdowns in three of its six nuclear reactors.

Twelve years later, the clean up and decommission of the plant continues, and new evidence suggests that at least one reactor could be vulnerable to future earthquakes

On March 11, 2011, at 2:46 p.m. local time, Japan experienced a 9.1 magnitude earthquake—the biggest earthquake in the country’s recorded history—80 miles off the coast of Sendai. The shaking lasted six minutes, but the earthquake and the resulting 50-foot tsunami caused immense devastation and death, killing upwards of 20,000 people.

Twelve years later, Japan is still recovering from this historic earthquake, and nowhere can this be seen more plainly than at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Although the plant, equipped with six nuclear reactors, terminated fission reactions automatically once it detected the earthquake, the resulting tsunami that arrived less an hour later breached the plant’s seawall and damaged the back-up generators needed to pump coolant to dissipate decay heat. This caused three of the six reactors to experience a meltdown over the next 72 hours.

Because of the immense radiation inside these reactors, engineers still don’t know the exact extent of the meltdowns. But for years, robotic rovers have investigated these highly irradiated zones to get a better understanding of each reactor’s status and—crucially—ability to withstand another earthquake.

Earlier this week, the Associated Press reported that one of these robotic sojourns, conducted by an underwater remotely operated vehicle named ROV-A2, uncovered something troubling: exposed steel bars in the main support structure of Unit 1, along with missing pieces of its external concrete wall.

Located right under the nuclear core of Unit 1, this support structure wasn’t in jeopardy of failing on its own, but experts worried about its ability to withstand another earthquake if one were to strike. Because decommissioning and cleaning up Fukushima Daiichi will likely take decades to fully complete, the plant experiencing more earthquakes is likely. Just last year, the region was hit by another earthquake—thankfully the tremor was some 63 times less powerful than the devastating disaster in 2011.

Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (TEPCO), which operates Fukushima Daiichi, says that it will analyze the video taken by the underwater drone, along with other data, in the coming months to figure out ways to improve the unit’s earthquake resistance. This a priority, as 880 tons of melted nuclear fuel remains inside the three failed reactors—that’s about 10 times the fuel removed during the Three Mile Island clean up after the 1979 meltdown, according to the Associated Press.

Although nuclear disasters like Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima grab headlines, nuclear energy as a whole is actually a safer source of energy than its fossil fuel alternatives, eliminating mining deaths and helping to lower the number of people who die from pollution every year. The U.S. Department of Energy recognizes the need for nuclear to address climate change, and everything scientists and engineers can learn from this disaster will only make future nuclear reactors safer.

LEAKY SHIP OF STATE TOO

US hit by ‘worst leak of secret documents since Edward Snowden’

Roland Oliphant
Sat, April 8, 2023

JOE HAS DARK OILY PUPILS FROM X FILES

Joe Biden, the US president. The White House is investigating the appearance of highly classified briefing documents related to Ukraine on social media - Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

The United States is facing possibly its worst intelligence leak since Edward Snowden flew to Moscow after a new batch of classified documents appeared on social media.

More than 100 classified documents relating to Ukraine, China, the Middle East, the Pacific, and terrorism are now believed to be in the public domain after they were posted in an obscure internet forum last month.

It comes after White House officials said they were investigating the appearance of highly classified briefing documents related to Ukraine on Twitter on Thursday.

The US Department of Justice said it had launched an investigation into the leak.

American officials said Russia or pro-Russian elements were likely behind the leak, but did not give further details.

Phillip Ingram, a retired senior British military intelligence officer, said the leak was "very significant" and potentially deeply damaging.

“It shows a failure at the very highest levels of classification,” he said. “These are top secret or above top secret. They are daily briefing documents for senior US decision-makers at joint chiefs - or potentially presidential - level.

“If it is genuine, the Americans have a very serious problem. The biggest since Edward Snowden.”
Briefings marked 'top secret'

The initial leak consisted of briefing documents dated March 1 and marked "secret" and "top secret", which began to appear on Twitter and Telegram on Thursday.

They included battle maps, casualty estimates, and a timeline for the integration of Western equipment into the Ukrainian army.

Some had been crudely doctored to increase the Ukrainian casualties and reduce the Russian ones.

One of the slides says the Ukrainian Security Service believed its own agents may have disobeyed orders and carried out the drone attack on a Russian A-50 aircraft at a Belarusian airbase on Feb 26.

The attribution suggests it was sourced from a signals intercept, which in turn suggests the Americans are eavesdropping on Ukrainian communications.

The new tranche began to circulate on social media channels on Friday.

As well as more Ukraine documents, they include an assessment of Chinese diplomatic pressure on Jordan and other issues in the Middle East and Pacific regions.

Both sets of documents carry designations that mean they should have been accessible only to a very small group of people.

Some are marked "NOFORN", or not releasable to foreign nationals, which is reserved for very high-level intelligence that the Americans do not want to share even with their Five Eyes intelligence allies Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand.

Others are labelled "ORCON", or originator-controlled, meaning the agency that provided the intelligence retains full control of who can see it or which parts are replicated or disseminated.

A CIA spokesman said the agency was also aware of the posts and was looking into the claims, but would not comment on the source.

Although the leaks are likely to trigger fears of a highly placed Russian spy in the US, it would be unusual to burn such a valuable mole by releasing their intelligence online.

Aric Toler, a researcher with the Dutch investigative group Bellingcat, established that the first batch of more than 30 documents appeared to have been posted on an obscure chat server on March 1 and 2 - within a day of them being created.

The user who put them there, who goes by the username Lucca, told Mr Toler that he found the files on a third - now deleted - Discord server called Thug Shaker Central, and that there were many more of them.

“Basically, he and some friends were in a tiny Discord server and one of the guys there was posting hundreds upon hundreds of leaked documents,” said Mr Toler. “The leaked files went back at least to January of this year. The earliest I've seen a trace of is Jan 15."

The leaks cover only a small period of time, but include information the Russians may find useful.

One revealed Ukraine is running low on medium-to-high altitude air-defence missiles and could run out of them by the beginning of May - information Russia could use to plan its air campaign.

It also gives the names and training timetables for nine brigades being prepared to lead Ukraine's spring offensive. It reveals which units are receiving advanced Western kit, including the unit receiving British Challenger II tanks.

It says the offensive will begin at any time from April 1, but does not say where the main blow might fall.

The Discord server that Mr Toler tracked the leaks to belongs to a popular YouTube channel called Wow Mao, which creates “low effort” meme videos with titles like “which Communist would you smoke with?” and “who is the better philosopher? Diogenes versus Jordan Peterson”.

A few days later, some of those files were reposted to another Discord server for players of Minecraft, a video game popular among teenagers in which players explore a vast virtual world with blocky graphics and build structures from cubes.

Then, on Wednesday last week, three of those files were reposted from the Minecraft server to 4Chan, a message board about Japanese animation that is notorious for spawning far-right memes like Pepe the Frog and the “Incel”, or involuntarily celibate, movement made up on sexually frustrated young men.

It was at this point the crude adjustments to the casualty figures were added to one of the files.

The 4chan images were then quickly picked up by pro-Russian war bloggers, who posted them on Telegram and Twitter - prompting the White House to launch an investigation on Thursday.

That convoluted path makes tracing the original poster difficult.

It also suggests the leak was obtained opportunistically, perhaps by hacking, rather than by a highly-placed Russian mole. It would be reckless to blow such a valuable spy's cover by releasing the intelligence they obtained publicly.

Many commentators, including pro-Russian war bloggers, cautioned that the initial leak could be false information deliberately released by the US to mislead Russia ahead of Ukraine’s anticipated spring offensive.

Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, said the leaks contained a "very large amount of fictitious information" and was probably a Russian fabrication to sow confusion between Ukraine and its allies.

"These are just standard elements of operational games by Russian intelligence. And nothing more," he wrote.



Mark Galeotti, an expert on the Russian security services, said the leaks did not seem to have been concocted by Moscow, and that the American reaction suggested the papers were genuine.

“The Russians have proven on the whole quite poor at doing really realistic fabrications,” he said.

“And if it was a total fabrication, the Americans would have dismissed it as such. As far as I know, they haven’t - they’re saying things like ‘we don’t comment on this sort of thing’.”

"The main value to the Russians is in embarrassing the Americans and raising questions about their security. This will give the Ukrainian even more excuses not to be that candid with DC."

Why Leaked Pentagon Documents Are Still Circulating on Social Media

Ryan Mac and Kellen Browning

New York Times
Sun, April 9, 2023 

The Pentagon in Arlington, Va., on April 18, 2021. (Stefani Reynolds/The New York Times)

Twitter and social media platform Discord have various policies that might have prompted them to remove the leaked Pentagon documents that Biden administration officials say revealed key information about U.S. intelligence gathering operations.

But gray areas in those rules and uneven enforcement of them make it unclear how, or even if, executives at those companies would decide to remove them.

As of Saturday, Twitter continued to host tweets with the Pentagon’s documents, some of which had been up since at least Wednesday. There is no indication that Elon Musk, who bought Twitter nearly six months ago, will take any action against the tweets with the classified documents.

Two days earlier, Musk seemed to respond sarcastically to a tweet about the leaked material. “Yeah, you can totally delete things from the Internet — that works perfectly and doesn’t draw attention to whatever you were trying to hide at all,” he wrote.

On Discord, which is a messaging platform popular with video game players, the Pentagon documents may have been circulating as early as March. Since Discord chat groups — known as servers — are not directly managed by the company as a Facebook or Twitter feed is, the distribution of the Pentagon documents would have been difficult to spot.

Musk did not respond to a request for comment Saturday, and Discord declined to comment. It is not known if the companies, which are both based in the United States, have been asked to remove the Pentagon material.

In the past, Twitter may have removed the material under rules that prohibit the publication and distribution of hacked materials, two former executives told The New York Times. Under this policy, Twitter would remove tweets with “real or synthesized hacked materials” or place warning labels on the material. Some of the Pentagon material circulating on social media may have been manipulated.

But there were caveats to Twitter’s rules, as they were described in a policy document, which was last updated in October 2020. The rules allowed for exceptions for material that forms the basis for reporting by news agencies. And debates inside social media companies about what to allow online have often been similar to discussions that traditional media have about whether leaked or hacked material is of enough public interest to justify publishing.

It was not clear Saturday whether the Pentagon material was hacked or intentionally leaked — the images circulating appeared to be photographs of documents. The documents could fall into a gray area that, at least in the past, would have led to discussion among compliance officers inside the company about whether they qualified for a takedown.

Twitter used its hacked-material policy to block the circulation of an article in October 2020 from the New York Post that said the FBI had seized a computer that purportedly belonged to Joe Biden’s son Hunter. Twitter’s leaders, including then-CEO Jack Dorsey, later called the decision a mistake.

The former executives, who spoke to the Times on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from Musk, said Twitter often received reports of potential violations of its polices from U.S. government organizations.

But since acquiring the company in October, Musk has shrunk the groups responsible for moderation and more than 75% of Twitter’s 7,500 employees have been fired or have left. Ella Irwin, Twitter’s head of trust and safety, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Twitter has removed or prevented the circulation of content at the behest of governments such as India and on Musk’s whims.

This past week, Twitter also began regulating the circulation and engagement of links to Substack, a newsletter platform, after the startup unveiled a Twitter-like service. On Friday, many Substack writers found that tweets that had links to their Substack pages could not be liked or retweeted.

Discord surged in popularity during the pandemic, moving beyond its video game roots. By late 2021, the platform had more than 150 million active users each month.

Discord provides so-called servers that are essentially chatrooms, where people can discuss their hobbies and message with one another or join audio calls. Some servers are public and contain thousands of people, while others — such as servers made just for a group of friends — are private.

This arrangement has enabled Discord to thrive but has also led to problems with harmful content. Ensuring that Discord users follow the platform’s policies and refrain from posting inappropriate or questionable material has largely been left up to the individuals who create the servers, some of whom deputize members of the server communities to help enforce rules.

The private nature of some of these groups means they can easily escape detection or moderation.

In 2017, white nationalists organized the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on far-right Discord servers. Company executives were aware the white nationalists were using the platform but did not remove them until after the rally.

Discord said it had since beefed up its content-moderation team, and the company’s CEO, Jason Citron, said in a 2021 interview that 15% of his employees worked on trust and safety teams.

Still, the company did not discover Discord messages in a private server posted by the shooter who killed 10 people at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, last spring. In the messages, the shooter posted racist remarks and appeared to detail how he planned to carry out the attack. After the shooting, Discord said it was investigating the postings and working with law enforcement agencies.

In its most recent transparency report, covering the last three months of 2022, Discord said it had disabled more than 150,000 accounts for policy violations that ranged from “harassment and bullying” to “exploitative and unsolicited content.” The number of accounts it had disabled was a 17% decrease from the three months before that, the company said.

c.2023 The New York Times Company

LEAKY SHIP OF STATE

Israel rejects claim Mossad backed judiciary overhaul protests


Demonstration against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his nationalist coalition government's judicial overhaul, in Tel Aviv

Reuters
Sun, April 9, 2023

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel's government on Sunday rejected claims raised in documents allegedly leaked from the Pentagon that leaders of its foreign intelligence service Mossad had supported nationwide protests against a proposed overhaul of Israel's judiciary.

The New York Times on Saturday published an assessment it attributed to a Central Intelligence Update from March 1 that Mossad leadership had encouraged its staff and Israeli citizens to join the mass protests. The paper said that while the leaked documents seemed authentic, it did not mean they were accurate.

The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement that the report was "mendacious and without any foundation whatsoever".

"The Mossad and its senior officials did not – and do not – encourage agency personnel to join the demonstrations against the government, political demonstrations or any political activity," it said.

Netanyahu's overhaul plan has sparked unprecedented public anger since his coalition of hard-right and religious parties came to power late last year, and has also caused alarm among Israel's Western allies.

The proposed legislation would enable parliament to override Supreme Court decisions and hold control over judicial appointments.

After weeks of intensifying demonstrations, Netanyahu in late March relented and said he would delay the contested reforms to allow for compromise talks with opposition parties.

The U.S. Justice Department said on Friday it was in touch with the Defense Department and had began a probe into the leak of the alleged documents, covering several subjects relating to national security. It declined further comment.

(Reporting by Ari Rabinovitch; Editing by Alison Williams)

US has real UFO problem and it’s not Chinese spy balloons, says former Navy fighter pilot

Nick Allen
Sat, April 8, 2023 

THIS IS NOT A UFO, ITS A FLYING SAUCER 

IDENTIFIED SINCE 1952

Lieutenant Ryan Graves is leading an effort to encourage reporting of sightings of what the military calls Unidentified Aerial Phenomena - Science Photo Library RF

A former US Navy fighter pilot has told how his squadron encountered UFOs almost daily for months while training off the American coast.

The sightings included a near collision with an object that appeared like a cube inside a sphere, and a close encounter with a fleet of objects moving at 120 knots into the wind.

Lieutenant Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot, is now leading an effort to encourage reporting of sightings, and advocating for scientific study of what the military calls Unidentified Aerial Phenomena [UAPs].

Last year, Congress held its first hearing into UAPs for 50 years, and the Pentagon has received 350 new reports in the last two years, 171 of which remain unexplained.

Sealed-off block of airspace

Lt Graves told the Telegraph how in 2014 his squadron - the VFA-11 “Red Rippers” - was based on the USS Theodore Roosevelt, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, preparing for a deployment to the Persian Gulf.

The pilots trained in a sealed-off block of airspace called W-72 off the coast of Virginia, where nothing else was allowed to fly.

After the planes’ radar was upgraded pilots began picking up objects in the training area.

They were initially dismissed as radar errors, but then they flew closer and started seeing them on their FLIR systems, which are infrared cameras that detect heat.

“It was almost as if the sun was shining a flashlight [on the UAPs],” said Lt Graves. “We would have them on a radar, and then we’d have a FLIR. We’d fly by them as low as we could trying to see them.

“We were trying to figure out what the heck these things were. We were seeing them pretty much daily. We’d go out there and they’d be out there in the morning, they’d be out there in the evening.

“These things were pretty much always out there. That would range from two to three of them, to six or seven.”

Then, the near collision happened when an object passed right between two jets, within 50ft of the lead aircraft.

Lt Graves said the pilot involved was shaken up after landing back on the carrier.
Black cube inside of a clear sphere

“He said ‘I almost hit one of those damn things!’ and we all knew what he was talking about,” he said.

“It was completely stationary and he described it as a dark grey or black cube inside of a clear sphere.

“He cancelled the flight, not trusting his ability to clear his airspace in front of him.”

The pilots began operating in different parts of their training area to avoid hitting the unidentified objects.

In early 2015 the USS Theodore Roosevelt relocated, as scheduled, from Virginia to Jacksonville, Florida.

But the sightings of UAPs continued near the ship even though it had moved 600 miles south.

That was when an F/A-18 pilot filmed one of the most famous of all UFO videos, showing an object looking like a “spinning top” or “gimbal”.

“It was a unique object that we recorded on one particular night only,” said Lt Graves.

THIS IS A UFO/UAP

Video grab image shows part of an unclassified video taken by Navy pilots showing interactions with unidentified aerial phenomena - AFP

“One aircraft from my squadron, they were returning to the boat, they were east of the ship, about three or four miles off the shore. That’s when they saw the gimbal.”

On the video, which was later declassified, the pilots can be heard shouting “Oh my gosh!” and “Look at that thing dude!” and “It’s rotating!”

Lt Graves was in the post-flight briefing with other pilots and a sizeable group of “intelligence folks”.

He said: “No one thought this was benign. It was very clear that this was unusual and outside the normal.

“What you don’t see [on the declassified footage] is the radar information, which shows a formation of four to six objects that were operating kind of outward of the gimbal.

“They turned very quickly, and they all kind of got jumbled up, and then they rolled out and reformed in the opposite direction. They turned, it was a sharp turn.”

He added: “I don’t know 100 per cent if they were the same objects we were seeing before [off Virginia].”

Americans for Safe Aerospace

Since leaving the Navy, Lt Graves has launched Americans for Safe Aerospace, which is aimed at promoting reporting of UAPs, aiming to help coordination between the public and private sectors.

He said: “I think it’s moving in the right direction. I think a lot of the cultural baggage that had prevented the reporting has gone away, at least in the Navy, I can’t speak for other branches.

“I’ve been getting reports from people that are still flying out there, that are still seeing these objects.

“Some of them were describing cubes and spheres. I’ve heard it described over the course of eight or nine years, basically the same object being reported. Also nondescript, white objects are reported as well.”

He added: “We have to be aware that there are objects in our airspace and we are not fully aware of what they are. Uncertainty in our airspace is a national security threat.”

In terms of what they could be - foreign drones, extraterrestrial - he doesn’t know.

“An F/A 18 is not a proper scientific tool for understanding what we’re seeing,” said Lt Graves.

“So we need to gather more data. There’s a lot of things on the table, but we need more data.

“We’re just not at a point where we can draw conclusions.”

Looking for Orthon: The Story of George Adamski, the First Flying Saucer Contactee, and How He Changed the World

 
Paperback – September 1, 2008
by Colin Bennett (Author)

On November 20, 1952, George Adamski first made contact with extraterrestrials-including a long-haired youth from Venus named Orthon-in the California desert. or so he claimed. He offered photographic proof. He wrote books about his encounters, including the sensational bestseller Flying Saucers Have Landed. He never stopped advocating the truth of his claims even as he came under extraordinary ridicule. And in the process, however inadvertently, Adamski invented the modern mass counterculture. This new edition of Colin Bennett's modern classic posits, in the author's uniquely engaging style, Adamski as a kind of unwitting performance artist who "structured one of the most blatant acts of visionary cheek of the twentieth century," introducing the jittery postwar Western world to the image of the UFO, which confounded and tweaked authority while also fully embodying Cold War neuroses. Whether Adamski was telling the truth or not is almost irrelevant-though Bennett has his own ideas about Adamski's veracity. What remains compelling about Adamski's bizarre and compelling tale of alien visitations is the transformative power of stories, even if they're false, to warp our culture on a grand scale.

Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953)

In 1953, Desmond Leslie and George Adamski wrote and published Flying Saucers Have Landed. This book became a bestseller with its combination of a historic look at UFO sightings dating from the 1290 AD and a first-hand account of a sighting from the 1940s. This book and a second title by Adamski sold over 200,000 copies in the 1950s.

George Adamski was involved in the California occult scene in the early 20th century. Prior to his interest in flying saucers, he created the religious movement Royal Order of Tibet in which he served as the philosopher-guru. During his time over this group, he received permission from the United States government to make wine for "religious purposes," which ended up being financially lucrative as he sold much of the wine.

By the 1950s, Adamski had moved beyond the Royal Order of Tibet to focus on the burgeoning UFO movement. In the 1940s, he claimed to have seen a flying saucer, which is famously known because of its cigar shape. Even though Adamski became quite the UFO celebrity, his sightings have been proven to be hoaxes.

For the book, Desmond Leslie was tasked with writing a history of UFO sightings and general information about flying saucers and aliens. Unlike Adamski, Leslie's fame wasn't based on the sightings of unidentified flying objects. Leslie was a close cousin of Winston Churchill and the heir to Castle Leslie, an impressive Irish estate famously known as the wedding venue for Sir Paul McCartney and his second wife Heather Mills who wed in the Leslie family church.

Leslie's fame came from when he punched theatre critic Bernard Levin on the BBC1 show That Was the Week It Was in front of 11 million viewers. Levin had written a critical review of the performance of Leslie's wife prompting the altercation. In addition, Leslie is often credited with being an early adopter of electronic music  with some of his soundscapes being used in early Dr. Who episodes.

Special Collections' copy of Flying Saucers Have Landed has a one-of-a-kind aluminum foil wrapper around the book. Foil hats are often used by UFO aficionados and conspiracy theorists to repel electromagnetic radiation and prevent mindreading. This foil cover references the belief that aliens can employ mind control techniques.

For more information about this item or any of the materials in Special Collections, contact Jennifer Brannock at Jennifer.Brannock@usm.edu or 601-266-4347.

Text by Jennifer Brannock, Curator of Rare Books & Mississippiana.

Archaeologists revisit Jersey's Neanderthal site



BBC
Sat, April 8, 2023

Archaeologists will be exploring Jersey's Ice Age history through a collection of artefacts from a Neanderthal site.

The items were found at La Cotte à la Chèvre, a small cave near Grosnez on the north coast.

Experts say the site suggests that Neanderthals lived and hunted in Jersey 250,000 years ago.

The team will catalogue items, which include about 16,000 stone tools, animal bones and sediment samples.

The archaeologists will be in Jersey for three weeks working alongside Jersey Heritage's curator of archaeology Olga Finch.

Most of the artefacts have been stored in bags or boxes since they were excavated in the early 20th Century and 1960s, said Jersey Heritage.

The team will be led by Dr Josie Mills, who has studied Palaeolithic sites in Jersey since 2010.

Dr Mills said: "La Cotte à la Chèvre is an important site for understanding Jersey's Ice Age past.

"By repackaging and cataloguing the artefacts, we hope to reveal more about how Neanderthals used this site and how it compares to the larger and better-known La Cotte de St Brelade at Ouaisné.

"I am so excited to be working back in Jersey after a long hiatus due to the pandemic."

People will also have a chance to learn more about La Cotte à la Chèvre through a free guided walk around the area led by Dr Mills on 16 April and a free talk on 4 May at Sir Francis Cook Gallery.

AMA's first gay president to take over at tumultuous time


American Medical Association President-Elect Dr. Jesse M. Ehrenfeld poses for a picture in his office at the Medical College of Wisconsin Friday, March 24, 2023, in Milwaukee. At 44, Ehrenfeld will be among the AMA's youngest presidents when he begins his one-year term on June 13.

 (AP Photo/Morry Gash)

LINDSEY TANNER
Fri, April 7, 2023

CHICAGO (AP) — The first openly gay person to lead the American Medical Association takes the reins at a fractious time for U.S. health care.

Transgender patients and those seeking abortion care face restrictions in many places. The medical judgment of physicians is being overridden by state laws. Disinformation is rampant. And the nation isn’t finished with COVID-19.

In the two decades since Dr. Jesse Ehrenfeld first got involved with the AMA as young medical resident, the nation’s largest physicians’ group has tried to shed its image as a conservative self-interested trade association. While physician pocketbook issues remain a big focus, the AMA is also a powerful lobbying force for a range of public health issues.

Two years ago, the AMA won widespread praise for announcing a plan to dismantle structural racism within its ranks and the U.S. medical establishment. It has adopted policies that stress health equity and inclusiveness — moves that inspired critics to accuse it of “wokeness."

At 44, Ehrenfeld will be among the AMA's youngest presidents when he begins his one-year term on June 13. An anesthesiologist, Navy combat veteran and father of two young children, he spoke recently to The Associated Press about his background and new job.

The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Q. Why is your being part of the LGBTQ community a big deal at this moment and how will it inform your role as AMA president?

A: I didn’t run as a gay man. That’s not my platform, but it’s a part of my identity. And people know that.

Representation and visibility is so important. I can’t tell you the number of emails, letters, phone calls, text messages that I got when I was elected into this role from people around the world that saw this as an important moment, an important recognition of what inclusivity and equality can be to help advance health equity for everyone.

Q: How will your experience as part of the LGBTQ community inform and influence your new role?

A: I’ve experienced the health care system as a gay person, as a gay parent, as in many ways wonderful positive experiences and other ways, some deeply harmful experiences. And I know that we can do better as a nation. We can do better as a system that can lift up health. And I expect that there’ll be opportunities to shine a light on that during my year as president.

Q: What are examples of those experiences?

A: There’s so many times where our health care system just does not accommodate people who aren’t in the majority. As a gay parent and a gay dad, I can’t tell you how many forms I filled out where there’s a place for the mom and a place for the dad. It’s a small thing. But it’s a signal that we’re different and maybe we’re not welcome or accepted.

When you have those small, subtle irritations that add up day after day after day, whether you’re an LGBT person or from a minority group, that causes stress. These friction points … are so pronounced for so many who are in underserved communities, so many in the LGBT community, and particularly for transgender individuals. And I know we can do better.

I’ve been fortunate to have two beautiful boys brought into this world with the support of an incredible group of physicians. But there were definitely lots of moments along the way where it was clear that we were a little bit different than everybody else in a way that didn’t need to be.

Q: This seems like an unprecedented time for political interference in medicine.

A: I’m deeply concerned about government intrusion into decision-making for patients. The Supreme Court ruling around abortion has had profound implications for reproductive rights. And fundamentally, patients have a right to access evidence-based health care services. That includes comprehensive reproductive health care. It includes care for transgender people.

States that ban abortion, that ban health care for transgender youth are placing the government right into the patient-physician relationship. And we know that this leads to devastating health consequences and can jeopardize lives. The AMA continues to speak out against these kinds of actions.

Q: What power does the AMA really have to protect those rights?

A: I don’t think we’re powerless at all. The AMA was deeply involved in helping the Biden Administration put out guidance to help physicians and patients understand that you don’t have to disclose private medical information to third parties. And we’ll continue to call for things like unrestricted access to (the abortion drug) mifepristone.

Q: Are you discouraged by the number of states that seem to be jumping on this bandwagon?

A: I’m an optimist. There are particular political divisions that are different right now. The attack on science, the attack on following the evidence to deliver care is new. Globally, it has accelerated during the pandemic, but the rampant misinformation, disinformation — all of those challenges are things I know we can overcome. It requires the AMA to lift up our voices and to not give up.

Q: Will addressing the nation’s mental health crisis be part of your role?

A: We need Congress to take action. There have been 15 years now of repeated failures by health care companies to comply with what was a landmark law in 2008 around mental health parity and substance use disorder.

That law passed by Congress has never been enforced. Those violations continue to be more serious than they were a decade ago.

It affects patients with autism. It affects patients with eating disorders, substance use disorders. It delays care. It’s harming patients.

And we are likely causing deaths to happen that are avoidable. We know that there are federal actions that could be taken to help with this, including enabling patients to recover losses associated with an improper denial of care.

The other aspect around mental health access that is really important is permanently expanding access to telehealth.

Q: Critics have long said the AMA is primarily a self-interested trade group. How is that a misconception?

A: We have a pretty simple message, and it’s to elevate the art and science of medicine for the betterment of human health. And that’s why we care about things like climate change and things like health equity.

We have to make sure that there is joy in the practice of medicine. We have to make sure that our health care systems reward and support and allow practices to thrive.

And you look at boneheaded decisions like the fact that physicians got a 2% pay cut from Medicare this past January as opposed to an inflation update. Those are things that are important. They’re financial.

But without advocacy in those realms, practices will close. Medicare patients won’t have a doctor to see. And we just we can’t allow that to happen.

___

Follow AP Medical Writer Lindsey Tanner at @LindseyTanner. ___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.