Canadian charity says aid truck bombed in Gaza in 'targeted' attack

CBC
Fri, April 19, 2024 

The International Development and Relief Foundation, a Toronto-based registered non-profit, says its primary water aid truck was bombed in northern Gaza in the early hours of Wednesday morning, and is calling on the Canadian government to investigate. (Submitted by IDRF - image credit)


A Canadian humanitarian organization says its primary water aid truck was bombed in Gaza and is calling on the federal government to mount a full investigation into what it believes was a "targeted" incident.

The International Development and Relief Foundation (IDRF), a registered non-profit based in Toronto, told CBC News the truck was bombed in the early hours of Wednesday morning and that no one was hurt in the incident.

Zeina Osman, the IDRF's director of impact, said the bombing is the first involving a Canadian aid truck during the current war in the Gaza, but wouldn't say outright if the organization believes the Israeli military was behind the bombing.


The truck was parked outside the Tuffah district in the northern part of Gaza at the time, but was clearly marked with the organization's name, as well as a maple leaf, she said.

"It's hard not to see this as further targeting of the international aid community," Osman told CBC News.

The bombing comes just over two weeks since Israel admitted that one of its airstrikes had mistakenly struck a World Central Kitchen (WCK) convoy, killing seven aid workers, including a dual Canada-U.S. citizen.

IDRF chief operating officer Nabil Ali said the agency has notified Global Affairs Canada about the bombing, but has not received a response.

"We're looking for the Canadian government's support," he said. "I think, like at a minimum, the government has to kind of look into this ... to understand exactly how this could happen to a Canadian aid agency providing services on the ground."

CBC News has contacted Global Affairs for comment.

Ali said the truck was paid for entirely from Canadian donor dollars and that thousands will be without water as a result of the bombing.

IDRF chief operating officer Nabil Ali said the truck was paid for entirely from Canadian donor dollars and that thousands will be without water as a result of the bombing. (Submitted by IDRF)

Ali said the truck had been out the day before delivering water, and when IDRF workers returned to it in the morning, they found it had been destroyed.

"It was a shock to the whole team, and we're very, very thankful that no one on our team was hurt by it. But it really has shaken us up and we're really worried about what the future holds for us right now.

"We would question why a water tank that provides clean drinking water was bombed. It makes absolutely no sense," he said. "The basics of humanitarian principles are not being upheld and that's a real issue."

'Humanitarian principles are not being upheld'

Late last month, the top United Nations court ordered Israel to take measures including opening more land crossings to allow supplies including food, water and fuel into the war-ravaged enclave, where 2.3 million civilians face crippling shortages of necessities.

The International Court of Justice issued two new so-called provisional measures in a case brought by South Africa accusing Israel of acts of genocide in the latter's military campaign in Gaza, launched after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks.

Israel stringently denies it is committing genocide and says its military campaign is self-defence. It urged the court not to issue new orders.

Ali said the truck was paid for entirely from Canadian donor dollars, and that thousands will be without water as a result of the bombing.

"That truck was a staple in providing people with clean drinking water on a daily basis," he said.

IDRF chief operating officer Nabil Ali said the agency has notified Global Affairs Canada about the bombing, but has not received a response.

IDRF chief operating officer Nabil Ali said the agency has notified Global Affairs Canada about the bombing, but has not received a response. (CBC)

In a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, NDP MP Heather McPherson called on Canada's foreign affairs minister to respond to the bombing.

"A Canadian charity's water truck was bombed in Gaza. Attacks on humanitarians continue. @MelanieJoly, what actions are you taking to end this horror?"

Ontario MP Salma Zahid also commented, calling the incident "disappointing and devastating news."

"Water is life, and access to clean drinking water is a life-saving issue for millions in Gaza. Humanitarian groups like @IDRFcanada are doing vital work and all parties to conflict have an obligation to ensure their protection."

CBC News has asked Global Affairs Canada for clarity on whether it is still pursuing investigations into the airstrike on the WCK convoy. The department has not responded, nor has it said whether it wishes to involve its own investigators in any probe, or have direct access to the Israel Defence Forces soldiers involved.

Meanwhile, IDRF said on X that over the last six months, the truck delivered clean drinking water to tens of thousands, "serving as a lifeline" in northern and central Gaza.`

It also said it will continue to operate, albeit with smaller tanks, making it more difficult. It also reiterated its calls for an "immediate and lasting ceasefire" in Gaza.

"This incident shows the dangers that humanitarian workers face every day. It's not the first time aid workers have been targeted in this crisis, and sadly, it may not be the last," it said.

"We refuse to accept a reality where delivering life-saving aid comes at such a devastating cost."

Danielle Smith wants ideology 'balance' at universities. Alberta academics wonder what she's tilting at

CBC
Sat, April 20, 2024 

After launching a new bill that constrains federal deals with cities and other provincially controlled entities, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has declared an ambition to overhaul what post-secondary research churns out. Somehow. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press - image credit)


From the exam-marking trenches to the ivory tower executive suites, Premier Danielle Smith has injected nervousness throughout Alberta's post-secondary sector.

It initially seemed her Bill 18, the Provincial Priorities Act, was intended to make her government play checkstop or gatekeeper whenever the federal government and mayors made deals without provincial involvement.

Then it became apparent that Smith's government would apply the same scrutiny to the higher-learning sector, and the premier's remarks made it clear she had federal research grants and notions of ideological "balance" in her targets.


"When the government of Alberta states that it wants to align research funding with provincial priorities, it risks colouring research coming from Alberta post-secondary institutions as propaganda," wrote Gordon Swaters, a University of Alberta mathematics professor and academic staff association president.

"Students are caught in the UCP's forever war with Ottawa," stated James Steele, head of the University of Calgary Graduate Students' Association.

Bill Flanagan chimed in on his University of Alberta president's blog Wednesday: "I will continue to do all I can to advocate for a regulatory framework that does not impede our ability to secure federal funding and operates in a manner consistent with the university's core commitment to academic freedom."

An academic world, wondering jointly: what's Smith going to do?

It doesn't appear even she knows, not yet revealing any clear direction.

Campus improv night

Several signs, in fact, suggest that the UCP government did not initially conceive of the post-secondary realm to be a major player in this Bill 18 drama — at least, not until journalists began asking last week how those provincially controlled entities could get tangled up in the bill's oversight.

Consider the following:

Advanced Education Minister Rajan Sawhney didn't participate in the April 10 news conference; only Smith and Municipal Affairs Minister Ric McIver did.


The premier didn't mention post-secondary once in announcing the program; it only came up when a reporter asked about it, and Smith mentioned a curiosity about social-science research.


When Smith began speaking in more detail in interviews on April 12, she extensively referred to a Nova Scotia business professor's criticisms of the system, which appeared in an Edmonton Journal column that very day.

If this policy approach involved more forethought, one imagines there would be a body of evidence or anecdotes beyond that morning's newspaper. Smith did cite one political scientist's survey that indicated far more left-identifying Canadian professors than right-wing ones — which was mentioned in that same Journal column.

This week, she tabled that article in the legislature.

A few days later, in her 38-minute debate speech on the bill she extensively quoted from that piece, but also brought in a second anecdotal point — another article.

This one came from the National Post in 2021, a McGill University chemistry professor's protests that he was denied a science research grant because the "woke" granting agency expected him to factor diversity and equity into his assistant hiring. Unmentioned by Smith — that agency's peer review committee gave the same scientist, Patanjali Kambhampati, a $144,565 grant last year.

For those keeping score at home, that's two articles about out-of-province profs forming almost the entire public justification for Smith's coming policy on universities.

Now, journalists love to imagine they have massive influence in high offices, and probably inflate their self-importance too often (or maybe this is just me). But it's likely that most journalists, and more importantly most citizens, don't expect or intend for articles or columns to form not just the backbone but the entire skeleton of political decision-making.

Bill Flanagan is the incoming president of the University of Alberta. The former dean of law at Queen's University assumes the new post on July 1, 2020.

University of Alberta president Bill Flanagan pledged this week to push for a provincial approach 'that does not impede our ability to secure federal funding and operates in a manner consistent with the university’s core commitment to academic freedom.' (Peter Evans/CBC News)

But even if Smith cobbled together her justification from news clippings after she tabled Bill 18, there is at least a sense of where her grievances lie. And if it's not clear what route she'll take with this legislation, she's signalled what the desired destination is.

She's made it clear she believes more conservative-tilted research would bring more like-minded academics and then students. "If we did truly have balance in universities, then we would see that we would have just as many conservative commentators as we do liberal commentators," she told the CBC's Power and Politics.

Smith offered this week two potential paths she could pursue. One is using this provincial oversight bill to track all federal research grants to determine what share goes where — even though the granting agencies already publish everything online, as many academics have recently noted to the UCP.

"The other way is that we could also establish our own research programs to make sure that we're providing that kind of balance," Smith added.

The UCP government, in this notion, would create a new body to support ideologically focused research that Smith doesn't feel gets its fair shake from the non-partisan, peer-review committees that dole out agency grants, at arm's length from the Liberal government or the governments of various stripes that have overseen these agencies for more than a century.

Believe this to be far-fetched and heavy-handed, for a partisan government to set up their own shop to conduct public-interest research?

It's already happened in the UCP government era — twice.

Former premier Jason Kenney gave his "energy war room" twin mandates to advocate for and research oil and gas, to do work he felt was lacking elsewhere; Smith has maintained this program.

In early April, Smith announced a new Crown corporation for research and expertise on addiction recovery — to bolster, hone and spread elsewhere the type of drug-crisis response her government has already invested heavily in.

The constitution squarely places post-secondary education into provincial jurisdiction, but the federal level has long led the way on supporting research projects.

The province topping up federal research funding could be a good thing, said Richard Sigurdson, past arts dean at the University of Calgary. Emphasis on could.

The University of Calgary sign is pictured at the campus entrance, on a sunny fall day.

Calgary's largest post-secondary school receives more than $200 million a year in grants from the federal government and outside jurisdictions. Bill 18 requires provincial officials to approve all such deals, and could let them veto ones they don't see matching Alberta priorities. (CBC)

"It would only be great if the provincial government was to provide funds at an arm's length, non-partisan fashion," he wrote in an email while on academic administrative leave in Berlin. "There cannot be any interference with institutional autonomy or academic freedom."

If the government takes this approach and establishes its own research body in the style of the Fraser Institute — a conservative think-tank where Smith herself used to work — expect heaps of controversy. But it could be less messy than actually using Bill 18's gatekeeper function to interfere with federal agency grants, something that the Quebec government doesn't do, despite long having the provincial go-between powers that Alberta now intends to mimic.

'Firing a shot'

Alex Usher, a longtime analyst with the consultancy Higher Education Strategy Associates, doesn't expect the Smith government to intervene with agency research grants.

But he still expects a fight that universities won't like.

"While the UCP government may not be targeting tri-council grants specifically, they are firing a shot at the province's universities, warning them that they will be expected to show 'ideological balance,'" Usher wrote on his website.

"God knows what this will mean in practice, but my take would be that it will be low-level skirmishing and attempts at micro-management for the rest of the UCP's term of office, combined with attempts to [wage] culture war [over] odd-sounding research projects in what the right likes to call 'grievance studies.'"

The premier's recent rhetoric doesn't make it clear she knows what it will mean in practice, either. The Bill 18 debate seems to have become the jumping-off point, perhaps due to a combination of fluke and expansively written legislation.

Now the premier has been thinking about it, and finding articles to read. So an entire sector will be left to wait, wonder and worry.

The Trans Mountain saga is nearing its end — the larger debate will go on
CBC
Sat, April 20, 2024

Protesters outside an event Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is attending in Calgary, Alta., Thursday, Nov. 22, 2018. (Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press - image credit)

In November 2018, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau went to Calgary to speak to the chamber of commerce. A crowd gathered outside the venue and chanted, "Build that pipe."

Trudeau might have responded that he was trying to do just that — at least in regards to one pipeline. Trudeau's government had actually purchased the Trans Mountain pipeline six months earlier, with the stated purpose of ensuring its expansion could be completed.

Five and a half years later, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland used her budget speech to celebrate the fact that the Trans Mountain expansion is nearing completion — an achievement she held out as evidence of what an "activist" federal government can accomplish.


Rising to respond a few minutes later, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre begged to differ. The lesson, he said, was the opposite — if the government had just gotten out of the way, a private company would have built the pipeline.

The pipeline is almost complete. The debate, obviously, is far from over.

Freeland's framing is a stretch. The federal government didn't set out to buy a pipeline — it was just willing to do so when that seemed to be the last remaining option.

But when Poilievre says the government should have gotten out of the way, he's aiming at the wrong government. It was the efforts — however futile — of British Columbia's provincial government to stymie the project that led to Kinder Morgan's decision to walk away.

And though it was suggested at the time that the federal government should have somehow compelled or cajoled the NDP government in B.C. to get out of the way, it's worth remembering that the New Democrats were dependent on a confidence-and-supply agreement with Green MLAs that committed the provincial government to using "every tool available" to block the project.

Ultimately, it was federal ownership that rendered all such tools moot.

Why an 'anti-oil' prime minister built a pipeline

On the day oil begins to flow through the new pipeline, it will finally answer the doubts raised by Poilievre's predecessor in 2019 when the Trudeau government gave the project its final approval.

"I don't believe he actually wants it built," Andrew Scheer said of the prime minister.

It takes some imagination to believe Trudeau would agree to purchase a pipeline for $4.5 billion in public funds — inviting no end of criticism from progressive rivals and environmentalists — without intending to see the expansion completed.

But you can easily understand the cognitive dissonance some were experiencing at the time. This was, after all, the prime minister described by Conservatives as the most "anti-oil" leader in Canadian history.

(Nine years into Trudeau's time as prime minister, Canada's oil production is at record highs.)

Scott McBride, of Nanaimo, B.C., holds a caricature of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during a protest against the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion in Burnaby, B.C., on Saturday, March 10, 2018. (Darryl Dyck/Canadian Press)

Indigenous leaders are calling on people to raise their voices Saturday to stop a $7.4 billion pipeline expansion project that pumps oil from Canada's tar sands to the Pacific Coast. The Trans Mountain pipeline expansion by the Canadian division of Texas-based Kinder Morgan would nearly triple the flow of oil from Alberta's tar sands to the Vancouver area and dramatically increase the number of oil tankers travelling the shared waters between Canada and Washington state.

To fully understand how the Trudeau government ended up buying a pipeline, it might be necessary to review decades of inaction by countless governments against the threat of climate change and their slight efforts to reconcile meaningfully with Indigenous peoples. By the time Trudeau came to office, pipelines had taken on a symbolic value well beyond the practical.

But when Trudeau went to Calgary's Petroleum Club in 2013, he embraced two clear positions. A price on carbon emissions needed to be part of a plan to responsibly develop Canada's resources, he said, but getting Canadian resources to new markets was in the national interest and something for which the federal government should be held responsible.

(He also said that while governments can issue permits, "only communities can grant permission" — a simplistic slogan that did not survive contact with the reality Trudeau faced in 2018.)

There was a straightforward economic argument for building a new pipeline. If more Canadian oil could get to "tidewater," Canadian producers would be less dependent on the American market and would be able to charge a higher price. And by 2019 — after the government had let Northern Gateway die and Energy East had been abandoned — the Trans Mountain expansion was the only pipeline proposal left standing.

Bedford Consulting Group is already projecting that CEO pay will tick higher in 2024. The Trans Mountain expansion project, shown here under construction in Abbotsford, B.C., in May 2023, is expected to add over half a million barrels per day of Canadian oil export capacity. The Trans Mountain expansion project under construction in Abbotsford, B.C., in May 2023. (Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press)

But there may also have been a question of national unity. Albertans and their government might not be big fans of the federal government right now. It's fair to ask how much more negative the political climate might be if all efforts to build a pipeline out of the province had been thwarted.

The federal government might not recoup all of its investment when it eventually sells the newly expanded pipeline, but it's hard to put a price on holding a country together.

Politically, the purchase of the pipeline obviously didn't lead to great Liberal gains in Alberta. It also didn't save Rachel Notley's NDP government. And it may have hurt the Liberal Party with progressive voters in other provinces. But the purchase didn't lead to the sort of electoral wipeout in B.C. that Liberals might have feared at the time.

The pipeline's nearly done. Now what?

As Freeland noted in her budget speech, the Bank of Canada now expects that the start of operations for the expansion will have a measurable impact on Canada's national GDP. The Liberal government has estimated the project will generate $500 million in corporate tax revenues. (The government has pledged that all profits will be directed toward clean energy.)

At the same time, the Liberals surely will be criticized if the pipeline is sold at a loss. And they risk taking the heat for any spills or accidents that follow in the years ahead.

While his critics insisted that "climate leaders don't build pipelines" — another simplistic slogan — Trudeau positioned the project within the larger cause of transitioning to a clean economy.

"To those who want sustainable energy and a cleaner environment, know that I want that too. But in order to bridge the gap between where we are and where we're going, we need money to pay for it," he said in 2019. "It is in Canada's national interest to protect our environment and invest in tomorrow while making sure that people can feed their families today."

A prominent Alberta-based environmentalist said oil executives told him building the pipeline would better position them financially to make emissions-reducing investments.

In 2021 — the most recent year for which official data is available — Canada's oil and gas sector accounted for 189 megatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, 28 per cent of the national total. The sector's emissions are expected to have risen in 2022. And if, a decade from now, the sector's emissions continue to rise and Canada has missed its emissions targets, Trans Mountain might be framed, fairly or not, as part of a larger failure.

But since buying Trans Mountain, the Trudeau government has proposed new rules to reduce methane emissions for the industry and a cap on total emissions from the sector. The Liberals have also pledged billions of dollars toward subsidizing the development and use of carbon capture technology.

If nothing else, the flow of oil through the newly expanded pipeline might only strengthen the case for getting on with the work of reducing the oil industry's emissions.

Report suggests little progress in first year of Alberta's emissions reduction plan

The Canadian Press
Fri, April 19, 2024 

EDMONTON — Alberta has done little to advance its plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions a year after introducing it, an analysis suggests.

"Based on this lack of progress, it doesn't appear that Alberta has an active climate plan," Simon Dyer of the clean energy think tank Pembina Institute said Friday. "It's a plan in name only."

Environment Minister Rebecca Schulz said in a statement that Alberta is reducing emissions.

"I am confident that Alberta will continue to lead in responsible energy production for years to come," Schulz said.

"We are taking a practical, effective approach that supports jobs, our growing economy and the demands of safe, reliable energy."

On April 19, 2023, the United Conservative Party government released its Emissions Reduction and Energy Development plan. Its stated goal was to "enhance (Alberta's) position as a global leader in emissions reductions, clean technology and innovation, and sustainable resource development."

It included eight directions to reduce emissions while maintaining energy security.

"It seeks to accomplish this through collaboration and partnerships, clean technology and innovation, and finance and policy frameworks," said a government document about the plan.

It was derided at the time as a plan to make a plan. According to Pembina's analysis, that's largely what it has remained.

The province's oilpatch has already achieved a methane emissions reduction of about 45 per cent. The plan included a commitment to try to increase those reductions by up to 80 per cent.

"Alberta Environment and Protected Areas will engage stakeholders, Albertans and Indigenous organizations to assess potential pathways to achieve a provincial 75 to 80 per cent methane emissions reduction target," the plan said.

Pembina points out that, since the plan was released, Alberta has opposed federal measures to achieve that goal.

"There's no evidence that any work has taken place," said Dyer.

Similarly, the plan proposed introducing regulations to implement its 100-megatonne emissions from the oilsands as well as lowering that threshold.

"Alberta will explore reducing the provincial legislated oilsands emission limit and implementing regulations," it said.

There's no indication of any move in that direction, the Pembina report concludes. "On the oilsands emissions limit, there is no publicly available evidence of progress."

The report does praise the government's creation of a grant program for carbon capture initiatives. It also notes increases in the percentage of money from its industrial carbon levy that goes to emissions reduction initiatives.

But the report maintains that necessary discussions regarding different sectors of the economy aren't happening.

"(The government)said they were going to hire consultants to assess abatement opportunities for every individual sector," Dyer said. "There's no evidence that work has been done.

"There's been no public consultation on elements of the plan."

Promised forums for Indigenous and youth involvement haven't materialized. Alberta remains the only jurisdiction in Canada that doesn't allow utilities to provide energy efficiency programs.

As well, the report says Alberta's plan to tighten the rate at which industrial facilities must reduce emissions under its carbon levy isn't enough to prevent the market from being flooded with cheap carbon credits, undermining the economics for emissions reduction.

The province also hasn't introduced any intermediate benchmarks to measure progress toward its goal of carbon neutrality by 2050.

Alberta's carbon emissions have increased nine per cent since 2005, the baseline year for most international agreements. The gains the province has made have come from the phase-out of coal-powered electricity, now almost complete.

Oil and gas emissions have increased almost 40 per cent since 2005.

As well, the province has created uncertainty for carbon-reducing measures, such as renewable electricity, by imposing new restrictions.

The consequences of inaction on emissions reduction aren't limited to Alberta, said Dyer.

"Canada will not be able to achieve its target, if Alberta is not an active participant. Alberta is clearly doing far less than its share toward meeting that national goal."

Nor are the consequences limited to the environment, Dyer said.

"It damages Alberta's brand as a modern and dynamic location, if we're not seen as part of the solution."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 19, 2024.

Bob Weber, The Canadian Press

US says Taliban will not be recognised until it allows women’s participation in society

Taliban’s ‘self-stated goal of legitimacy can only be achieved’ with women’s participation, says US

Arpan Rai

The Taliban will not be recognised as the legitimate government of Afghanistan until it allows the full participation of girls and women in the wartorn country’s society, the US State Department has said.

Equal rights for women and girls continues to be a key tenet of US policy towards Afghanistan, said Vedant Patel, the principal deputy spokesperson for the department, speaking at a news briefing on Wednesday.


“We continue to reiterate regularly, through relevant channels, with the Taliban that their self-stated goal of legitimacy can only be achieved, and will likely be impossible to achieve, if half of their population is being left out of participating in its society, participating in its economy,” Mr Patel said.


The Taliban has effectively removed girls and women from schools, colleges, public parks, gyms, salons and national parks through several diktats banning them from entering these places.

Taliban security personnel in the Baharak district of Badakhshan province (AFP )

“It continues to be a key factor of our approach to Afghanistan policy, and it’s something that we’ll continue to work towards,” Mr Patel said, referring to the inclusion of more than 21 million women in Afghan society.

The ban on education for girls and women is the Taliban’s biggest criticism which has hindered its plans to gain recognition as the legitimate rulers of Afghanistan.

Last month, Afghanistan renewed its academic year but without any trace of girls whom they barred from attending classes beyond the sixth grade, making it the only country with restrictions on female education.


Before taking full control of Afghanistan in August 2021, shortly after the US and Nato forces pulled out of the country, the Taliban promised a more moderate governance in its second stint. In the 1990s, they banned education for girls and women, along with restricting women’s movement outside their houses without a male guardian. Both edicts have returned to Afghanistan despite the protest of the international community.

Women and children are barred from visiting a recreational park in Charikar, Parwan Province (AFP)

The Taliban previously said girls continuing their education went against their strict interpretation of Islamic law, or Sharia, and that certain conditions were needed for their return to school. However, they made little or no progress in creating those conditions, according to government critics.

Education given to boys and men, although more legitimised by the Taliban as opposed to none for girls, is also severely harmful, international human rights groups have found out.

The Taliban have “abusive” educational policies which are harming boys as well as girls. In December last year, Human Rights Watch said there has been less attention to the deep harm inflicted on boys’ education as qualified teachers – including women – left, and inclusion of regressive curriculum changes as well as an increase in corporal punishment have led to falling attendance.

 

LIVE: Greta Thunberg attends global climate strike by Fridays for Future

19/04/24

It’s ‘irresponsible’ to ignore widespread consciousness across animal world, dozens of scientists argue

BY SAUL ELBEIN - 04/19/24 


There is good reason to believe fish, amphibians, molluscs and insects are sentient, according to a new declaration signed by three dozen scientists.

The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness argues that current scientific research indicates such widespread animal consciousness is a “realistic possibility” — and that scientists and policymakers must take that into account when considering risks to those animals.


The declaration was published Friday at an event at New York University, where scientists engaged in active and at times heated debate about the state of the science on animal consciousness, and the wisdom of releasing such a statement at all.

The problem of considering animal consciousness is that it “immediately brings us into contact with serious imaginative limitations,” signatory Jonathan Birch, a philosopher at the London School of Economics, told attendees.

That’s a problem wrapped into the titles of many classic papers and books that wrestle with the subject, from philosopher Thomas Nagel’s seminal 1974 paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” to primatologist Franz de Waal’s 2017 book “Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?”

Many scientists and philosophers have argued that humans’ limitations — as a species with a dense internal monologue, a reliance on sight and a culture built on spoken language — can blind us to how sentience might work in other species.

“Sometimes these imaginative limitations lead people to doubt whether the scientific evidence can bear on these questions at all,” Birch said.

“But I think that’s wrong,” he added. “I don’t personally think that other animals will have a verbal inner monologue in the way that I do. But equally, there are probably forms of consciousness other animals have that we lack,” like the subjective experience of a bat navigating a dark forest using echolocation.


The declaration is brief — just three paragraphs — and its wording is very restrained. It stops short of arguing that animal consciousness is certain or proven. Instead, it argues that decades of literature now show “strong scientific support” for the idea that mammals and birds are conscious, and the “realistic possibility” of consciousness in creatures from reptiles to octopi, crabs and insects.

As long as such a possibility exists, the signatories agreed, “we should consider welfare risks and use the evidence to inform our responses to these risks.”

Support for this idea was not universal among event attendees. One scientist in the front row told Birch that he worried the declaration would be perceived as irresponsibly overstating the evidence.


“I’m not sure this declaration is a good idea,” he said. All scientists, he said, ”are familiar with articles that summarize research that people do not trust — because they feel they are cherry-picking the data, they are relying on studies that are not objective.”

But Birch argued the declaration was in fact quite conservative. “This is not a work of advocacy. It is describing the state of science as fairly as we can.”

He added that while the signatories themselves disagreed on the dimensions of animal consciousness and its ethical implications, they agreed “big steps have been taken in the last 10 years,” and that these needed to be part of the conversation.


The report follows more than a decade after the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness found that mammals, birds and other animals had “the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors” and that “humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.”

Scientists’ understanding of animal consciousness has advanced in the interim. Per a summary of the recent research in Quanta Magazine, “we now know, for example, that octopuses feel pain and cuttlefish remember details of specific past events … and that zebra fish show signs of curiosity.”

In the insect world, Quanta noted that “bees show apparent play behavior, while Drosophila fruit flies have distinct sleep patterns influenced by their social environment. Meanwhile, crayfish display anxiety-like states — and those states can be altered by anti-anxiety drugs.”


One line of research has followed the increasing evidence of self-awareness in fish and reptiles. Reptiles, in particular, are ancestral to both mammals and birds, the two orders for which there is the strongest evidence of sentience.

“If we accept that mammals and birds are conscious, then either consciousness evolved at least twice in each of those lineages separately, or it’s ancestral to all of the animals, in which case reptiles are probably conscious as well,” said Anna Wilkinson, who studies amphibians at the University of Lincoln.

Speaking to whether reptiles or fish experience pain — a big question in considering their welfare — Wilkinson acknowledged that recent research shows that fish have different neural structures than mammals.


But she argued that “just because birds cannot fly without feathers — that doesn’t mean that bats cannot fly. They don’t have feathers — they just achieve it through a different mechanism.”

“It seems unlikely that the kinds of consciousness that reptiles have are similar to the kinds of consciousness that mammals have,” she added. “And this is a challenge that I think we need to rise to.”

We know how to prevent the next Deepwater Horizon spill: stop fast-tracking approval for drilling 

BY DONALD BOESCH, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 04/20/24 

FILE – A large plume of smoke rises from fires on BP’s Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, more than 50 miles southeast of Venice on Louisiana’s tip on April 2010. A new National Academy of Science study says that 13 years after a massive BP oil spill fouled the Gulf…

Fourteen years ago, the British Petroleum (BP) Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig suffered a blowout in water a mile deep. The Gulf of Mexico explosion took the lives of 11 people, released 134 million gallons of oil into the Gulf over 87 straight days, wreaked widespread ecological harm, displaced communities, and devastated local economies.

Ultimately, the worst oil spill in U.S. history cost $17.2 billion in damage. President Obama appointed me to the national commission to investigate the causes of this disaster.

Through the course of our investigation, my colleagues and I discovered that (in addition to multiple direct errors) the Interior Department had performed no meaningful analysis of the potentially significant environmental consequences when it considered BP’s applications for Deepwater Horizon. Instead, the government had essentially rubber-stamped BP’s exploration plans and drilling permits using a decades-old policy to exempt them from the typically mandatory environmental review. Known as a “categorical exclusion,” this became a routine practice — one that the Interior Department continues to regularly employ.

In 1978, faced with looming oil shortages, Congress passed the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to promote offshore development of oil and gas resources. The act expressly singled out the Gulf of Mexico, which is the source of about 97 percent of all U.S. offshore oil and gas production, for less rigorous oversight under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The Interior Department then created the categorical exclusion policy to further bolster oil production. This allowed the government to fast-track approval of oil companies’ offshore drilling permits, declaring them not subject to the rigorous oversight normally required under NEPA.

Our commission’s investigation also uncovered troubling evidence that government personnel responsible for reviewing offshore oil drilling permits were made to understand that flagging environmental concerns would “increase the burden” on oil companies by “creating unnecessary delays.” And it was also evident that staffers were simply too under-resourced to meet the extraordinary expansion of oil development in the Gulf.

To be clear, the Interior Department had conducted general environmental reviews evaluating impacts of oil and gas development in the Gulf at large. But by using categorical exclusion, the government did not analyze the unique risks at the Deepwater Horizon site, thereby failing to account for the geological complexity and susceptible deep-sea life specific to that area in the Gulf.

At the close of the investigation, our commission recommended that the Interior Department strengthen its oversight procedures through the oil exploration and development process.

Six years later, the department issued a memorandum directing the discontinuation of categorical exclusions for offshore oil project approvals. However, the policy revision was never published in the Federal Register. Then, in 2017, under President Trump, the government reversed course and reinstated fast-tracking approvals for offshore oil drilling.


Fast forward to today, and the categorical exclusion still hasn’t been retired, while many other things have greatly changed concerning energy and the Gulf of Mexico. Over the last 14 years, offshore oil and gas exploration and production has continued to shift into waters even deeper and riskier than where BP was drilling. Human-caused climate change has become more obvious, with the waters of the Gulf warming faster than the world’s oceans as a whole. This is setting the stage for increasingly powerful hurricanes, making offshore drilling even more dangerous. While oil production in the Gulf has been generally steady, reserves are being depleted, leaving the Gulf littered with unproductive platforms, inadequately plugged wells and 18,000 miles of abandoned pipeline on the seabed.

Over the same period, as a result of inland fracking, U.S. crude oil production has dramatically increased and is at an all-time high. Our country has become a net exporter of crude oil, with more than twice as much of it shipped from Gulf ports than produced in the offshore waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

Yet, there is global commitment to quickly reduce greenhouse gas emissions to avoid a climate catastrophe. This necessitates commensurate reduction in burning of fossil fuels and expansion of renewable energy. It is new renewable energy — wind, solar, and geothermal — that we must be fast-tracking (with appropriate environmental precautions), not more environmentally damaging production of fossil fuels.


Over the past five years, the Interior Department has fast-tracked approvals for more than 90 percent of proposed offshore oil projects, yet additional oil spills from risky wells have continued, including this year. It’s long past time to discontinue the routine use of categorical exclusions for offshore oil and gas development. This simple policy change could be the difference between setting the stage for the next Deepwater Horizon disaster and steering clear of another catastrophe — before it’s too late.

Donald Boesch, a professor of marine science, served as president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and vice chancellor for Environmental Sustainability.

How Texas unleashed a geothermal boom

BY SAUL ELBEIN - 04/20/24 



With its nation-leading renewables fleet and oil and gas industry, Texas is poised to dominate what boosters hope will be America’s next great energy boom: a push to tap the heat of the subterranean earth for electricity and industry.

That technology, known as geothermal energy, has demonstrated the rare ability to unite the state’s warring political camps — and is fueling a boom in startups that seek to take it national.


While other forms of renewable energy lost ground during Texas’s 2021 and 2023 legislative sessions before a legislature that combined a hard-right political bent with a focus on building more “dispatchable” power, the geothermal industry advanced. State lawmakers passed four key bills in 2023 that helped lay the foundation for a new generation of drilling — with just one vote against.

In the 2023 session, “we didn’t get put into the renewable bucket, we didn’t really get put into the oil and gas bucket,” said Barry Smitherman, former Republican head of the state Railroad Commission and head of the Texas Geothermal Energy Alliance.

Instead, “we became this hybrid that was acceptable to people on both sides of the aisle”​

The regulatory clarity established by those bills has laid the groundwork for a new generation of startups powered by the state’s urgent need for reliable electricity in the face of increasingly extreme weather, as well as a growing trickle of oil and gas veterans leaving an industry they see as plagued by boom-and-bust cycles. As of last year, Texas had 11 of the 27 total geothermal startups in the US.

On Wednesday, startup Bedrock Energy unveiled a new geothermal-powered heating and cooling system at a commercial real estate complex in Austin. Earlier this month, next-generation drilling company Quaise — which uses high powered radio waves to drill through hard rock — filed a permit with the state energy regulator to begin field testing its drills, years ahead of what industry insiders had thought was possible. Houston-based Fervo is building a 400-megawatt project in Utah. Military bases across the state are looking into geothermal as a potential source of secure electricity in an era of price spikes and cyberattacks.

And later this year, Sage Geosystems, a company founded by three former Shell executives, will begin using a fracked well as a means of storing renewable energy — which CEO Cindy Taff said will get the company most of the way towards the ultimate goal of commercially viable geothermal electricity.


The rise in geothermal startups comes alongside a broader surge in Texas renewable energy. Last month, solar generation eclipsed coal both in terms of power generation and market share. Texas also has more utility-scale wind and solar capacity than any other state, though it lags California when it comes to rooftop solar.

The Sage project shows the conceptual benefits of geothermal energy to the Texas grid, which increasingly runs on wind and solar energy. When the sun is high, the wind is blowing and demand is low, Sage will pump water into subterranean wells, creating zones of high pressure that utilities can tap as “batteries” when other energy supplies fall.

Though it lags California in total capacity, Texas is set to add the most utility scale batteries in the country in 2024, but these can only store power for two to six hours — creating a niche for projects like Sage, which aim to store power for up to a day.


In building out its projects, Sage benefited from that nearly-unanimous package of legislative reforms passed by the during the notably acrimonious 2023 session, which opened the way to operators like Taff — and offered a potential roadmap to other oil and gas states looking to set up geothermal industries of their own.

In its campaign for those pivotal laws, the geothermal lobby benefited from a recent traumatic experience for Texas: the brutal, deadly and staggeringly expensive legacy of 2021’s Winter Storm Uri.

In addition to resulting in hundreds of deaths from freezing temperatures and carbon monoxide poisoning from generators, the storm left tens of millions across the state without power for nearly a week and caused electricity prices in Texas’s spot markets to soar to an unheard-of $9,000 per megawatt hour — costing ratepayers an estimated $17 billion in overcharges, a court ruled in 2023.


The total cost was even higher: an estimated $300 billion, higher than that of Hurricane Katrina, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers.

That tragedy was weaponized by both sides in the state’s frenetic culture wars. Republicans blamed the wind industry, which had 27 percent of its turbines freeze, according to a report from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Meanwhile, Democrats blamed the lack of weatherization in the natural gas industry, which FERC found had lost 58 percent of its generation or pipeline capacity during the storm — undercutting the “firm” or “dispatchable” supply of energy needed to avert blackouts.

As Republicans sought to restrict the state’s burgeoning renewables industry, geothermal threaded the needle — aided by its lobbyists’ deep ties to the oil industry and the Republican establishment.


The lobby pushed the message of “geothermal as firm, dispatchable, 24/7, on-off switch, clean,” Smitherman told The Hill. “And it just resonated with everyone.”

Lobbyists were “playing offense on three bills,” Smitherman said. First, in S.B. 785, the industry tackled the question of who owns geothermal heat — the subterranean energy that future projects will want to tap for industrial use or to generate electricity.

That was a thorny question, because Texas law divides up surface rights — which include rights to land and the groundwater beneath — and mineral rights, which govern commodities like oil and gas below the surface.


During the fracking boom, that division created ugly situations in which mineral-rights holders allowed drilling rigs to operate on — and pollute — lands that they didn’t live on, sometimes against the wishes of the people on the site.

In S.B.785, legislators agreed with the industry that heat is legally more like water than oil — which makes the process of exploration substantially easier. For operators like Sage, Taff said, “that means we go in and we just really have to have an agreement with a landowner,” rather than having to sign separate deals with the mineral rights holder and landowner.

S.B. 786 clarified that the geothermal industry is regulated by the Texas Railroad Commission, the state’s confusingly-named oil and gas regulator — rather than a mix of the commission, the state environmental regulator and the state utility commission for different aspects of the industry.


And in S.B. 1210, the legislature overwhelmingly voted that the state’s thousands of “orphaned wells” — inactive, non-producing oil and gas wells — can be converted to geothermal wells without an additional permit. (As The Texas Tribune reported, Sage used one of these for a test well in south Texas.)

Finally, in what Smitherman called “a defensive play,” the lobby worked to ensure through H.B. 5 that geothermal energy was eligible for the same tax breaks as other forms of dispatchable power — a privilege that would otherwise have only been available to coal, nuclear and natural gas.

Together, these laws mean that a geothermal startup now just has to talk to a single regulator and a single rights holder; can cut costs on drilling using an existing well; and can realize tax breaks previously available only to far more established forms of power generation.

It can also take advantage of the state’s burgeoning startup scene and huge oil and gas workforce — a necessary ingredient in a sector that is built on exploring the subsurface and drilling holes.

For oil and gas workers, geothermal offers its own appeal. Part of this is emotional: Taff told the Tribune about how she moved to geothermal after a decade of being pressured by her daughter to leave the “dark side” of oil and gas for renewables — and found that geothermal offered her a chance to use her downhole experience in a way that wind and solar would not.

”That redemption arc is really, really inspiring for oil and gas people,” said Jamie Beard of Project Innerspace, a nonprofit geothermal advocacy group. Involvement in the industry lets former oil and gas workers “feel like they can use their entire life’s work for something that they’re going to be respected for — and right now they are villainized for,” she said.

But in a state — and an energy sector — where belief in climate change remains controversial, geothermal can also make a more prosaic pitch: a stable job after the rollercoaster of oilfield work.

“Oil and gas is very feast and famine,” Joselyn Lai, the CEO of Bedrock Energy, told The HIll.

“It’s good times — and then it’s like everyone’s unemployed for like six months. There’s definitely this hope and belief that the clean energy future will be one where there’s more consistent jobs, and that it’s where growth is happening.”

That pitch comes as automation and efficiency have cut oilfield jobs — and as many projections suggest that oil demand will peak this decade, even as production is currently at record levels.

One Bedrock employee who had specialized in well completions — the process of inserting pipe and bringing out oil and gas — described being laid off from an oil company because his job could be done by a worker in South Asia at a tenth the price.

By drilling so many wells and dialing in their efficiency so much, he said, “we drilled ourselves out of a job.” Now he helps Bedrock drill 1,000 foot wells into the stable temperature of the subsurface, which can be used to dump heat in the summer or retrieve warmth in the winter — potentially offering commercial real estate clients a way to cut their heating and air conditioning costs by two to four times.

That kind of project exemplifies a main part of geothermal’s appeal: It is a consistent product, which despite being zero-carbon offers the kind of electricity that utilities are used to working with.

The industry also faces serious challenges — particularly when it comes to securing financing to roll out and develop prototypes. First-of-their-kind geothermal projects often struggle to get across what the startup industry calls the “valley of death” — the dangerous period when they have secured initial investment and are paying for operations and payroll but aren’t yet making any money. (All of the companies listed in this article are in this difficult zone.)

Despite the promise of geothermal, many potential corporate partners “want to be first to go fifth,” Bedrock investor Gabriel Scheer of Elemental Excelerator, a nonprofit investment firm focused on climate technologies.

But for those investors who take the risk, Scheer said, there is the upside of getting a jump on a new technology — and getting to shape the way it unfolds.

And in Texas specifically, the geothermal industry has certain distinct advantages. First, the experience of Winter Storm Uri means state businesses may be more focused on securing reliable heat and electricity than other states.

Geothermal also benefits not just from the need to buttress the large wind and solar fleet, but also from the trail that those industries have blazed in terms of innovative forms of financing.

In particular, virtually every wind and solar project in the state is built after developers sign a “power purchase agreement” with potential customers — something that the geothermal industry can easily adapt, said Dennis Wamsted of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

In Texas, Wamsted said, “Geothermal has the ability to come in and say, ‘You guys are familiar with all these contracts? Here, we are doing exactly the same thing.”

Beard, the industry advocate, argued that Texas offers a model for other fossil fuel-rich states — like North Dakota or Pennsylvania — that want to transition their own industries. She was one of more than a dozen coauthors of “The Future of Geothermal in Texas,” a landmark 2023 report by five state universities that helped establish the industry’s bonafides before that year’s legislative session.

In the next six months, her team intends to replicate that report in ten such states, including Oklahoma and Pennsylvania. “The idea is, if you go into a state that has a big, significant oil and gas industry and you catalyze geothermal — you all of a sudden have a bipartisan solution,” she said.

Geothermal, she conceded “has really struggled on a federal level, with things like permitting and incentives.”

But if such a research and lobbying effort were replicated across “all the oil and gas states, all of a sudden you have a federal coalition. You have movement on the federal level, and that’s the eventual outcome of all of the state work.”

A national boom in geothermal would offer significant climate benefits. And in a world where the past pollution from oil and gas production is already anticipated to cut mid-century incomes by nearly 20 percent — even with aggressive climate action — it also has notable economic appeal.

But in her pitch to investors or clients, Lai told The Hill, she doesn’t make the environmental pitch — because she doesn’t need to. At the end of the day, she said, “it’s about the financial benefits.”

U.S. Navy to Test Epirus’ Drone-disabling HPM Technology Against Seaborne Attack Vessels

U.S. Navy To Test Epirus’ Drone-Disabling HPM Technology Against Seaborne Attack Vessels

The U.S. Navy will test Epirus' long-pulse High-Power Microwave (HPM) technology to disable small vessels powered by outboard motors.

Naval News Staff 19 Apr 2024


Epirus press release


Epirus, a high-growth technology company, announced today that the 2024 Advanced Naval Technology Exercise Coastal Trident Program (ANTX-CT24) will include field experiments to investigate the ability of the company’s long-pulse High-Power Microwave (HPM) technology to temporarily disable small vessels powered by outboard motors.


The activities, planned and conducted by Naval Surface Warfare Center Port Hueneme’s Office of Technology, will examine the capability of a low-cost, effective and non-lethal option to address the growing threat from seaborne drones. Seaborne drones have recently been used by both state and non-state actors as an offensive military capability.


The Navy’s decision to test Epirus’ HPM technology follows the U.S. Army’s awarding Epirus a $66.1 million contract in support of the Indirect Fire Protection Capability-High-Power Microwave Program (IFPC-HPM).

Epirus stand at Sea Air Space 2024

The company delivered the first of four systems to the Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office in November and finalized delivery of all systems in March 2024. The systems will be going through additional Soldier training and engineering developmental testing in April.

“We welcome this opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of long-pulse HPM technology in another threat environment. Epirus can defend against a wide range of threats across domains. Our expanded collaboration with the Department of Defense also underscores the growing recognition of the benefits of working with innovative tech companies outside of the traditional defense ecosystem.”
Andy Lowery, Epirus CEO

In addition to testing the technology’s ability to temporarily disable outboard motors and small vessels, the exercise will engage stakeholders in port security and critical infrastructure protection to increase awareness and access to counter-vessel capabilities and test its effectiveness when deployed on uncrewed autonomous vessels.

An ANTX-24 program spokesperson said the research exercise is intended to support Naval Innovative Science and Engineering research and accelerate identification, assessment, and implementation of leading-edge technology proposed to address gaps for the U.S. Navy and its interagency partners in port and maritime security.

“ANTX-CT24 will feature technical demonstrations and experiments across a wide variety of technology areas, including unmanned systems countermeasures. We have conducted several HPM experiments in the past, as a method to counter electronic systems and unmanned aircraft swarms, and expect that an assessment of Epirus’ HPM system in a counter-surface vessel role will support the program’s goals effectively,” said Brendan Applegate, NSWC Port Hueneme Lead for Fleet Experimentation and Exercises.

ANTX-CT24 planning and execution milestones can be found on their website.