Why UC workers say they must sleep in their cars to do their jobs for the wages paid

Cathie Anderson
Wed, August 23, 2023 


Xavier Mascareñas/xmascarenas@sacbee.com

LONG READ

Veronika Honcharuk drives 133 miles one way to get to her job in San Francisco from her home in Placerville. She logs patients’ admission information in the emergency department at UCSF’s Helen Diller Medical Center.

She works 12 hours a shift, three days a week. To clear enough money to cover her parking ($300), gas ($600) and her car payment ($400) each month, she must put in a week and a half at her job.

Honcharuk’s employer frequently offers her the opportunity to work overtime, she said, and she usually takes it because she needs the money.

But if she works those extra hours, she will likely sleep in her car until the next shift rather than making the journey home and back. The drive time would eat up five to six hours.

Step into the world of low-wage workers at the University of California where overtime is a necessity, affordable housing is a super-commute away and cars double as bedrooms. Now, thousands of UC workers are demanding a wage increase that would allow them to alter this reality.

“I’d love to get a new car. It would definitely help to pay my mortgage and to put more money into savings,” Honcharuk said. “There’s not a lot left over once you’ve paid a mortgage and car bill and the phone bill and all these bills. They all add up. You don’t have a lot to put aside for security.”

The UC Board of Regents could better the lives of nearly a quarter of UC employees with pay increases that would equal to 2.5% of its current operating budget — or even less, according to researchers for Honcharuk’s union, AFSCME Local 3299. They make their case for two separate wage proposals in a report being released Wednesday titled “Priced Out: The University of California’s Role in the Affordability Crisis.”

The University of California, responding to a query from The Bee, said it had not yet seen the AFSCME researchers’ report but that its leaders are open to discussing the wage proposals. Outside a recent regents meeting, AFSCME workers shouted their demands for a $25 minimum wage and across-the-board wage increases of 5% for AFSCME members currently earning more than that. The union and the UC will open talks on a new contract in January.

“UC is aware of and has been reviewing the union’s public campaign around $25/5%,” system leaders said in a statement issued by the UC Office of the President. “If that is the economic proposal that AFSCME brings to the bargaining table in January of 2024, the university will seriously consider it, working with AFSCME through the bargaining process to identify economic terms that are fair, competitive, and reflect the varying economic markets across our state. “

Union: Inflation outpaces pay hikes

While inflation has soared by 12% in California since February 2021, the AFSCME researchers said, pay raises haven’t kept up. In 2020, after three years of bargaining on a new contract, AFSCME workers received a 6% across-the-board wage increase and 3% raises in each successive year. Essentially, this translates into a 5% pay cut for these employees, the researchers said.

The UC Office of the President, however, said that wage gains for AFSCME workers have averaged 5% annually over their four-year-contract because they have received not only across-the-board pay hikes but also annual step increases based on job performance.

AFSCME researchers said a third of their members and none of the unrepresented student workers qualify for step increases, and pay increases for these workers pale in comparison to the market-based adjustments that the system has given higher-paid workers.

Average pay for UC chancellors has jumped by 34% since 2021, to the equivalent of $320 per hour, they said, and pay for senior managers rose 12% over a similar time period to $226 per hour.

Even before those salary bumps, the researchers said, these affluent employees were far better-positioned to weather escalating inflation than AFSCME Local 3299’s membership.

Those inflationary pressures jolted Honcharuk, 22, and her husband last year when their landlord told them that the monthly rate on their three-bedroom duplex in Carmichael would jump 24.4% to $2,800.

After discussing it, the couple decided that, rather than paying so much on rent, they should put that money into a home where they could build some equity.

“We thought, if we’re gonna be paying almost $3,000 for rent, we would look for a larger place or like a good place to live so we can still take in our parents who had to move out of the state,” Honcharuk said. “When they come to visit, we want some space for them.”

Honcharuk was born in Carmichael, but she quickly realized that she might not find a home there in her price range of $500,000 or less. The couple toured numerous Sacramento-area homes, but many required extensive repairs, Honcharuk said. By looking farther in a more rural county, she said, they finally found a three-bedroom home in Placerville.

Commute times climb

Since the move in December, Honcharuk said, her commute has taken two to three hours one way, up from the 1.5 hours she spent on the road from Carmichael. Four days of work had covered half the rent in Carmichael. Honcharuk now must work six days to earn half their mortgage payment.

The couple could not have afforded so much space if they lived closer to their jobs in San Francisco. Honcharuk’s husband Mike has been working as a supervisor in the ophthalmology department at a different UCSF medical campus. Both applied for jobs at health care systems in Sacramento but didn’t have any luck.

AFSCME researchers say renters in San Francisco pay a median price of $2,665 for a one-bedroom apartment. For 20% more than that, the Honcharuks acquired their three-bedroom house in El Dorado County.

The median pay for AFSCME service and patient care workers is $29.22 an hour, the researchers said, but federal data show a worker would have to earn $51.05 an hour to cover rent and other living expenses near the UCSF campus. Honcharuk earns about $30 an hour.

In 2017, half of the UC’s service and patient care workers could not afford a one-bedroom rental close to work, the researchers said, and 6% of workers would have spent more than half of their gross income on housing if they had rented a place near work.

Today, the researchers said, those numbers are worse: 70% cannot afford the one-bedroom rental, and 15% would have to devote more than 50% of their gross pay to housing if they lived near their UC job. Looking at pay data for only service workers, the researchers discovered that 95% cannot afford a one-bedroom rental close to work.

Davina Woods is one of those service workers. She is a senior custodian at UCLA and has worked there for 12 years, but she earns less than $25 an hour. She and one of her daughters had split rent on a duplex in Long Beach, just a 30-minute drive from her workplace, but five years ago, the duplex owner sold the place and served them with notice that they had to move.

Mother and daughter ended up moving to a four-bedroom family home in San Bernardino, and together with Woods’ two sons, they pooled their money and took over the mortgage payment from an elderly relative.

“I do what I have to do to make ends meet,” Woods said.

The commute to UCLA from San Bernardino takes an hour and 25 minutes on a good day, Woods said. But she often encounters traffic problems, she said, so she leaves the house at 1:30 p.m. so she can start her shift on time at 5:30 p.m. She gets off work at 2 a.m.

Workers push for bigger pay hikes amid labor shortages

Both Honcharuk and Woods said they are regularly asked to take on extra work because of a shortage of workers. While Honcharuk frequently works overtime, Woods said she has been charged with cleaning more areas in the same amount of time. Woods said she is working injured now, coping with tendinitis as well as carpal tunnel syndrome.

“People retired; people quit. People moved to daytime or from daytime to overnight. They have to take time off with injuries,” Woods said, “and they don’t replace them. The positions are open. So they expect us to do their work and do ours, too, and they call that swing.”

Low-wage and middle-class workers nationally tell employers that their pay doesn’t reflect their value to their organizations, said Robert Bruno, director of the labor studies program at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

For four or five decades prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, workers in middle-income or working-class jobs just didn’t have much leverage to negotiate pay or pay increases, he said, accepting raises barely keeping up with inflation.

The gap in income inequality transformed into a gulf, he said, but after being deemed too essential to stay home, many low-wage workers are demanding employers close this gap.

Eight out of 10 Californians with annual incomes below $40,000 said the availability of well-paying jobs in their region is a problem, according to a survey on “Californians and their Economic Wellbeing” released in November by the Public Policy Institute of California.

In that same poll, more than 70% of all Californians surveyed said the income gap between rich and poor is getting larger and they think the government should do more to address income inequality.

Before AFSCME launched its campaign, another big union — this one representing nearly 100,000 people — launched a campaign in spring 2022 urging municipalities around the state to set a minimum wage of $25 for health care workers. The labor group, known as Service Employees International-United Healthcare Workers West, has won approval of its measure in Los Angeles, Long Beach, Downey, Inglewood and Lynwood.

Sacramento City Council Member Katie Valenzuela also tried to get her colleagues to consider a measure like the one SEIU-UHW had backed in other cities, but she said it was effectively killed in committee — at least for now.

“I introduced it because it was really common-sense legislation,” Valenzuela said. “The data shows that you need to be a two-income household, even at $25 an hour, to potentially afford living in Sacramento County.”

Valenzuela said she hopes Democrats in the California legislature will push through Senate Bill 525, introduced by state Sen. Maria Elena Durazo of Los Angeles, to make SEIU-UHW’s proposed $25 minimum wage for health care workers a statewide requirement.

If SB 525 becomes law, more than 469,000 health care workers would gain an average wage increase of more than $5.74 per hour, about a 30% jump in pay, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, Labor Center said in an April 2023 report titled “Proposed Health Care Minimum Wage Increase: What It Would Mean For Workers, Patients and Industry.”

“The low wages paid to health care support workers, direct care workers, and health care service workers in California means they struggle to meet their basic needs; these low wages also significantly contribute to the difficulty in maintaining adequate health care staffing across the state,” wrote labor center researchers Enrique Lopezlira and Ken Jacobs. “Staffing shortages impact patient care, leading to increased wait times, longer hospital stays, and inadequate treatment of chronic illnesses.”

The California Hospital Association and other groups have opposed the bill, however, saying it will raise costs by roughly $8 billion annually and cause severe financial distress for hospitals, nursing homes, physician offices and other health care providers.

“The increase in labor costs will require reducing or eliminating health services to balance revenue and expenses,” CHA Vice President Rony Berdugo wrote in a letter to legislative leaders. “In extreme cases, it will mean bankruptcy and outright closure, especially for those hospitals that are already on the financial brink.”

The hospital industry succeeded in getting referendums challenging the ordinances in Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Downey on the ballot, so implementation is on hold until citywide votes can be held.

The California Nurses Association also has opposed the measure, saying that registered nurses already earn significantly more than $25 an hour and this measure could send a signal to employers that its OK to pay them less than their current median salary.

Why AFSCME Local 3299 is taking up the fight at UC

Even if these local and statewide mandates passed, they apply only to state government and its political subdivisions such as cities, counties and special districts. The University of California is a public trust, not a political subdivision, state courts have ruled, so it cannot be compelled to follow state or local minimum wage laws.

The AFSCME researchers also linked low pay to staffing shortages, pointing out that a number of UC executives have noted that hiring has been challenging during and since the COVID-19 pandemic. The UC often has run a cash surplus, UC finance chief Nathan Brostrom told the regents at a meeting in January, largely because job vacancy rates are three times higher than they were before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Jo Mackness, an assistant vice chancellor at UC Berkeley whose portfolio includes oversight of dining and residential halls, told the regents at a meeting of the finance and capital strategies committee in November that Berkeley is finding it “increasingly difficult” to hire at the pay rates offered at that time.

“One of the areas where we save money is we haven’t spent as much money on compensation, largely because we haven’t been able to fill the vacancies across the system,” she said. “That is beginning to emerge as a risk factor for us, as a university, as a system.”

UC leaders, in the statement sent to The Bee, acknowledged that, to recruit and retain workers to AFSCME-represented jobs in several markets, they have had to offer pay above what is required by the contract.

“These adjustments have varied by locations and positions but include market increases for senior custodians and custodians, adding steps to the lead custodian scale, and providing referral and retention bonuses,” according to the UC statement. “In addition to these AFSCME-specific increases, over the last several years, UC has added to the benefits it provides all employees, including providing care and bonding leave and an infertility benefit. The University will continue to review what additional benefits are necessary to retain its employees and maintain a healthy and supported work environment.”

Both Woods and Honcharuk said they’ve watched as colleagues have come and gone, some saying they could make the same money with less of a workload, some retiring and others leaving for jobs that pay more.

Claudia Preparata, the research director for AFSCME Local 3299, said her research on pay explains why: “During the COVID-19 pandemic, our members were the heroes on the front line, like (they) literally were going into work, putting themselves at risk. They did not have the luxury of being able to work remotely. And every day you would hear about frontline heroes. Now ... what the data reinforces is they are literally the ones in the system to be the most left behind and that is very stark.”

5% of UC operating budget covers 62,000 workers’ pay

It is virtually impossible to spend a minute on a UC campus or in a UC hospital without somehow being touched by work done by one of 62,000 people who earn less than $25 an hour.

Like Honcharuk, they check in patients. Like Woods clean hospital rooms, classrooms, lobbies, libraries, offices, operating rooms and many other spaces. They serve food. They weed, mow grass, spread fertilizer, pick up litter. They enforce rules, monitor who comes and goes, patrol the property.

Although the 62,000 represent about 24% of the UC workforce, their combined wages make up 5% of the system’s operating budget, Preparata and senior researchers Geoff Goodman, Owen Li and Kate Spear wrote in their “Priced Out” report.

Li, Preparata and Spear shared highlights from their report during a video conference with The Bee, stressing that their proposals are intended to benefit both unionized workers and undergraduate students. Some of those student workers are trying to earn enough to meet the yearly self-help obligation in their financial aid package, which averages $9,900.

In reviewing demographic information on both the students and AFSCME members, the researchers found that about 80% of each group are people of color.

The UC houses only 38% of its students, so many undergraduates are competing with staff for affordable housing close to UC campuses and hospitals, the researchers said, putting upward pressure on rents. And, they noted that a 2022 UC survey found that 8% of students experienced homelessness, up from 5% in 2016.

Housing, however, is not the only cost weighing heavily on wallets. A 2021 accountability report from the UC found that 44% of students reported being food-insecure.

That same report noted that 35% of UC students received Pell grants, indicating they come from households earning $50,000 or less in income.

Yet, living near a UC campus brings with it higher-than-average prices for basic expenses such as housing, food, taxes and health care, according to Daniel Masterson, a professor in UC Santa Barbara’s Department of Political Science.

He found that the average cost of living in counties with a UC campus is not only 47% higher than the national average but also higher than the average cost of living in other counties with universities — even higher than the top 50 non-UC schools.

The UC has taken steps to help with food pantries, grocery gift cards, meal vouchers, the researchers said, and the California legislature has appropriated millions for emergency meal services, CalFresh enrollment clinics and rapid rehousing.

Pay as a preventative strategy

But pay raises, Li said, could be a preventative strategy. Here are two proposals that he, Spear and Preparata floated in their report and the rationale behind them:

In the first, the researchers argued that the least UC could do is to restore the buying power that its personnel have lost since 2017. Back then, 6% of AFSCME-represented workers would have had to spend more than half their income to get housing near work. By 2022, AFSCME researchers said, calculations showed 15% of workers were in that boat.

If the UC raised the minimum wage for these workers to $25 and gave the remaining AFSCME-represented workers a 5% wage increase, the researchers said, the portion of AFSCME members facing that severe housing burden would fall to 4%.

The pay boost would also allow students to earn enough money to meet their self-help financial obligation, without working as many hours, Spear said.

Right now, she said, about 11% of undergraduates are working more than 20 hours a week, even though research suggests n students work working such hours negatively affects students’ academic progress and performance.

At $25 an hour, student workers could earn an additional $600 a month if they worked 15 hours a week.

If the UC instituted a $25 minimum wage and the recommended 5% wage bumps, Spear and her colleagues said, the system’s operating budget would grow by 0.7%.

In the second wage proposal, AFSCME researchers suggested the UC pay the median hourly wage that it would take to ensure a full-time California worker could afford housing. Known as the statewide housing wage, the figure is $33.84 an hour.

That tops the median hourly wage of $29.22 that UC service and patient care workers are making and the median pay of $16 an hour for students, the researchers said.

This proposal also calls for a 5% wage bump for workers already making above the suggested $33.84 minimum wage.

The statewide median housing wage would have been more than enough to cover rent on a one-bedroom apartment near UC Merced, UC Riverside, UC Davis, and UC Los Angeles, researchers said, and at this pay, no UC worker would have to spend more than half their income to live near work.

If the UC instituted the hourly $33.84 minimum wage, its operating budget would grow by 2.5%, researchers said.

UC officials said that, when evaluating the union’s economic proposals, they would carefully review market data for AFSCME positions by location and prioritize providing fair wages and an equitable and healthy work environment. Any decision will be informed by the university system’s financial constraints and operational needs, they added.

AFSCME links pay to staffing shortages, quality care

AFSCME researchers said they also are anxious to end staffing shortages in the UC’s health systems because of the consequences for both employee well-being and patient care.

The Berkeley Labor Center’s Lopezlira and Jacobs, in their report on SB 525, also saw a connection: “There is ample research linking higher pay, reductions in worker turnover, and improved staffing levels to better quality of care for consumers,” they wrote. “Increasing pay to health care workers can be expected to improve patient outcomes, including shorter hospital stays and lower mortality rates.”

Jacobs and Lopezlira shared results from several studies, including one that found “a 10% increase in the minimum wage significantly improves key quality of care indicators in nursing homes, reducing the number of quality of care health inspection violations by 7.4%, the use of restraints on patients by 3.3%, and age-adjusted patient mortality rates by 3.1%.”

On average, 12.1% of the higher payroll costs from SB 525 would be offset by lower turnover costs, the Berkeley Labor Center investigators wrote, and the proposed wage increases would raise operating costs by about 3%.

Labor and policy experts disagree on the overall economic effect of these wage increases.

Michael Shires of Pepperdine University said these proposed pay increases are part of an inflationary spiral in which wage increases lag or follow rising prices. Other government bodies will face pressure to provide comparable wage increases to employees, and businesses in other will eventually have to follow suit to compete for workers.

“The bottom line is that these proposals will eventually lead to higher prices, wages and taxes,” Shires said.

But University of Illinois’ Bruno said that, while such arguments have been made since the minimum wage was instituted, decades of analysis have shown that raises play a small role in inflation.

“These kinds of concerns about raising wages have … never borne out. At $20 or $25 an hour, you’re really barely in the lower middle class. In some cities, you are able to afford nothing more than a studio apartment.”

Concerns about housing costs loomed large in Honcharuk’s childhood home, she said. When she and her brothers started working, the family no longer qualified for housing assistance, so they all had to pitch in to help pay the rent.

Her parents, she said, long dreamed of buying a home in California but were never able to afford it.

“My mom didn’t work for a while. She took care of our younger siblings. She worked on call as a dental assistant whenever she could,” Honcharuk said. “My parents weren’t able to buy a home until they moved out of the state (last summer). They moved to Missouri where they could afford a home.”

Biden admin to fund $4M study linking climate change to child labor, trafficking in Nepal, grant docs show

Danielle Wallace
Wed, August 23, 2023 

The Biden administration is funding a $4 million project to determine a connection between child labor and climate change in the South Asian country of Nepal.

The U.S. Department of Labor on Monday announced the availability of $4 million in federal taxpayer dollars to be released through its Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB) "to fund a technical assistance project in Nepal to increase the responsiveness of local communities to child labor and/or forced labor in the context of a changing climate." Interested parities have until Oct. 9 to apply for the massive grant, and award decisions are expected to be announced by the end of December.

One of the desired outcomes is "increased understanding of the link between climate change and vulnerability to child labor and/or forced labor risks," while another is "increased implementation of child-centered, gender-sensitive and socially inclusive climate adaptation initiatives," according to documents released on the federal government's grant website.

The Labor Department said applicants must propose strategies "based on a gender equity and social inclusion analysis to identify potential barriers of access to and control of resources and decision-making faced by men, women, boys and girls from diverse backgrounds and underrepresented populations, and how these barriers will be overcome by the project."

President Biden's Department of Labor is aiming to fund a $4 million study linking climate change to child labor in Nepal.

"Locally-led" climate change strategy, according to the grant details, should be collaborative with the Nepalese government to address the "priorities of climate-vulnerable populations, such as children, women, indigenous populations, and other disadvantaged groups."

"While further research is needed on the link between climate change and child labor and forced labor, there is evidence of climate change increasing vulnerability to labor exploitation and trafficking, gender-based violence and trafficking of women and girls, child labor, and forced labor and trafficking," the grant documents say.

Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., who sits on the House Judiciary Committee, is among critics who ripped the Biden administration for shelling out $4 million toward this study.

"The Biden administration’s priorities are simply absurd," Johnson told the Washington Examiner. "While 5.8 million Americans are out of work, Biden’s DOL is spending money to investigate how 'a changing climate in Nepal' impacts child labor?!?"

Students hold a poster to mark the World Day Against Child Labor in Kathmandu, Nepal, June 12, 2022. (Getty Images)

"This failed, woke approach to governance is destroying our country," he added.

Fox News reached out to the Department of Labor for comment on the grant and the GOP criticism but they did not immediately respond.

Kathleen Sgamma, president of Western Energy Alliance, an energy and public lands trade group with 200 member companies, told the Examiner the Biden administration is trying to use climate change as an "explanation for everything" instead of offering viable solutions to lift the Nepalese people from poverty.

"One way to do that is by helping them access more reliable, affordable energy in the form of oil, natural gas, and coal, which would actually reduce the poverty that causes families to have to rely on child labor," Sgamma said. "A convoluted study about climate change does nothing to lift families out of poverty and free children to go to school instead of work in sweatshops."

In recent years, the number of children working in the brick kilns of Nepal has boomed after the 2015 earthquake and the COVID-19 pandemic, Getty reported.

"The real irony is that misguided climate change policies in the West that favor intermittent solar energy over reliable fossil fuels are actually directly leading to slave labor in China, where solar panels are made by enslaved Uyghurs," Sgamma added.

Tax forms show Thea Lee, deputy undersecretary and leader of ILAB, which will distribute the grant funding, served as president of the progressive Economic Policy Institute think tank between 2018 and 2021 and has also sat on the board of the Congressional Progressive Caucus Center, the Examiner reported.

The Labor Department said Nepal ranks 10th on the list of countries most at risk of climate change, according to the Global Climate Risk Index 2021. The World Bank estimates that 80% of Nepal’s population faces "climate-related peril," according to the grant details.

Nepal also has pernicious rates of child labor and forced labor, the Labor Department said, estimating 1.1 million children are in child labor, 222,493 of whom are in hazardous work and 85% are working in agriculture. Agri

Tropical forests nearing critical temperatures thresholds

Linnea Pedersen
Wed, August 23, 2023 

The new research suggests that leaf death could become a new factor in the predicted "tipping point" where tropical forests transition due to climate change and deforestation into savannah-like landscapes. 

(Raul ARBOLEDA)

Global warming is driving leafy tropical canopies close to temperatures where they can no longer transform sunlight and CO2 into energy, threatening total collapse if the thermometer keeps climbing, according to a study Thursday.

A tiny percentage of upper canopy leaves have already crossed that threshold, reaching temperatures so high -- above 47 degrees Celsius -- as to prevent photosynthesis, the study published in Nature reported.

Currently, some leaves exceed such critical temperatures only 0.01 percent of the time, but impacts could quickly scale up because leaves warm faster than air, the researchers said.

"You heat the air by two to three degrees and the actual upper temperature of these leaves goes up by eight degrees," lead author Christopher Doughty of Northern Arizona University told journalists.

If tropical forest's average surface temperature warms 4C above current levels -- widely considered a worst-case scenario -- "we're predicting possible total leaf death," he said.

The new research suggests that leaf death could become a new factor in the predicted "tipping point" whereby tropical forests transition due to climate change and deforestation into savannah-like landscapes.

If air temperatures increase unabated by 0.03 C per year, the study projected, mass mortality among the canopies could happen in a little more than a century.

Doughty and his team used data from the NASA ECOSTRESS satellite -- designed to measure plant temperatures -- validated with ground observations, based in part on sensors attached to individual leaves.

- Increased tree death -

There remain uncertainties as to how high leaf temperatures might impact the forest as a whole, the scientists cautioned.

"Believe it or not, we don't know terribly much about why trees die," said co-author Gregory Goldsmith of Chapman University.

It doesn't take a scientist to know that when a tree loses its roots it dies, he said.

But the interactions and feedbacks between heat and drought -- and water and temperature -- on overall tree health aren't as clear.

Total leaf death might not necessarily mean total tree death.

The critical temperature at which leaves turn brown and die might also differ by species, depending on the size and thickness of their leaves and the breadth of their canopy.

But there are already concerning signs. In the Amazon, where temperatures are higher than in other tropical forests, the rate at which trees are dying has increased in recent decades.

"The Amazon is currently experiencing higher levels of mortality than Central Africa and that could possibly be due to the high temperatures we've seen there," said Doughty.

Increased fragmentation of the forests from deforestation has also been shown to make the remaining forest areas warmer.

Tropical biomes contain 45 percent of the Earth's forests, and play an outsized role in absorbing human-caused carbon pollution.

They also harbour half or more of the world's plant biodiversity, with at least 40,000 different tree species, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The fact that a few leaves are overheating at current temperatures is a "canary in the coal mine," said senior author Joshua Fisher of Chapman University.

"You want to be able to detect something happening before it's widespread," he said.

"The fact that we can do that now gives us that ability to actually do something as a collective society."

Scientists not involved in the study said it should serve as a warning that nature's capacity to adapt to climate change has limits.

"It is true that trees and other kinds of vegetation can soak up emissions and provide cooling," commented Leslie Mabon, a lecturer in environmental systems at The Open University.

"However, this study illustrates that without concerted action by humans to reduce emissions and limit global heating at the same time as protecting and enhancing nature, some functions of nature may start to break down at higher temperatures."

Researchers discover another way tropical

forests could suffer due to climate change

JULIA JACOBO
Wed, August 23, 2023 

Scientists have recently discovered a phenomenon occurring in tropical forests that could be of great concern if global warming continues unabated.

Climate change has caused the leaves on some plants in tropical forests to stop undergoing photosynthesis -- the process in which plants and other organisms use sunlight to synthesize foods from carbon dioxide and water, according to a study published Wednesday in Nature.

"When leaves reach a certain temperature, their photosynthetic machinery breaks down," Gregory Goldsmith, a professor of biology at Chapman University in Orange, California, told reporters.

PHOTO: The sun shines through the rainforest near Belem, Brazil, June 7, 2023. (Picture Alliance via Getty Images)

This study is really the first to establish the limits of these tropical forest canopies, Goldsmith said.

MORE: How climate change could hinder reforestation efforts, according to experts

The analysis indicates that tropical forests may be approaching the maximum temperature threshold for photosynthesis to work, the researchers found.

Researchers used high-resolution measurements taken from an instrument on board the International Space Station between 2018 and 2020. They also placed sensors on top of tree canopies in places like Brazil, Puerto Rico and Australia to estimate peak tropical-forest canopy temperatures.

PHOTO: The National Forest in the Carajas mountain range, Para state, Brazil, May 17, 2023. (Dado Galdieri/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

They found many of the leaves are approaching a critical temperature threshold, according to Christopher Doughty, a professor in infomatics, computing and cyber systems and lead author of the study.

The data shows that canopy temperatures peaked at around 34 degrees Celsius -- or 93.2 degrees Fahrenheit -- on average, although a small proportion of those observed exceeded 40 degrees Celsius, or 104 degrees Fahrenheit.

MORE: Forests in Brazil emitting more carbon than they absorb due to climate change: Study

Researchers are "just starting to see" these temperatures light up throughout forests, Joshua Fisher, a climate scientist with a focus on terrestrial ecosystems at Chapman University, told reporters at Monday's news conference.

The percentage of leaves that began to fail was small -- just an estimated .01% of all leaves in the forests studied, according to the study. But warming experiments predict this value will rise to 1.4% under future warming conditions.

PHOTO: Falls on Mother Cummings Rivulet in Meander Forest Reserve, Great Western Tiers, Tasmania, Australia. (Auscape/Universal Images Group via Getty)

The critical temperature beyond which photosynthetic machinery in tropical trees begins to fail averages at about 46.7 degrees Celsius or about 116 degrees Fahrenheit.

MORE: Why reforestation is a crucial part of saving the environment

Modeling suggests that tropical forests can withstand up to a 3.9 degree Celsius increase over current air temperatures before a potential tipping point is reached, which is within the worst-case scenario for climate predictions and possible, the researchers found.

"There's a potential for a tipping point in these forest," Doughty said.

PHOTO: A trail in the rain forest of El Yunque National Forest, Puerto Rico, Jan. 1, 2011. (Diego Cupolo/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Known as the the carbon sinks of the world, tropical forests serve as critical carbon storage due to their capture and pack away carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In addition, they hold most of the world species, which is why it is important to understand future temperatures and tropical forests, Doughty said.

"There's all sorts of potential feedbacks once you start losing bits of forest," he said.

Ambitious climate change mitigation goals and reduced deforestation are needed to help forests stay below thermally critical thresholds, the authors found.

Parts of tropical rainforests could get too hot for photosynthesis, study suggests

Laura Paddison, CNN
Wed, August 23, 2023

Some leaves in tropical forests from South America to South East Asia are getting so hot they may no longer be able to photosynthesize, with big potential consequences for the world’s forests, according to a new study.

Leaves’ ability to photosynthesize – the process by which they make energy from carbon dioxide, sunlight and water – begins to fail when their temperature reaches around 46.7 degrees Celsius (116 Fahrenheit).

While this may seem high, leaves can get much hotter than the air temperature, according to the report published Wednesday in Nature by a group of scientists from countries including the US, Australia and Brazil.

The scientists used temperature data beamed down from thermal satellite sensors on the International Space Station, 400 kilometers (nearly 250 miles) above the Earth. They combined this with on-the-ground observations from leaf-warming experiments, in which scientists climbed into the canopy to painstakingly add sensors to leaves.

Rather than looking at average temperatures, the scientists were looking at extremes, said Christopher Doughty, associate professor in ecoinformatics at Northern Arizona University and a report author. They found that average forest canopy temperatures peaked at 34 degrees Celsius (93 Fahrenheit) but some exceeded 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit).

Currently, 0.01% of leaves are passing the critical temperature threshold beyond which their ability to photosynthesize breaks down, the report found, potentially killing the leaf and the tree.

This percentage, while small, is poised to increase as the world warms, the report said, posing a threat to the world’s tropical forests – which cover roughly 12% of the planet and hold more than half of the world’s species. They also provide a vital role in sucking up and storing carbon and helping to regulate the global climate.

“There are all sorts of potential feedbacks once you start losing bits of forests, even leaves on individual trees,” Doughty said on a call with reporters.


Tropical rainforest in the Mobuku Valley, Uganda. - Martin Zwick/REDA&CO/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

Tropical forests can withstand around 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 Fahrenheit) of additional global warming before they reach a tipping point in terms of their ability to photosynthesize, according to the report.

If warming exceeds this level, the amount of leaves surpassing critical temperature thresholds could rise to 1.4%, potentially causing large-scale leaf loss and the death of the whole tree, the report found.

This level of warming is not expected under current climate policies, which are estimated to bring 2.7 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels. But it is within the range of the most pessimistic climate scenarios if the world continues to burn fossil fuels.

While these figures may seem small, the risk is significant given how critical tropical trees are for life, the climate system and the planet.

“Almost all life – including humans – is dependent on photosynthesis for food either directly or indirectly,” said Kevin Collins, senior lecturer in environment and systems at the Open University, who was not involved in the research.

The findings indicate that global warming is putting this vital process at risk, he told the Science Media Centre. But, he added, there are more immediate concerns for tropical forests, including deforestation, wildfires and droughts.

Christopher Still, a forest ecosystem professor at Oregon State University, also not involved in the report, said that the research provided some novel insights. While there’s been a big focus on the impact of drought on tree loss, he told CNN, “this paper says it’s not just drought – we need to really also worry about the temperatures that leaves are reaching.”

While he acknowledged the numbers in the report are small, he added, “I would focus a little bit less on the percentages, and more on the concepts of leaves pushing up against these really high temperature conditions and how often that happens, how long it lasts and what it really means.”

Others were more cautious. Chloe Brimicombe, a climate scientist at the University of Graz in Austria, said that given how few leaves are reaching the critical temperature threshold, and how high warming would need to get before a tipping point, “this suggests in theory tropical forests are quite resilient to climate change.”

She told the Science Media Centre, “this is a simple model and trees and forest dynamics are much more complex than this.”

The report authors said despite uncertainties, the research gives important insights around how tropical forests will respond to climate change.

“It’s a little bit of a canary in the coal mine that we’re starting to see,” Joshua Fisher, a climate scientist at Chapman University and a report author, said on a call with reporters. “And you want to be able to detect something happening before it’s widespread.”

US FCC will release public comments on bid to deny Fox TV station license renewal

David Shepardson
Wed, August 23, 2023 

A man walks past the logo of Fox Networks Group during the annual MIPCOM television programme market in Cannes

By David Shepardson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Federal Communications Commission in an unusual move on Wednesday said it would publicly release comments on a bid by an advocacy group to deny the renewal of a licence for Fox Television Stations' Philadelphia station.

The Media and Democracy Project in July asked the U.S. telecom regulator to deny a licence renewal for WTXF-TV in Philadelphia, saying Fox News aired "false information about election fraud" about the 2020 presidential election and arguing it sowed discord and contributed "to harmful and dangerous acts on January 6" at the U.S. Capitol.

The group argued it "amounts to misconduct that violates the FCC's policy on the character required of broadcast licensees."

The FCC said it was opening a public docket allowing for release of comments and presentations, saying permitting broader participation will serve the public interest.

"For the sake of transparency, now everyone can read the filings and review the record as it develops," an FCC spokesperson said.

The Media and Democracy Project cited Fox Corp and Fox News $787.5 million settlement in April resolving a defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems over whether Fox was liable for airing false claims Dominion's ballot-counting machines were used to manipulate the presidential election in favor of Democrat Joe Biden over then-President Donald Trump, a Republican.

A Fox Television spokesperson on Wednesday said the "petition to deny the license renewal of WTXF-TV is frivolous, completely without merit and asks the FCC to upend the First Amendment and long-standing FCC precedent."

Fox noted WTXF-TV/FOX 29 News Philadelphia broadcasts over 60 hours of local news and other programming weekly.

The FCC, an independent federal agency, does not license broadcast networks, but issues them to individual broadcast stations on a staggered basis for eight-year periods.

Fox cited FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel's comments in 2017opposing Trump's suggestion the FCC could revoke the broadcast license for Comcast's NBC over coverage of his administration.

Rosenworcel said in 2017 FCC reviews do "not involve the government making editorial decisions about content. Doing so would be an affront to our First Amendment tradition."

(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Sonali Paul)

China quietly recruits overseas chip talent as US tightens curbs

Wed, August 23, 2023 




By Julie Zhu, Fanny Potkin, Eduardo Baptista and Michael Martina

HONG KONG/SINGAPORE/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - For a decade until 2018, China sought to recruit elite foreign-trained scientists under a lavishly funded program that Washington viewed as a threat to U.S. interests and technological supremacy.

Two years after it stopped promoting the Thousand Talents Plan (TTP) amid U.S. investigations of scientists, China quietly revived the initiative under a new name and format as part of a broader mission to accelerate its tech proficiency, according to three sources with knowledge of the matter and a Reuters review of over 500 government documents spanning 2019 to 2023.

The revamped recruitment drive, reported in detail by Reuters for the first time, offers perks including home-purchase subsidies and typical signing bonuses of 3 to 5 million yuan, or $420,000 to $700,000, the three people told Reuters.

China operates talent programs at various levels of government, targeting a mix of overseas Chinese and foreign experts. The primary replacement for TTP is a program called Qiming overseen by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, according to national and local policy documents, online recruitment advertisements and a person with direct knowledge of the matter who, as with others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity.

The race to attract tech talent comes as President Xi Jinping emphasises China's need to achieve self-reliance in semiconductors in the face of U.S. export curbs. Regulations adopted by the U.S. Commerce Department in October restrict U.S. citizens and permanent residents from supporting the development and production of advanced chips in China, among other measures.

Neither China's State Council Information Office nor the ministry responded to questions about Qiming. China has previously said its overseas recruitment through the TTP aimed to build an innovation-driven economy and promote talent mobility, while respecting intellectual property rights, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency.

Qiming, or Enlightenment, recruits from scientific and technological fields that include "sensitive" or "classified" areas, such as semiconductors, two of the people said. Unlike its predecessor, it does not publicise awardees and is absent from central government websites, which the sources said reflected its sensitivity.

Some of the documents mention Qiming alongside Huoju, or Torch, a longstanding initiative of the Ministry of Science and Technology that focuses on creating clusters of tech companies. The ministry did not respond to a request for comment.


Qiming also operates in tandem with recruitment initiatives run by local and provincial authorities and a government-backed hiring drive by Chinese chip companies, according to two of the people and another source familiar with the matter. Reuters could not independently establish the companies involved.

The U.S. has long accused China of stealing intellectual property and technology, a charge Beijing has dismissed as politically motivated.

"Foreign adversaries and strategic competitors understand that acquiring top U.S. and Western talent is often just as good as acquiring the technology itself," said Dean Boyd, a spokesperson for the U.S. government's National Counterintelligence and Security Center, when asked about Chinese talent recruitment schemes.

"When that recruitment creates inherent conflicts of interest or commitment, that can create risks to U.S. economic and national security."

Curtailing intellectual property leakage via talent flows is difficult, said Nick Marro, a China analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit, because such efforts "can run the risk of turning into ethnically-charged witch hunts".

ELITE UNIVERSITIES

China's chip industry has flourished in recent years but faces a shortage of about 200,000 people this year, including engineers and chip designers, according to a 2021 report published by the China Center for Information Industry Development, a government think tank, and the China Semiconductor Industry Association.

China's newer talent endeavours, which like the TTP focus on elite-level recruitment, favour applicants trained at top foreign institutions, three sources said.

"Most of the applicants selected for Qiming have studied at top U.S universities and have at least one Ph.D," said one of these people, adding that scientists trained at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and Stanford universities were among those sought by China. The universities did not respond to requests for comment.

Reuters could not determine how many experts have been recruited under Qiming or associated programs, though thousands have applied, according to Reuters' review of government documents.

U.S. officials say that while talent poaching in the U.S. is not illegal, university researchers risk breaking the law if they fail to disclose affiliations with Chinese entities while receiving U.S. government funds to conduct research, illegally share proprietary information, or violate export controls.

Reuters found more than a dozen advertisements for Qiming applicants posted since 2022 on Chinese platform Zhihu and LinkedIn by people who identified themselves as recruiters.

In a February LinkedIn post, Chen Biaohua, who listed his employer as Beijing Talent Linked Information Technology, asked candidates eligible for Qiming and Huoju to email him their resumes.

The post said Chen was seeking "young talents" under 40 with a doctorate from well-known universities and overseas experience. He was also seeking applicants who held senior roles at foreign academic institutions or large companies.

Headhunting firm Hangzhou Juqi Technology posted an ad in March on ResearchGate, a social network for academics, seeking people with doctorates from top universities and experience at Fortune 500 companies to help recruit 5,000 overseas researchers for Chinese enterprises.

The ad described this effort as serving Qiming and Huoju, with each researcher able to obtain as much as 15 million yuan, or about $2.1 million, in rewards. It said that anyone who recommends a candidate who is then selected for the talent programs would receive "diamonds, bags, cars, and houses".

Chen and LinkedIn declined to comment. Questions sent to Chen's employer, as well as to Zhihu, ResearchGate and Hangzhou Juqi Technology yielded no responses.

One foreign-trained semiconductor expert at the Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT) was identified on its website as a 2021 Qiming recipient. Ma Yuanxiao is an associate professor at BIT's School of Integrated Circuits and Electronics, who did his masters at Britain's University of Nottingham between 2013 and 2015 and his Ph.D at the University of Hong Kong until 2019.

Ma and BIT did not respond to requests for comment.

OPENING WALLETS

Across China, provincial and municipal governments are pouring resources into the recruitment drive, official documents show.

One initiative is the Kunpeng Plan, run by authorities in eastern Zhejiang province, whose 2019 launch was covered in state media. The Zhejiang Daily reported in June 2022 that the program aimed to attract 200 tech experts in five years, with 48 already recruited.

In the eastern city of Wenzhou, local authorities' investment in each Kunpeng professional can reach up to 200 million yuan, including an individual reward, start-up funding and housing, according to a 2022 talent policy report by the city government.

A report by the Wenzhou branch of the Communist Party's Organization Department, which oversees personnel decisions, said its total budget in 2022 increased 49% from a year earlier, mainly because it had assigned 85 million yuan to Kunpeng and similar programs.

One Kunpeng recipient is Dawei Di, a Cambridge-educated professor at Zhejiang University whose research focuses on semiconductor optoelectronic devices, the university's journal reported in 2021.

In Huzhou, also in Zhejiang, employers that recommend candidates to Qiming can receive incentive payments of up to 1.5 million yuan from the city or district governments if those people are accepted, according to a 2021 city directive.

None of the city, provincial or Communist Party authorities, nor Di or his university, responded to queries from Reuters.

'ONE FOOT OUT'

Despite Xi's emphasis on advancing China's chip know-how, two sources with direct knowledge of the matter said many Chinese semiconductor experts overseas were wary of returning because of China's political environment and weaker position in chip development relative to the West.

"They have no idea if the programs could change overnight or lose government support," one said.

Zhuji, a county-level city in Zhejiang, reported in October 2022 that it had over 200 applicants for talent programs, mainly Qiming, but only eight successful candidates from the previous year had returned to China. Zhuji government's general office did not respond to a faxed request for comment.

Two people familiar with the matter said some Chinese scientists, especially those with foreign citizenship or permanent residency, worried that joining China's government talent programs could mean forgoing international opportunities or becoming subject to U.S. investigations.

In some cases, these people said, those experts will be offered roles at Chinese chip companies' overseas operations.

"Safer to have one foot in China, one foot out," one said.

($1 = 7.1475 Chinese yuan renminbi)

(Reporting by Julie Zhu, Fanny Potkin, Eduardo Baptista and Michael Martina; editing by David Crawshaw)

The little-known history of Disney’s abandoned Sierra Nevada ski resort: ‘Public agencies now have to justify what they’ve done’

Leo Collis
Wed, August 23, 2023 

If you’ve never been to Disney’s Sierra Nevada ski resort, there is a very good reason for that. Simply, it does not exist.

Walt Disney himself was a key figure in the proposals for the ski resort, which would have brought an “American Alpine Wonderland” to the Mineral King Valley site that then neighbored the Sequoia National Park, per KCET.

But the development never came to pass, and the dissension to the project brought about a significant change in United States law, in which environmental groups could sue government agencies for unethical plans.

What were the plans for the Sierra Nevada resort?

In 1965, what was then known as Walt Disney Productions proposed the construction of a five-story hotel with 1,030 rooms in Mineral King Valley, where visitors could take advantage of four-mile ski runs in addition to an ice rink, tennis courts, and a golf course.

According to KCET, it was expected the resort would bring $600 million in revenue in its first decade.

However, the resort itself and subsequent transportation needs would have led to the serious destruction of vital ecosystems and environmental beauty, and nature lovers weren’t about to let that happen.

“This is a different story if it’s not surrounded by Sequoia National Park,” said Daniel Selmi, an emeritus law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

“But even without the park, Disney’s ski resort would have had to be smaller,” Selmi said. “At some point, you end up with a project so big that you lose sight of the area itself. You have to make a decision — is this an area of such breathtaking beauty that 100 years from now we want people to be able to go in there and look at it and say, ‘Wow,’ without seeing [a ski resort]?”

Why did the project fail?

Despite proposals for the plan being accepted in 1965, legal action and activism soon followed.

Most notably, the Sierra Club was at the forefront of the opposition. As KCET observed, the group of nature lovers held “hike-ins” and petitioned federal officials to save the area from the destruction that would be caused by construction on the site and surrounding infrastructure.

The Sierra Club sued leaders of the Sequoia National Park and Sequoia National Forest in 1969, suggesting that Disney would have too much control of national forest land. That halted construction for three years.

After the suit failed in the Supreme Court in 1972, Sierra Club made amendments to its challenge in 1976. With the death of Walt Disney and the company under new leadership, the decades-old plans soon petered out. The project was officially mothballed by Congress in 1978, and Mineral King was integrated into Sequoia National Park.

How did the Sierra Club change the face of environmentalism?  

Not only did the actions of the Sierra Club draw significant attention to its environmental efforts because of the organization they were up against, but its legal challenges led to a change in the law.

According to the Los Angeles Times, despite Sierra Club losing its 1972 case in the Supreme Court, the subsequent ruling still established that it was legally acceptable for environmental groups to sue government agencies.

Furthermore, it shifted the Club’s perspective, as the LA Times piece noted that the battle for Mineral King Valley saw it switch from a “relatively nonconfrontational band of outdoors enthusiasts to the harder-core, more organized conservation activists known today for their legal and lobbying muscle.”

So the next time you see environmental groups challenge the government for unethical practices, just remember that it was the Sierra Club — and the misguided ambitions of Walt Disney, who was overlooking the importance of environmental conservation — that paved the way.

“The Forest Service said repeatedly they had studied Mineral King to death before deciding to put a ski area there,” Selmi said in the LA Times article. “And they hadn’t done that. Public agencies now have to justify what they’ve done in much greater depth than they did before. It’s like night and day. They have to be concerned with the law.”

FOR SALE

Canada's Trans Mountain seeks last-minute route deviation on pipeline expansion

Reuters
Updated Wed, August 23, 2023

FILE PHOTO: A pipe yard servicing government-owned oil pipeline operator Trans Mountain is seen in Kamloops

OTTAWA (Reuters) -The Trans Mountain Expansion (TMX) project has asked Canadian regulators for a route deviation on a 1.3-kilometre (0.8 mile)section of pipeline in British Columbia, months before the 600,000 barrel per day project is due to start shipping crude.

The application to the Canada Energy Regulator came to light as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Wednesday said he was confident the project was a solid investment and that interest was high among Indigenous groups who wanted to buy a share of the pipeline.

The Canadian government bought the pipeline for C$4.5 billion ($3.3 billion) in 2018 to make sure the project was completed after it ran into challenges, including opposition from Indigenous peoples and environmentalists, but costs have ballooned to C$30.9 billion.

TMX is expected to start operating in the first quarter of 2024.

The regulator is weighing whether to allow Trans Mountain Corp (TMC), the government-owned corporation building the project, to deviate from its previously approved route on a section of the pipeline just south of Kamloops in southern interior British Columbia.

The proposal has encountered opposition from the local First Nation, whose traditional territory the pipeline crosses, according to TMC's application to the regulator, dated Aug. 10.

In the application TMC said it had encountered "significant technical challenges" micro-tunnelling through hard rock formations and requested to instead adjust the pipeline route and use a conventional open trench.

Last week the regulator gave TMC until end of day on Wednesday to provide more information on its request.

The expansion project will nearly triple the flow of crude from Alberta's oil sands to Burnaby, British Columbia, and is intended to unlock Asian markets for Canadian oil, which is now mostly exported to the United States.

Now that it is nearing completion, the government has approached Indigenous groups looking at buying a stake in the pipeline.

"I am very excited and interested that there are so many Indigenous groups interested in purchasing the TMX pipeline. We're engaged in conversations with them right now," Trudeau told reporters in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.

"We are confident that the business case for the Trans Mountain pipeline remains solid," he added, when asked whether the government would have to sell the pipeline for less than it cost to build it.

($1 = 1.3566 Canadian dollars)

(Reporting by Ismail Shakil and Steve Scherer in Ottawa and Nia Williams in British Columbia; Editing by Bill Berkrot and Sonali Paul)

Trans Mountain pipeline project runs into fresh construction-related hurdle

Story by The Canadian Press •

Trans Mountain pipeline project runs into fresh construction-related hurdle© Provided by The Canadian Press

CALGARY — The Trans Mountain oil pipeline expansion project has run into another construction-related hurdle that could delay its completion.

The crown corporation that owns the pipeline has filed for regulatory approval to modify the route of one of the remaining stretches of pipe yet to be completed.

In its regulatory filing, Trans Mountain Corp. said it has run into engineering difficulties related to the drilling of a tunnel in B.C. and wants to alter the route slightly for a 1.3-kilometre stretch of pipe, as well as the construction method.

But the filing documents illustrate how the company is facing opposition from the Stk’emlúpsemc te Secwépemc Nation, whose traditional territory the pipeline crosses and who had agreed to the originally proposed route and construction method.

The documents state that between May and July 2023, Trans Mountain Corp. met and corresponded several times with the First Nation's leadership, who continued to express concern that the pipeline project was deviating from its previously agreed-upon route and construction method.

In its filing, Trans Mountain Corp. said it needs the regulator to make a decision as soon as possible to avoid construction delays that could result in "significantly increased construction costs" for the project.

It also warns of costs and impacts to "various third parties who are relying on the timely completion" of the project.

The Trans Mountain pipeline is Canada's only pipeline system transporting oil from Alberta to the West Coast. Its expansion, which is currently under way, will boost the pipeline's capacity to 890,000 barrels per day (bpd) from 300,000 bpd currently.

Trans Mountain Corp.'s target date for the mechanical completion of the expansion project had been sometime during the third quarter of this year, with the pipeline's in-service date expected in early 2024.

However, the project has been plagued by difficulties. The pipeline was bought by the federal government for $4.5 billion in 2018 after previous owner Kinder Morgan Canada Inc. threatened to scrap the pipeline's planned expansion project in the face of environmentalist opposition.

Its projected price tag has since spiraled, first to $12.6 billion, then to $21.4 billion, and most recently, to $30.9 billion (the most recent capital cost estimate, as of March of this year).

Trans Mountain Corp. has blamed the cost overruns on a variety of factors, including inflation, COVID-19, labour and supply chain challenges, flooding in B.C. and unexpected major archeological discoveries along the route.

The federal government has indicated it does not wish to be the long-term owner of Trans Mountain.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau confirmed that the government is currently in talks with potential buyers. (A number of Indigenous-led initiatives and partnerships have previously expressed interest in owning the pipeline.)

"I’m very excited and interested that there are so many Indigenous groups interested in purchasing the TMX pipeline," Trudeau told reporters in Charlottetown.

"We’re engaged in conversations with them right now, it would be premature to speculate too much on that."

However, critics have suggested that Trans Mountain's mounting costs will mean the government will have to absorb a significant loss when it does sell the pipeline. Because of the way existing contractual agreements with oil shippers are structured, only a portion of the rising capital costs of the project can be passed on to oil companies in the form of increased tolls. (Tolls are the rates oil companies pay to shift product on a pipeline, and they are how the pipeline company makes money.)

A report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer last year found the federal government stands to lose money from its investment in the pipeline, and suggested that if the project were cancelled at that time, the government would need to write off more than $14 billion in assets.

Trudeau said Wednesday that the pipeline remains an important project for the Canadian economy that ensures future markets for this country's oil and gas resources.

"We are confident that the business case for the Trans Mountain pipeline remains solid," he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 23, 2023.

Amanda Stephenson, The Canadian Press

ECOCIDE

Petrobras Gets Help From Brazil’s Attorney General to Explore the Amazon

Mariana Durao
Wed, August 23, 2023


(Bloomberg) -- Brazil’s government may have lifted one of the key hurdles for Petrobras to drill at a promising offshore oil region, a move that could escalate a standoff between the oil company and environmental authorities.

A major impact study that the Ibama environmental agency is demanding isn’t necessary for the project, the attorney general’s office, or AGU, said in an opinion that was released on Tuesday. It sent the case to a mediation chamber to start a reconciliation process between the federal agencies involved.

Petroleo Brasileiro SA, as the Rio de Janeiro-based producer is known, is “fully willing” to join the mediation to solve any disagreements, it said in a message on Wednesday. The oil giant considers to have met all the necessary requirements to start work, adding that it’s open to any new requests.

In May Ibama blocked Petrobras from exploring the Foz do Amazonas basin out of environmental and social concerns. The license where Petrobras plans to drill was auctioned in 2013 and has been held up ever since.

Mines and Energy Minister Alexandre Silveira supports the exploration project and had asked the attorney general’s office to rule on if an impact study was necessary. Meanwhile, Environment Minister Marina Silva, who oversees Ibama, has raised concerns about developing a region off the coast from where the Amazon River flows into the Atlantic.

Silva has so far resisted pressure from other parts of government. The absence of a major impact study was not the only reason why Ibama has blocked Petrobras’s drilling request, the Environment Ministry said in an emailed response. It also cited “inconsistencies” in information provided by the company.

Ibama said it has received the attorney’s general’s opinion and will comment in due course.

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s administration is confronted with the competing priorities of growing the economy and protecting the environment. The debate about offshore drilling in Brazil comes as Colombia and Ecuador move to constrain the oil industry.

Ecuadorian voters passed a referendum this month to shut a major oil field in its Amazon region. Colombia’s Gustavo Petro is against exploring for oil at new areas and slammed “denialism” about climate change at an environmental summit in Brazil earlier this month.

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin Rocket Tests Spew Enough Methane to be Spotted From Space

Frank Landymore
Wed, August 23, 2023 

Gassed Up

Things are getting kind of gassy at Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' space tourism firm.

Case in point, Bloomberg reports that a Blue Origin facility in West Texas is regularly emitting so much methane during recent rocket tests that plumes of the stuff are being spotted from space.

The unexpected detection was made in June by Carbon Mapper, a nonprofit that scans for greenhouse gas emissions across the globe.

Using data gathered by an instrument on board the International Space Station, Carbon Mapper estimated that about 1.5 metric tons of methane were spewing out of the Blue Origin facility per hour, appearing as a conspicuous cloud on its website's map.

Without more data, there's no telling how long those emissions lasted.

Situation Normal

It's certainly no secret that methane figures into Blue Origin's plans. Its flagship rocket engine, the BE-4, uses what's known as liquefied natural gas (LNG) for propulsion, made almost entirely of methane. And according to a company spokesperson, these emissions are par for the course.

"We frequently transfer LNG from our suppliers into storage tanks at our engine test stands," the spokesperson told Bloomberg. "Everything operated normally."

Until now, though, the Bezos venture's methane footprint has remained a relative unknown. Even with Carbon Mapper's latest findings, we can't narrow down its emissions for sure, but an air permit application spotted by Bloomberg may help clue us in.

According to the document, filed with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (2020) in 2020, Blue Origin estimates that it will emit around 3.4 million cubic feet of LNG per year, or roughly 60 tons of methane.

Climate Driver

Methane is a greenhouse gas and a significant driver of climate change. According to the International Energy Association, methane alone is responsible for nearly a third of the Earth's warming temperatures.

Blue Origin emitting several dozen more tons of the stuff annually may not be that much in the grand scheme of things — globally, the energy industry released 135 million tons of the stuff in 2022 — but remains worth scrutinizing nonetheless.

For one, it is far from the only space firm to use methane as a rocket propellant  — SpaceX and its troubled Starship is a notable example. In fact, methane is increasingly viewed as the ideal rocket fuel by space firms due to, among many factors, its high density, stellar performance, and cost efficiency. We can expect a lot more methane-powered launches in the future, in other words.

So while space travel's environmental impact is currently believed to be relatively insignificant, there's reason to suspect that at current rates of the industry's growth, it's poised to become a massive polluter.