Musk's X disabled feature for reporting electoral misinformation - researcher
Byron Kaye
Tue, September 26, 2023 

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Elon Musk's X, formerly called Twitter, disabled a feature that let users report misinformation about elections, a research organisation said on Wednesday, throwing fresh concern about false claims spreading just before major U.S. and Australian votes.

After introducing a feature in 2022 for users to report a post they considered misleading about politics, X in the past week removed the "politics" category from its drop-down menu in every jurisdiction but the European Union, said the researcher Reset.Tech Australia.

Users could still report posts to X globally for a host of other complaints such as promoting violence or hate speech, the researcher added.

X was not immediately available for comment.

Removing a way for people to report suspected political misinformation may limit intervention at a time when social media platforms are under pressure to curtail falsehoods about electoral integrity, which have grown rapidly in recent years.

It comes less than three weeks before Australia holds a referendum, its first in a quarter century, on whether to change the constitution to establish an Indigenous advisory body to parliament and 14 months before a U.S. presidential election.

"It would be helpful to understand why X have seemingly gone backwards on their commitments to mitigating the kind of serious misinformation that has translated into real political instability in the US, especially on the eve of the 'bumper year' of elections globally," said Alice Dawkins, executive director of Reset.Tech Australia.

In a letter to X's managing director for Australia, Angus Keene, Reset.Tech Australia said the change may leave content that violates X's own policy banning electoral misinformation online without an appropriate review process.

"It is extremely concerning that Australians would lose the ability to report serious misinformation weeks away from a major referendum," said the letter which was published online.

Since billionaire Musk took Twitter, as it was then known, private in late 2022, the company, which cut most of its workforce, has been accused of allowing the proliferation of antisemitism, hate speech and misinformation.

As previously reported by Reuters, Reset.Tech Australia found X failed to remove or label a single post containing misinformation about the Australian referendum over a three-week period, including after it was reported using the now-disabled feature.

Musk has said X's "Community Notes" feature, which allows users to comment on posts to flag false or misleading content, is a better way of fact checking. But those notes are only made public when they are rated as helpful by a range of contributors with varying points of view, according to X's website.

Australia's internet safety regulator wrote to X in June demanding an explanation for an explosion in hate speech on the platform, noting it had reinstated some 62,000 high profile accounts of individuals who espouse Nazi rhetoric.

The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), which will oversee the Oct. 14 referendum, has said the spread of electoral misinformation is the worst it has seen.

The commission said it was still able to report posts containing political misinformation directly to X, even after the feature was disabled. For other users, the AEC was "available for people to ask questions or seek information".

(Reporting by Byron Kaye; Editing by Sonali Paul)

European Union report finds X has a major disinformation problem

X outstripped many of its larger peers in the amount of disinformation on its platform.

Karissa Bell
Senior Editor
Tue, September 26, 2023 



X, the company previously known as Twitter, could soon find itself in hot water with European Union officials due to the amount of misinformation on its platform. The platform has an outsize role in the spread of misinformation, according to a new EU report.

The EU shared its findings in its first report on platforms’ handling of mis and disinformation as part of the Digital Services Act. The sweeping law, which recently went into effect, requires major platforms to disclose details about their handling of misinformation. Dozens of companies have additionally agreed to a voluntary “Code of Practice” on disinformation. X announced in May that it was pulling out of the agreement, though the company said it would adhere to the stricter disinformation policies required under the DSA.

The report found that X outstripped many of its larger peers when it comes to the volume of disinformation on its platform, and the engagement such posts attract. “X … is the platform with the largest ratio of mis/disinformation posts,” European Commission Vice President Vera Jourova said in a statement. The report also found that X ranked the highest in discoverability of misinformation and disinformation, followed by Facebook and Instagram.

X didn’t respond to a request for comment. In a series of tweets from its Global Affairs account, the company disputed the “framing” of the data and said it remains “committed to complying with the DSA.”

In a statement, Jourova said that all of the major platforms need to “to adjust their actions to reflect that there is a war in the information space waged against us.” She said that upcoming elections within the EU “will be an important test for the Code that platforms signatories should not fail.”

She also said that Musk would not be “off the hook” just because Twitter pulled out of the code of practice, according to comments reported by The Guardian. “My message for Twitter/X is you have to comply. We will be watching what you do.”


EU Faults Musk’s X Over Russian Disinformation

Bloomberg News
Tue, September 26, 2023 

(Bloomberg) -- Elon Musk’s X was cited as the biggest outlet for Russian disinformation as European Commission Vice President Vera Jourova warned of Slovakia being targeted by pro-Kremlin narratives ahead of an election Saturday.

The European Union’s chief trade negotiator, Valdis Dombrovskis, also issued some of the bloc’s strongest criticism yet on China’s failure to condemn Russia’s war in Ukraine, saying it was damaging Beijing’s investment opportunities.

Senate Democratic and Republican leaders in Washington agreed Tuesday on a plan to keep the government open through mid-November and provide $6 billion in assistance to Ukraine. The stopgap measure to avert an Oct. 1 shutdown still would have to overcome gridlock in the Republican-controlled House.

The Senate’s stopgap measure to avert an Oct. 1 shutdown still would have to overcome gridlock in the Republican-controlled House and a federal funding lapse remains likely.

In Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy discussed increasing the production of drones during a meeting with military commanders and officials. Ukrainian authorities reopened operations that had been suspended at a Danube River border checkpoint with Romania after a Russian drone strike damaged port facilities in the region overnight.
Russia is still relying on European shipping to transport its oil even as the country’s supplies exceed Group-of-Seven price caps, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. Roughly two-thirds of Russian crude and petroleum products is being transported by vessels insured or owned in nations implementing price caps imposed by the G-7 and its allies, the Helsinki-based researcher said.

Report: Engagement with Foreign Propaganda is Soaring on Elon Musk's X

Lucas Ropek
Tue, September 26, 2023 


Once upon a time, Twitter (now renamed X) routinely tried to label what it deemed “state affiliated” news sites, in an effort to highlight potential government disinformation and propaganda. After Elon Musk took over the platform late last year, however, he decided to put the kibosh on that policy. Predictably, new research shows that, since Musk did away with the site’s media labeling, user engagement with foreign propaganda has exploded.

A new report from NewsGuard, which analyzes media trends, claims that sites like Russia’s RT and TASS, China Daily, and Iran’s PressTV, have seen huge upticks in user engagement over the last several months. Indeed, the report claims that, in the 90 days that followed the removal of X’s “state affiliated” labels, engagement with posts from the English-language versions of their accounts shot up by some 70 percent.

Foreign propaganda is getting boosted by X’s algorithm, researchers claim

Why, exactly, are users engaging with this kind of content so much more frequently? Well, according to NewsGuard’s report, X’s own algorithm appears to be amplifying the content, thus creating a larger audience for it. Prior to Musk’s takeover, Twitter claimed that content from “state affiliated” media could never be boosted by its algorithm. However, NewsGuard says that, since Musk’s takeover, stories from sites like RT and China Daily are “algorithmically recommended” in users’ “For You” feeds with some regularity. Previous research has highlighted this trend, showing that Musk’s changes have allowed foreign disinformation campaigns to gain increasing visibility.

Jack Brewster, an analyst with NewsGuard, told Gizmodo it’s clear that, under Musk, “X now gives readers much less information about the sources from which they’re getting their news” and that the site’s recently tweaked information filtering processes have clearly “had a substantial effect on how disinformation spreads on the platform.”

Musk’s changes have made an already complex informational landscape that much more confusing

Of course, it’s important to note that Twitter/X’s disinformation problem did not begin with Elon Musk. The platform has always been a cess pool of propaganda and much of that propaganda does not originate via news organizations—state affiliated or otherwise. Armies of bots and trolls, weaponized by government agencies, political operatives, celebrities, and shadowy contractors, are routinely used to manipulate the flow of information on the site. It also recently came to light that, in the years prior to the rollout of the “state affiliated” media labels, Twitter blatantly helped amplify the U.S.’s own propaganda efforts in the Middle East, meaning that it could hardly be called a neutral arbiter of information during that period.

Twitter’s media labeling policy—which Musk did away with—was also a mess. Notably, the platform labeled state-affiliated news organizations run by America’s geopolitical foes (China, Russia, and Iran), but did not dole out similar labels for Western media outlets. Radio Free Europe, the government funded news organization that, during the height of the Cold War, received significant covert funds and programmatic direction from the CIA, and which continues to be financed by the government, was never given the same treatment as RT or China Daily. Voice of America, an openly state-owned news network, was also never labeled until Musk showed up. These U.S. organizations have claimed that their editorial policies make them different than foreign state media organizations.

Brewster readily acknowledges that the pre-Musk labeling policy had some problems, though he notes that the recent changes have clearly dispensed with important guardrails that, no matter how flimsy, were designed to combat a certain amount of information pollution on the platform.

“I don’t think Twitter before Musk did things perfectly,” said Brewster. “But I think we should always be trying to think of new ways to give people more information instead of less—especially on social media platforms, where the accountability and transparency is usually next to none. I think these platforms—the internet, overall—were not really built to spread information in a responsible way. Instead of getting better, though, this situation seems to be getting worse.”

Gizmodo

Meet the whale that may upend the offshore oil industry

Dino Grandoni and Timothy Puko, 

(c) 2023, The Washington Post
Tue, September 26, 2023

Rice's whale, also known as the Gulf of Mexico whale. (NOAA Fisheries)

It was a whale of an announcement.

After years of research, scientists said they had discovered an entirely new species of whale swimming right under their noses in the Gulf of Mexico.

Yet as soon as scientists identified Rice's whale, also known as the Gulf of Mexico whale, two years ago, there was a problem. There were hardly any left. With only about 50 remaining, the whale is one of the most endangered marine mammals on Earth.

Now efforts to protect the whale are running headfirst into that other behemoth off the Gulf Coast: the offshore oil and gas industry.

The Biden administration has proposed protecting a massive swath of ocean from Texas to Florida, potentially restricting fossil fuel activity in one of the nation's top oil-producing spots. Already Biden's deputies sought to remove millions of acres within its habitat from an offshore oil lease sale originally scheduled for Wednesday.

Offshore oil drillers and Republican lawmakers from Gulf Coast states responded with lawsuits to stop protections they say are economically crippling and hastily executed.

A federal district judge last week agreed, ordering the Biden administration to reverse course on the upcoming lease sale. An appellate court Monday delayed the lease sale until November.

The decision to remove acreage from auction "circumvented the law, ignored science, and bypassed public input," said Erik Milito, head of the National Ocean Industries Association, an offshore energy lobbying group.

But scientists say oil extraction still poses a clear risk to the whale, with officials estimating the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010 wiped out about one-fifth of the population. With so few Rice's whales left, the loss of even a single individual is devastating for the species.

"The science is quite clear that these whales won't survive in an environment with such heavy industry," said Kristen Monsell, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group. "It would just be an incredible tragedy to watch this whale species go extinct, especially so soon after we learned that it was its own species."

---

An all-American whale

In early 2019, a whale washed ashore in the Florida Everglades. It was a bad day for the whale, which died, but a great one for Michael McGowen.

Like many marine biologists, McGowen, a research zoologist and curator of marine mammals at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, knew there was something special about the whales in the Gulf of Mexico.

For decades, the region's whales were thought to be members of a widespread species called Bryde's whales. But a genetic analysis in 2014 suggested that the whales were so different that they might be a species unto themselves.

But to officially declare an animal a new species, scientists needed a body - a single example of an organism used to formally describe a new branch on the tree of life. For years, marine biologists struggled to find that first specimen - what scientists call a holotype - for the Gulf of Mexico's whales.

So when he got the call in 2019 about the whale, McGowen was elated. "We said that we would take the whole thing."

Transporting a rotting, 38-foot carcass up the East Coast is not easy. To allow its flesh to decompose, the body was loaded on a flatbed truck and driven 200 miles north to be buried in a secluded sand spit south of St. Petersburg. "People are going to complain if this giant whale is stinking up everything," McGowen said.

Five months later, the team exhumed the bones and drove them to the Bonehenge Whale Center in North Carolina to be buried in manure for further composting. Finally, the skeleton was shipped to a Smithsonian storage facility in Maryland to remove the grease from the blubbery remains.

"This skeleton of a mature male was very greasy," said John Ososky, who led the carcass retrieval for the museum.

After examining the whale's skull, scientists with the National Marine Fisheries Service published a study in 2021 declaring Rice's whale a new species. The animal was named after the late biologist Dale Rice, the first to identify the whales in the Gulf of Mexico.

Because the whales appear to live exclusively in U.S. waters, only the United States can protect them.

"This is the only whale in the world that lives entirely in the waters of one nation," said Peter Corkeron, a whale biologist who has been ringing the alarm bell. "I initially wanted to see it called the 'American whale.'"

---

A whale in 'prime real estate'

Despite the discovery, very little is known about America's newest whale.

They are "very difficult to work with because they're very shy," said Jeremy Kiszka, a Florida International University marine biologist who helped decipher their diet. The whales are picky eaters, diving deep for fatty fish.

"They will not let you come too close," he said.

Another thing we know: Humans are a big threat.

Beyond oil spills, seismic air guns that blast sound waves underwater to search for oil and gas deposits can create a deafening environment for marine mammals. Other threats include vessel strikes, entanglement in fishing gear and debris in the ocean. A hard piece of plastic found in the stomach of the Rice's whale that washed up in the Florida Everglades may have contributed to its death.

Prompted by lawsuits from environmental groups, the Biden administration started taking greater steps this summer to protect the whales under the Endangered Species Act and other laws.

In July, National Marine Fisheries Service proposed designating a 28,000-square-mile swath in the Gulf of Mexico as critical habitat for Rice's whales.

And in August, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), which oversees offshore oil and gas leasing, removed 6 million acres of Rice's whale habitat from the Wednesday offshore oil lease sale.

The agency also wanted to require oil companies to lower the speed of their vessels in the whales' waters and avoid the area after sunset. The whales rest at the surface at night, making them vulnerable to being hit by boats.

"This whale is really a poster species for why we need to end offshore oil and gas drilling," Monsell said.

But immediately, Republican lawmakers complained that throttling vessel traffic would hamper the Gulf Coast economy. The speed limits, said Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), would "detrimentally impact our nation's ability to domestically produce oil and gas in hopes of becoming energy independent."

Milito, the offshore lobbyist, said it is too early to tell right now how offshore wind and other industries would be impacted by protections for the whales. But he and other lobbyists said they could lead oil companies and investors to rethink their plans for the region.

"For oil and gas, it could be significant," Milito said. "The withdrawn acreage, it's prime real estate."

A ban on overnight maritime shipping could cause gridlock for an industry that runs around-the-clock, oil lobbyists said. Such changes could lead to offshore operations consuming more energy or a sharp increase in the cost of running them, they said.

The National Marine Fisheries Service, also known as NOAA Fisheries, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

---

'The least we could be doing' to protect the whale

The state of Louisiana and the oil giant Chevron joined the American Petroleum Institute (API), a top lobbying group, to sue the Biden administration and put those 6 million acres back on the auction block on Wednesday without the new stipulations for the whales. They argued officials made a last-minute decision that the science supported restrictions across the Gulf.

"At 11th hour, right before this lease sale, the administration did a 180 turn," said Ryan Meyers, API's senior vice president and general counsel.

In a decision issued Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge James D. Cain Jr. ruled in favor of Louisiana and the oil sector. The judge, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, wrote the "process followed here looks more like a weaponization of the Endangered Species Act than the collaborative, reasoned approach."

Environmental groups responded by appealing the decision while BOEM asked for an emergency stay of the judge's order. On Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit delayed the lease sale until Nov. 8.

"These baseline protections for the Rice's whale are quite literally the least we could be doing to save the species from extinction," Steve Mashuda, an attorney at the green group Earthjustice, said in a statement.

Despite the legal battle, the Biden administration is still considering designating a long stretch of the Gulf of Mexico as critical habitat, a move that could end up imposing more restrictions on oil and gas activity in future lease sales.

Many oil lobbyists are still wary of President Biden's campaign promise to ban offshore drilling. His administration is expected to announce this week a long-awaited plan for offshore oil leasing for the next five years.

The oil and gas sector is the first affected by the whale protections because the environmental groups' lawsuit targeted it specifically, but other industries might face restrictions, too, Milito said. The proposal arrives at a time of transformation in U.S. waters, with anti-wind advocates worried about the impact of offshore turbines on whales.

"It might be oil and gas now," Milito said. "But eventually it's going to apply to every maritime business" in the Gulf.

For environmentalists and scientists, there is little time left to protect the whales. The Smithsonian plans to raise awareness with a forthcoming exhibit of one of its Rice's whale bones and the piece of plastic from its stomach. And marine biologist Kiszka will continue studying what the whale eats.

"I'm not confident that in 50 years they're going to be around," Kiszka said. "Honestly, I wouldn't bet my life on it."

This article is part of Animalia, a column exploring the strange and fascinating world of animals and the ways in which we appreciate, imperil and depend on them.



US gets more time for oil auction in lawsuit over Gulf of Mexico whales

Updated Mon, September 25, 2023 
By Nichola Groom and Clark Mindock

(Reuters) -A U.S. appeals court on Monday gave the Biden administration until Nov. 8 to hold an expanded sale of oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico, the latest development in a legal fight over federal protection of an endangered species of whale.

The New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted a request by the U.S. Interior Department to stay part of an order issued by a federal judge in Louisiana, which had given the government until the end of this month to hold an auction that includes 6 million acres (2.4 million hectares) more than it had planned to offer.

The Interior Department had told the appeals court it disagreed with U.S. District Judge James Cain's ruling, but only asked the court give its Bureau of Ocean Energy Management more time to hold the sale. The U.S. said the short deadline injected "chaos" into an auction that had already started by mail and needed to be changed significantly to comply with the order.

The 5th Circuit did not block the lower court judge's decision more broadly, which environmental groups had said was necessary to protect the endangered Rice's whale from oil and gas development.

Cain's Sept. 22 order had been celebrated by the oil and gas industry, which had sued in August alongside the state of Louisiana over an earlier decision by the Interior Department to scale back the auction.

The Interior Department declined to comment on the ruling.

The American Petroleum Institute (API), a plaintiff in the suit, said it was pleased that the court had upheld the lower court's decision to reinstate acreage and remove "burdensome stipulations," but expressed disappointment with the delay.

"It should not take a court order or an act of Congress for Interior to carry out its responsibility to meet the energy needs of the American people," API Senior Vice President Ryan Meyers said in a statement.

Representatives for the environmental groups and the Louisiana attorney general's office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Democratic President Joe Biden originally paused federal drilling auctions shortly after taking office in 2021 as part of his climate change agenda.

The Interior Department finalized plans for a reduced lease sale in August, after last year's Inflation Reduction Act mandated the auction move forward. The sale made about 67 million acres in the Gulf available for bids.

The changes stemmed from an agreement struck in August between federal agencies and environmental groups that had sued in 2020 alleging the government did not provide adequate safeguards for the whales.

Those groups had claimed the whales can be harmed or killed by oil spills, vessel strikes, noise, marine debris and other impacts of oil and gas exploration and development.

(Reporting by Nichola Groom and Clark Mindock; Editing by Sandra Maler, Alexia Garamfalvi, Richard Chang and Sonali Paul)


Coast Guard spots critically endangered whales off Louisiana

Emily Mae Czachor
Updated Tue, September 26, 2023 


Officers with the United States Coast Guard captured video footage over the weekend of one of the most endangered whales on the planet, after encountering three of the creatures off the Louisiana coast in the Gulf of Mexico.

The footage shows three Rice's whales, enormous members of the baleen whale family that have been seen in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico, marine wildlife officials say. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates that there are likely fewer than 100 Rice's whales left in the world.

"CRITICALLY ENDANGERED SPECIES SIGHTING: Station Venice presents to you……. Rice's Whale," the U.S. Coast Guard station in Venice wrote on Facebook Sunday, captioning a 16-second video of the whales swimming nearby. The video was removed later on Tuesday from the U.S. Coast Guard Venice station's Facebook page.

"It is thought there is less than 100 individuals of this species remaining," the Coast Guard said.

Coast Guard officers from the agency's Venice station spotted the whales while on a Living Marine Resource patrol, an operation meant to manage and protect fish and other marine resources, in the Mississippi Canyon, a spokesperson for the U.S. Coast Guard said, according to the Miami Herald. What they initially believed to be large pieces of floating debris turned out to be three Rice's whales, estimated to measure about 25 feet long, according to the newspaper.

CBS News contacted the U.S. Coast Guard for confirmation and more details but did not receive an immediate reply.

The Mississippi Canyon is a sprawling underwater canyon located in the north-central part of the Gulf of Mexico, south of Louisiana. The Coast Guard's recent sighting in that area came after another by researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration over the summer. That sighting also happened in the Gulf of Mexico, according to NOAA Fisheries.

While surveying the northeastern portion of the Gulf, researchers observed a Rice's whale blow in the distance, and eventually steered their vessel closer to the whale until it was floating adjacent to their boat in the water. Tony Martinez, the field chief scientist on the survey, said in a statement that being able to capture such detailed photographs of the Rice's whale and observe the sounds it makes, is critical to understanding the endangered species, which in turn helps to protect the population.

Although previous surveys have mainly placed the remaining Rice's whales in the northeastern section of the Gulf of Mexico, it is thought that the whales may have once been found throughout a wider section of the Gulf, NOAA Fisheries said.

Trump Hops On Evidence-Free Campaign To Kill Offshore Wind

Chris D'Angelo
Updated Wed, September 27, 2023 at 5:18 AM MDT·6 min read

Former President Donald Trump has joined the right-wing war against offshore wind with an evidence-free rant about the fledgling industry being responsible for a spate of recent whale deaths along the East Coast.

“Their windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before,” Trump said Sunday during a campaign speech in South Carolina. “The windmills are driving them crazy. They’re driving the whales, I think, a little batty.”

Trump, who as president spearheaded a fossil fuel-centric “energy dominance” agenda and repeatedly exaggerated the wind industry’s impact on birds, told the crowd that he “saw this weekend, three of them came [ashore].”

“You wouldn’t see it once a year,” he claimed, referring to some unspecified time in the past. “Now they’re coming up on a weekly basis.”

Trump appeared to be referencing reports from last month, when three dead humpback whales washed ashore in the Tri-State area over a four-day period. At least one showed signs of being hit by a boat, although federal officials have yet to conclude full necropsies.

To be clear, wind development — like any other offshore activity — does have the potential to disrupt and harm whales and otherwise negatively impact the ocean environment. It is not without environmental risks, and scientists have urged federal agencies to remain vigilant as the industry expands in U.S. waters.

But federal scientists have repeatedly thrown cold water on sweeping claims coming from fossil fuel-allied climate denial groups, anti-wind organizations and GOP lawmakers — namely, that offshore wind development is wreaking havoc on whales.

“At this point, there is no scientific evidence that noise resulting from offshore wind site characterization surveys could potentially cause mortality of whales,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration states on its website. “There are no known links between recent large whale mortalities and ongoing offshore wind surveys.”

To make their case, anti-wind advocates often conflate the plight of the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale with recent humpback whale strandings, which federal authorities have classified as an “unusual mortality event” that dates back to 2016.

Along with dismissing any link between the whale deaths and offshore wind, officials have stressed that vessel strikes, entanglement in fishing gear and climate change are among the biggest human threats to whales, including humpback and right whales. More than 200 humpback whales have died along the East Coast since 2016. Forty percent of the animals that underwent necropsies showed signs of being struck by a boat or an entanglement.

Ironically, Trump’s comments were part of a broader attack on what he called the Biden administration’s “extreme regulatory attacks,” specifically a new proposal to expand vessel speed limits and seasonal speed zones along the East Coast — changes that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says are “essential to stabilize the ongoing right whale population decline and prevent the species’ extinction.” 

An endangered North Atlantic right whale entangled in fishing rope swims alongside a newborn calf on Dec. 2, 2021, in waters near Cumberland Island, Georgia.

“The Biden administration, right now, is trying to bludgeon the boating and maritime industry,” Trump said, adding the proposed rule would limit vessels to the speed of “a slow golf cart.” He claimed that only one whale has been killed by a vessel strike off South Carolina in the last 50 years and, more bizarrely, that a person has “a better chance of being struck by lightning than hitting a whale with your boat” — talking points that sound like something pulled straight from a shipping industry newsletter.

The former president’s rant shines a clear light on the pipeline of misinformation now flowing between conservative, fossil-fuel aligned groups, right-wing media and GOP lawmakers.

As HuffPost reported last year, anti-offshore wind groups, including some of the nation’s most hard-line climate change denial outfits, suddenly branded themselves guardians of the endangered right whale as they ramped up a legal war against newly approved offshore wind projects. Fox News hosts have given anti-wind advocates hours of airtime to peddle unfounded claims about offshore wind devastating whale populations, while often parroting those talking points themselves.

In March, Republicans introduced a resolution that cited recent whale deaths and called for an immediate federal moratorium on offshore wind leasing and construction activity pending the outcome of an investigation to “determine the true impacts” of this development. The resolution came three days after Peter Murphy, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, or CFACT, a right-wing group with a long history of peddling climate change disinformation, penned a post on the organization’s website calling for a moratorium.

More recently, Michael Shellenberger, the two-time unsuccessful California gubernatorial candidate and centrist environmental nonprofit leader, co-produced a documentary, titled “Thrown to the Wind,” which argues in no uncertain terms that when it comes to offshore wind and the recent whale deaths, correlation is as good as causation.

The documentary “proves that the US government officials have been lying” about the cause of the whale mortalities, Shellenberger wrote in an Aug. 26 piece published in the conservative New York Post. (The Post added quotation marks to the headline, which reads: “New documentary ‘proves’ building offshore wind farms does kill whales.”)

Fox News has had Shellenberger on to promote his film at least four times, according to Media Matters to Media Matters, a media watchdog group. In one interview with Fox’s Brian Kilmeade, Shellenberger said he and his team are “working with Congress to get hearings and an investigation on this, because we think there is widespread corruption, including in the U.S. government.”

They’ll almost certainly find allies on Capitol Hill.

“These windmills, according to an earlier report on your network, are killing the whales,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) told Fox in an interview earlier this month, apparently referencing the unfounded claims in Shellenberger documentary.

Even as whales have become a key tool in the right-wing fight against offshore wind, Trump and other conservatives are actively condemning more stringent vessel speed limits — a concrete action aimed at curbing one of the primary threats to the animals.

Last year, HuffPost asked CFACT’s Collister Johnson about the vessel speed rule. He dismissed the idea that reducing vessel speeds could help safeguard whales. And when pressed about what he sees as the solution, he quickly argued that’s for federal regulators to figure out.

“That’s not our problem,” he said.

Related...

Republicans Are Latching On To A New Conspiracy Theory — And It's Comically Absurd


Climate Deniers Exploit Endangered Whales In Bid To Kill Offshore Wind


Ron Johnson Spouts A Big Blubbery Tale About Whale-Killing Windmills

‘Debris’ floating in Gulf of Mexico turns out to be 3 endangered creatures
Moira Ritter
Mon, September 25, 2023 at 2:19 PM MDT·1 min read
210



Unsplash


CLARIFICATION: This story has been updated to reflect that Coast Guard officials identified the whales spotted in the Gulf of Mexico as sperm whales after previously identifying them as critically endangered Rice’s whales. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also told McClatchy News in a statement that they are sperm whales.

The story continues below.

Coast Guard officers were conducting a routine patrol in the Gulf of Mexico when they spotted something strange.

The officers from the U.S. Coast Guard Station Venice were on a Living Marine Resource patrol — which seeks to protect fish and marine resources — near the Mississippi Canyon, a spokesperson told McClatchy News. That’s when they saw what appeared to be a pile of debris floating in the water.

As the officers got closer though, they realized they had discovered something much more special: It was three 25-foot sperm whales.

Officials shared a video of one of the creatures swimming through the water in a Sept. 24 Facebook post.

The video shows a sperm whale, a spokesperson from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration wrote in an email to McClatchy News.

Sperm whales are endangered and are typically found in Alaska and the northern Atlantic, according to Whale Sense. The deep-diving creatures are known to prey on squid, sharks and other fish. Females can grow to 40 feet and 15 tons, while males can be up to 52 feet and 45 tons.

The whales were spotted roughly 30 miles south of the SouthWest Pass, which is south of New Orleans.

The Father Has Spent His Career at Ford. The Son Might Not.

Jenna Russell
Tue, September 26, 2023

WESTLAND, Mich. — On Friday morning just before 10, Steve Kellums, 54, and his son Keegan, 24, sat side by side in the older man’s living room in Westland, a short drive from the Ford Motor assembly plant where they both work. One week into the strike by 3,300 workers at the plant, they were anxiously awaiting an announcement from their union president on Facebook Live.

Bent over his cellphone, Keegan tried to tamp down sparks of optimism. He knew better than to imagine that the strike, at that point limited to his plant and two others in Missouri and Ohio, would end quickly, because the United Auto Workers and Ford management were so far apart.

“I know it’s going to get more ugly before it gets better,” Keegan said, taking a swig from a bottle of Pepsi.

Steve turned toward him. “Or, let’s be positive,” he said, sounding decidedly dadlike. “There’s at least a chance they could have come to an agreement.”

Father and son have leaned on each other since Sept. 15, when the autoworkers union began its first simultaneous strike against General Motors, Ford and Stellantis, Chrysler’s parent company. Both men were on strike for the first time in their lives, and have been talking each other through it day by day. They represent two ends of the spectrum among the workers, and two perspectives on the industry, a generational divergence that ripples through the broader workforce.

Their views reflect larger changes in the way younger people see work, and think about obligation to employers, a shift that has fed recent growth in support for unions and union organizing efforts at more private companies.

With 28 years behind him at Michigan Assembly — an immense plant in Wayne, 30 miles west of Detroit, that ordinarily churns out some of Ford’s most popular SUVs and trucks at slightly faster than one vehicle a minute — Steve Kellums hopes to retire by the time he turns 60, and he dreams of buying a small farm in Tennessee. He was hired in 1994, before a downturn in the industry and a recession drove Ford into financial crisis, and forced the union to make once-unthinkable concessions, including accepting a two-tier wage system with lower pay for newer workers.

When Keegan Kellums started at Ford in 2020, his pay reflected those tumultuous changes. He said he left Amazon, where he was making nearly $18 an hour as a packager, to start at Ford at just $16 an hour.

His father said it pained him to see how much had changed since the days when a job at Ford meant a comfortable middle-class life. He was making double his son’s wages when Keegan was hired.

“Twenty-five years later, they only offered him $3 more per hour than I got when I joined,” Steve said. “Is this the life I wanted for him? No.”

Now, the UAW is trying to eliminate two-tier wages, add retiree benefits for younger workers, and raise pay by 40% over the next four years, to make up for the compensation lost to givebacks over time. Ford has said it cannot afford those proposals.

On the picket line last week outside the plant in Wayne, it was hard to find a union member who did not have two or three generations of relatives employed by the company. For much of its history, since it began offering factory workers $5 a day to build the Model T in 1914, Ford’s wages and benefits allowed blue-collar employees to join the middle class. Jobs with the automaker were sought after. Turnover was low.

Keegan has ties to Ford on both sides of his family. His maternal grandfather worked for 42 years at Michigan Assembly. His father’s great-grandfather worked at another Ford plant in Dearborn. Keegan’s first new car, in high school, was a silver Ford Fusion; to make his payments, he worked at the nearby Henry Ford museum.

As a boy, he imagined a future with Ford, but was taken aback when his father did not embrace his plan.

“My dad said, ‘No, be something bigger than that, go to college — I come home tired every day,’” the younger Kellums recalled another day last week, sitting in the local union hall near tables piled with food donated to striking workers.

When Keegan was 9 or 10 and the country sank into recession, the union agreed to help keep Ford afloat through a bad time, but members now say Ford never restored their losses when profits surged again, leaving them disillusioned and less able to get by.

“I knew something was going on,” Keegan said of that time in his childhood. “The big birthday parties got smaller. We stopped going to Cedar Point, the amusement park, for vacation every summer.”

After high school, he worked as a cashier at Dollar Tree, making minimum wage and living at home, and then for Amazon, where he hoped to find more opportunity. But he found the workplace chaotic during the pandemic, with frequent changes in sick-time rules and people being fired with little warning.

When the job came up at Ford, he felt conflicted, but the prospect of joining a strong union made the difference.

“The union could protect me,” he said. “That was it, right there.”

The new job was a grueling adjustment for him — physically demanding, hot and dirty. Lacking seniority, he worked from 6 p.m. until 4:30 a.m. and came home exhausted, his arms coated in black grime. Like his father, who works days, Keegan is a material handler, “feeding the line” by swiftly moving heavy rolling racks of auto parts from the warehouse to the fast-paced assembly floor.

“I’m a big boy,” he said, “and it takes all my weight to move them.”

As his endurance grew, so did his pay; earlier this month, his hourly wage rose to $24. He had saved enough by last November to move out of his father’s house and into an apartment with two roommates.

When the call came to strike, father and son both said they felt ready. Steve took the bigger financial hit, because all union members are getting the same strike pay from the union — $500 a week. But Keegan faces more uncertainty; he had planned to sign a lease on a new apartment this November, but now, with no idea how long the strike will last, he wonders if he should move back in with his dad.

If that is what it takes to win a better contract, so be it, he said, noting that for younger, lower-paid workers like him, the strike feels like less of a risk than it might for older workers.

“The difference with my generation is, we don’t have a lot to lose,” he said. “We don’t have a pension. We don’t have kids.”

Each generation says it is fighting for the other: Keegan wants to see his father’s losses restored, while Steve wants to know that his son will be able to make a decent living at Ford, as he himself once did, before cuts to his hours and overtime reduced his income. “I couldn’t tell you the last time I had 40 hours,” he said.

In his son’s view of the future, though, Ford is just one option. “If I could find a good job somewhere else, I would,” Keegan said, “but what else is there around here?”

The announcement the men were waiting for Friday morning turned out not to be the strike’s end, but its expansion. Workers at 38 GM and Stellantis parts distribution centers in 20 states were called to walk out. Shawn Fain, the UAW president, did not expand the strike to additional Ford employees, though, citing progress in bargaining on job security and wages.

Encouraged by that glimmer of hope, Keegan said the strategy seemed sound, and that he approves of the union’s aggressive approach. “The older generation, in general, has been more passive,” he said. “I think my generation pushed them to take the first step.”

Steve wonders how willing the younger workers will be to accept even reasonable compromises at the bargaining table.

To save money while the strike goes on, Keegan said he would continue to go “grocery shopping” in his father’s pantry and visit often for home-cooked meals. At the union hall Thursday, Keegan’s girlfriend scooped up several donated tomatoes to give to his father, a skilled cook who can replicate their favorite Outback entree, Alice Springs Chicken.

After the announcement Friday morning, it was time for Steve to head to the picket line, where he serves as a strike captain outside Gate 19 for six hours a week. Keegan tagged along, although his own assigned day to picket was not until Sunday. Keegan knew his dad would join the line again with him then.

Keegan’s girlfriend has picketed as well, between her shifts at Walmart, where pay and benefits are lacking, she said, and there is no union to push for better. While the strike has made her more aware of the potential drawbacks of a job at Ford, the 22-year-old said it still looked like a better option.

Given the chance to work at Ford, she said, she would jump at it.

c.2023 The New York Times Company

Stephen King Gives 'Jimmy' Jordan A Frightening Fact Check On Crime

Ed Mazza
Updated Wed, September 27, 2023 


Bestselling author Stephen King called out House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) for missing the point on crime even after holding a hearing on the subject.

With the federal government on the brink of a shutdown as House Republicans fail to advance funding bills, Jordan took the Judiciary Committee to Chicago for the hearing, which critics dismissed as a stunt.

Rather than focus on the actual causes of crime, Jordan blamed it on Democratic lawmakers.

“You’re not safe in Democrat-run cities,” Jordan wrote on X, formerly Twitter, as he shared a report on armed robberies in Chicago.

King, who has long spoken out against gun violence and in favor of tighter restrictions on firearms, pointed out what Jordan seems to have missed:



King has called out other lawmakers for failing to act to prevent gun violence.

Earlier this year he pointed to Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) for obsessing over Hunter Biden instead of the epidemic of deadly gun violence.

Producing power from cow poop: A Florida dairy aims to reduce climate impact of cattle

Ashley Miznazi
Mon, September 25, 2023 

At barn No. 5 at the Larson Dairy farm just north of Lake Okeechobee, a line of cows pump out milk bound for grocery stores shelves and family refrigerators across Florida.

Being cows, they are also producing a steady supply of something else — manure, a lot of it.

Poop is an inevitable byproduct of the cattle industry and, like cow burps and farts, it emits methane, a potent greenhouse gas that scientists point to as a major driver of climate change. But an innovative process now in operation at Larson helps reduce the climate impact of this dairy herd, capturing and cleaning methane locked in those cowpies and sending it to a natural gas pipeline near the farm.

Environmentalists and climate change experts, who have long criticized the cattle industry over pollution problems, have plenty of questions and concerns about the process.

But the end result is something that Jacob Larson, a third-generation Florida farmer, sees as a big step forward he could not imagine possible a few years ago: His dairy waste supplements the state’s energy supply and can perhaps even become a valuable product of its own.

“Just the thought process of turning manure into fuel is mind-boggling,” said Larson, during a tour of the dairy’s poop-to-power system, which emerged through a partnership with Brightmark, a waste-to-energy company based in California that has picked up much of the tab for installing and operating the equipment.

Turning poop into power

Since the source of this power is cow poop, the process itself is not particularly pretty. In the dairy barn, a spray system regularly wets down the manure with water to liquefy it, creating a brown stream that flows down a ditch into a concrete reservoir. From there, pipes take it into the heart of the system, something called an “anaerobic digester” lagoon.

The system appears relatively low-tech. From above, a digester consists of large black tarps spread over what looks like a mound. But underneath, it functions like an insulated, oxygen-free underground bunker. Manure goes through four chemical reactions as bacteria feed on it. Depending on the temperature and amount of nutrients in the manure, Brightmark says it can take days to weeks for “bio-gas” to form, cleaned and processed. The company delivered its first bio-gas to a nearby pipeline in August.

Anaerobic digesters are in place on four of Larson’s sprawling farms, fed by a steady supply of manure from some 12,000 cows. The poop-to-power calculation is complicated but by one expert estimate, 10 of the cows at barn No. 5 can produce enough bio-gas in a month to run a typical home over the same period.

“The Larsons take care of cows and produce high-quality cows and high-quality manure,” Larson said. “We commit our manure supply to Brightmark, and they take the manure supply from there.”

After processing, what’s left of the manure is run through a rotating composter that squeezes out water and remaining solids. The dried leftovers, stored in piles, and the remaining liquid are used as fertilizer on the farm.

“It’s like recycling, that’s the beauty,” said Rishi Prasad, an environmental science professor at Auburn University who is not affiliated with Brightmark but has studied the process involved. “You are basically recycling manure on the farm for energy, for feeding the plants like corn, and then that corn would go back to feeding the dairy cows.”

The methane challenge

Livestock operations, according to a United Nations assessment, account for about a third of all global methane emissions — with cows far and away the No. 1 source. Methane is a particularly problematic greenhouse gas — its warming effect some 28 times greater than carbon dioxide on a 100-year timescale, and more than 80 times more powerful over 20 years, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

So reducing methane emissions could make a big difference and is one of the major challenges of curbing climate change. While some activists call for banning or shrinking the cattle industry, that goal hasn’t won much political or public support.

“The whole planet is not going to stop eating beef, or stop drinking milk or stop eating pizzas,” said Prasad, who studied anaerobic digesters as part of his pHd research at the University of Florida. “But we need to think about how we can make the food production industry more sustainable and reduce emissions so we can buy more time.”

California, where Brightmark is based, already has embraced the use of digesters and fueled expansion through a state policy called the Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) intended to reduce the impact of transportation fuels. Under the complex rules, California views digesters as “carbon-negative” so bio-fuel can be used as a “credit” to balance out fossil fuels in a commercial trading market.

It works this way. While there are no caps on emissions from dairy farms, oil and gas companies have strict limits on emissions produced by transportation fuel. To stay within emissions limits, those companies can either sell fuel with a lower carbon footprint or offset its use.

So at dairy farms, owners of the digesters can sell “carbon-negative” fuel to oil and gas companies like Chevron, which partnered with Brightmark — a transaction that helps offset its own emissions in the California system. Because digesters receive credit both for reducing methane emissions from manure and replacing a fossil fuel, dairy bio-gas is a particularly attractive commodity in the California market, 10 times more valuable than landfill gas.


Brightmark sees a promising future in Florida, where digesters also have been catching on. According to EPA’s database, as of May 2022, there were about 330 anaerobic digesters at livestock farms in the U.S. and over 30 in Florida. Larson Family Farms isn’t included on the list yet. The EPA also sees room for growth in Florida, with one report projecting up to 80 dairy farms as candidates.

“The mission for us is to re-imagine waste and really look at better ways to create environmental benefits associated with the things that we waste,” Bob Powell, CEO of Brightmark, said in an interview with the Miami Herald. “I definitely think the project with the Larsons is a flagship project and one that people can point to.”

Brightmark, Larson and other supporters see the systems as a win-win. Bio-gas creates a new use, and potential revenue stream, from a former waste product.

“We’re going to be offsetting on an annual basis 57,000 tons of CO2 equivalent out of the environment,” Powell said. “And to put that in perspective, that would be the equivalent of planting over 75,000 acres of forest each year.”

Not a cure for climate impacts

But the systems also are not silver bullets and even some supporters say that labeling them “carbon negative” oversells the benefits.

“I don’t think this falls under a carbon-negative scenario,” said Prasad, the Auburn associate professor. “But it is reducing the methane that goes back into the atmosphere by recycling it and not throwing it directly into the environment.”

Ruthie Lazenby, who focuses on energy law and policy at UCLA, said the anaerobic digesters also only deal with one part of the cow emissions problem. They don’t process burps and passed gas, she wrote in a report supported by the United States Department of Agriculture.

“It is imperative that policymakers and others recognize that manure bio-gas systems reduce emissions from only one part of this system—manure management,” Lazenby said in the report.

Manure also happens to be the smallest part of the problem. While agriculture operations overall account for 10% of global greenhouse emissions, only 12% of that comes from manure, according to the EPA. In one study, scientists recorded up to 95% of cow’s methane emissions came from burps and farts.

While the digesters can cut overall methane emissions from a dairy, she and others also worry whether selling bio-gas might actually encourage the expansion of a cattle industry that could potentially offset the benefits of manure-to-power systems. Lazenby believes the industry’s operations need to be more closely regulated.

“Embracing digesters is a profoundly pessimistic approach to greenhouse gas reduction and assumes that the best we can do is pay factory farms to capture a portion of their greenhouse gas emissions,” she said. “Not only that, it invests in a technology that requires the ongoing production of those very greenhouse gasses.”

A study from The Union of Concerned Scientists also showed that California’s system gave a competitive financial advantage to large-scale dairy operations. The EPA, which has embraced digesters, also favors larger operations. In the screening document titled, “Is Anaerobic Digestion Right for Your Farm?” the second question asks how large the farm is and said potential candidates for digesters should have at least 500 cattle.

One estimation calculated that each cow could bring in an extra $1,000 in revenue from carbon credits every year.

“On its face, using bio-gas to power homes and cars might be an attractive approach if you assume that these vehicles are going to be running anyway and this offers an opportunity to displace fossil fuels,” said study author Kevin Fingerman, an associate professor of energy and climate at Calpoly Humboldt State University. “The complication emerges when we ask if there would be as much methane vented if we didn’t have policy promotions for bio-gas.”

“By creating a new revenue stream, does that reinforce large-scale operations?” he said.

Climate impact also isn’t the only concern — particularly in Florida, where environmental groups have long argued that cow manure is also a contributor to water pollution problems and algae blooms — and a major source of damaging nutrients flowing south into Lake Okeechobee. Brightmark believes the digesters will help reduce impacts there as well. In the past, manure would be disposed of in an open-air lagoon with greenhouse gasses vented into the atmosphere.

“Because of the process creating a more stable fertilizer, it reduces phosphorus and nitrogen in the environment and it’s allowed a dramatic water positive impact in our farming communities,” Powell said.

But Prasad and others are skeptical about how much of a difference a digester makes in reducing pollution impacts from fertilizer.

“There is no such thing as a ‘stable fertilizer’ because it has nutrients,” Prasad said. “If you apply the digester’s fertilizer throughout the season everything adds up and putting it in the same places for years can become a problem.”

The EPA also considers the leftover material potentially problematic.

“Digestate [the leftover solids and liquid] is a nutrient-rich by-product from organic waste anaerobic digestion but can contribute to nutrient pollution without comprehensive management strategies. Some nutrient pollution impacts include harmful algal blooms, hypoxia, and eutrophication.”
For one farmer, a family legacy

Brightmark acknowledges that it has aspirations beyond the Larson farms. The company is also interested in developing larger operations, but says not every dairy farm it might contract with will wind up adding cows.

“Brightmark is evaluating farms based on certain sizes,” said Ryan Berger, a partnership coordinator with Brightmark. “Sometimes it does work out to add more cows to that. We have a number of farms that we’ve worked with that have added cows. We have another set of farms that we work with that really haven’t grown.”

For Larson, his family’s goal is to continue a legacy in providing a staple product for Florida — but with reduced impact on the community and state he loves.

“The hours are long, the work is hard and sometimes it’s dirty, but at the end of the day it’s pretty rewarding,” Larson said with a grin. “We feel a lot of responsibility. We’ve been blessed, and when much is given, much is required. We do know that we have a lot to give back.

One thing he does question is the contention from EPA and Brightmark that digesters can help reduce odors emanating from a dairy operation. Larson, who has been smelling cows his whole life, isn’t too sure about that.

“I can’t say it smells much better.”

Ashley Miznazi is a climate change reporter for the Miami Herald funded by the Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Family Foundation in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners.

Chinese social media censored a top economist for his bearish predictions. He now warns that China’s property crisis will take a decade to fix

Nicholas Gordon
Tue, September 26, 2023 

Graham Crouch—Bloomberg via Getty Images

How long will it take to fix China’s flailing real estate sector? One of the country’s most prominent economists, who was ejected from its social media platforms for his bearish predictions about the economy, thinks it might take 10 years to fix.

“Fixing the property sector may be a multiyear or even a decade’s work in front of us,” Hong Hao, chief economist for Shanghai-based hedge fund Grow Investment, said on CNBC Tuesday.

That will mean more pain for China’s suffering real estate sector, now two years into its debt crisis. A default in 2021 by China Evergrande Group, one of the country’s largest private developers, sparked contagion across the whole sector as financing dried up. Construction stopped, leading to protests as homebuyers realized they might never get the homes they paid for.

Now with China’s economy underperforming after the COVID pandemic, Beijing officials are grappling with how to wean the economy from real estate without torpedoing the economy in the short term.

For much of the past decade, Chinese developers like Evergrande went on a debt-fueled construction spree, building millions of new homes throughout the country. That’s led to an oversupply, dragging down prices.

“We built way too much housing for Chinese people,” Hong said on CNBC.

Demand is also in long-term decline. Investment bank Goldman Sachs estimated in August that China’s annual urban housing demand peaked at 18 million units in 2017, and will fall to 11 million units this year and 9 million units by 2030.

On Tuesday, Hong pointed to slowing rates of urbanization, with fewer rural Chinese moving to the cities for work. "Two years ago, we were selling 18 trillion yuan [$2.5 trillion] worth of property," he said. "This year, we'd be lucky to do even [10 trillion yuan], and going down the road, we'd be lucky to do even [5 trillion] or [6 trillion]."

Bearish takes

Hong is an outspoken commentator on China’s economy, growing his audience during his tenure as the head of research of BOCOM International, a division of state-owned Bank of Communications.

Yet Hong’s takes were censored last year amid China’s tough COVID lockdowns in cities like Shanghai. Hong argued that the lockdown, which trapped millions of people to their apartments in a bid to stop an outbreak, would hurt China’s economy and would encourage capital flight.

Both WeChat—the ubiquitous messaging platform—and Twitter-like Weibo suspended Hong’s accounts in May 2022. Hong soon resigned from BOCOM, which the company said was for personal reasons.

When Hong got a new gig at Grow International a few months later, he warned that those working at state-owned brokerages were starting to face restrictions about what they could say. “Even if you don’t speak the truth, market prices will tell the truth,” he told Reuters at the time.

Hong’s suspension was an early indicator of Beijing’s censorship of bad economic news. This year, regulators are asking analysts and economists to stop using negative language to describe China’s economy—think “subdued inflation” rather than deflation—and the statistics bureau has stopped releasing some indicators like consumer confidence and youth unemployment.

China’s economic recovery has stagnated. Retail sales and manufacturing have grown at lower-than-expected rates for much of the year, and foreign trade has plunged. Still, Chinese economic data beat forecasts last month, suggesting that government support measures may finally be having an effect.

China’s property crisis

China’s real estate sector contributes as much as a third of the country’s GDP. Yet the sector’s liquidity crisis shows no signs of ending anytime soon.

China Evergrande, whose default arguably triggered the crisis in the first place, missed a payment on an onshore yuan-denominated bond on Monday. The developer revealed over the weekend that it could not issue new debt. Chinese authorities are also probing the developer’s former CEO and CFO, reports Caixin.

The bankrupt developer faces a liquidation petition on Oct. 30.

Another major Chinese developer, Country Garden, is also having debt issues. The developer, which has four times as many projects as Evergrande, recently made a $22.5 million interest payment with just days to spare.

While China has relaxed some real estate policies in a bid to stabilize home prices, analysts think that the glory days of the sector are over.

That may be by design, as officials try to wean China off its real estate sector. On CNBC, Hong suggested that once China’s economy relies on other industries rather than the property sector, then “we will have a better, much healthier Chinese economy than before.”

“Not having an overbearing Chinese property sector actually is good for the Chinese economy going forward,” he said.

Fortune.com